Chapter II: Part 2

Or to understand the gulf that separates men and women in the art and science of shopping, see my Lady Bareacres at the mantlemaker's, accompanied by a lady companion. All the riches of the establishment are displayed before her, and she parades in front of the mirror in an endless succession of flowing robes. She gives the impression of inexhaustible good intentions, but she finds that there is nothing that suits her, and she goes away to repeat the performance elsewhere. And as she goes Delilah looks daggers at the companion who has come with her ladyship to get hints for the garment that she is to make for her. The man has not been born who could play so high a hand as that. Whether his inferiority in the great art of shopping is to be accounted to him as a virtue or a shame may be left to the moralists to discuss; but the fact is indisputable enough. He knows his weakness, and rarely goes into a shop except in the last extremity or under the competent guardianship of a woman. He can look in shop windows if he have firmness of mind and can say, "Danton, no weakness!" with the assurance that Danton will not bolt inside. But there is one sort of shop window before which the least of us are safe. And it transcends all shop windows in interest. It is the window through which you look into the far places of the earth. Canada and Queensland, British Columbia and New Zealand. The Strand is lit up with glimpses of these distant horizons--landscapes waving with corn, landscapes flowing with milk and honey, bales of fleecy wool, sugar-canes like scaffold poles, peaches that make the mouth water, pumpkins as large as the full moon, prodigious trout that would make the angler's heart sing, snow mountains and climbing-boots, a thousand invitations to come out into the wide spaces of the earth, where plenty and freedom and the sunshine await you. I daresay it is an illusion. I daresay the wide spaces of the earth are very unlike these wonderful windows. But I love to look in them and to feel that they are true. They almost make me wish that I were young again--young enough to set out

For to admire and for to see.
For to behold the world so wide.

A DAY WITH THE BEES

There is a prevalent notion that the country is a good place to work in. The quiet of the country, so runs the theory, leaves the mind undistracted, calm and able to concentrate on the task in hand. It is a plausible theory, but it is untrue. In town the movement, noise and ceaseless unrest form a welter of sound that has no more personal significance than the lapping of the waves on the sea-shore. It does not disturb--it rather composes the mind. It is the irrelevant babble of the world, enormous but signifying nothing, in the midst of which the mind is at ease and self-contained. But in the country every sound has an individual meaning that breaks in upon the quiet and demands attention. It is not general; it is particular. Take to-day, for example. I had sat down after breakfast, determined to traverse the Sahara on which I am engaged and to reach the oasis of a chapter-ending by nightfall.

But I had hardly begun when a bumble bee flew in at the open door on one side of the room and made for the closed window on the other side. The buzz of a bumble bee in the open air makes a substantial volume of sound. But inside the room this turbulent fellow sounded like an aeroplane as he roared against the window-panes in his frantic efforts to get through. Give him time, I thought. He will discover that there is no thoroughfare by the window and will return by the way he came in. Let me get on with my work. But the bumble bee has as little sense in the matter of exits and entrances as the wasp has, and my visitor kept up such a thunder against the window-panes that I was compelled to surrender, got up, opened the window, and with a judicious thrust with a newspaper piloted the fellow out into the open air.

It was a bad beginning for the journey across the Sahara; but I sat down, composed myself afresh, and started again, ignoring the thrush who was calling his hardest to me just outside the window to come out and see what a glorious sunshiny day we had got at last. But I was hardly launched again on my journey when I became conscious of unusual sounds in the garden. I looked out and saw the odd man, who had been banking up the potatoes, shielding himself as if from a storm and uttering strange cries. I left the desert again and rushed out. Everybody else in the house I found was rushing out. There, swirling like a cloud of dust across the garden, was a swarm of bees which had swept down from the hills and across the meadow land behind us and were evidently on the point of settling. They passed by the house with the boom of ten thousand wings and came to rest in a hawthorn bush on the road below. It was no business of mine. The expert was out with veil and gloves on for the fray and could very well manage without my help; but no amount of familiarity makes me able to resist the call of a swarm of bees, and I forgot all about Sahara until we returned triumphantly with a branch bearing a vast coagulated mass of bees and succeeded in housing them in a spare hive.

Then I remembered Sahara and, like Mr. Snodgrass (the exercise having warmed me unduly), I took off my coat and announced to myself that "Now I am about to begin." A ring at the telephone bell! A swarm of bees had settled on the roof of a house a mile or two away, and would we be so kind as to take them away. Off went the expert as fast as petrol could carry her, and I returned to my lonely plough and the desert sands. But this day was doomed for me by the warm sun that had set all the surplus population of the hives for miles round trekking to new quarters. The cold Spring and the wet May and early June had kept the bee world quiescent. Looking in the hives we could see all the preparations for swarming in progress, but the weather had been unpropitious and now with this sudden burst of summer all the tide of repressed life was released, and it seemed that the whole countryside was alive with bees in flight from their crowded homes to new lodgings. Before the expert returned there was sensation once more in the garden. No. 5 had swarmed, and down between the spruce-trees and the hedge the air was thick with the migrants. Usually our swarms settle in the hedge while the couriers fly far and wide to reconnoitre for suitable quarters. And it is in this interval of waiting that they are hived afresh. But this swarm neither settled in the hedge nor flew away with that sudden inspiration which sometimes seizes them. They swirled round and round like a tornado that had lost its way. Then they were observed to be returning to the hive they had left.

Here was a mystery indeed. Had the queen changed her mind and gone back, or had she by some miracle eluded her enormous family? The arrival of the expert, with her new capture, relieved us of responsibility in the matter. She opened the hive and took out the frames on which the bees were massed, but the queen, discoverable by her larger size, was not to be seen. At last, outside on the path, we saw a group of bees and in the midst of them the queen. The adventure had been too much for her powers, or perhaps she had defective wings. She was put back in the hive, and what the workers thought about the flight that failed I shall never know. But a new home to which the queen had no need to fly was soon at their disposal.

By this time the day was far advanced, but my journey across Sahara had hardly begun, and even now the interruptions from the bees were not at an end. For the third time there was commotion in the garden; on this occasion the note was tragedy. One of the hens, which had had some accident, was confined in a coop as a sort of convalescent home. Its water-supply was outside and thither the bees had gone to drink. One of them, objecting to the beak that came out of the coop, stung the hen near the eye, and the smell of the acid infuriated its fellows and soon the unhappy hen was enveloped in a cloud of bees each stabbing it in its vulnerable spot. When its plight was discovered the poor creature was insensible and apparently dying. With difficulty the assailants were driven off and the victim was put out of its misery.

When night came I was still ploughing my lonely furrow with no hope of reaching the goal for which I had started out so hopefully in the morning. No, the country is too exciting a place to work in. Give me the solitude of London, where there are no bees to swarm and no thrushes to keep telling one what a fine day it is in the garden.

ON SHAKING HANDS

If there is one custom that might be assumed to be beyond criticism it is the custom of shaking hands; but it seems that even this innocent and amiable practice is upon its trial. A heavy indictment has been directed against it in the Press on hygienic grounds, and we are urged to adopt some more healthy mode of expressing our mutual emotion when we meet or part. I think it would need a pretty stiff Act of Parliament and a heavy code of penalties to break us of so ingrained a habit. Of course, there are many people in the world who go through life without ever shaking hands. Probably most people in the world manage to do so. The Japanese bows, and the Indian salaams, and the Chinese makes a grave motion of the hand, and the Arab touches the breast of his friend at parting with the tips of his fingers.

By comparison with these modes of salutation it may be that our Western custom of shaking each other by the hand seems coarse and bucolic, just as our custom of promiscuous kissing seems an unintelligible indecency to the Japanese, to whom osculation has an exclusive sexual significance that we do not attach to it. In the matter of kissing, it is true, we have become much more restrained than our ancestors. Everyone has read the famous passage in Erasmus' letters in which he describes how people used to kiss in Tudor England, and how, by the way, that learned and holy man enjoyed it. He could not write so of us to-day. And there is one connection in which kissing has never been a common form of salutation with us. Masculine kissing is an entirely Continental habit, chiefly cultivated among the Russians. The greatest display of kissing I have ever witnessed was at Prince Kropotkin's house--he was then living at Brighton--on his seventieth birthday. A procession of aged and bearded Russian patriarchs came to bring greetings, and as each one entered the room he rushed at the sage, flung his arms about his neck, and gave him a resounding smack on each whiskered cheek, and Kropotkin gave resounding smacks in return.

This is carrying heartiness too far for our austerer tastes. I do not think that Englishmen could be bribed to kiss each other, but I cannot conceive that they will ever be argued out of shaking hands with each other. A greeting which we really feel without a grip of the hand to accompany it would seem like a repulse, or a sacrilege. It would be a bond without the seal--as cold as a stepmother's breath, as official as a typewritten letter with a typewritten signature. It would be like denying our hands their natural office. They would revolt. They would not remain in our pockets or behind our backs or toying with a button. We should have to chain them up, so instinctive and impetuous is their impulse to leap at a brother hand.

No doubt the custom has its disadvantages. We all know hands that we should prefer not to shake, warm, clammy hands, listless, flaccid hands, bony, energetic hands. The horror and loathing with which Uriah Heep filled our youthful mind was conveyed more through the touch of his hand than by any other circumstance. It was a cold, dank hand that left us haunted with the sense of obscene and creepy things. I know the touch of that hand as though it had lain in mine, and whenever I feel such a hand now the vision of a cringing, fawning figure damns the possessor of it in my mind beyond reprieve. It may be unjust, but the hand-clasp is no bad clue to moral as well as physical health. "There is death in that hand" was Coleridge's remark after parting from Keats, and there are times when we can say with no less confidence that there is pollution, or dishonesty, or candour, or courage "in that hand."

Some personalities seem to resolve themselves into a hand-shake. It is so eloquent that it leaves nothing more to be discovered about them. There is Peaker, the publisher, for example, who advances with outstretched hand and places it in yours as though it is something he wants to get rid of. It is a cold pudding of a hand, or a warm pudding of a hand, according to the weather, but, cold or warm, it is equally a pudding. What are you to do with it? It obviously doesn't belong to Peaker, or he would not be so anxious to get rid of it. You can't shake it, for it is as unresponsive as a jelly-fish, and no one can shake hands heartily with a jelly-fish. Hand-shaking must be mutual, or it is not at all. So you just hold it as long as civility demands, and then gently return it to Peaker, who goes and tries to get someone else to take it off his hands, so to speak.

And at the other extreme is that hearty fellow Stubbings, the sort of man who

Hails you "Tom" or "Jack,"
And proves by thumping on your back
How he esteems your merit.

But he does not thump you on the back. He takes your hand--if you are foolish enough to lend it to him--and crushes it into a jumble of aching bones and shakes your arm well-nigh out of its socket. That's the sort of man I am, he seems to say. Nothing half-hearted about me, sir. Yorkshire to the backbone. Jannock right through, sir. (Oh, torture!) And I'm glad to see you, sir. (Another jerk.) He restores your hand, a mangled pain, and you are careful not to trust him with it again at parting. And there is the limp and lingering hand that seems so overcharged with affection that it does not know when to go, but lies in your palm until you feel tempted to throw it out of the window. But though there are hands that make you shudder and hands that make you writhe, the ritual is worth the occasional penalty we have to pay for it. It is the happy mean between the Oriental's formal salaam and the Russian's enormous hug, and if it has less dignity than the Arab's touch with the finger-tips, which is like a benediction, it has more warmth and more of the spirit of human comradeship. We shall need a lot of medical evidence before we cease to say with the most friendly of all poets:

Then here's a hand, my trusty frien'.
And gie's a hand o' thine.

ON A FINGER-POST

At the end of the orchard, where the road that climbs up the hillside from the valley crosses the old British track that had ambled along the slopes of the hills for thousands of years, stands a finger-post. One of its hands has fallen with age, and the other two are hardly legible, though with difficulty you may see that one of them directs the wayfarer to Dunstable. I have never seen anyone consult it, and on a moonlight night it looks the most gaunt and solitary thing on earth, for ever pointing a minatory finger over the glimmering landscape, like a prophet vainly directing a naughty and unheeding world to the land of Beulah. Nobody takes any notice of it.

But it has its moments of consequence. On high-days and holidays in the summer, days such as these, happy picnickers from afar, mostly school-children out for their annual treat, come to a halt at the old finger-post on their way to the summit of the hill. The horses are unhitched from the waggonette and are left to graze while the children spread their lunch or their tea on the Icknield Way, which here resumes the character of a green-ride over which the centuries have passed without record of change. But no one ever seems to want to go to Dunstable. I do not want to go to Dunstable myself. In time I suppose the poor old finger-post will tire of telling the world to go to Dunstable and will drop its second arm in weariness and despair.

I have no desire to go to Dunstable, because I like the name so much that I do not want to spoil the emotion of pleasure it gives me by any earthly contacts. I should as soon think of going to Dunstable as of going to Ashby-de-la-Zouch. I would not destroy the poetry that hangs about that name for anything the place could give me. Ashby-de-la-Zouch belongs to the realm of dreams, where high romance is always afoot and you may see any day some splendid knight in the tournament charging down upon his foe, while the beautiful heroine drops her handkerchief to show that she can bear no more. Why should I desecrate this agreeable fancy by discovering that Ashby-de-la-Zouch is (perhaps) a grubby little place with one frowsy tea-shop and a tin tabernacle? I do not say that that is what Ashby-de-la-Zouch is like. It may be a very nice place with a boulevard and a bandstand. I shall never know. But it could not possibly be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Nothing could be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

It is so with Bideford in Devon. It may be that if one went to Bideford in Devon one would find it very much like Southend-on-Sea, or Skegness or Blackpool or any other popular resort. It may have a pier and half-a-dozen cinemas and a "Ham and Eggs" Parade like New Brighton. It may be a wilderness of stuffy lodging-houses, with

"APARTMENTS"

in every window, and touts who salute you at every step. But to the imagination Bideford in Devon is something quite different from that. It is the gateway of adventure, the arch wherethrough gleams the untravelled world. On the shore you may meet Grenville or Drake in buff jerkin and silken hose, and Salvation Yeo telling tales to a crowd of open-mouthed youths and blowing clouds of tobacco before their astonished eyes. And in the harbour you may see the little _Revenge_ herself, waiting for her crew of "men from Bideford in Devon" who are to share in the immortal exploit that hangs like an imperishable halo over this Devon shore.

I once knew a man who came from Bideford. I don't suppose he was really better than if he had come from Chowbent, or Wigan, or Coggeshall. I fancy he was quite an ordinary man; but to me he came trailing clouds of glory from afar. He seemed to waft breezes from the Spanish Main before him, and in his pockets I fancied I heard the chink of doubloons that had come from a treasure-ship in Nombre Dios Bay. I could not regard him as a man. I regarded him as a romance. What else could one do with a man who came from Bideford in Devon? I was very young then, but I doubt whether years have wrought any difference. I doubt whether I could do business with any success with a man who had come from Bideford. I should be as wax in his hands or as clay to the potter. But much as I love the sound of its name, no finger-post will ever tempt me to Bideford in Devon. I will preserve the vision. I will not break the spell.

Now, it is different with places like those Essex villages, Messing and Mucking. Anyone might go to Messing or to Mucking and have quite a pleasant surprise. I have not been to them myself, but I should not be afraid to go to them. If Messing (or Mucking) should turn out to be no better than its name I should rejoice in its blunt honesty, and if on the contrary it should prove a country idyll, all ivy and parish pumps and village greens and thatched cottages, with perhaps the ancient pound in one field and the old village stocks in another, a ghost haunting the Tudor manor-house and an owl keeping its nightly vigil in the church tower--if, I say, Messing (or Mucking) should be like this one, one would have the sensation which Mr. Birrell had when he picked up a first edition of Gray's _Elegy_ on a threepenny barrow. Yes, decidedly, if that finger-post pointed to Messing or Mucking I would go there. But not to Dunstable.

Places with beautiful or suggestive names are like the heroes of our fancy: they ought not to be seen. Who ever saw a man who had become a myth to him without disappointment? I remember when I was a boy and saw W. G. Grace for the first time what a sense of disillusion I suffered. He had become a fable to me. I used to see him in imagination descending from Olympus, with all nature celebrating his advent. The clouds would clap their hands at his approach and the earth would assuredly tremble with joy. And instead he just walked about and talked like any other man, and got out on the same plane of frail mortality. It was my first lesson in the brutal realism of things.

It was such a shock that Stevenson records in _Across the Plains_. Who is there who has not felt the beauty of that word "Wyoming"? It is a name that would almost make one forget the toothache. It is the very stuff of poetry, a balm for the troubled spirit, an anodyne for the jangled nerves. I could imagine a doctor prescribing that a patient should repeat "Wyoming" half a dozen times every hour as a cure for neurasthenia or something like that. That was how Stevenson felt about it until he had the misfortune to see it.

To cross such a plain (Nebraska) is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match to them in misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path....

But get down the book and read the whole passage. It is as beautiful a piece of descriptive prose as you will find anywhere. But when you have read it you will be glad that you have not been to Wyoming and that you can still soothe the toothache with the sound of its magic name.

I shared the disenchantment which Stevenson felt in Wyoming when not long ago I travelled by the Ohio. I had been a captive since childhood to those bewitching vowels. However dull the world seemed, it could be brightened by the thought of the Ohio. I saw that shining river flowing through the landscape of fancy to the Southern seas, to the accompaniment of negro melodies and the song of the mocking-bird. Its waters were crystal like the river of Bunyan's vision, and as they went they sang of the old legends of the Kentucky Shore and Tennessee. Now the vision is shattered. I know that the Ohio (in winter at all events) is as yellow as pea-soup and as thick, flowing by rank, dishevelled shores, slopping over its banks and leaving great messy pools along its borders. I travelled by it and across it for the best part of a day, and I left it behind as gratefully as Stevenson left behind the Black Hills of Wyoming. It was a warning to me to leave the cloud palaces of the mind unvisited. If I ever see a finger-post pointing to Wyoming, I shall ignore it as I ignore the hand that, from the corner of the orchard, points me to Dunstable.

THE OPEN WINDOW

I entered a railway-carriage at a country station the other morning and found myself in a compartment containing five people. I took a vacant seat between a man in the corridor corner and a lady dressed in handsome furs in the window corner. A girl whom I took for the lady's daughter sat opposite to her, and a gentleman whom I took to be the lady's husband sat next the girl, while another man occupied the remaining corner by the corridor. These people had all evidently been in the train some time, and on entering I was vaguely sensible of having broken in upon a drama which was unfinished. The atmosphere seemed charged with feelings whose expression had only been suspended, and I was not surprised when, the train being in motion, hostilities were resumed.

The window by which the lady sat was half-open, and as the train gathered speed the wind, which was blowing from the east, came in like a whip-lash. It missed the lady in her wraps, but hit me in the face and curled round the neck of the man in the corridor corner. He leaned forward and asked, with the air of having made the request before, that the window should be closed. "Certainly not!" said the lady. I glanced at her and, so far as her face was visible above the billowing furs that enveloped her, saw she was a person who was not to be trifled with. Her lips were tight pressed and her nostrils swelled with battle.

The man in the corner addressed himself to the husband, who had buried himself in his newspaper in the obvious hope of being overlooked. The man explained with what deadly aim the wind came into his corner, and how if the window were shut and the corridor door was opened they could have plenty of air without discomfort. Dragged thus into the fighting-line, the husband lowered his paper and looked over his glasses timidly in the direction of his wife. She had a copy of a picture paper in her hands, and without looking at her husband she emitted a little snort and turned the pages as if she were wringing their necks. The husband, who had a kindly face and looked as though he had long since laid down his arms in an unequal battle, knew the symptoms. He uttered no word to the terrific woman by the window, but turning to the man and still looking benignly over his glasses, offered to take the post of peril in the corner. The man said No, he was quite comfortable in his corner if the window were closed. He put on his hat, turned up his coat collar, held up his paper against the gale and fell silent.

The husband, with one more furtive glance at his wife, resumed reading. As I watched him I thought of the story of the old parson, who, driving with his wife in a country lane, met a farmer in his cart. There was no room to pass, and the law of the road made the parson the offender. It was his business to "back" to a wide place in the lane to allow the farmer's cart to pass. But the parson's wife would not let him do so. The farmer must get out of the way. The poor parson was in tears between his duty and terror of his wife. "Don't worry, parson; don't worry," said the farmer. "I'll go back. I've just such a old varmint as her myself at home."

And that was how the battle over the window ended. The man in the corner made one brief rally. He flung the corridor door open in the hope of diverting the draught or, perhaps, making things unpleasant for his foe. But she was invulnerable to attack. She only stabbed the pages of her picture paper a little more viciously. The man then fled from the field. He went out and found seats for himself and his companion in another compartment, and returning removed his luggage. The lady's victory was complete. She was left unchallenged mistress of the compartment. She gave her paper a final comprehensive stab, commanded her husband to close the corridor door which her defeated antagonist had shamelessly left open, and sat up to enjoy her triumph.

As I looked from her to the nice, kindly, hen-pecked husband now again absorbed in his newspaper, I felt pity for so afflicted a fellow-creature. Poor fellow! What a life!

ON AN UNPOSTED LETTER

I took a bundle of old letters out of a jacket pocket this morning to look for a document which I wanted, and which I thought might be there. It was not there. I was not in the least surprised. I am never surprised when I do not find things in my pockets. Long experience has taught me not to expect to find what I want in my pockets and what ought to be there. But, on the other hand, I rarely fail to find things I do not want, things that simply refuse to be lost, negligible things, tiresome things, old bills, old envelopes of vanished letters, notes I have made about matters long since dead, sometimes startling things that make me leap up with ejaculations only wrung from me in moments of sudden dismay.

It was so this morning. For though I did not find the document I wanted, I found a couple of letters, written a fortnight ago, put in envelopes, addressed and stamped--but not posted. One of them was of little consequence: the other was of much consequence. It was to a person who, I knew, expected to hear from me on an important matter, and from whom I had expected to hear in reply. I had wondered why he had not replied, and why when he saw me at a club a few days ago he rather obviously avoided me. I felt puzzled, for there had been nothing in my letter at which he could take offence--yet obviously he had taken offence. Now I knew why he had taken offence. He was annoyed at not receiving a letter from me which he had expected to receive, and I was annoyed at not receiving a reply to a letter I had not sent.

And in this little incident I saw an illustration of most of the personal differences which afflict us in our journey through this troublesome life. Take a common example. A is talking to B as they walk along the street on a subject of absorbing interest to him when C passes them. A knows C quite well, and in ordinary circumstances would give him a cordial greeting, but he is so full of his argument with B that he is only dimly conscious of C's propinquity and he passes with a vague air of having seen him in another world. A has no intention of being rude or even distant, and goes on without the least idea that he has given C offence. Indeed, he is not aware that he has seen C, so deep was he in thought about other things. But C is a proud fellow, ready to feel an affront, and resolute in paying it back. The next time they meet C is stiff and remote and A goes away wondering why the fellow cut him and determined to be something of an iceberg himself when the occasion arises. And so from this trivial incident A and C drift into an attitude of hostility and aloofness which a moment's candour on either side would show to have no shadow of foundation.

Most of the actions of other people which give us annoyance spring from causes that have nothing to do with the motives we assign to them. Othello smothers Desdemona through a misunderstanding about a handkerchief that five minutes' quiet talk would have cleared up, with disastrous results to the villain, Iago. It is an excellent rule to distrust our reading of facts, still more our reading of other people's motives in relation to them. It is wrong in nine cases out of ten. I can hardly recall a case in which my first conclusion as to why So-and-So did this or that has not, on fuller knowledge, turned out to be absurdly wide of the mark. How can it be otherwise? How, for example, can that excellent person who avoided me at the club know that I have not been guilty of an act of wilful discourtesy towards him? He does not know that the nice letter I wrote to him has been lying in one of my pockets for a fortnight. I did not even know it myself. Yet the knowledge of that fact is essential to a true understanding of my conduct towards him. He has doubtless smothered me under the pillow, Othello-fashion, as a rude fellow. It is a mistake. I am only a careless fellow who ought not to be trusted with such treacherous things as pockets.

I think the moral of it all is summed up in the remark which an intrepid lady, whose name has of late become a household word, once made to me. "I never allow misunderstandings to go unexplained," she said. "If a friend 'cuts' me I ask her why she cut me, and I usually find it is for a reason that does not exist. If I don't understand the action of a friend I ask for an explanation, and I generally find it clears the air." It is a good rule. If we were not too proud to explain ourselves or to ask explanations of others most of the misunderstandings of life would disappear, and many of our worries with them.

In the meantime, I have posted that letter, with a covering note of explanation. That will remove one misunderstanding from my own encumbered path.

A NOTE ON DRESS

I read a sensational article in a newspaper the other evening. It was an article which set forth Fourteen Commandments to men on how to be dressy. I call it sensational because of its novelty. Every day in almost any paper you turn to, you will find a page or half-page about women's dress, usually adorned by amazing drawings of impossible women dressed in impossible clothes, and standing in impossible attitudes, who all seem alike in their vacuity and futility. But never before do I remember to have seen in a daily newspaper an article addressed to men, telling them what clothes they should wear and how to wear them. I daresay there have been such articles, but I have not seen them, and certainly they are so infrequent that they may be said to be unknown.

I shall be curious to see whether the innovation has come to stay, for it has been a subject of mild speculation with me why all the literature of dress should be confined to women. On the face of it we might suppose that it was only women who wore clothes at all, and certainly only women who cared what clothes they wore or made a science of wearing them. No doubt this is largely true. Every woman has a serious interest in dress. "There was never fair woman but she made mouths in a glass," says the poet, and there was never woman of any sort, fair or plain, that could refuse at least the tribute of a glance at a well-dressed milliner's window. You will hear women discuss dress on the bus as earnestly and continuously as their boys discuss cricket, or their husbands discuss stocks and shares, or motor-cars, or golf, or the iniquities of politicians. I have never yet heard two men discuss dress in the abstract for two minutes. You might sit in any smoking-room in any men's club in London for a year without hearing a remark on the fashion in ties or trousers, or a single comment on the fact that this or that person was well- or ill-dressed. If dress is mentioned at all, it is mentioned in an ironical vein, as a matter fitting, perhaps, for a light jest among friends, but nothing more.

This must not be taken to mean, I think, that men are wholly indifferent to dress. It does not fill anything like the place in their mind that it fills in the mind of women, and I fancy there is an unwritten convention among them that it is bad form almost bordering on the improper to talk about clothes. It would smack of vanity in regard to one's personal appearance. Women can talk about clothes without this sense of personal vanity. They talk about it in a detached, abstract way, as they might talk about pictures, or music, or any other æsthetic subject. They are interested in it objectively as an art. They like to see pretty dresses, even though they cannot hope to wear them. They throng to a wedding, not so much from interest in the principals as from the desire to see the clothes the bride wears. They like to see them much as they might like to hear a beautiful performance on the violin, although they themselves can never hope to play the violin. Even women who dress dowdily themselves and affect to have souls above the follies of their sex, secretly love a display of fashions and like to read about the garments of women they do not know and do not want to know.

Men are certainly not like this. They are not interested in dress as an art. If their newspaper, describing a political meeting, informed them that the chairman was dressed in a frock-coat, with three buttons and a full skirt, that he wore trousers with a tendency to bell-bottoms, and patent leather shoes with pointed toes, and white gaiters--if they were told this they would wonder what the joke was about. Where a man is keenly interested in dress, he is interested in his own dress. His concern is his own personal appearance. He is particular about the crease in his trousers and the cut of his coat where his wife, perhaps, is only interested in the objective beauty of gowns and toques, and can enjoy the sight of them on other people as well as in her own mirror.

Are we to conclude that men are superior to women in having none of this disinterested enthusiasm for dress as an art? It is a nice question. I should not wish to see the subject fill so large a place in their thought as it does in the case of women; but they ought not to be above it, or pretend that they are above it. After all, to be well-dressed--not "dressy"--nor necessarily fashionable--is as proper a wish in man as in woman. Dress has its spiritual and moral reactions. It may seem absurd, but it is true that we are in a real sense the creatures of our clothes. We are better men, more civilised men, in a well-fitting garment than in an ill-made garment. Baggy knees dispirit the mind. Slovenliness does not stop at the clothes, but infects the soul. That is why a clean-up in the evening and a change of clothes is a good moral tonic for anyone. The case was well put by an Australian squatter to a friend of mine who visited him on his estate far away in the wilds of the interior. My friend asked him why, in so remote a place, he made it a practice to "dress" for dinner. "I do it," said the squatter, "to avoid losing my self-respect. If I did not dress for dinner I should end by coming in to dinner in my shirt-sleeves. I should end by not troubling to wash. I should sink down to the level of the cattle. I dress for dinner, not to make myself pretty, but as a spiritual renovation."

FAREWELL TO HAMPSTEAD

In the house there are portents of impending change. A feeling of clearance is in the air. There is a going-away aspect about the furniture, pictures are down and in odd passages and corners there are bundles and boxes of books piled up for removal. Most conclusive of all, there is beside the gate a board bearing in large red letters the word "Sold." It is the announcement to the world that I am on the march to fresh woods and pastures new. They are beautiful woods and desirable pastures. I have no doubt I shall be as happy amidst them as a very variable temper permits me to be in this very variable world of ours. And yet I confess that the sight of that word "Sold" over the gate gives me an orphaned feeling. It translates itself in my mind into "Finis"--the end of a chapter, the completion of another long stage in a journey that seems now unconscionably short, the cold epitaph of irrevocable things. Taking farewell of a house that has become as familiar to you as your own shadow is like taking leave of something of your spiritual self. It is no longer a thing of bricks and mortar. It is compact of dreams and babbles of a thousand forgotten things that were and will not be again. That is so of any house where you have lived long and seen happy days; but when that house is at Hampstead, a bow-shot from the Heath, the twinge of parting is peculiarly sharp.

I daresay there are as pleasant places under the sun as Hampstead. I do not know them, but I am willing to believe that there are. Pleasanter places, I think, there cannot be. It was Happy Hampstead in the far-off days when the Abbot and monks of Westminster used to come hawking and hunting up its breezy heights and down into the Forest of Middlesex beyond; it was Happy Hampstead when the gallants and fine ladies of two hundred years ago came to Well Walk to drink the waters and dance and philander in the greenwood, and it is Happy Hampstead still, the hill of vision and the inexhaustible playground of the city that spreads, vast and mysterious, at its foot. Here on this sandy spit, with its ponds and its hollows, its birch woods and its hawthorn bushes, its wide vistas and secret places, its sense of the seashore and its feeling of the mountains, is the land where it is always afternoon. Romance clings to it like an odour and mirth is in its very atmosphere. It is the idyll of London.

And what a wealth of memories swarm around its hillsides, peopling its quaint courts and ways, and the very gorse bushes, with the shadows of the past. There is hardly a foot of its soil that is without its story--Dick Turpin riding on moonlit nights over the swarthy heath; Dick Steele taking refuge from his creditors in the lonely cottage on Haverstock Hill, where Sir Charles Sedley had lived before him; the famous Kit-Cat Club with Addison and all the wits of the day holding its summer sessions hard by the Whitestone Pond; Charles Lamb hunting among the gorse bushes for the snuff-box that he had thrown away the day before in a mood of renunciation after a visit with Home to the "Bull and Bush"; Shelley carrying a poor woman whom he had found lying in the snow to Leigh Hunt's house in the Vale of Health; Sir Harry Vane coming out of his house on Rosslyn Hill on his last journey to the Tower; Constable's pines by the Spaniards' Road, and the gibbet tree on which the highwaymen were hanged in chains, that still lies where it fell above the road at North End; Wordsworth walking up the hill to visit Joanna Baillie; and Pope hobnobbing with Arbuthnot; Johnson, in the days of his poverty, tramping up from Fleet Street to see his ailing wife at Frognal; the tales of the Spaniards' Inn, where Mrs. Bardell had her party, and where the rioters assembled for their attack on Mansfield at Ken Wood; the great Pitt, in his madness at Pitt House; Romney nursing his gloomy spirit at Holly Hill; Keats attending his dying brother in Well Walk and writing his immortal odes in Wentworth Place; Crabbe----

But no, the shadows crowd too thick and fast to be recorded. I walk amongst them with the feeling that I, too, seem about to become a shadow, and as I leave the Heath where the children are playing hide-and-seek among the hawthorn trees and the dogs are splashing in the Leg of Mutton Pond and turn into a road where the one brazen word "Sold" seems to fill the landscape, I have a vague sense of attending a funeral. Fortunately it is my own funeral--the funeral of twenty happy years on this sunny eminence--and not the funeral of Happy Hampstead. Men may come and men may go, but neither time nor change can touch the spirit of this enchanted hill.

Jane says that she will never have the heart to return to it. I feel a bit like that myself. I feel that I shall not want to disturb the dream into which those Hampstead days are fading. It will be enough to remember that I too once dwelt in Arcady.

ON PLAGIARISM

I have had many literary enthusiasms, some of them transient, some of them lasting, but Pope was never one of them. He seems to me to dwell in a walled-in garden, very perfectly kept, amazingly neat and tidy with the box-hedges trimmed to a nicety and shaped here and there into cocks and other fantasies; but airless and stuffy. I like to take a stroll down his trim couplets now and then, but I am soon content to pass out to the landscapes where the Miltons and Shelleys and Wordsworths and Shakespeares fill the lungs with the great winds and feast the eye with the great spaces. I do not therefore feel any particular horror at Professor Karl Pearson's discovery that Pope is a plagiarist. I should not be disturbed if he proved he was a bad plagiarist. He has not done that, but he has found that Pope's aphorism, "The proper study of mankind is Man," is lifted from Pierre Charron--"La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homme c'est l'Homme." It seems to me a rather poor, pedestrian thing to steal--so commonplace indeed as to defy paternity. Anybody might have said it without feeling that he had said something that anybody else could not have said as well.

If this were the worst charge of plagiarism that could be brought against Pope--and I shall show presently that it is not--few illustrious poets would have so clean a record. If we damned him for so trivial a theft as this, what sort of punishment would be left for the colossal borrowings of a Shakespeare or a Burns? Take, for example, that most exquisite of Burns's songs, "O, my luve is like a red, red rose." There is not a single stanza that is not lifted from old ballads and chapbooks. Compare, as an illustration, the third stanza:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear.
While the sands o' life shall run.

with this from _The Young Man's Farewell to his Love_ in the Motherwell collection of chapbooks:

The seas they shall run dry,
And rocks melt into sands;
Then I'll love you still, my dear,
When all those things are done.

Even the fine change from "melt into sands" to "melt wi' the sun" is traceable to another source. Wordsworth and Milton, proud and austere though they were, were not above enriching their verse with borrowed thoughts. Milton's borrowings from Dante are abundant, but they are done in the grand manner, as of a prince taking a loan from an equal, not because he needs it, but as a token of their high companionship and their starry discourse. To be plagiarised by Milton would be no grievance, but a crowning distinction. It would be a title-deed for immortality. The two most beautiful lines in the poem on the daffodils by Ullswater are Dorothy Wordsworth's, and in sending _The Ettrick Shepherd_ to the _Athenæum_ for publication Wordsworth acknowledged that in the lines:

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits
Or waves that own no curbing hand.

he was indebted to a now unknown poet, G. Bell, who in speaking of Skiddaw said, "Yon dark cloud _rakes_ and shrouds its noble brow." One can imagine G. Bell being famous in the Elysian Fields as the man from whom Wordsworth once borrowed a thought.

The indebtedness of Keats to others is indebtedness for words rather than ideas, but it is an immense debt. You can almost trace his reading by the perfumed words that he has ravished from other gardens, and to which he has given a new and immortal setting. When he writes: "Oh Moon! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee," we know that he has been dipping into Beaumont and Fletcher, and so we may track him through Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Sandys' _Ovid_ and Thomson's _Seasons_, and a score of other luxuriant gardens of long ago. But this plucking of verbal flowers can hardly come within the scope of plagiarism. For that accusation to hold there must be some appropriation of ideas or at least of rhythm and form. Often the appropriation may be so transfigured as to rob it of any element of discredit. Thus, Tennyson's:

Our little systems have their day.
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

is clearly traceable to the magnificent image in Shelley's _Adonais_:

The One remains; the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

In both we have the idea of Heaven's light streaming down upon the "broken lights" of our earthly tabernacle, and being splintered into many-coloured fragments, but the later poet's employment of the idea, however inferior, is sufficiently original and fresh to warrant the spoliation. And, indeed, Shelley himself must have had a great phrase of St. Augustine's in mind when he wrote his immortal stanza.

Often the apparent plagiarism is unintended, even unconscious. Some minds are tenacious of good things and quite honestly forgetful of the source. I don't refer to cases like that of the late Canon Fleming, who preached and published a sermon of Dr. Talmage's as his own, and when exposed declared that he had been so impressed by it that he had written it out and then forgotten it was not his own. Nor do I refer to such thefts as that of Disraeli from Thiers. In that case Disraeli, like Fleming, explained that he had copied the passage into his commonplace book and mistaken it for his own. But as Thiers did not speak English, the explanation, as Herbert Paul remarks, was not felt to be explanatory. I refer to honourable men who would not stoop to these depths of brazen effrontery. In the instance I have quoted from Tennyson, it is of course obvious that the poet knew the source. He probably knew Adonais by heart, and he would certainly not have been shocked to find that others had noted the similarity. He quite deliberately invited criticism and comparison. In another case in which he appropriated a picturesque image from Shakespeare, it is difficult to suppose that he was unconscious of what he was doing. "Heigho! an it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged," says the Carrier, calling up the sleepy ostler in _Henry IV._, "Charles's Wain is over the new chimney and yet our horse not packed. What, ostler!" In the _May Queen_ we read:

And we danced about the maypole and in the hazel copse
Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney tops.