Chapter II: Part 2

CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_to First Mate James_): I think we had better fiddle harmonics on the strings of the mainsail.

FIRST MATE JAMES: I mentioned to you, sir, the last time that we somewhat infelicitously met, that I intended to appeal, with a dozen differential precautions, to another and probably more closely qualified meteorologic authority on the subject of the Second Mate’s whimsical, wanton, perhaps fortunate but so far unconfirmed and unqualified change of course, and indeed, if I may venture without presumption, and at the risk of incurring the suspicion of undue parenthesis, and of an almost tremulous desire to say everything, I would, and indeed I had done so already, but for a fugitive shade of displeasure on your eyebrows, I would adumbrate the shadow of a surmise, that, faced as we are--

CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_impatiently_): The young who fear to enter the forest of advice do so at the cost of losing their way in the lane that knows no ending.

(_Enter Ship’s Cook Chesterton_)

COOK CHESTERTON: The Purser complains of the pea-soup. He says it is not fit for a dog. It is true. It is not fit for a dog, but the whole soul and glory of this fast and frantic life is to eat and to enjoy food that a dog rejects. He doesn’t see that it is the dog who is wrong.

PURSER SHAW: I never said that the dog was wrong in his choice of food. I have no objection to eating dog biscuit; what I do object to is eating dog soup.... What I do object to is eating a soup which professes to be made of vegetables and in reality is made of dog. I see no moral objection to cannibalism. I have no moral objection to eating shoulder of boatswain; but I do object to the old-fashioned superstition of believing that soup is still made of fresh peas when _it isn’t_. That soup was made of old flesh. If you don’t believe me, ask the steward. Here, Steward.

(_Enter Steward Beerbohm_)

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Our battle is ever between undeserved rewards and stolen fruits. What say you, Steward?

STEWARD BEERBOHM: Let us forget these bickerings and turn ourselves lightly to the thought of home, of Piccadilly, of the artificial haunts and the gaudy hostels, where indifferent cooks and careless waiters proffer inartistically prepared _mets_ to the blasé, the faded and the jaded and the new rich, who partake of it with feigned satisfaction, and pay for it with a faint but exquisite pleasure in knowing that the bill is more than they can afford.

PURSER SHAW: Your Piccadilly is here and now. I venture to submit that the Steward is an incurable romantic. Now romance in food is preposterous.

COOK CHESTERTON: There is nothing so romantic as food, nothing so poetic as roast beef, nothing so fantastic as plum-pudding, nothing so lyrical as eggs and bacon, nothing in cant modern sense so artistic as a mutton chop, nothing so dreamy as toasted cheese.

PURSER SHAW: Exactly. You are still infected with the poison of your nurseries and the sentiment of Christmas. I have exploded Christmas. I have annihilated the nursery.

STEWARD BEERBOHM: I think Christmas very quaint and charming, and a nursery, conducted according to the principles of the early years of Victoria the First, a place of dainty manners and delicate precepts and wistful rhymes. I would not forget them for anything.

FIRST MATE JAMES: The word nursery, now you speak it, throws a curious thrill through the lining, so to speak, of the psychological situation. We might, in fact, in such a case even follow the steward into another and no less refined a speculation, the question of whether the nursery, the sanest seat of moral ethics, might not, after all, be the high final if somewhat narrow circle of all ultimate--that is to say--

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: To have the sense of the eternal in the nursery is nothing. To have had it is the beginning of wisdom. But let us rather put off discussion of the theme, until round the mahogany we can broach a bottle of the Old Widow, nay rather, Hermitage--ah! that was a great wine--

STEWARD BEERBOHM: The suggestion of asceticism in the name, blent with the sensuality of the thing, heightens its charm. Who would not be a hermit, and dwell in one of those rococo palacules built for weary monarchs in an age of scepticism, flute-playing, and minuets?

(_Enter Second Mate Hardy_)

SECOND MATE HARDY: The spirit of the years is looking down upon our ship with an ironical smile. O Wessex, Wessex! Would that I could see Stonehenge and a large red moon rising over the plain.

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: I am glad to be away from the island of chills and the _informes hiemes_.

PURSER SHAW: Sir, with all due respect, I cannot allow this digression to continue. No Englishman can talk consecutively for more than two minutes on the same subject.

COOK CHESTERTON: That is why the Irish have conquered England.

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Observe the Southern Cross, if indeed that be the Southern Cross, hanging like a jeweled hilt in the spheral blue--

STEWARD BEERBOHM: Pretty little trinket! Is it a brooch or an aigrette? Methinks a device of Cartier--

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Those stars are pebbles on the silvery wheel-course of the chariot of the moon.

SECOND MATE HARDY: Pitiless, inflexible stars, thousands and thousands of millions of miles away.

PURSER SHAW: Don’t you believe it. That’s one of the lies men of science tell us.

COOK CHESTERTON: It doesn’t matter if the stars are twenty miles off, or twenty millions of miles off. The point about the stars is that they are stars.

(_Enter an Ordinary Seaman_)

ORDINARY SEAMAN: Please, sir, the ship is sinking.

SECOND MATE HARDY: I knew it! O Irony!

PURSER SHAW: Then we shall have to eat roast boatswain after all.

FIRST MATE JAMES: If I might hazard a suggestion, without of course trying to grasp any impertinent or rather importunate shadow of a scheme--

ORDINARY SEAMAN: The cabin boy has escaped in the galley.

CAPTAIN MEREDITH: O brave!

STEWARD BEERBOHM: Ouf!

(_The ship sinks with all hands._)

* * * * *

To-night (when is it? I have lost count of time, but I know it is still July) one of the officers told me a yarn. It was his own ghost story, and it was ultimately spoiled for him, just as happened in the case of Kipling, when he heard phantom billiard players playing all night and found out the next day that the noise was caused by a rat and a loose window-sash. This is the story; but I shall spoil it in the telling because to tell a sea-yarn you must be a sailor.

The ship was sailing somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope. It was dirty weather and the sailor who was on watch came and reported to the officer that there was a ghost in the sea, for’ard.

The officer sent him away, but he returned almost immediately and reported that the ghost was still there.

The officer said rude things, and added that he had better go aloft and watch the ghost from there. Another man was sent to replace the craven, and all was calm for a while, when suddenly this second sailor came back, pale with fear, and said that a woman was rising through the mist from the sea. Some one else was sent to replace this man, and the ghost had such an effect upon him that he fell down and broke his leg. Then the captain came on deck and the officer reported the state of affairs to him. He went forward and came back saying, “It is a ghost.” Then, being a religious man, he fetched a Bible and tried to exorcise the ghost by reading the Scripture.

While this was going on, the officer who told me the story went forward, and there, as plain as a pikestaff, in the murky mist, he saw a white woman slowly rise in the swell and then disappear. Paralysed with horror, he stood looking at the sea, and the woman rose once more; and then, his fear left him, and he realized that it was the figurehead of the ship which had got knocked off.

But I have spoiled that story. I have merely told the bare facts; what you want is the whole thing; the dialogue, the details; the technical terms.

From Colombo to Fremantle is probably the most monotonous part of the voyage. The only object of interest is the albatross, but as nobody shot one, with a crossbow, no untoward events happened.

_Fremantle: July_

Fremantle is the least attractive of ports. You are not meant to stay there. You are meant to go on to Perth. Nevertheless, it was my first sight of an Australian city. It struck me as being in some ways rather like a Russian provincial town; this is not odd, because Russia is a country of colonists. What differentiates a Russian city from an Australian--and indeed from any other city--is the churches with their gilded spires and blue cupolas and their Byzantine shape.

At Fremantle the firemen went on shore--against orders. They drank to their hearts’ content, and came back in a state of truculent inebriation, as did many of the steerage passengers. We left Fremantle in the evening. There was a strong wind blowing. Two little tugs were doing their best to pull us out of the narrow harbour. They could scarcely pull their own weight; and then one of the hawsers broke. We drifted to port where alongside of the wharf some cargo steamers lay at anchor.

“Hullo!” said somebody; “we shall only just do it.”

The passengers became interested.

Then it became evident that we weren’t going just to do it; and we went--_crunch! crunch!_--into the steamers alongside the wharf, carrying away the wooden gear they had to put cattle in.

Then began a slow battle of the tugs against the wind; whenever we seemed to be moving to starboard, the wind brought us back again to the wharf. It looked at one moment as if we were going to be there all night. Two of the firemen were fighting forward. Then the wind dropped a little, our own engines began to work, and we steamed safely out of the harbour.

We did hardly any damage to the ship against which we crunched, except carrying away that wooden gear; but the moment any little incident of that kind happens in a ship, it makes you realize instantly how disagreeable a real accident would be. These large ships look so helpless under such circumstances: and after all, when accidents happen, they happen, whether a ship is in harbour or in midocean, whether she is large or small: witness the Royal George and the Titanic.

_Adelaide: July_

We reached Adelaide on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I went on shore and saw for the first time the dark-brown colouring, the scrub, and the gum-trees of Australia. It was supposed to be winter; but it was what we call in England early spring, because the almond trees were in full bloom. The atmosphere was dazzingly clear but cold. The whole colour and nature of the place, with its dark evergreens, brown earth, luxuriant winter vegetation, and its blue and lilac hills in the distance, and its limpid sky, reminded me of the south of France in winter; but Australia has a peculiar atmosphere of its own which, if properly painted, ought to make the fortune of a painter. There are some very clever Australian painters.

Adelaide is called the “Garden City” of Australia. It deserves the name, for it looks like a garden even in winter. The hotels are good, the streets spacious and wide boulevards, and there is the most beautifully situated steeplechase course I have ever seen. It being Sunday, everything was shut: this made occupation in the city less interesting than it might have been, and it was too cold to motor into the hills.

At Adelaide fourteen firemen left the ship forever. The trouble about firemen on the mail steamers that go to Australia is that they are white men. They cannot stand the heat of the tropics and they do not earn a living wage.

“Who,” as the chief engineer said to me, “would not be a fireman in the Red Sea in July, when the temperature is 120 in the shade? And who would not be a man who has to look after firemen?”

One cannot travel on a big liner without being amazed, or rather aghast, at the conditions under which the crew and the stewards live in the merchant service, and the terms under which the officers serve, so that one wonders how it happens that any one goes to sea; and one is inclined almost to agree with Dr. Johnson’s opinions on the subject.

“A ship,” he said, “is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniences of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life they are not fit to live on land.”

“Then,” said Boswell, “it would be cruel in a father to breed his son to the sea.”

“It would be cruel,” said Johnson, “in a father who thinks as I do. Men go to sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession; as, indeed, is generally the case with men when they have once engaged in any particular way of life.”

But what is wrong with the officer’s life in the merchant service? it will be asked.

The answer is that he is miserably underpaid. In some cases he gets less than an able seaman gets in Australia. He has to buy linen, his uniform, many pairs of whites. His work is one of great responsibility. A captain when he has worked for twenty years gets no pension. Talk with any officer in the merchant service and his advice to any one who thinks of going to sea is, “Don’t.”

As to the men, a sailor’s life in a liner is about the same as a sailor’s life anywhere, but the accommodation of the stewards is miserable. The “glory-hole” where they sleep crowded together has an almost incredible insufficiency of space and air. And a first-class steward has to keep himself neat and clean: besides which he is extremely hard-worked.

Talking of the recent dock strike in London with one of the stewards, he told me they didn’t want to come out in sympathy with the strikers, because they got absolutely nothing by it. They were most of them made to come out on strike, with no prospect of any betterment in matters which concerned them.

I don’t believe the stewards’ accommodation in a ship is a bit better than it was forty years ago.

_Melbourne: July_

I practically only had a glimpse of Melbourne; a drive through the city, a visit to a newspaper office and to some of the shops, a walk through the park in the twilight, a dinner with a friend, and a drive in a taxi back to the harbour.

I was struck by the mildness of the climate; but I was told that up till then the weather had been very cold. I was struck here again by the softness and peculiar luminous quality of the atmosphere; by the size of the city, which seemed quite enormous; a handsome city, with regular streets, tall buildings, and a multitude of cars.

_Sydney: August 2_

We entered the bay in the dawn--or rather before the dawn; it was very misty; we moved in a vague twilight of blue shadows. I got up to see the bay, but you could see nothing distinctly, nothing but mist and blue shadows; the whole thing very unearthly and beautiful. I went back to my bunk, intending to get up again in half an hour’s time, when it was lighter. But I went to sleep, and when I woke up again we were right against the wharf.

You could hear the bugles from a British man-of-war, the Drake. It was a brilliant, warm, delicious day.

I spent a whole day in the city of Sydney, exploring the stores, riding about aimlessly in the cars. I had luncheon at the Australian Hotel. The waiters were dressed as stewards, and, indeed, many of them are ex-stewards. I thought the food excellent. I visited two excellent bookstores.

When you go to a bookstore in London and ask for any book, you are told they haven’t got it. Here in Sydney I found the men in the stores abnormally intelligent. You could even get different kinds of books written by the same author, which is a difficult feat anywhere. Most booksellers think that if a man writes a book on, say, poultry, it is preposterous to ask for a work of his on political economy or step-dancing. And yet it happens that many writers write books on different subjects--Andrew Lang, for instance. We received the sad news of the death of Andrew Lang at Fremantle. Andrew Lang is an author who spent the large capital of his wit, his learning, his wide sympathies, royally and generously without stint; he was a master of English prose, and some of the best pieces of prose he ever wrote were flung into leaders in the “Daily News.” Those which were afterwards collected in a book called “Lost Leaders” make the most delightful reading. He wrote just as well and just as wittily on street noises or midsummer heat as on Homer, the Young Pretender, or Joan of Arc. He was profoundly unprovincial; he had a fine and rare quiet appreciation of French poetry; he could write ghost stories, fairy tales, doggerel; he was a supreme dialectician, an amusing parodist, a prince of letter writers, as well as a poet;--perhaps he was above all things a poet. The following translation of Rufinus’ verses to Rhodocleia, sending her a wreath, is a good example of his verse. He has turned an exquisite Greek poem into an exquisite English poem.

“Ah, Golden Eyes, to win you yet,
I bring mine April coronet.
The lovely blossoms of the spring
For you I weave, to you I bring
These roses with the lilies set,
The dewy dark-eyed violet,
Narcissus, and the wind-flower wet:
Wilt thou disdain mine offering?
Ah, Golden Eyes!

Crowned with thy lover’s flowers, forget
The pride wherein thy heart is set,
For thou, like these or anything,
Hast but a moment of thy spring,
Thy spring, and then--the long regret!
Ah, Golden Eyes!”

To go back to Sydney and the stores. The trouble is I cannot remember either of their names. I had dinner at a restaurant called the Palace Hotel, and after dinner I visited the office of the Sydney “Herald,” where I spent a very pleasant time. I had already been met by two interviewers in the morning, and they asked me whether I was going to write anything about Australia. I said No, that I had no intention of so doing, as I did not believe in writing seriously about a country where one doesn’t make a proper stay. Practically I saw nothing of Australia; but I suppose there is no harm in writing these notes--the mere rough impressions of a fugitive traveller.

Although I was only twelve hours in Sydney, I had occasion to notice the hospitality of the people. What struck me also was the life and gaiety of the place.

The next morning, which was Saturday, I had to leave the liner, which had been my home for the last six weeks, and embark on the Maunganui for Wellington, whither I was bound.

The Maunganui, which belongs to the Union Steamship Company, is a new vessel, and quite extraordinarily comfortable. The voyage from Sydney to Wellington takes from Saturday to Wednesday, but sometimes if the weather is bad it takes longer.

As we steamed out of Sydney, I at last had a view of the famous bay, and it exceeded all my expectations: the colouring is so rich, the lines and shape of the coast are so nobly planned, and the sky and the sea are so intoxicatingly bright, fresh, and dazzling. I am sorry for people who are disappointed in Sydney.

_On Board the Maunganui: August_

The ship is crowded with passengers. There is a very comfortable smoking-room on the upper deck. The ship is beautifully clean and new-looking. She is a new ship. She made her first voyage in February, 1912.

There are on board fifty “boys” who are going to Buenos Ayres. There are engineers. As for the rest of the passengers, there are many men, many women, and many children. The sea is unusually smooth--unusually, that is to say, for this part of the ocean, which I am told is generally rough.

I settle myself down to read O’Brien’s “Life of Parnell,” one of the best biographies in the English language.

I think a ship is the pleasantest place to read in in the world. First, you have the advantages of being indoors and out of doors at the same time, if you sit on a deck chair, or in a smoking-room near an open door. Secondly, you are just sufficiently and not too much interrupted. You can pause and watch the passengers. You overhear scraps of talk. You engage yourself in desultory conversation.

But during all this first afternoon I am riveted by the doings of Parnell--the man who, so cold and aloof, exercised an electric power over the rest of his fellow creatures: the man who smashed the machinery of the House of Commons, in order to compel the British to deal with the Irish question.

I was at school when some of the most stirring acts of that drama were being played. All schoolboys are, of course, “Conservatives,” and our schoolmaster was a fanatical Tory. The mere mention of Mr. Gladstone’s name maddened him, and I remember one day his telling the boys that he had received a circular from some political Liberal association, and that he intended to send it back to the secretary with a penny inside it, so that the sender should have to pay eightpence. This was a good civic lesson for the young! All the boys professed to be staunch Tories; but if it was discovered that one’s parents were Liberals, one was labelled Liberal. This was my unfortunate predicament.

The general election of 1885 took place when I was at school. The Head Master addressed the school when it began, and he prefaced his speech by saying, “There are only seven Liberals in the school.” This was nice for the Liberals.

On the 5th of November an effigy of Chamberlain was burned in the garden. The effigy bore a large cardboard cow with the words “Three Acres” written on it. Years afterwards I described this incident in an article for a London daily. In mentioning Chamberlain I added the words, “who was at that time a radical.” The editor crossed out these words. The Conservative readers of this daily were not to be reminded that Chamberlain had ever been a radical. It seemed almost like blasphemy to hint at such a thing. And yet it was true. Unless history be suppressed altogether, the fact will have to go down to posterity that in 1885 Chamberlain was a radical. It seemed a terrible shame in those days that one’s parents should be on what, in the opinion of one’s world, was obviously the wrong side.

English private schools are, or were, the most curious institutions in the world. The parents of to-day say they are entirely changed and altered. They may be; but one thing is quite certain, the parents don’t know. The only people who know are the boys, and they don’t reveal the secrets of the fortress until they are grown up; but, judging by what grown-up boys of twenty now tell one, they do not seem to me to be greatly changed.

My school was totally unlike the schools depicted in fiction and pictured by the boyish imagination. There were no bullies--at least, not among the boys; the masters did the bullying. They exercised a reign of terror; they ruled by mysterious hints and vague threats, so that one moved perpetually under the shadow of an impending but unknown doom. The sense of guilt for some crime which one didn’t know the nature of was perpetually being brought home to one. And the boys used to catch the tone of mystery, and act as if they formed part of the conspiracy, which, of course, they didn’t. They were all equally in the dark.

The discretion of boys is extraordinary: their fear of giving anything away; their constant profession of happiness, in spite of obvious misery. But then, of course, it must be remembered that they accept the conditions of school life as the best that life has to offer. They think that _is_ happiness.

* * * * *

In the evening after dinner some of the “boys” played poker. Gradually I made their acquaintance. One of them told me of the life in Buenos Ayres. He asked me to lend him a book. He had a pal who read books, and was in fact reading, he said, a book which he believed to be the _best book in print_. That was a nice phrase, and I have already quoted it. He fetched the book: it turned out to be “Monte Cristo.” I agree as to the description of it.

In another book on English prisons I have read just lately, called “A Holiday in Gaol,” the writer says that “Monte Cristo” was engaged half a dozen deep by the prisoners at Wormwood Scrubbs.

The “boy” turned over the leaves of “Monte Cristo” and came across the name “Sinbad the Sailor,” and asked me whether it was the same story as “Sinbad the Sailor,” because he had seen that played at Sydney, and couldn’t make it out. It is, indeed, not very easy to make out the story of “Sinbad the Sailor” from a pantomime version.

I saw this actual version of “Sinbad the Sailor” later in Wellington, and a very good pantomime it was; but lucidity and cohesion of plot were not its strongest points.

In Sydney pantomimes go on all the year round, I am told, and not only at Christmas time, as in England.

I was playing patience after dinner. This led to talking of fortune-telling by cards, and one of the Sydney “boys” asked me to tell his fortune, which I did, as well as that of five or six others. The next day one of them informed me that I had told their fortunes “to a tick.”

Let me hastily say that I don’t believe there is anything in it; but cards are uncanny things all the same, and fruitful in odd coincidences.

Once when I was travelling in Russia I met a man who professed to tell fortunes by cards. It was in a third-class railway carriage and the man was a poor man. This is how he did it. He told one to wish, and then dealt out his cards in the orthodox manner; but he added, “When you wish, you mustn’t think of a green horse or else your wish won’t come true.” As if after being told such a thing one could help thinking of a green horse.

* * * * *

I am reading a book by that delightful author, William de Morgan, called “Somehow Good.” He is one of those authors who does the work for you. The book reads itself: just in the same way as Italian servants say that crockery breaks. For instance, an Italian servant never says, “The cook has broken a plate,” but “A plate has broken itself to the cook.” (Si e rotto un piatto alla cuoca.)

I have often wondered how housemaids acquired the apparently innate genius they possess for breaking things. It certainly amounts to genius; for it happens automatically and suddenly, as if prompted by divine and authentic inspiration. The gift is apparently shared by steerage passengers in a liner. The chief officer of the liner in which I travelled from England told me, before we had reached Fremantle, that twelve hundred glasses had been broken in the steerage. (There were eight hundred passengers.)

Sailors and Chinamen never break anything; but, on the other hand, there is nothing that children will not break. Children are like white ants; they are entirely destructive, and they construct nothing, except sand castles. And sand is the best safety-valve for the terrible and unlimited powers of childhood that exists.

This has been noted by the poet, who says:--

“On the other hand,
Children in ordinary dress
May always play with sand.”

* * * * *

In reading through the last pages that I have written, I am struck by the fact that there is very little about travel in these supposed notes on travel. The word longitude has not yet occurred, and no scrap of information that could be of any possible practical use to any one has yet been given. Does it matter?

Practical information can be sought for in guidebooks. I say _sought for_ purposely, for it can really only be obtained by experience. As for geographical details, I cannot think that the perusal of them is very interesting. And then, in writing on random subjects under a misleading title, I am only following well-known precedents. For instance, if you buy a modern book on “Gardening,” what do you find? You open the book, say, at the chapter headed “June,” and you find this kind of thing:--

I don’t think the pictures in the Royal Academy are so good this year as they were last: but the average level is on the whole higher. I remember Lord Melbourne saying that the Academy was the only picture gallery he really enjoyed, because the pictures told one stories and there was no damned nonsense of art about them. I am sorry that the girls of the present day are no longer taught sketching. Every girl should be able to sketch badly. Albums of sketches, made on the Continent, are a great resource on rainy Saturdays, and do well to sell at bazaars.

Italy is a good subject for sketching. Apropos of Italy, I came across the following poem in the South Wiltshire “Gazette.” It was said to be by Wordsworth, but a kind correspondent tells me that it is really by Miss Ellen F. Winthrope, who died at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1887, at the age of seventy-three:--

_Lines written at Florence_

Look upward, for the sky is not all cloud.
Look forward, think not of the dismal shroud.
No lane but has a turning, and no road
That leads not somewhere to a warm abode.
Take courage. If the day seems rather long,
The cooling dew will fall at evensong.

Believe, and Doubt is sure to slink away,
Doubt is a cur; and Fear is but a fool;
Rely upon yourself and let your stay
Be the observance of the heavenly rule.
Never say die; and do not be afraid;
At eventide the wages will be paid.

A Dutch friend of mine gave me the following very good recipe for cooking anchovies: “Take an old garden hat, boil for seven minutes in boiling water. Add four pounds of cinnamon, one nutmeg, and half a glass of Chablis. Cut the anchovies in pieces and place on china plate. Pour the boiling water over them, and serve tepid with slices of lemon.”

Another friend of mine gave me this quaint, old-fashioned recipe for boiling a turkey: “Gather strawberry leaves on Lamas Eve, press them in the distillery until the aromatick perfume thereof becomes sensible. Take a fat turkey and pluck him, and baste him, then enfold him carefully in the strawberry leaves. Then boyl him in water from the well, and add rosemary, rue, parsefoil, passevelours, carraway, floramour, velvet flower, lavender, thistles, stinging nettles, and other sweet smelling herbs. Add also a pinte of Canary wine, and half pound of butter and one of ginger passed through the sieve. Serve with plums and stewed raisons and a little salt. Cover him with a silver dish cover. The Compleat Cook, 1656.”

Appended to this was the quaint motto:--

“Live and learne, for flowyrres fade,
June waiteth not for man or mayde.”

That is the kind of thing you will find in the June chapter of the modern book on “Gardening.”

Then, if you take a book on a definite place, called, say, Rome. What do you find? Facts? No. Dates? No. But something like this:--

_The Spirit of Rome_ (_with apologies to Vernon Lee_)

_May 11._ We drove this afternoon to the Villa Madama; on the way we talked of Richard Strauss and the non-melodic musicians. Strauss is a Dionysiac. We compared his prophetic mood-music with the old-fashioned facile melodies of Wagner that pleased our youth. While we were talking a shepherd passed us. As he passed he took off his hat and said, “Buon giorno.” Very Roman that.

_May 27._ Porta Pia. A ragged cloud in the west and the sun shining very pale and watery. Passed a man playing a harmonium. P---- insisted on stopping to listen and the man asked him the time. This is the kind of thing that only happens to P---- and in Rome.

_May 31._ Mount Aventine. S---- and I strolled up the hill. We walked into a church (blonde marbles and seaweed-coloured pillars). A woman dressed in a bonnet and black silk came in and said her prayers. S---- said this reminded her of Boston. Why?

_June 2._ Sunday. Heard a sermon in the afternoon at the church of St. Praxed. (Alas! the tomb of Browning’s Bishop is not there, nay, probably Browning had another church in his eye.) The priest in the middle of his sermon, yawned, and said, “Basta!” Then, for the first time during this visit, for the first time since twenty years, I felt the unmistakable thrill of recognition, and said, “This is Rome.”

Or there is another method. That is the contemplative historic description of something you have never seen (the Belloc method). You don’t pretend to have seen it; but you describe what you might have felt, had you seen it. It is something like this:--

I have never been to Arles. But yesterday as I was walking along the Roman Road between Chanctonbury and Horsham, I thought of Arles. Arles is perpetually seeking new things in Europe. Arles has the spirit, the judgment, and the greatness of the thirteenth century. Chicago differs utterly in mood from Arles. In Chicago there is war. You buy a newspaper and ten to one the leading article will be an affirmation or a denial of a creed or a dogma. In Arles you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing but the record of the weather, two days old. And, as I consider the two towns, neither of which I have visited, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining them as in remembering the sharp pictures of Birmingham and Swindon. I have been to Swindon; and that reminds me, Swindon has a song of its own. It is called “If the Swin was in the Swim.” I have great hopes of the town of Swindon.

The world has become introspective and subjective. People no longer write about what they heard or saw. They assume that the reader knows all that. But they describe what they felt and thought on Monday, or on Tuesday, or on any other day of the week. Anatole France started the game by saying that criticism was the adventures of the soul among masterpieces.

This method came as a boon to reviewers and critics: they no longer had to pretend to read the books they reviewed. To dramatic critics, especially, the system was invaluable; but they have now carried it further still. The “literary” critic who wrote an account of a play instead of telling you what the play was about and the effect it had on the audience, gave you his “impressions” of the play. But now he just gives you his impressions: not his impressions of the play, but his impressions of anything: the Woman’s Suffrage Movement--the Rocky Mountains. He need scarcely mention the play; but it is generally done. These impressions he will write in the obscure dialect of modern Oxford, which consists of a complicated kind of literary slang. He writes so carefully that it is impossible to know exactly what he means. He will begin by describing a journey he has just made; he will continue to give you his views on Henry James, or the principles of art, then he will suddenly find after two columns of disquisition that he has come to the end of his space, and he will put off dealing with the play to the following week. By that time he will have forgotten what he meant to be going to say, and he will be obliged to write a new disquisition on something else. That is how the “literary critic” deals with the drama to-day. I find no fault with the system.

This is how the “literary” critic would deal with “Hamlet” were “Hamlet” a new play:--

_A Non-Conductor_

Last week I had a good deal to say about the possible effect of woman’s suffrage on art, and this led me to disagree, as the French say, on the attitude of Aristophanes towards the woman question. The fault I have to find with Mr. Shakespeare’s play which was produced tentatively at the Repertory Theatre in Wolverhampton last Tuesday, will be plainer when I have first explained the reason why Walt Whitman never wrote a play.

Walt Whitman had probably the greatest unexpressed dramatic gift of the century. He was the most potentially dramatic of all the modern poets: although his centrifugality led him out, so to speak, of his perspective, and shifted his dioramic outlook from the psychologic-human to the devisualized-ideal. Yes, Whitman was perhaps the greatest dramatist who never wrote a play: with the possible exception of Browning, who wrote plays which were in reality unbegun novels. Unlike Swinburne, whose system consisted of finishing his play before it began and filling up the space with deciduous phrases. Swinburne and Browning are the two great negative poles of drama: Whitman is the inverted mute magnet, who repelled drama from him instead of attracting it. I will explain, and in order to explain, we must go back to the Indian drama; etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

Here, on the other hand, in contrast to this, is an example of the older impressionist method; a short notice written in a cheap newspaper, by a critic who has not had time to see the last act, and to whom the manager has refused to give a sketch of the plot:--

_Hamlet: Puzzle-Play at the Pantheon_

Mr. Shakespeare is presumably a new writer. I don’t remember having seen any of his work before, although it was rumoured last night that he had once been guilty of some sonnets. He may be able to write sonnets; but writing sonnets is one thing and writing a play is another. Not that there is no cleverness and no promise in “Hamlet”; but it is a literary cleverness, and not a dramatic cleverness.

The play suffers from dullness, length, and want of action. There is far too much talk from beginning to end. And the talk is not dramatic. Mr. Shakespeare has made the unpardonable mistake of not making his intention clear.

Is Hamlet, the hero of this rather disagreeable family imbroglio, meant to be mad, or is he meant to be simulating madness? Is the ghost a real ghost? Are we to take it seriously, or is it merely the practical mystification of a royal buffoon?

And what are we to think of the heroine? Is she really mad also? Or is her madness a literary device contrived so as to afford Mr. Shakespeare opportunities for “lyricism” and incidental music? Either Mr. Shakespeare meant to write a serious tragedy on the subject of madness, or he meant to parody the prevalent mania for so-called psychological studies: but the audience, being at a loss to know what he meant, was merely puzzled and bored. The actors did their best with their thankless task, and Mrs. Siddons, who celebrated her diamond jubilee last Thursday, looked younger than ever in the somewhat ungrateful part of the peevish and provoking heroine.

The upshot of all this digression is that I wish to excuse myself for having written at random by the exposition of current models and precedents.

* * * * *

After a four days’ voyage from Sydney, I have arrived at the other end of the world: Antipodes.

_Wellington: August 10_

It is the end of winter here, the beginning of spring; and colder, of course, than it is in Australia. The Wellington wind which you hear so much of you feel and hear a great deal as soon as you get up on to the hills. In the town I think you feel it less than one is told.

Before sailing from London, five people told me that you can always tell a Wellington man because he holds on his hat when he walks round a corner of a street, because the wind blows round the corners. Everybody in the ship coming out, to whom I mentioned New Zealand, told me the story again, until at last I thought of having a small placard hanging round my neck with “I know how to tell a Wellington man” written on it, or “Don’t tell me the story of the Wellington man and wind; I know it.”

The first thing that strikes an Englishman about the landscape of New Zealand is the absence of atmosphere. The jagged hills stand out sharp against the clear sky like a photograph seen through a stereoscope. There are no half-lights, no melting mist or wreathing haze, no vague distances.

Another thing which strikes the stranger is the volcanic appearance of the hills and the soil. New Zealand is a tropical island cooled and made temperate by the neighbourhood of the South Pole. Wellington nestles among steep hills covered with light-green grass and shorn of all trees. Its roofs are nearly all red. If you climb up a hill you see the view on either side of it, and the sea, very deep and blue.

Not so very many years ago New Zealand was covered with bush; and the vegetation must have been riotously splendid, for what remains is very fine.

My first walk in the country along the beach, where a very blue sea breaks over sharp brown rocks, and high cliffs stand out sharp and sheer, reminded me of South Devon.

My first long drive in the country reminded me of Russia, that is to say, of eastern Siberia and Transbaikalia. The little wooden one-storied houses, with red iron roofs and verandahs, might have been taken from Siberia. The sharp outline of the hills, the colour of the scrub, the clearness of the sky, all this is very much like what you see from the windows of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Another thing the stranger will notice immediately is the limpidity of the streams and the water.

Everybody tells me that this is the wrong time of year to be in New Zealand. One should be here in the summer: that is to say, in November and December. One should be able to camp out in the bush, by the great lakes, where the black swans sweep and wheel in the transparent afterglow.

I shan’t see all that, alas! because it is practically winter now. I shall miss probably all the important sights.

In Wellington you see a great many private automobiles; very few public cabs and taxis. Most people use the tram-cars, which is much the most convenient way of getting about, let alone the cheapness.

The first thing that strikes you in Wellington is the well-to-do-ness of everybody. There are no beggars; the workmen are all well off. The people seem quite extraordinarily happy.

_Near Palmerston: August 20_

I have spent four days in the country near Palmerston. As you travel in the train the country is more like eastern Siberia than ever. In the distance you see a sharp range of blue hills, in the foreground a flat plain on which little squat one-storied wooden houses with red iron roofs are dotted about.

The small provincial cities, too, are--as in Australia--very like the provincial towns in Russia. The streets are broad and the houses have verandahs.

Another point of resemblance: the way the people ride. You meet children riding back from school, two on a pony. They seem to belong to the pony. They ride like little centaurs. This reminds me of the evenings in the plains of the Russian country, where one used to see the children of the village galloping off bareback on large horses and driving a lot of riderless horses to the river, to water them.

As you drive in the country in New Zealand, the first thing you notice is the tall gum-trees, and whenever you get near the bush you hear the song of strange, unfamiliar birds. No native-born New Zealand bird has wings.

* * * * *

The New Zealanders are born footballers. You see the children playing everywhere. On every Saturday afternoon there is a big football match, and crowds of people look on. Rugby football is the national game of New Zealand, and I suppose the New Zealanders are the best players in the world.

At the Athletic Park Ground you often see two matches going on at once. It is extremely difficult to watch two matches at once; because the moment you begin to watch something in the one, something interesting is sure to happen in the other. One would think, speaking as an outsider, that the Rugby game is far more interesting to look on at than the Association game. But the Londoner does not think so. Every Saturday in London, and, indeed, all over England, thousands of people look on at the Association game, and they care very much less for Rugby, which they consider to be a “toff’s game.” There is, they say, “too much shirt-tearing” about it for their taste.

Rugby football in New Zealand has not yet been spoiled by professionalism. People think it is an honour to play for a team, and they are willing to travel and play all over the country for the honour of it, and without remuneration.

In England professionalism has spoiled not only football but almost every other game, with the possible exception of “Old Maid,” cribbage, and “My Bird Sings.”

The result is:--

(1) People prefer looking on at games to playing them themselves.

(2) They demand professionals and they bet on them.

(3) Some games become so professionally perfect that people no longer care to look on at them.

The passion of the crowd in England for watching football is looked upon by many people as the most ominous sign of national decadence, and as a manifestation resembling that of the gladiatorial shows in ancient Rome. They say it is this passion for watching, and for betting in the watching, that is responsible for the prevalence of professionalism. In England one local club buys a celebrated player from another local club. Therefore, it is obvious that this is the death of any real local spirit.

As for the games becoming so professional that people lose interest in them, this does not apply to football: but it does apply to cricket. In the last years there is in England a great falling-off in the public interest in cricket. The play has become so perfect that nobody cares to look at it.

And even, or rather especially, at the schools in England, games have become ultra-professional.

All this is a pity, but it does not apply to New Zealand. New Zealand has, up to now, been unspoiled by professionalism. Long may it remain so. One football enthusiast told me that the cloven hoof was making its appearance.

* * * * *

What most people want to hear about New Zealand are facts with regard to the economic situation of the country: the labour question, the effects of woman’s suffrage, the drink question, prohibition, etc. Now, unless one makes a really thorough and serious study of these questions, which it is impossible to do without devoting considerable time to it, without, in fact, living in the country for a reasonable period, it is worse than useless to fire off a few superficial and dogmatic generalizations. It is for this reason that I forbear from discussing them here.

_Wellington: September_

The first manifestations of the spring have taken the form of rain and wind. Whenever the wind is in the south, the weather is cold: for the wind comes straight from the South Pole. But luckily the rain does not last long. Changes of weather in New Zealand are very sudden. The hills are now covered with gorse in bloom. Daffodils are out everywhere; and in the town you see arum lilies that grow wild in New Zealand in great profusion; but I imagine their time is later.

I am leaving the country just as the pleasant season is beginning, and I am leaving before I have had time to see the most interesting places in it. I have not seen New Zealand; but I have seen Wellington, and I have had a glimpse of the country. I have seen the Parliament sitting. I have met many interesting people. I have been to two concerts, one picture-show, one hospital, one theatre, and four football matches. I have not been to one thing: and that is morning tea.

Morning tea is, I believe, a custom peculiar to New Zealand. The New Zealanders give teas at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Eleven o’clock in the morning is the time when one feels most exhausted. Refreshment of some kind at 11 A.M. is surely a need of human nature; and the New Zealanders have done well to crystallize the need into a tradition and a habit.

Tea and whisky seem to be the national drinks of New Zealand--especially whisky. But tea is often drunk at meals.

The impression that prevails in England that New Zealand is a place where you can’t get anything to drink, is a false one. Of course, some of the cities in the country are under the ban of prohibition, and so are certain portions of Wellington itself: from these you have to cross the street into such territory as lies outside the ban. The railway cars are teetotal.

The people here often tell you that they are being over-legislated. And one notable New Zealander told me that what the country most needed was improvement in higher education. The people, he said, did not care for higher education. Their point of view was material. They wouldn’t do things unless there was something to show for it.

In Wellington there are four large, long streets full of shops, tall stone buildings, English in character, hotels, banks, etc., with verandahs covering the pavement the whole way, and cars running through them. Outside of these streets, the houses are mostly built of wood, and resemble, as I have already said, those of a Russian provincial town.

The prices strike an Englishman as high, and the cost of living in New Zealand is undoubtedly high. The wages are, from our point of view, enormously high. A good chauffeur (I know of a case in point) can get £4 a week, and a house. From the English point of view such wages are very high indeed.

The New Zealanders strike me as being much more like English people than the Australians. Of course they have characteristics of their own. One thing is certain--a more friendly, hospitable people does not exist.

To go into the matter of their institutions, life, etc., would need a far more prolonged study and stay than I have been able to make, and I have already said, three or four times, that I don’t believe in pronouncing judgments on a country before you know it thoroughly.

One of the most interesting people I have met here is a French lady of the highest culture and education, Sœur Marie Joseph, who is at the head of a Home of Compassion for derelict children. She went out to the Crimean War under Florence Nightingale and looked after the wounded on the battlefields that knew nothing of anæsthetics. She told me that sometimes the doctors, after a day of surgical operations, would be drunk with the fumes of the blood. The wounded had to be tied down to be operated on, and sometimes, where this was not practicable, people had to sit on them to hold them down.