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OLD LAMPS FOR NEW

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

[(Larger)]

The Head of a Young Girl,
by Jan Vermeer of Delft,
from the Picture at the Mauritshuis
at the Hague.

OLD LAMPS FOR NEW

BY
E. V. LUCAS
AUTHOR OF “OVER BEMERTON’S”
“MR. INGLESIDE,” ETC.

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1911

Copyright, 1911,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1911.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

OLD LAMPS FOR NEW

The School for Sympathy

I had heard a great deal about Miss Beam’s school, but not till last week did the chance come to visit it.

The cabman drew up at a gate in an old wall, about a mile out of the town. I noticed as I was waiting for him to give me change that the Cathedral spire was visible down the road. I rang the bell, the gate automatically opened, and I found myself in a pleasant garden facing a square red ample Georgian house, with the thick white window-frames that to my eyes always suggest warmth and welcome and stability. There was no one in sight but a girl of about twelve, with her eyes covered with a bandage, who was being led carefully between the flower-beds by a little boy of some four years her junior. She stopped, and evidently asked who it was that had come in, and he seemed to be describing me to her. Then they passed on, and I entered the door which a smiling parlour-maid—that pretty sight!—was holding open for me.

Miss Beam was all that I had expected—middle-aged, authoritative, kindly, and understanding. Her hair was beginning to turn grey, and her figure had a fulness likely to be comforting to a homesick child.

We talked idly for a little while, and then I asked her some questions as to her scholastic methods, which I had heard were simple.

“Well,” she said, “we don’t as a matter of fact do much teaching here. The children that come to me—small girls and smaller boys—have very few formal lessons: no more than is needful to get application into them, and those only of the simplest—spelling, adding, subtracting, multiplying, writing. The rest is done by reading to them and by illustrated discourses, during which they have to sit still and keep their hands quiet. Practically there are no other lessons at all.”

“But I have heard so much,” I said, “about the originality of your system.”

Miss Beam smiled. “Ah, yes,” she said. “I am coming to that. The real aim of this school is not so much to instil thought as thoughtfulness—humanity, citizenship. That is the ideal I have always had, and happily there are parents good enough to trust me to try and put it into execution. Look out of the window a minute, will you?”

I went to the window, which commanded a large garden and playground at the back.

“What do you see?” Miss Beam asked.

“I see some very beautiful grounds,” I said, “and a lot of jolly children; but what perplexes me, and pains me too, is to notice that they are not all as healthy and active as I should wish. As I came in I saw one poor little thing being led about owing to some trouble with her eyes, and now I can see two more in the same plight; while there is a girl with a crutch just under the window watching the others at play. She seems to be a hopeless cripple.”

Miss Beam laughed. “Oh, no,” she said; “she’s not lame, really; this is only her lame day. Nor are those others blind; it is only their blind day.” I must have looked very much astonished, for she laughed again. “There you have an essential part of our system in a nutshell. In order to get a real appreciation and understanding of misfortune into these young minds we make them participants in misfortune too. In the course of the term every child has one blind day, one lame day, one deaf day, one maimed day, one dumb day. During the blind day their eyes are bandaged absolutely, and it is a point of honour not to peep. The bandage is put on overnight; they wake blind. This means that they need assistance in everything, and other children are told off to help them and lead them about. It is educative to both of them—the blind and the helpers.

“There is no privation about it,” Miss Beam continued. “Every one is very kind and it is really something of a joke, although, of course, before the day is over the reality of the affliction must be apparent even to the least thoughtful. The blind day is, of course, really the worst,” she went on, “but some of the children tell me that the dumb day is the most dreaded. There, of course, the child must exercise will-power only, for the mouth is not bandaged.... But come down into the garden and see for yourself how the children like it.”

Miss Beam led me to one of the bandaged girls, a little merry thing, whose eyes under the folds were, I felt sure, as black as ash-buds. “Here’s a gentleman come to talk to you,” said Miss Beam, and left us.

“Don’t you ever peep?” I asked, by way of an opening.

“Oh, no,” she exclaimed; “that would be cheating. But I’d no idea it was so awful to be blind. You can’t see a thing. One feels one is going to be hit by something every moment. Sitting down’s such a relief.”

“Are your guides kind to you?” I asked.

“Pretty good. Not so careful as I shall be when it’s my turn. Those that have been blind already are the best. It’s perfectly ghastly not to see. I wish you’d try!”

“Shall I lead you anywhere?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said; “let’s go for a little walk. Only you must tell me about things. I shall be so glad when to-day’s over. The other bad days can’t be half as bad as this. Having a leg tied up and hopping about on a crutch is almost fun, I guess. Having an arm tied up is a little more troublesome, because you have to get your food cut up for you, and so on; but it doesn’t really matter. And as for being deaf for a day, I shan’t mind that—at least, not much. But being blind is so frightening. My head aches all the time, just from dodging things that probably aren’t there. Where are we now?”

“In the playground,” I said, “going towards the house. Miss Beam is walking up and down the terrace with a tall girl.”

“What has the girl got on?” my companion asked.

“A blue serge skirt and pink blouse.”

“I think it’s Millie,” she said. “What colour hair?”

“Very light,” I said.

“Yes, that’s Millie. She’s the head girl. She’s awfully decent.”

“There’s an old man tying up roses,” I said.

“Yes, that’s Peter. He’s the gardener. He’s hundreds of years old!”

“And here comes a dark girl in red, on crutches.”

“Yes,” she said; “that’s Beryl.”

And so we walked on, and in steering this little thing about I discovered that I was ten times more thoughtful already than I had any notion of, and also that the necessity of describing the surroundings to another makes them more interesting.

When Miss Beam came to release me, I was quite sorry to go, and said so.

“Ah!” she replied; “then there is something in my system after all!”

I walked back to the town murmuring (inaccurately as ever) the lines:—

Can I see another’s woe

And not share their sorrow too?

O no, never can it be,

Never, never, can it be.

On the Track of Vermeer

Not long ago the papers contained a little paragraph stating that Herr Bredius, the curator of the Mauritshuis Gallery at the Hague, had just returned from a journey of exploration in Russia, bringing back with him over a hundred valuable pictures of the Dutch School which he had discovered there, in country and city mansions and even in farmhouses; for the Russian collectors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as is well known, greatly esteemed and desired (as who must not?) Dutch art. That was all that the paragraph said, and since that was all we may feel quite sure that among those hundred and more pictures there was nothing from the divinely gifted hand of Jan Vermeer of Delft; because the discovery of a new picture by Jan Vermeer of Delft is something not merely for mention in a paragraph but among the special news—something with which to agitate the cables of the world.

Can you conceive of a more delightful existence than that of Herr Bredius—to be when at home the conservator of such masterpieces as hang in the Mauritshuis on the banks of the Vyver, in the beautiful and bland Dutch capital (some of which are his own property, and only lent to the gallery), and when in mind to travel, to leave the Hague with a roving commission to hunt and acquire new treasures? I can’t. And that is why, when I am asked who I would choose to be were I not myself, I do not say the King, or Mr. Pierpont Morgan, but Herr Bredius of the Mauritshuis.

And yet if I had Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s wealth, I would.... But let us consider first the life and works of Jan Vermeer of Delft.

Jan Vermeer, or Van der Meer, was born in Delft and baptized there on 31 October, 1632. His father was Reymer Janszoon Vermeer, and his mother Dingnums Balthasars. In 1653 he married, also in Delft, Catherina Bolnes or Bolenes. How many children they had I do not know, but eight survived him. It is generally believed that Karel Fabritius, himself a pupil of Rembrandt and a painter of extraordinary distinction, was Vermeer’s instructor; but the period of tuition must have been very short, for Fabritius became a member of the Delft Guild in 1652, before which he might not teach, and he was dead in 1654, killed by a powder explosion. A poem on the death of this great painter by a Delft writer has a stanza to the effect that from the ashes of that Phœnix rises Vermeer. There is very little of the work of Fabritius to be seen; but his exquisite “Siskin,” a small picture of the little musical shy bird, painted with the breadth that is commonly kept for auguster subjects, hangs next Vermeer’s “Head of a Young Girl” (my frontispiece) at the Hague, and would alone prove Fabritius to have possessed not only strength but sweetness.

Dr. Hofstede de Groot, the author of a magnificent monograph on Vermeer and Fabritius, published in 1907 and 1908, conjectures Vermeer to have had an Italian master as well as a Dutch, and it is easy to believe. I had, indeed, with none of Dr. de Groot’s knowledge, come to a similar conclusion; and in the huddle of pictures in one of the rooms of the Academy at Vienna I even found a copy of an Italian picture—a Correggio, I think—which Vermeer’s hand might easily have made, so luminous and liquid is it. That he visited Italy is more than unlikely—practically impossible; but to gain that something Italianate which his works occasionally discover there was no necessity for him to have done so, for Italian painters settled in Holland in some numbers. The “Diana and her Nymphs” at the Hague, and the “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary” (which I have seen only in reproduction) in Scotland, have each Italian characteristics; but I must add that in Vermeer’s authorship of these pictures Dr. de Groot does not absolutely believe.

The facts about Vermeer are singularly few, considering the high opinion in which he was held by contemporaries. Almost the only intimate thing told of him is the story of his unpaid bread bill, as recounted by De Monconys, the French traveller. De Monconys visited him in 1663 and wanted to buy a picture, but none could be found in the artist’s house. Vermeer’s baker consented, however, to sell one which was hanging on his wall and for which he had allowed 300 florins. After Vermeer’s death, it is told, the baker’s debt of 3176 florins was liquidated by two pictures. Since Vermeer’s wife is known to have had rich relations and to have come into money from time to time, we may guess this gigantic account to have been the result rather of bad management than of poverty; for of all the painters of the world none less suggests necessity than Jan Vermeer of Delft: on the contrary, his work carries with it the idea of aristocracy and prosperity, certainly a fastidiousness rarely associated with the father of a large family’s struggle for existence in the seventeenth century. Moreover, we are told that his prices, even when he was alive, were higher than those of any painter save Gerard Dou, and such a guild as that of Delft would not be likely to elect a starving man as its chief four several times.

No, if Vermeer owed money to his baker it was because he was easy-going, placid, above such trifles, as other artists have been before and since: indeed, occasionally still are, I am told. You can see that Vermeer was placid: the fact shines in every picture. He was placid, and he liked others to be placid too. His wife was placid, his daughters (if, as I conjecture, certain of his models were his daughters) were placid, his sitters were placid. His one undisputed landscape shows that he wanted nature to be placid; his one street scene has the dove brooding upon it.

Yet when we put in one balance the debt for bread and in the other the very slender output of this famous artist, to whom a collector could come even from distant France with a heavy purse, we are face to face with a difficulty; because even placid men when they become chiefs of guilds do not much care for continual reminders that they owe money, and in such a small town as Delft Vermeer and his baker would have had some difficulty in not often meeting. Moreover what of the butcher? And the vintner? The inference therefore—especially when it is remembered that the baker occasionally agreed to be paid in kind and hang we know not which of the masterpieces on his wall—the inference therefore is that Vermeer painted, was forced by necessity to paint, many pictures in excess of the very small number at the present moment identifiable. Of this, more later; but I want to bring out the point here, since it is of the highest importance and might indeed completely alter the life of Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

We may believe Vermeer to have been a home-keeping man from several circumstances. One is that he was not only born in Delft (in 1632), but he married in Delft (in 1653) and died in Delft (in 1675); another that the years in which he was a chief of the Delft Guild, and therefore a resident there, were 1662, 1663, 1670 and 1671; another that his only famous landscape and his only known street scene are both Delft subjects; and another that of his thirty odd known figure pictures, thirty-one are lighted from the left precisely in the same way, which leads one to suppose that most of them were painted in the same studio.

When I add that Vermeer died in December, 1675, at the early age of 43, and that his executor was Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope (and probably his model for several pictures), I have said all that is known for certain of his career.

To me it is not to Andrea del Sarto that the title of the “Perfect Painter” belongs, but to Jan Vermeer of Delft. Andrea with all his weakness was in a way greater than that: he had, one can see, finer thoughts, sweeter imaginings, a richer nature than a perfect painter needs; the phrase perfect painter limits him to the use of his brush, and one thinks of him (and not wholly because Browning was a man of genius) always as a human being too. But of Vermeer we know nothing save that he was a materialistic Dutchman who applied paint to canvas with a dexterity and charm that have never been equalled: in short, with perfection. His pictures tell us that he was not imaginative and not unhappy; they do not suggest any particular richness of personality; there is nothing in them or in his life to inspire a poet as Andrea and Lippo Lippi inspired Browning and Romney Tennyson. Vermeer was not like that. But when it comes to perfection in the use of paint, when it comes to the perfect painter—why, here he is. His contemporary Rembrandt of the Rhine is a giant beside him; but ruggedness was part of his strength. His contemporary, Frans Hals of Haarlem, could dip his brush in red and transform the pigment into pulsating blood with one flirt of his wrist, and yet think of his splendid carelessnesses elsewhere. His contemporary, Jan Steen of Leyden, had a way of kindling with a touch an eye so that it danced with vivacity and dances still, after all these years; but what a sloven he could be in his backgrounds! His contemporary Peter de Hooch could flood canvas with the light of the sun, but how weakly drawn are some of his figures! And so one might go on with the other great painters—the Italians and the Spanish and the English and the French; naming one after another, all with more to them as personalities than Vermeer, all doing work of greater import; and all, even Michael Angelo and Leonardo, even Correggio, even Raphael, even Andrea, even Chardin, falling beneath Vermeer in the mere technical mastery of the brush and the palette—no one having with such accuracy and happiness adjusted the means to the desired end. He aimed low, but at his best—in, say, six pictures—he stands as near perfection as is possible.

It is this joyful mastery that fascinates me and made it so natural, when in the autumn of 1907 I was casting about for a motive for a holiday, to say, “Let us pursue this painter, let us see in twenty-one days all the Vermeers that we can.”

The farthest European city containing a Vermeer of which I then knew being Vienna (I afterwards found that Budapest has a putative example), we went there first; and there was a certain propriety in doing so, for in the Vienna picture the artist is supposed to have painted himself, and to begin with a concept of him was interesting and proper. The “Maler,” as it is there called, is at Count Czernin’s, a comfortable mansion at Number 9 Landes-gericht strasse, open to visitors only on Mondays and Thursdays. There are four rooms of pictures, and nothing in them matters very much save the Vermeer. An elderly butler is on duty; he shows you the best place to stand in, brings a chair, and murmurs such facts about the marvellous work as appeal most to his imagination—not so much that it is a miracle of painting as that it was acquired for a mere song, and that Americans constantly walk into this room with blank cheques in their hands and entreat the Count to fill them up at his pleasure. But no, the Count is too proud of his possession. Well, I admire him for it. The picture may not have such radiance as the “Pearl Necklace” at Berlin, or such charm as the “Woman Reading a Letter” at the Ryks, or such sheer beauty as the Mauritshuis “Girl’s Head,” but it is brilliant and satisfying. It does not give me such pleasure as certain others, to be named later, but it is in some ways perhaps finer. Vermeer is seated at his easel with his back to the world—a largish man with long hair under a black velvet cap, and the careful costume of a man who can pay for his bread. Nor does the studio suggest poverty. The artist is at work on the head of a demure damsel whom he has posed near the window, with the light falling upon her, of course from the left. The little mousy thing has a wreath of leaves in her hair and a large book held to her breast; in her right hand is a long musical instrument. On the wall is the most fascinating of the many maps that the artist painted—with twenty little views of Dutch towns in the border. Vermeer was the first to see the decorative possibilities that lie in cartography; and he was also, one conjectures, a geographer by inclination.

The beautiful blue Danube had so little water in it just then that the voyage to Budapest would have taken almost twice as long as it should, and there was not time. To make the journey by train, just for one day, was an unbearable thought at that moment; although I now regret that we did not go. The Budapest Vermeer is a portrait, a Dutch Vrouw, standing, looking full at the world, without any accessories whatever. Not having seen it, I can express no opinion as to its authorship, but Dr. de Groot is doubtful, although he reproduces the picture in his book among the practical certainties. So also does M. Vanzype, the most recent of our painter’s critics, whose monograph, “Vermeer de Delft,” in the “Collection des Grands Artistes des Pays-Bas,” was published in 1908. M. Vanzype goes farther, for he also includes the portrait of a young man in the Brussels gallery for which the curator, M. A. J. Wauters, has made out so eloquent a case, but which Herr Bredius and Dr. de Groot both repudiate. For myself, all I can say of it is that one does not jump to the denial of it as one did to the putative example in our National Gallery, just completed by the addition of its lost half. The Budapest Vermeer is in reproduction a beautiful picture—a youngish Dutch woman with the inevitable placidity, but not so open and easy-going as the personalities whom the artist chose for his own pictures: she has folded hands and large white cape and cuffs. M. Vanzype admits that this portrait and that of the young man at Brussels lend colour to the theory of Thoré and M. Arsène Alexandre that Vermeer studied for a while immediately under Rembrandt; but he goes on to show that this was practically an impossibility.

Turning reluctantly away from Budapest, we went next to Dresden, which has two Vermeers and a light and restful hotel, the Bellevue, very agreeable to repose in after our caravanserai at Vienna. The Bellevue is on the bank of the river and close to the Picture Gallery, into which one could therefore drop again and again at off hours. The famous Raphael is of course Dresden’s lodestar, and next come the Correggios, and there is a triptych by Jan Van Eyck and a man in armour by Van Dyck; but it is Vermeer of whom we are talking, and the range of Vermeer cannot be understood at all unless one sees him in the capital of Saxony. For it is here that his “Young Courtesan” (chastely softened by the modest Baedeker into “The Young Connoisseur”) is found. It is a large picture, for him, nearly five feet by four, and it represents a buxom, wanton girl, of a ripe beauty, dressed in a lace cap and hood and a bright yellow bodice, considering the value of the douceur which a roystering Dutchman is offering her. Behind is an old woman curious as to the result, and beside her is another roysterer, whose face might easily be that unseen one of the artist in the Czernin picture, and who is wearing a similar cap and slashed sleeves. The party stands on a balcony, over the railing of which has been flung one of the heavy tapestries on which our painter loved to spend his genius. The picture is remarkable as being a new thing in Vermeer’s career, and indeed a new thing in Dutch art; and it also shows that had Vermeer liked he might have done more with drama, for the faces of the two women are expressive and true; although such was his incorrigible fastidiousness, his preference for the distinguished and radiant to the exclusion of all else, that he cannot make them either ugly or objectionable. The procuress is a Vermeer among procuresses, the courtesan a Vermeer among courtesans. The fascination of the canvas, though totally different from that of any other of his works, is equal in its way to any: it has a large easy power, as well as being a beautiful and daring adventure in colour.

The other Dresden picture is also a little off Vermeer’s usual path. The subject is familiar: the Dutch woman reading a letter by a table, on which is the customary cloth and a dish of apples; the light comes through the same window and falls on the same white wall; but the tone of the work is distinct, sombre green prevailing. It would be thrilling to own this picture, but I do not rank it for allurement or satisfaction with several of the others. It comes with me not even fifth or sixth. Vermeer’s best indeed is so wonderful—the “View of Delft,” the “Girl’s Head” at the Mauritshuis, the “Milkmaid” and “Woman Reading a Letter” at the Ryks, the “Pearl Necklace” at Berlin, the “Street in Delft” at the Six Gallery, and the “Young Courtesan” at Dresden—that anything below that standard—such is the fastidiousness which this man’s fastidiousness engenders—quickly disappoints; although the student working up to the best and reaching the best last would be continually enraptured.

Next Berlin. After the “Girl’s Head” at the Mauritshuis, which among the figures comes always first with me, and the “View of Delft,” it is, I think, the Berlin “Necklace” that is Vermeer’s most charming work. I consider the white wall in this painting beautiful beyond the power of words to express. It is so wonderful that if one were to cut out a few square inches of this wall alone and frame it one would have a joy for ever. Franz Hals’ planes of black have never been equalled, but Vermeer’s planes of white seem to me quite as unapproachable. The whole picture has radiance and light and delicacy: painters gasp before it. It has more too: it is steeped in a kind of white magic as the “View of Delft” is steeped in the very radiance of the evening sun. Berlin is to me a rude and materialistic city with officials who have made inattention a fine art, and food that sends one to the “Continental Bradshaw” for trains to Paris; but this picture is leaven enough. It lifts Berlin above serious criticism. I hope that when we have fought Germany in the inevitable war of which the papers are so consistently full, it will be part of the indemnity.

The other Vermeer in the superb gallery over which Dr. Bode presides with such dangerous enthusiasm (dangerous, I mean, to other nations), is not so remarkable; but it is burnt into my memory. That white Delft jug I shall never forget. The woman drinking, with her face seen through the glass as Terburg would have done it (one likes to see painters excelling now and again at each other’s mannerisms); the rich figure of the Dutch gentleman watching her; the room with its chequered floor: all these I can visualize with an effort; but the white Delft jug requires no effort: the retina never loses it. Vermeer, true ever to his native town and home, painted this jug several times. Not so often as Metsu, but with a greater touch. You find it notably again in the King’s example at Windsor Castle.

Berlin has also a private Vermeer which I did not see—Mr. James Simon’s “Mistress and Servant.” Judging by the photogravure, this must be magnificent; and it is peculiar in respect of being almost the only picture in which the painter has a plain table-cloth in place of the usual heavily-patterned tapestry. The lady in ermine and pearls is evidently ordering dinner; the placid, pleasant maid has a hint of Maes. The whole effect seems to be rich and warm. Two other pictures I also ought to have seen before leaving Germany—one at Brunswick and one at Frankfort. In the Brunswick painting a coquettish girl takes a glass of wine from a courteous Dutch gentleman at the table, while a sulky Dutch gentleman glooms in the background. On the table is another of the white Delft jugs. The Frankfort picture is “The Geographer at the Window,” dated 1668, which in the reproduction strikes one as a most beautiful and dignified work, wholly satisfying. The geographer—probably Antony van Leeuwenhoek—leans at his lighted table over a chart, with his compasses in his hand. All the painter’s favourite accessories are here—the heavy tapestry on the table, the window with its small panes, the streaming light of day, the white wall, the chair with its brass-headed nails. And the kind thoughtful face of the geographer makes the whole thing human and humane. Vermeer, I fancy, was never more harmonious than here. I shall certainly go to Frankfort soon to translate this impression into fact.

At Amsterdam we went first to the grave and noiseless mansion of the Six family at Number 511 Heerengracht, one of the most beautiful and reserved of the canals of this city. A ring at the bell brought a rosy and spotless maid to the door, and she left us for a little while in a lobby from which Vermeer might have chosen his pictures’ blue tiles, until a butler led us upstairs to the little gallery. I am writing of 1907, before the negotiations for the purchase by the State of Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” were completed, and we therefore saw it in its natural home, where it had been for two hundred and more years. But now, at a cost of 500,000 florins at twelve to the pound (or at nearly £155 a square inch) it has passed to the Ryks. The price sounds beyond reason; but it is not. Granted that a kind and portly Dutchwoman at work in her kitchen is a subject for a painter, here it is done with such mastery, sympathy, and beauty as not only to hold one spellbound but to be beyond appraisement. No sum is too much for the possession of this unique work—unique not only in Vermeer’s career (so far as we know), but in all painting. What the artist would have asked for it we do not know. At the sale of his works in 1696 it brought 175 florins.

Vermeer here is at his most vigorous and powerful. His other works are notable above everything for charm: such a picture as the “Pearl Necklace” at Berlin represents the ecstasy of perfection in paint; but here we find strength too. I never saw a woman more firmly set upon canvas: I never saw a bodice that was so surely filled with a broad and beating bosom. Only a very great man could so paint that quiet capable face. Some large pictures are very little, and some small pictures are large. This “Milkmaid” by Vermeer is only eighteen inches by fifteen, but it is to all intents and purposes a full length: on no life-size canvas could a more real and living woman be painted. When you are at Amsterdam you cannot give this picture too much attention; be sure to notice also the painting of the hood and the drawing of the still life, especially the jug and the bowl. It was this picture, one feels, that shone before the dear Chardin, all his life, as a star.

The other Six Vermeer is that Delft façade which artists adore. The charm of it is not to be communicated by words, or at any rate by words of mine. It is as though Peter de Hooch had known sorrow, and, emerging triumphant and serene, had begun to paint again. And yet that is, of course, not all; for De Hooch, with all his radiant tenderness, had not this man’s native aristocracy of mind, nor could any suffering have given it to him. Like the “View of Delft,” like the “Young Courtesan,” this picture stands alone not only in Vermeer’s record, but in the art of all time. Many grow the flower now—there is a modern Dutch painter, Breitner, whose whole career is an attempt to reproduce the spirit of this façade—but the originator still stands alone and apart, as indeed, by God’s sense of justice, originators are usually permitted to. The sale of twenty-one of Vermeer’s pictures at Amsterdam in 1696 included the “Street in Delft” which the Six family own, and also a view of houses, a smaller work, which fetched forty-eight florins. (That is one of the Vermeers which have disappeared, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, sir.)

The Vermeers at the Ryks were, in 1907, two in number (now made three by the “Milkmaid”); and of these one I do not like, however much I am astounded by its dexterity, and one I could never tire of. The picture that I do not like, “The Love Letter,” shows, with the “New Testament Allegory” at the Hague, the painter in his most dashing mood of virtuosity. Neither has charm, but both have a masterful dexterity that not only leaves one bewildered but kills all the other genre painters in the vicinity. Both were painted, I conjecture, to order, to please some foolish purchaser who frequented the studio. But the other Ryks picture—“The Woman Reading a Letter”—here is the essential Vermeer again in all his delicacy and quietude. It was the first of his best pictures that I ever saw, and I fell under his spell instantly. What I have said of the “Milkmaid” applies also to the “Reader”; she becomes after a while a full length. The picture is only twenty inches by sixteen, but the woman also takes her place in the memory as life-size. It is one of the simplest of all the pictures: comparable with the “Pearl Necklace,” but a little simpler still. The woman’s face has been injured, but it does not matter; you don’t notice it after a moment; her intent expression remains; her gentle contours are unharmed. The jacket she wears is the most beautiful blue in Holland; the map is a yellowish brown; the wall is white. The woman, whose condition is obviously interesting, is, I like to think, the Vrouw Vermeer, possibly the mother of the young girls in the pictures at the Hague, Vienna and Brussels.

The Hague is the most comfortable city that I know in which to see pictures. It is so light and open, the Oude Doelen is so pleasant a hotel, and the pictures to see are so few—just a handful of old masterpieces at the Mauritshuis and just a handful of the romantics at the Mesdag Museum. That is all; no formal galleries, no headaches. Above all there are here the two most beautiful Vermeers that are known—the “Young Girl”—and the “View of Delft.” Writing in another place some years ago I ventured to call the Mauritshuis picture of a girl’s head one of the most beautiful things in Holland. I retract that statement now, and instead say quite calmly that it is the most beautiful thing in Holland. And to me it is in many ways not only the most beautiful thing in Holland, but the most satisfying and exquisite product of brush and colour that I have anywhere seen. The painting of the lower lip is as much a miracle to me as the flower of the cow-parsley or the wing of a Small Heath. I said that the “Pearl Necklace” was steeped in white magic. There is magic here too. You are in the presence of the unaccountable. Paint—a recognized medium—has exceeded its power. The line of the right cheek is surely the sweetest line ever traced. I don’t expect you to come a stranger to this face and feel what I feel; but I ask you to look at it quietly and steadily for a little while, in its uncoloured photographic presentment, until it smiles back at you again—as surely it will. Yes, even in the photogravure reproduction that stands as frontispiece to this book lurk the ghosts of these smiles.

Who was this child, one wonders. One of the painter’s, I think. One of the eight, whom it amused him to dress in this Oriental garb that he might play with the cool harmonies of yellow, green and blue, and the youthful Dutch complexion. If this is so, it is one of his latest pictures, for all his many children were under age when he died. It is probable that the child in the Duke of Arenberg’s picture at Brussels, in the same costume, was a sister. There is certainly a family likeness between the two, and if, as one may reasonably suppose, Vermeer’s wife was his model for certain of the other pictures, we may easily believe that both were her daughters, for they have her candid forehead, her placidity.

Think of what has been happening in the world during the years since this sweet face was set upon canvas—the evolutions and tragedies, the lives lived and ended, the whole passionate fretted progress of the nations! “Monna Lisa” has smiled a century and more longer, and she has been looked upon every day for centuries: this child, not a whit less wonderful as a conquest of man over pigment, smiled unseen; for when she was bought at a Hague auction a few years ago by Herr Des Tombes for two florins thirty cents she was covered with grime. Think of it—two florins thirty cents—and if she found her way to Christie’s to-day I don’t suppose that £50,000 would buy her. I know that I personally would willingly live in a garret if she were on its wall. But leaving aside the human interest of the picture, did you ever see, even in a reproduction, such ease as there is in this painting, such concealment of effort? It was no small thing at that day for a Dutchman to lay his colours like this, so broadly and lucidly. It is as though the paints evoked life rather than counterfeited it; as though the child was waiting there behind the canvas to emerge at the touch of the brushwand.

And the “View of Delft”—what is one to say of that? Here again perfection is the only word. And more than perfection, for perfection is cold. This picture is warm. Its serenity is absolute; its charm is complete. You stand before it satisfied—except for that heightened emotion, that choking feeling and smarting eyes, which perfection compels. The picture is still the last word in the painting of a town. Not all the efforts of artists since have improved upon it; not one has done anything so beautiful. It is indeed because he painted these two pictures that I have for Jan Vermeer of Delft such a feeling of gratitude and enthusiasm. Wonderful as are many of his other pictures that I have described, they would not alone have subjected me to so much travelling in continental trains by day and night. But to see this head of a young girl and this view of Delft I would go anywhere.

To the “New Testament Allegory” I have referred above: it does not give me pleasure except in its tapestry curtain. That detail is, I suppose, among the wonders of painting. The other Mauritshuis Vermeer is the “Diana and Her Nymphs”—that gentle Italianate group of fair women, the painting of which Andrea himself might have overlooked. It is at once Vermeer and not Vermeer. It is very rich, very satisfying; but I for one should feel no sense of bereavement if another name were put to it. As a matter of fact Nicholas Maes was long held to have been its author. A fifth Vermeer the Mauritshuis chanced to possess when I was there, for Herr Bredius had recently discovered in a Brussels collection a very curious example from the magic hand—a tiny picture of a girl with a flute, in a Chinese hat (or something very like it), with an elaborate background: not a very attractive work, but Vermeer through and through, and so modern and innovating that were it hung in a Paris or London exhibition to-day it would look out of place only by reason of its power. The picture is seven and a half inches by six and three quarters, and now belongs to Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

After Delft, where we roamed awhile to reconstruct Vermeer’s environment, but where, I regret to say, little is known of him, Brussels. For Vermeer there, one must, as in Vienna, visit the home of a nobleman—the Duke of Arenberg—and here again one falls into the hands of a discreet and hospitable butler. The d’Arenberg mansion is in the Rue de la Régence, just under the crest of the fashionable hill. It is open to the picture lover, like that of Count Czernin, only on certain days. The gallery is small and chiefly Dutch, with a few good pictures in it. The Vermeer is isolated on an easel—the most unmistakable perhaps of all, although so cruelly treated by time, for it is a mass of cracks. Yet through these wounds the beautiful living light of a young girl’s face shines—not the girl we have seen at the Hague, but one very like her—her sister, as I conjecture—dressed in the same Eastern trappings, a girl with a strangely blank forehead and eyes widely divided, akin to the type of Madonna dear to Andrea del Sarto. The same girl I think sat for the “Player of the Clavichord” in our National Gallery, to which we soon come. She is a little sad, and a little strange, this child, and only a master could have created her. At Brussels also is one of Vermeer’s “Geographers,” in the collection of the Vicomte du Bus de Gisegnies; but this I did not then know. And in the Picture Gallery is the conjectural portrait of the young man of which I have written above.

After Brussels, Paris—a good exchange. Paris has one Vermeer in a private collection—Alphonse de Rothschild’s—an astronomer, which I have not seen, and one in the Louvre—the beautiful “Dentellière”—before which I have stood scores of times. This too is very small, only a few inches square, but the serene busy head is painted as largely as if it were in a fresco. The lighting is from the right instead of the left—a very rare experiment with Vermeer.

It is greatly to be regretted that our National Vermeers are not better, because to many readers of this essay they must necessarily be the only pictures from his hand that they can study at all times; and my ecstasies will appear to be foolish. The lady standing at a spinet is a marvel of technique; the paint is applied with all Vermeer’s charm of touch; the room is filled with the light of day; there are marvellous details, such as the brass-headed nails of the chair, and the little spot of colour on the head is fascinating; moreover there is an agreeably ingenious scheme of blue, beginning with the gay sky of the landscape on the wall, passing through the delicate tippet of the lady and ending on a soberer note with the covering of the chair. But it is not a picture of which I am fond; it is a tour de force; and I think I positively hate the ugly Cupid on the wall, which would be a blot on any man’s work, most of all on Vermeer’s. One feels that he must have painted this to please the husband of the sitter, who insisted on his pictures being immortalized. Vermeer, left to himself, would have painted a map. The other—the seated girl at the piano—lacks the painter’s highest radiance. It is the same girl that we saw in the Brussels picture.

Of the other London Vermeers two (only two!) belong to Mr. Otto Beit. One of these is a tiny “Lady seated at a Spinet,” not in the first rank of fascination, but a little masterpiece nevertheless, and the other, “A Lady Writing a Letter,” notable for the strong and beautiful painting of the lady’s face, foreshortened as she bends over her task. Beside her stands her blue-aproned maid, waiting to take the missive to the door. The table has its usual tapestry and the wall its picture, this time an old master. But the head of the lady is what one remembers—with her white cap and her pearl drops and her happy prosperous countenance.

Mr. Beit’s Vermeers are in Belgrave Square: there is another in Hyde Park Gardens, the property of Mrs. Joseph: “The Soldier and the Laughing Girl” it is called. The girl sits at the table with a bright and merry face; the soldier, who has borrowed his red from Peter de Hooch, is in the shade; on the wall is a splendid rugged map of Holland and West Friesland. The picture is paintier than is usual with Vermeer, but very powerful and rich. Mrs. Joseph (I am told) has been forced by the importunities of collectors and dealers to have recourse to a printed refusal to sell this work!

The Vermeer belonging to the King hangs in the private apartments at Windsor, but when I saw it, it was, by the courtesy of His Majesty’s Surveyor of Works of Art, carried into a less sacred room of that vast and imposing fortress for us to look upon. The Court was absent, and workmen were here and there, but one could have told that this was the abode of a monarch, even had one been blindfolded. There was a hush! On a walk of some miles (as it seemed) through dusky passages in which now and then one saw dimly one’s face in a slip of a mirror at the corners, we passed other creatures who had some of the outward semblance of human beings; but we were not deceived. They were marked also by a discretion, an authority, beyond ordinary mortality; not the rose, of course, but so near it that one flushed. To have this new experience, for I had never entered a royal castle before, and be on a visit to a Vermeer, was a double privilege. The Vermeer is very charming, but not one of the first rank; and its coating of varnish does not improve it. But it is from the perfect hand none the less, and there is the white Delft jug in it for the eye to return to, like a haven, after every voyage over the canvas.

England also has Vermeer’s “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,” which, when it was exhibited in Bond Street some few years ago, divided the experts, but is now, although not confidently, given to our painter by Dr. de Groot. This picture, which I have not seen, has in the reproduction much of the large easy confidence of the “Diana and her Nymphs” at the Hague. It hangs now in Skelmorlie Castle, and some day I hope to blow a blast outside those Scottish walls and succeed in getting the drawbridge lowered that I may look upon it.

There are nine examples in America to-day (1911). Of these Dr. de Groot reproduces only six, for the other three have come to light since he published. The six which he gives are—Mr. B. Altman’s “Woman Asleep” (from the Rodolph Kann Collection), Mr. James G. Johnson’s “Lady with the Mandoline,” Mrs. Jack Gardner’s “Three Musicians,” Mr. H. C. Frick’s “Singing Lesson,” Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s “Lady with Flute,” and “The Woman with the Water Jug,” in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Of these I have seen only Mr. Morgan’s, described above. The three new ones are Mr. Morgan’s “Lady Writing,” Mrs. Huntington’s “Lady with Lute,” and Mr. Widener’s “Lady Weighing Pearls” (or gold), which was exhibited in London early in 1911, and which brings Dr. de Groot’s list to thirty-seven. This new Vermeer is not absolutely his best; it is not so great and simple and strong as “The Milkmaid,” at the Ryks; it is not so radiant as “The Pearl Necklace,” at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin; it is not so exquisite and miraculous a counterfeit of life as the “Girl’s Head,” at the Mauritshuis; nor so enchanting and epoch-making as the “View of Delft,” in the same gallery. Those I take to be the artist’s four finest pictures. But it is well in his first dozen, and it is vastly better than either of those in the National Gallery.

The new picture represents a woman: one of those placid domestic creatures to whom Vermeer’s brush lent a radiance only a gleam of which many a Madonna of the Southern masters would have envied. How little can they have thought, these Delft housewives and maidens, that they were destined for such an immortality! She stands beside a table, as most of Vermeer’s women do, and she has a jacket of dark-blue velvet trimmed with fur, and a white handkerchief over her head. The tablecloth also is blue; the curtain is orange. Standing there, she poises in her right hand a pair of goldsmith’s scales. On the table is a profusion of pearls (painted with less miraculous dexterity than usual), and a tapestry rug has been tossed there too. Behind her placid, comely head, on the wall (where Vermeer usually places a map), a picture of the Last Judgment hangs, which may or may not be identifiable. (I should doubt if Vermeer introduced it with any ironical intention; that was not his way.) This picture is on a light grey wall. The light comes, of course, from the left, and never did this master of light paint it—or educe it—more wonderfully. It triumphs through the window and curtain exactly as in “The Pearl Necklace,” past the same black mirror. The woman’s face, however, has the greatest lustre; from it is diffused a lambency of such beauty that one might almost say that the rest of the picture matters nothing; such a soft and lovely glow were enough. The work is not signed, except with the signature of immanent personality.

Since the discovery of this picture—No. 36—yet another has been found—a large group of children representing Diana and her nymphs—which Mr. Paterson of Old Bond Street—the discoverer of “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”—has in his possession. Mr. Paterson is a true Vermeer enthusiast, and not one of those with whom the wish is the father to the thought. His new Vermeer is obviously an early work and is on a larger scale than any of the others: it has weaknesses of drawing and in more than one respect suggests an experimental stage; but one cannot doubt its authorship, and everywhere it is interesting, and here and there exquisite, especially in the figure of the child in the left-hand corner. With this picture the list of practically unquestionable Vermeers reaches thirty-eight.

There remain the one or two on the border-line of authenticity at which I have glanced, and also a signed landscape in the possession of Mr. Newton Robinson. This, if genuine (as I do not doubt), is Vermeer’s only woodland scene, with the exception of those on the walls of other of his pictures, such as that in the National Gallery, for example. It is a soft brown landscape, as little like Vermeer as possible in the mass. But in the detail—particularly in one detail—the signature is corroborated. In the foreground is a little arbour with some young people in it holding a musical party. The most prominent figure is a girl crowned with flowers: and this girl is sheer Vermeer in attitude, in charm, and in technique. The work is, I should guess, juvenile and experimental, but it has many attractions and is of the deepest interest as the thirty-ninth opus on the side of certainty.

Vermeer’s practically unquestionable output thus totals thirty-nine pictures. Think of the smallness of the harvest. Thirty-nine! That is to say, hardly more for Vermeer’s whole career than the Boningtons to be seen in a single London collection—that at Hertford House—where there are thirty-five of his works. And Bonington died at the age of twenty-seven. How many pictures by Bonington exist I know not, but hundreds, I suppose, in all. And Vermeer has only thirty-nine to his name, and lived nearly twice as long, and had eight children to support.

The question that confronts us, the question to which all these remarks of mine have been leading, then, is, Where are the others? Because there must have been others; indeed we know of a few, as I will presently show; but there must have been many others, since Vermeer began to paint when he was young, and painted till the end, and had a working period of, say, twenty-four years—between 1652, when he was twenty, and 1676, when he died. At the modest rate of only four pictures a year this would give him a total of ninety-six pictures, or nearly sixty more than we know of. But putting his output at a lower rate—say at two pictures a year—that would leave us with several still to discover. Of the existence at one time of two if not more of these we have absolute knowledge, gained from the catalogue of the Vermeer sale in Amsterdam in 1696, which I copy from M. Vanzype’s pages, together with the prices that they made and his commentary:—

“1. A young girl weighing gold in a little casket. 155 florins.

“2. A milkwoman. 175 fls.

“3. The portrait of the painter, in a room. 45 fls.

“4. A young woman playing the guitar. 70 fls.

“5. A nobleman in his room. 95 fls.

“6. A young woman at the harpsichord, and a young gentleman listening. 30 fls.

“7. A young woman taking a letter from a servant. 70 fls.

“8. A drunken servant, sleeping at a table. 62 fls.

“9. A gay company in a room. 73 fls.

“10. A man and a young woman making music. 81 fls.

“11. A soldier with a young girl who is laughing. 44 fls.

“12. A young lace-maker. 28 fls.

“13. View of Delft. 200 fls.

“14. House at Delft. 72 fls.

“15. View of several houses. 48 fls.

“16. Young woman writing. 63 fls.

“17. Young woman adorning herself. 30 fls.

“18. Young woman at the harpsichord. 42 fls.

“19. A portrait in ancient costume. 36 fls.

“20. and 21. Two pendants. 34 fls.”

On the above catalogue M. Vanzype comments as follows:—

“The greater number of these pictures seem to have been recovered.

“The Milkwoman [No. 2] is, in all probability, the one hanging for so long in the Six collection.

“The Young woman playing the guitar [No. 4] is actually the picture belonging to Mr. Johnson, in Philadelphia. It has been in the Cremer collection at Brussels and in the H. Bischoffsheim collection in London.

“The Young woman at a harpsichord with a gentleman listening [No. 6] is no doubt the much-admired picture at Windsor Castle, where it is one of the treasures and is called The Music Lesson. It was sold at Amsterdam at the Roos sale, in 1820, for 340 florins.

“The Young woman taking a letter from a servant [No. 7] is at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, under the title The Letter. It was bought by the State, through the intervention of the Rembrandt Society and of M. Van Lennep, from M. Messcher Van Vollenhoven for 45,000 florins.

“The Drunken servant sleeping at a table [No. 8] is, in all probability, the picture which until just lately belonged to the Kahn collection in Paris, and of the authenticity of which there is no doubt. [This was bought by Mr. Altman in 1910.] Bürger possessed another picture, a servant sleeping in a kitchen, and he believed that this was the work sold in 1696. In his picture the figure is not leaning on the table. It is now in the Widener collection and in it the characteristic qualities of Vermeer are not to be found.

“A man and a young woman making music [No. 10] is probably the Singing Lesson of the Frick collection at Pittsburg.

“A soldier with a young girl who is laughing [No. 11] is Mrs. Joseph’s picture in London.

“The young lace-maker [No. 12] is the little chef-d’œuvre in the Louvre sold for 84 francs at the Muilman sale in 1813; 501 in 1817 at the Lapeyrière sale; 265 fls. at the Nagel sale in 1851, and in 1870 bought by M. Blockhuyzen, of Rotterdam, for 1270 frs.

“The View of Delft [No. 13], if it has no replica, is the picture in the Museum at the Hague, for which 2900 fls. was paid at the Stinstra sale in 1822.

“The House at Delft [No. 14] is the Ruelle of the Six collection.

“The Young woman writing [No. 16] is without doubt the picture in the Beit collection in London. This was in the Héris sale at Brussels in 1857.

“The Young woman adorning herself [No. 17] is The Pearl Necklace in the Berlin Museum.

“The Young woman at the harpsichord [No. 18] is either the picture in the National Gallery or that in the Beit collection, or perhaps that in the Salting collection [now also at the National Gallery].

“It is believed that the portrait in ancient costume [No. 19] is the portrait of the young girl in the Museum at the Hague [my frontispiece].

“[Nos. 20 and 21.] Finally, since at the Hendrik Borgh sale in 1720 one Astrologer and its pendant were sold for 160 fls.; and since two Astrologers and a pendant were sold at the Neyman sale in 1797 for 270 and 132 fls., it may be deduced that the pendants of the 1696 sale are either the two Geographers which belong at the present day to the Museum at Frankfort and to M. Du Bus de Gisegnies at Brussels; or one only of these and M. Alphonse de Rothschild’s Astronomer.”

To these remarks of M. Vanzype may be added that No. 1 is the picture recently exhibited in London and now in Mr. Widener’s collection, and No. 3 is probably the Czernin picture. No. 9 might be the Brunswick painting. This leaves us only with two of the Amsterdam sale pictures to discover—No. 5, A nobleman in his room, and No. 15, View of several houses. But, of course, certain others which M. Vanzype and I think we have traced may be wholly different. M. Vanzype furthermore remarks: “Other pictures have at certain times been heard of and have since disappeared, notably the ‘Dévideuse’ discussed in 1865 by Bürger and an English connoisseur, which was then in England, but of which no trace has since been found.”

Among the thirty-nine that are known, although there are many interiors such as the painter loved, there is, remember, only one woodland scene, only one pure landscape, only one religious subject, only one real portrait, only one street scene, only one kitchen scene, only one purely classical subject, only one family scene. The isolation of these examples fills one with a kind of fury. No painter, and especially no painter with such an interest in the difficulties of his art, such a painter’s painter, so to speak, as Vermeer, and moreover a man with eight children and a clamorous baker—no painter paints only one landscape, especially when the result is so commandingly successful as the “View of Delft.” Where are the others? (M. Vanzype has found a replica, but it is not generally accepted.) No painter is satisfied with one attempt at a beautiful façade. Where are the others? (We know there was one other.) No painter paints only one classical subject. Where are the others? (Mr. Paterson’s example is only half-classical: classical with a domestic flavour: a family scene in masquerade, to be exact.) No painter paints only one religious subject. Where are the others? No painter paints only one portrait pure and simple as distinguished from portrait and genre. M. Vanzype, it is true, claims to have found another; but that would make only two. How indeed would he be allowed to paint no others, when he was Vermeer of Delft and lived in an age of Dutch prosperity and Dutch interest in art? Where are the others? Do you see how one feels—how maddening it is that these bare forty are all, when one knows that there must have been many more?

Vermeer may, of course, have himself destroyed some, as Claude Monet recently destroyed a number of his. But I do not think so; he could not have afforded to, and he was not that kind. No: they still exist somewhere. And the question where are they brings us back to the wealth of Mr. Pierpont Morgan, for which I was wishing at the beginning of this essay. With it I would furnish expeditions not to discover the Poles north and south, because I care nothing for them; not to conquer the air, because I love too much to feel my feet on this green earth; not to break banks or to finance companies; not to kill the gentle giraffe for America’s museums; but simply to hunt among the byways of Northern Europe in the hope of coming upon another work by that exquisite Delft hand. That is how I would spend my money; and incidentally what charming adventures one would have, and what subsidiary treasure one would gather! That would be an expedition worth making, even if the prime object of the search always eluded us.

The Fool’s Paradise

There is an old picture-shop in the West-Central district of London, notable for the grime of its canvases, in the window of which there is to be seen at this moment—unless a confiding purchaser has just borne it off—a girl’s head and bust by some very indifferent Dutch hand, under which is printed on the frame the startling and courageous legend, “The Coral Necklace. By Jan Vermeer, of Delft.”

Of course the ascription is inaccurate. Were it accurate and the picture worthy of it, this little shop would be the Mecca of the first art experts of Europe and America, and the dealer would be in the way to affluence; nor does the picture’s present owner probably believe in it. But what of some previous possessor who did believe in it—some simple soul who was genuinely convinced that upon his wall hung a portrait by this rarest and most exquisite and radiant of Dutch masters? Do you not envy him his easy credence, his want of fastidious taste? I do.

A little while ago there was a lawsuit—indeed a series of lawsuits—all turning upon the collection of porcelain left by a wealthy Regent Street merchant, whose hobby was the acquisition of china. As a man in the prime of life he had been a good judge; but as he grew older and his brain weakened his sense of discrimination left him, and it was discovered that his later purchases, so far from being the priceless examples of Dresden and other ware which they were thought to be, were all-but worthless. This naturally was a grief and disappointment to the heirs who were to benefit from the sale; but for us to be sorry for him is as foolish a waste of sympathy as I know. For though there he sat, that old amateur of ceramics, surrounded by the mediocre, yet in that he believed it to be the choicest he was enviable. That belief is the heart of the case, since it is not what things really are, but what one thinks things to be, that is the important matter.

Truth has a slightly different expression for every one. To this aged connoisseur with his decaying faculties her expression was falseness itself, could he have scrutinised it with intelligence, but to his dim eyes it looked like the finest candour, and therefore it was the finest candour. He sunned himself in it, and passing his hands lovingly over the spurious shepherdesses was happy. The point is that he could not have been happier had the porcelain been truly of the rarest and most wonderful.

I hope it will never be my fortune to visit a picture collector whose walls are hung entirely with obvious copies which he believes to be original, and flagrant daubs which he thinks masterpieces—a collector in short who relies only on the posthumous activity of artists; yet if it is, I hope I shall know how to control myself when he displays his treasures. But of one thing I am certain: that no matter how I may suffer from the concealment of my true feelings as an art lover, I shall experience a genuine affection for my host, and a genuine delight in his transparent, credible nature. Surely the people who live in fool’s paradises are the salt of the earth. The man who says of a fine thing, “A fine thing and my own,” I can admire, but not necessarily with warmth; the man (he is very common) who says of a fine thing, “A poor thing, but my own,” I have very little use for; but the man who says of a poor thing, “A fine thing and my own,” him I admire cordially, and could almost embrace.

But about this Vermeer. I cannot get it out of my head, for Vermeer is a painter of whom, as you know, I have made some study, and the thought of any one really sitting down excitedly with this grotesquely misattributed picture in his room, reading the lying label without a qualm, even with pride, scanning the commonplace paint with no twinge of dubiety—it is this thought which beats me. The man who confidently had the legend printed on the frame must indeed have been a simpleton beyond appraisement—the very briniest salt of the soil. For consider: the copyists, the forgers, may do credible things with Corot, even with Raphael. Every day they are writing David Cox’s signature on old water-colours; false ascriptions are the life-blood of too many firms. That is true. But Vermeer—there is only one Vermeer! and yet some man could know enough about Vermeer to wish to have something by him on his wall (modest wish—there are not, as I have been saying, forty known Vermeer canvases in the world), and then be satisfied with this! If ever I longed to meet a freak it is he—not only to examine his bumps, but to abase myself before him. For there is a true philosopher, a really wise man, if you like.

Meanwhile I wish some dramatist with an eye to quaint character, if there be such a one left, would set upon the stage for us a paradisiacal fool such as this—a simple kind of enthusiast without a shred of critical faculty or a drop of guile, whom we might see amiably fondling his geese and deeming them swans. That would give me, for one, great pleasure. Lamb, in his Captain Jackson, approached and skirted the type, but Vermeer’s “Coral Necklace” would not have attracted that engaging creature. If Anatole France were a dramatist and would return to the gentle, smiling mood in which he thought out and built up his Sylvestre Bonnard, he might give us this collector. I can think of no one else; and even he would probably be a little too much inclined to whip something on his back, such a castigator and ridiculer as he is.

Consolers of Genius

I have just added another famous dog to my list. It was a good list before, but it is now richer. It included Matthew Arnold’s Geist and Max and Kaiser, George Meredith’s Islet, Cowper’s Beau, Newton’s Diamond, Mrs. Browning’s Flush, Mr. Lehmann’s Rufus, all Dr. John Brown’s many friends, Scott’s deerhounds, Mortimer Collins’s St. Bernards, Pope’s spaniel. I remember only these as I write, but of course there are many others. And to this company enters now “Pomero.”

Landor’s “Pomero” came to him late in life—in the early ’forties—by which time the old man—he was then nearing seventy but had twenty fairly stormy years left—had settled again in England, his wife and family and most of his sympathies being far away in Italy. At Bath he then lived, making occasional visits to Gore House, and varying the composition of exquisite prose and tender felicitous verse with quarrels and tempests and tempests and reconciliations and tempests and lawsuits. Such then was the possessor of “Pomero”—or, as he would probably have called himself, the proud possession of “Pomero”—of whom such glimpses as I have had come to me in scraps of letters quoted by Forster in his Life of this noble, troubled, impossible, glorious creature.

Here is one, written by Landor at Warwick, when away from home, or what stood for home at that period—1844. Pomero had only just arrived from Fiesole; and it is worth remarking that had Landor lived to-day no such fortune would ever have been his, for never would he have survived such explosions of rage as the modern six months’ quarantine for imported dogs would have brought on him. (Think of him expressing his views to the custom-house officer at Dover!) “Daily,” he wrote, “do I think of Bath and Pomero. I fancy him lying on the narrow window-sill, and watching the good people go to church. He has not yet made up his mind between the Anglican and Roman Catholic; but I hope he will continue in the faith of his forefathers, if it will make him happier.”

Pomero, I should say, was a Pomeranian; but let me quote Sir Sidney Colvin’s charming sentences upon both man and dog. “With ‘Pomero’ Landor would prattle in English and Italian as affectionately as a mother with a child. Pomero was his darling, the wisest and most beautiful of his race; Pomero had the brightest eyes and the most wonderful yaller tail ever seen. Sometimes it was Landor’s humour to quote Pomero in speech and writing as a kind of sagacious elder brother whose opinion had to be consulted on all subjects before he would deliver his own. This creature accompanied his master wherever he went, barking ‘not fiercely but familiarly’ at friend and stranger, and when they came in would either station himself upon his master’s head to watch the people passing in the street, or else lie curled up in his basket until Landor, in talk with some visitor, began to laugh, and his laugh to grow and grow, when Pomero would spring up and leap upon and fume about him, barking and screaming for sympathy until the whole street resounded. The two together, master and dog, were for years to be encountered daily on their walks about Bath and its vicinity, and there are many who perfectly well remember them; the majestic old man, looking not a whit the less impressive for his rusty and dusty brown suit, his bulging boots, his rumpled linen, or his battered hat; and his noisy, soft-haired, quick-glancing, inseparable companion.”

Landseer, one feels, should have painted them: Dignity and Fidelity, Unreason and Understanding, Lion and Pomeranian. Since he did not, we must go to Forster’s extracts from the letters to fill in the picture. Another passage, also in 1844: “Pomero was on my knee when your letter came. He is now looking out of the window; a sad male gossip, as I often tell him. I dare not take him with me to London. He would most certainly be stolen, and I would rather lose Ipsley or Llanthony. The people of the house love him like a child, and declare he is as sensible as a Christian. He not only is as sensible, but much more Christian than some of those who have lately brought strife and contention into the Church.”

Again: “Pomero is sitting in a state of contemplation, with his nose before the fire. He twinkles his ears and his feathery tail at your salutation. He now licks his lips and turns round, which means ‘Return mine.’ The easterly wind has an evident effect upon his nerves. Last evening I took him to hear Luisina de Sodre play and sing. She is my friend the Countess de Molande’s granddaughter and daughter of De Sodre, Minister of Brazil to the Pope a few years ago. Pomero was deeply affected, and lay close to the pedal on her gown, singing in a great variety of tones, not always in time. It is unfortunate that he always will take a part where there is music, for he sings even worse than I do.”

So far the letters have been to Forster. Here is a passage from one to Landor’s sisters, also in 1844: “Let me congratulate you on the accident that deprives you of your carriage-horses. Next to servants, horses are the greatest trouble in life. Dogs are blessings, true blessings. Pomero, who sends his love, is the comfort of my solitude and the delight of my life. He is quite a public character here in Bath. Everybody knows him and salutes him. He barks aloud at all familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was St. Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise.”

For twelve years Pomero lived to make his master (his servant) happy or less unhappy, and then he died. That is the tragic thing—the brief life of these loyal devotees. It is not right, not fair, that so much love and energy should so quickly pass away. Many sensitive persons refuse for this reason to keep dogs at all. That, I think, is going too far, but I can understand it. Life at its longest for a human being is so brief and so fraught with disappointment and disillusion that, at least, one feels, the span of the most faithful and satisfying friends that man knows might have been made commensurate.... Pomero, as I have said, was Landor’s for twelve years, and then he died. Writing to Forster on the 10th of March, 1856, the old man—he was eighty-one—tells the news: “Pomero, dear Pomero, died this evening at about four o’clock. I have been able to think of nothing else....”

A few days later he wrote again: “Everybody in this house grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day and night upon his grave, and I will not disturb the kind creature, though I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around his little urn:—

O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo:

Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis.

Vale, hortule! aeternumque, Pomero! vale.

Sed, si datur, nostri memor.”

Eighty-one though he was, Landor had still nine years before him—years of trouble, and fury, and exile. Not till 1864 did he meet Pomero again.

Pomero had been Landor’s confidant and delight for five years when, in 1849, there came to one of the most illustrious of his contemporaries—and a critic of the world not less impatient than himself, but how different!—a similar companion. It was not, it is true, a Pomeranian, but a dog none the less.

The news was thus broken by one of the most remarkable women of all time to, as it happens, the same friend who had been first told of the arrival of Pomero. “O Lord!” she writes, wilfully, characteristically as ever, “O Lord! I forgot to tell you I have got a little dog, and Mr. C. has accepted it with an amiability! To be sure, when he comes down gloomy in the morning, or comes in wearied from his walk, the infatuated little beast dances round him on his hind legs as I ought to do and can’t; and he feels flattered and surprised by such unwonted capers to his honour and glory.” So wrote Jane Welsh Carlyle to John Forster, on the 11th of December, 1849.

Sixteen years later the writer of that letter died suddenly in her carriage in Hyde Park, and thus ended a life of heroic vivacity. Her husband, deprived for ever of the power of sustained work, difficult enough when he had her service and intelligence within call, spent a few months in his early bereavement in collecting and arranging and annotating her marvellous correspondence; and one does not envy him his feelings as he did it. Coming to the note to Forster which I have quoted, he thus introduced it: “Poor little Nero, the dog, must have come this winter, or ‘Fall’ (1849)? Railway guard (from Dilberoglue, Manchester) brought him in one evening late. A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white—a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training. Much innocent sport there arose out of him; much quizzical ingenuous preparation of me for admitting of him: ‘My dear, it’s borne in upon my mind that I’m to have a dog,’ etc., etc., and with such a look and style! We had many walks together, he and I, for the next ten years; a great deal of small traffic, poor little animal, so loyal, so loving, so naïve and true with what of dim intellect he had! Once, perhaps in his third year here, he came pattering upstairs to my garret; scratched duly, was let in, and brought me (literally) the ‘gift of a horse’ (which I had talked of needing)! Brought me, to wit, a letter hung to his neck, inclosing on a saddler’s card the picture of a horse, and adjoined to it a cheque for £50—full half of some poor legacy which had fallen to her! Can I ever forget such a thing? I was not slave enough to take the money; and got a horse next year, on the common terms—but all Potosi, and the diggings new and old, had not in them, as I now feel, so rich a gift!”

These three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle’s indomitably gay correspondence, laughing at her crosses, making light of her disappointments, extracting whatever of merriment or sunshine was possible, and never with any trace of self-commendation or consciousness of heroism: and a woman too who must have known that, given a fair chance, which she never had, she would have shone in her own way with hardly less brilliancy than her bear; who must have known she was worth petting, and considering, and adoring rightly—these three volumes of brilliant good-humour against odds, with the dour, intolerant, solitary widower re-living the irrecoverable past as he read them over and edited them, counting his lost opportunities on every page, are surely as tragic a work as literature knows. But Nero is pawing at the desk. The note continues: “Poor Nero’s last good days were with us at Aberdour, in 1859. Twice or thrice I flung him into the sea there, which he didn’t at all like; and in consequence of which he even ceased to follow me at bathing time, the very strongest measure he could take—or pretend to take. For two or three mornings accordingly I had seen nothing of Nero, but the third or fourth morning, on striking out to swim a few yards, I heard gradually a kind of swashing behind me; looking back, it was Nero out on voluntary humble partnership—ready to swim with me to Edinburgh, or to the world’s end, if I liked.”

Pomero, as I said, lived for twelve years with his whirlwind adorer. Nero had a shorter life with that strange Scotch couple only by a few months. This is the end of Carlyle’s note: “Fife had done his mistress, and still more him, a great deal of good. But, alas, in Cook’s grounds here, within a month or two a butcher’s cart (in her very sight) ran over him neck and lungs: all winter he wheezed and suffered; ‘Feb. 1st, 1860,’ he died (prussic acid, and the doctor obliged at last!). I could not have believed my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was—nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together (for he insisted on trying to come), Jan. 31st, is still painful to my thought. ‘Little dim, white speck, of Life, of Love, Fidelity, and Feeling, girdled by the Darkness as of Night Eternal!’ Her tears were passionate and bitter, but repressed themselves, as was fit, I think, the first day. Top of the garden, by her direction, Nero was put under ground. A small stone tablet with date she also got, which, broken by careless servants, is still there—a little protected now.”

It is there still, but few visitors to that gloomy Chelsea house, where two geniuses, a man and woman, failed sufficiently to subdue and blend their individualities for so many years, ever walk down the garden to see it. Underneath are the remains of one who could neither read nor write nor frame systems, but who lived the only successful life of the three.

An American Hero

Who was William Allen Richardson? I once asked. Since the publication of the volume of essays in which the problem was so tiresomely propounded many letters have reached me, each with its own solution. All are different; and their differences show how important it was that a warrior for truth should come forward and fling the question in the world’s face. For the growth of legend and myth that has been endangering the fame of this noble deviser of an orange-hearted rose was becoming too rampant. Let me, therefore, who asked the question, now answer it; for I know. By dint of careful pruning I have removed the apocryphal, and the truth remains. William Allen Richardson was—

But you must permit me first to narrate some of the experiences of an essayist who has the temerity to indulge in interrogation marks.

The first letter I received—almost immediately after the publication of the book—gave so lucid an account of William Allen Richardson that I began to think I had made too much of the mystery. “Do you really want to know about William Allen Richardson?” it began; and then this story was told: “William Allen Richardson and his wife loved roses, and the ambition of their lives was to raise an orange-coloured rose. At last they succeeded, and they called the treasure ‘William and Ellen Richardson,’ a rather cumbersome title, but meaning much to these two. Alas, the printer would have none of this sentiment—hence ‘William Allen Richardson.’”

I cannot say that this narrative satisfied me; but there was nothing in it to make one violently sceptical. Why should not William and Ellen have lived this idyllic rose-growing life? Why should not their names have been thus intertwined for ever, even if a little ungallantly? I had seen barges on the Thames called “William and Ellen,” I was sure; why not roses? I therefore went about saying that I now knew the whole history of William Allen Richardson, and the story was not doubted.

But then arrived an anonymous post card with the Paddington postmark: “I am of no importance and my brother is of no importance, but William Allen Richardson was the brother of my brother’s handy man. (At least he said so.)” What of William and Ellen after that? For the time, at any rate, the narrative of their fragrant union passed from my repertory.

That post card will give you an idea of the lightness with which this matter can be approached. I do not mean that the communication in itself is frivolous, for, though easy in tone, it yet states the case briefly and clearly; the lightness that I complain of is in the attitude of the writer’s brother towards this tremendous problem. Here he was, with his brother’s handy man claiming to be the own brother of the great William Allen Richardson, and yet doing no more (apparently) than treating it as a myth—never investigating—never, in short, really caring. Now if I had a brother whose handy man was—— But this is boasting, self-approval; and complacent people conscious of their own rectitude rarely get at the truth.

Other correspondents followed, all strangers to me, and each with a pet theory. One had it that William Allen Richardson had been gardener to a rose-loving duke. Another, that he was a Scotchman who had gone to France, to manage the Ducher nursery. Another, that he was the American editor of a horticultural journal. Then came another more circumstantial story, from a lady in Yorkshire. “I was taught by a dear old country vicar (himself an enthusiastic rose-grower and close friend of Dean Hole) that W. A. Richardson was one of the Quaker firm of Richardson, who had a place near Newry in the north of Ireland.” This so chimed in with my own Quakerish suspicions, as expressed in the original essay, that I was inclined to think we might really be at home at last; but meanwhile an American missive was on its way from Louisville, Kentucky, and when it arrived I saw at once that here was Veritas naked and unashamed.

A certain statesman who had taken much interest in the matter will be amused to read the Louisville communication. “I have often,” he wrote to me, “wondered, and occasionally asked, who W. A. R. was, and have been at times impatient that people should be content to live on without knowing. Now I would almost rather not know, having been disappointed for so long.” He went on to say that he suspected W. A. R. to be an American. Well, he was right. Sagacious and far-seeing as ever, he now has another opportunity of pointing to a fulfilled conjecture; for there is no doubt (since I have had corroboration from another transatlantic source) that the following letter is gospel.

The writer, Mr. W. R. Belknap, roundly states himself to be William Allen Richardson’s nephew. He continues: “William Allen Richardson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 20, 1819. When he was but two years old, his father moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he resided until his death, in October, 1892. William Allen Richardson married Miss Mary Short, daughter of Charles Wilkins Short, the botanist, who pursued his favourite studies of botany and horticulture at his country place, Hayfield, some five miles south-west of Louisville. With this congenial companionship, Mr. W. A. Richardson established himself in an adjoining place, Ivywood, and became much interested in the cultivation and propagation of roses. He imported a good many, and in this way became acquainted by correspondence with Madame Ducher (or she may have been called Veuve Ducher), at Lyons, France, who was especially interested in a rose which he sent her of a pale yellow colour, and she wrote Mr. Richardson that she had a sport from this rose in her own garden, which, if successful in propagation, she would name for him; hence the name which has interested you as applying to the beautiful copperish-yellow rose.... Mr. Richardson lived until 1892 in his country home near here, and would have enjoyed, if he might have foreseen, the interest which his namesake has aroused....”

And now we know. The secret is out, and the rose will smell no less sweet for it, nor climb less carelessly, nor refresh the eye less graciously. But I adjure America to be more proud of this feather in her cap. I do not suggest that William Allen Richardson should have a monument, for he has one in every right garden more beautiful than marble and very likely more enduring than bronze; but his name should be so deeply cut upon the roll of honour that no one need ever have to ask my question again.

But what a blow to that foolish romantic anecdote about Ellen!

Mr. Hastings

Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr. Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted, the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on the wall at Wimborne St. Giles’s, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but the Earl’s words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form which follows from the “Connoisseur” for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six years ago, before the days of amalgamation.

As to the portrait of Mr. Hastings, I have seen an engraving of it in one of Hutchins’s Dorsetshire books, and it is a crude enough thing—a little odd old man, with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff in his right hand—not so much a patriarch’s staff as a surveyor’s pole. Nothing in it to suggest that he loved spaniels, for example, or knew the best thing to do with a disused pulpit. Yet he did.

Now for the shrewd and cryptic statesman who first made the admirable remark (since given to others) that “Wise men are of but one religion,” adding to the lady who inquired what that was, “Wise men never tell.” He begins thus: “In the year 1638 lived Mr. Hastings; by his quality son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was ... low, very strong, and very active; of a reddish flaxen hair. His clothes always green cloth, and never all worth (when new) five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large Park well stocked with deer; and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen; many fish-ponds; great store of wood and timber; a bowling-green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being never levell’d since it was plough’d. They used round sand bowls; and it had a banqueting house like a stand, built in a tree.”—The mansion no longer stands in its entirety. It was pulled down, with the exception of two wings, at the beginning of the last century. One of these wings, however, contains the kitchen, and gives ample evidence of the hospitality which, as we shall see, was practised there.

Mr. Hastings “kept all manner of sport hounds, that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. And hawks, long and short winged. He had all sorts of nets for fish. He had a walk in the New Forest, and the manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish. And indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were free to him, who bestowed all his time on these sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters; there being not a woman in all his walks, of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he was not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular; always speaking kindly to the husband, father, or brother, who was, to boot, very welcome to his house whenever he came.” (“Popular” is a good word, so good, in this connexion, that one has to pause a little to savour it.) Thinking of him thus occupied, if ever, you would say, an old, whimsical bachelor was portrayed, he is portrayed here. But you would be wrong, for Mr. Hastings was married. It was his wife who brought him Woodlands, and she did not die till 1638, when he was eighty-seven. They had, moreover, a son. Lord Shaftesbury, who was something of a cynic, suppressed this detail. It amused him to eliminate Mrs. Hastings.

His lordship goes on to describe the free-and-easy (and, on the face of it, wifeless) character of Mr. Hastings’ house. “A house not so neatly kept as to shame him or his dirty shoes: the great hall strow’d with marrow bones, full of hawks’ perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers; the upper side of the hall hung with foxskins of this and the last year’s killing; here and there a polecat intermixt; game-keepers’ and hunters’ poles in great abundance. The parlour was a large room as properly furnished. On a great hearth paved with brick lay some terriers, and the choicest hounds and spaniels. Seldom but two of the great chairs had litters of young cats in them, which were not to be disturbed, he having always three or four attending him at dinner, and a little white stick of fourteen inches lying by his trencher, that he might defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them.” (One does not feel much room for a Mrs. Hastings here. She kept her own quarters, I imagine.)

I should like to see a picture of old Mr. Hastings at his meals—with all his animals about him and his hand holding his little white stick. Steinlen, who designed that fine poster for Nestlé’s milk—the cats clamouring for the little girl’s breakfast—could draw the animals; but for the little old gentleman, with his red hair and green clothes and great age, you would want a Dendy Sadler or Stacy Marks.

The description of the house continues: “The windows (which were very large) served for places to lay his arrows, cross-bows, stone-bows, and other such like accoutrements. The corners of the room full of the best-chose hunting and hawking poles. An oyster table at the lower end, which was of constant use twice a day all the year round, for he never failed to eat oysters, before dinner and supper, through all seasons; the neighbouring town of Poole supply’d him with them. The upper part of the room had two small tables and a desk, on the one side of which was a Church Bible, and on the other the Book of Martyrs. On the tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like; two or three old green hats, with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a pheasant kind of poultry, he took much care of and fed himself. Tables, dice, cards, and boxes were not wanting. In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used.”—Mr. Hastings must have been one of the earliest of the smokers, since he was born as far back as 1551.

“On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observ’d. For he never exceeded in drink or permitted it.” In another account of Mr. Hastings his iron rule with regard to liquor was suggested to have caused much unhappiness to his guests. And I must admit that there seems to be something wrong in a house where you may not see the bottle, much less handle it. But, on the other hand, it is such unexpected whims and unreasonableness that are the life-blood of these old originals. Any dull creature can be reasonable.

Now comes a priceless touch: “On the other side was the door into an old chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of bacon, or great apple pye, with thick crust, extremely baked.” “Never wanting” is splendid. One longs to know more of the service of this house—of the cook who fell in so complacently with such a master’s needs and ways. “Never wanting!”

Like Bishop Corbet’s fairies, Mr. Hastings was of the old profession. “His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat at. His sports supplied all but beef and mutton, except Fridays, when he had the best salt fish (as well as other fish) he could get; and was the day his neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it in with ‘My part lies therein-a.’” “He always sung it in.” Here lies an old custom indeed, dead, I suppose, as Mr. Hastings himself and all his spaniels and kittens. Who sings in a pudding to-day? And, indeed, what pudding is worth singing in? Not the rice which I had yesterday, at any rate.

And so we come to the end: “He was well-natured but soon angry.... He lived to be a hundred; never lost his eyesight, but always wrote and read without spectacles; and got on horseback without help. Until past four score he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.” He was buried in Horton church in 1650 at the age of ninety and nine, and England will never know anything like him again. Gone are such spacious days and ways; gone such idiosyncrasy and humour. Only, I imagine, on the bowling-greens are Mr. Hastings’ characteristics to be still observed; for our old devotees of that leisurely contest, that most pacific warfare, cannot in their attitudes, gestures and expressions differ much from the Squire of Woodlands. Just so did he, three hundred years ago, contort and twist his frame, as he watched his bowl’s career and bent every nerve and fibre to influence it to swerve at the last dying moment on the jack between his two rivals. These elemental anxieties do not change.

Thoughts on Tan

In my search for the curious, which I hope that nothing will ever satiate, I came recently upon this advertisement at the end of a not too respectable comic paper:—

Handsome Men are slightly sun-burnt. “Sunbronze” gives this tint. Harmless. Detection impossible. Makes men really handsome. Society Lady writes:—“Sunbronze is wonderful, charming, and genuine.” 1s. 1½d., etc.

When I read it first I laughed. Then I cut it out. Then I began not to laugh; and I am not sure now that one ought not to weep....

We were considering earlier in this volume a certain kind of fool’s paradise—the paradise which surrounds the collector-fool who genuinely believes his geese to be swans. That amiable simpleton deceived no one; he was merely soothingly and caressingly self-deceived to the top of his bent through a heaven-sent want of true taste. Compared with him the man who deliberately rubs a mixture on his face in order to induce his friends to believe that he has been much in the sun when he has not is complex indeed—for he is deceiving every one else without for an instant deceiving himself at all. For that is my reading of that advertisement. I do not accept its face value; I do not believe that it is bought by men in order to render themselves more attractive to the fair. My reading is that it is bought by men (and perhaps by women too: you observe the testimony of the Society Lady?) in order that it may lend colour to their assertion that they have been fashionably or expensively holiday-making when they have not.

But why pretend? you say. Ah! you are perhaps well-to-do. Nothing keeps you at home; or even if it did, it would not cause you shame. But can you not believe that there are others?...

We feel that we are greater than we know

—as Wordsworth says. That is an exalted mood. A commoner experience would perhaps be expressed thus:—

We hope you’ll think us greater than we are.

That aspiration, at any rate, is at the bottom of the success of such a lotion as this; and it is prevalent.

A full inquiry into this foible of poor human nature would need a volume; nor could I carry it out. Something of the minute scientific method of Professor Sully would be needed, with a considerable infusion of Thackeray added, and a leaven of pity, too.

Pity indeed. For though sheer brazen impudence and a determined lady-killing may resort to this strange bottle, this phial of mockery, yet I seem to see it being smuggled into simpler homes too. The poor clerk, for example, who is forced by sheer poverty to spend his week or fortnight in his London home, and by sheer shame to spend it almost perdu; reading the paper in bed, smoking his pipe in his back yard, helping with the children, playing pool at night over his glass in the public-house at the corner—how would he feel when he returned to work at the end of the period and had to confess that he had been nowhere? That is the point to consider, for few of us are great, and he is very small indeed. Amid triumphant stories of Margate and Southend, Yarmouth and Southsea, Brighton and even Guernsey, where would he be if he told the truth? Nowhere. And what fun is it not to be anywhere? Don’t you see? And so do you blame him if he spends 1s. 1½d., and anoints his countenance with a little of this delusive fluid on the morning of his return, and, strong in its testimony, talks vaguely but sufficiently of Herne Bay? Do you blame him? You must be a devil of a fellow if you do.

In a way he is entirely justified, for there is no doubt that he is gaining self-respect by losing it: that is to say, he would feel almost too paltry if he had to confess to the real squalid economy of his fortnight. And it is not good to feel too paltry.

But the wish to be thought more fashionable than one is, is not confined to the respectable poor—the poor, that is, who are forced to make something of a show: surely the least enviable class of all; the poor, in other words, who have to forego all the privileges of being poor. There is another class—Major Pendennis was at the head of it—who must intrigue a little too, if they are not to be too miserable. I remember a little man who had a room in Jermyn Street and lived in his Club; it was his habit to disappear for a fortnight or so every 11th of August, and reappear very brown and very vocal of the moors. His colour was genuine—no 1s. 1½d. bottle, but the Lord of Light himself had conferred it; yet not by beams that fell in Yorkshire or Scotland, but on Brighton’s pier. How, then, did his narrative of triumph in the butts carry conviction? What was his particular “Sunbronze”? He wore in the ribbon of his hat a little row of grouse feathers.

And that possibly is what one has to remember—that “Sunbronze” takes many forms—more than I know, or you know, or ever shall know, however extensive our knowledge may be at this moment. For we all “Sunbronze” a little; at least if not quite all, nearly all. We nearly all hope you’ll think us greater than we are.

On Leaving One’s Beat

When I am going for a long railway journey I always buy a number of papers associated with walks of life as far as possible removed from my own. Then the time passes easily. The ordinary papers one reads too quickly; the exorbitant require attention—they open the door to new worlds. I do not mean to suggest that one could go so far as to find entertainment in the Financial Supplement to the “Times”—that is too much; but the organs of dog-fancying, yachting, cricket, prize-fighting, the police, estate agents, licensed victuallers—these are sufficiently unusual and concentrated to be entertaining if they are really studied. Their exclusiveness, their importance, I particularly like: the suggestion they throw out that in this world all is vanity save their own affairs (as indeed it is). Such self-centredness is very exhilarating.

But the best fun of all is to be found in the stage and variety-hall papers. Not only are they the most amusing, but also the most human, for the sock and buskin have a way of forcing the heart to the sleeve. Limelight does more than all the sun of the tropics to bring emotion to the surface without shame; and it thus comes about that the periodicals of the players are full of refreshment to the cabined and reserved. Reading one of them the other day, I found in the advertisement columns (which should never be neglected) the following rich feast of opportunity, on which I have been ruminating ever since:—

“The Angel of His Dreams.”

Wanted, to rehearse April 19th, Summer Tour, Autumn if suitable, Dashing Leading Lady; must have power, pathos, intensity, and be capable of strong character work. Emotional Juvenile Lady, with pathos and intensity (look 17 in first Act; state if sing). Handsome wardrobe essential in both cases. Clever Emotional Child Actress, over 14, look 9; own speciality. Tall, Robust, Aristocratic Heavy Man; Aris. Old Man (Small Double and S.M.). Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double); Bright Low Comedian (short).

References, lowest summer terms, and photos essential.

—There is an advertisement if you like! Did you ever hear of so many strange wants? I certainly never did; nor ever did I hear of so many vacancies that I could not myself do anything towards filling. For, as a rule, one feels one could make some kind of a show in most capacities—one could maintain for a little while the illusion of being a gentleman’s butler, or even a gardener, a sleeping partner, an addresser of envelopes, a smart traveller, an election agent, a sub-editor, or any of the things that are so frequently advertised for, supposing one to have applied for the post and have been engaged. But how begin to be a “Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double)”? That leaves me utterly at sea. And “S.M.,” what is that?

It was while pondering upon these matters that I realized what an excellent thing it would be for many of us whose imagination is weak, and whose sympathetic understanding is therefore apt to break down, if we could now and then completely change our beat. Many a hidebound, intolerant, self-satisfied Puritan do I know who, forced into such a touring company as this, compelled by sheer adversity to assume the habit of a “Small Double and S.M.,” or a “Bright Low Comedian,” would come out of the ordeal far sweeter and fitter to play his part in the human drama, however he may have disappointed the promoters of “The Angel of His Dreams.” We remain—it is largely the fault of the shortness of life and the need of pence—too much in our own grooves. We are too ignorant of what we can really do.

That advertisement came from an organ of the legitimate Stage. Obviously. In a less classic and more intimate music-hall paper, which I bought at the same time, I found the charming announcement of the birth of a son to a North of England Valentine Vox. After stating the event—“The wife of ‘Baddow’ (ventriloquist) of a son”—it went on thus:—“Both doing well. Baddow takes this opportunity of thanking the managers and agents who so kindly transferred, altered, and rearranged dates, so that I played places near and was able to stay in Liverpool for this event.” There is something very engaging in the naïveté, pride and pleasure of that statement. It contains so much of the warm-heartedness of the variety-stage, where money and sympathy equally come easily and go easily. Baddow’s suppression of his Christian name, or even initial, I like: his satisfaction in having reached a position where both are negligible, together with the suspicion that he is aware that the advertisement would be of less value if the star style were tampered with. I like also his complacency as a parent of some importance. And then there is in it too the new evidence of the kindliness of those in power, all working together to keep the properly anxious ventriloquist near at home; and finally the really adorable transition, indicating real emotion, from the somewhat stilted if imposing third person to the familiar first.

The good, affectionate Baddow! I hope mother and son are still doing well, and that the son will grow up to be a comfort to his parents, and as a ventriloquist not unworthy of his father (though never surpassing him), and a delight to audiences.

The Deer-Park

After too many years I found myself last week once again in the first deer-park I ever saw; and the change was only in me. The same beautiful creatures were there, of the dappled variety, feeding in little groups, standing motionless as a stranger approached, and moving across the open or amid the trees of the avenue with the silent, timid curiousness of their kind. The sun was golden through cracks in the heavy clouds, and the deer’s soft dapplings shone in its light, while when they moved in any number they twinkled, glittered, almost smouldered.

Now and then an old stag, with antlers so broad and branching that they seemed not his at all, but a borrowed head-dress assumed almost as if for a charade, would pass with dignity and extreme deliberation from one group to another; now and then a fawn would trot up to its mother on legs of such slender delicacy that their serviceableness for anything but the most exquisite decoration seemed impossible; and twice there were royal battles between young stags, whose horns met in a terrifying clash and clatter like spears on shields.

These contests were interesting not only for the attack and counter-attack, but for the conduct of the older stags, two of which at once approached very slowly, but full of purpose, to act as referees, and, if necessary, to interfere. It was precisely the same in each engagement, although they were half a mile apart. The second was the more exciting, for once or twice the referee had to break in, and once with a furious rush one of the fighters charged his opponent clean into the river, down a steep bank, and then jumped in after him and continued the battle. All this we saw as we sat under one of the lime-trees in the beautiful avenue, and I remembered, as I sat there, that just such sounds as these—the rattling of antlers in concussion—we had been accustomed to hear years and years ago when we were children and lodged in a cottage by the park gates. Certainly I had not heard it since, but gradually it grew more and more familiar, rising to the surface of consciousness after this so long submersion.

What the life of a park deer is I have no notion, nor was there anyone to ask; but since that is thirty-five years ago at the least, it is improbable that any of these lovely creatures, so rare and dainty and fragile as to be almost unreal, are the same that used to thrill us at that distant day; yet I repeat there was no visible change whatever, save in me. Everything else was the same—the footpaths; the lime avenue; the oak deer-fence, still often in need of repair; the large house, once so awe-inspiring and now so ugly; the church by the Scotch firs; the red sand of the road; the curious house with the bas-relief of a hog on a plate of Sussex iron near the church—but most of all the deer, just as fairylike, just as thrilling, as ever, and moving exactly in their old mysterious ways. I was glad I had seen so few deer since, and none dappled. I will not see these again for some time, just to keep that emotion of surprise and delight green and sweet.

Considering how many deer-parks England has—though far from enough—it is remarkable that the sight of deer should be such an epoch in the life of the ordinary person. Yet the very word deer-park gives me a quickening of the pulse, and, I hope, always will. I came away wondering what Jamrach or Cross would want for a pair; but I have lost the wish for them. They should be kept more extraordinary than that. They must remain an event. I am even sorry for villagers who live near deer-parks; while having so much, they miss so much.

The other creature from romance that I group with the deer as making a red-letter day for a child, and indeed for some of us who are older, is the peacock. Now and then, but how rarely, there would be an excursion to some great mansion. The passage from room to room amid gilt furniture and ancestral portraits was an excitement, no doubt; but the most memorable sight of all was the blue breast of the peacock on the terrace-wall, caught through one of the diamond panes. Until I moved to London and contracted the Kew Gardens Sunday habit, I suppose that I had not seen ten peacocks in my life, and now again I see them ordinarily not once a year; but a little while ago I visited a poet who lives in an old house in the very heart of the country, and there I found many peacocks. They walked proudly and affectedly about the garden, they sat on the walls and on the roofs of the out-buildings, they screamed at each other and spread their tails. The complete skin of one that had died burned blue in the hall.

I expressed the usual commonplace as to their destructiveness of flowers.

“To me,” said the poet, “they are flowers. One cannot have both, so I have peacocks.”

From this, my first and latest deer-park, which has but a handful of cottages near it, we walked to the market town, a mile and a half away, and there I sought in vain for the little toy and sweet shop where all those years ago my first bow and arrow was bought. I know just where it stood, but new and imposing premises occupy its place. The bow was given me by one of those bachelor visitors who have it in their power at extraordinarily small cost to glorify the existence of small boys and emparadise the world. It is among the deeper tragedies that one can never receive one’s first bow and arrow again.

The Rarities

I have been staying in the remote country with an aristocrat, by which, of course, I mean not a man with two motor-cars, or a man with illustrious quarterings, but one through whose garden runs a trout-stream. I used to think that the possession of a cedar alone conferred aristocracy, and I still think that in some measure it does; but a stream with trout in it...! Moreover, this friend of mine has a cedar too.

It is odd how late in life one does some of the most desirable things. Here am I, who, ever since I can remember, have been longing to be idle with a book in a chair beside running water; yet not till last week did I find the conditions perfect. The sun was hot, yet not too hot; the book did not matter, yet was not despicable, and once a peacock butterfly settled upon the open page, and this justified in an instant the existence of author, publisher, paper-maker, printer, binder, and book-seller; the air was filled not only with the pretty whispering burble of the current, but also with the plashing of a fountain in its marble basin and the steady descent of water through a sluice; sweet scents came and went with the gentle breeze, and one had but to lift the eyes to see phloxes and dahlias in all their rich glory. And once—but that is too wonderful an experience to be mentioned without more ceremony.

Just as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so is one man’s commonplace another’s phenomenon. To an Englishman, for example, in Dieppe it is nothing to read that a swallow-tailed butterfly has been seen in England, because on the cliffs between Dieppe and Le Puy swallow-tails are as prevalent as garden-whites with us. But what a thrill for the English schoolboy with his net to see one in his native meadows! Again, it is nothing to a gamekeeper to watch a family of foxes at play in the early morning; but it would be an unforgettable spectacle to a town dweller. And I daresay that there are readers of these lines in Norfolk who are as accustomed to the sight of kingfishers as I who live far from water am to that of rooks; but to me kingfishers have appeared so seldom that they are like angels’ visits and mark the years. I remember one on the Rother, near Midhurst, in 1884; another near Abingdon in 1889; another at Burford Bridge in 1890; and a fourth in the valley between Rievaulx and Helmsley in 1894. That is my total—four kingfishers in quite a long and not indolent life, which includes at least two separate weeks on the Avon devoted to the search for this bird—not the frequented Avon either, but the Avon’s quieter parts such as one finds near the Combertons and about Harington Weir.

At least that was my total until last week. But now I must add a fifth, for as I was sitting by this little stream, thinking of nothing, quietly ruminative and happily receptive, suddenly a jewel darted through the air, and, burning bright against the sombre depths of a yew, disappeared again. Almost before I had realized its presence my fifth kingfisher was gone; but the day was made perfect by the flash.

And had I sat on I might have had even greater luck, for a fortnight ago, while my friend was standing motionless on his bridge, an otter climbed out of the water close by and strolled along the bank, bright-eyed and inquisitive. Luck is the only word; and, as I once wrote elsewhere, it is a kind of luck which goes entirely by favour of the gods. I have it not. The only otter I ever saw was at the Zoo; and incidentally I might add that the otter is the only animal in the Zoo for which (with the exception of the mice) one does not feel sorry. He seems so content; and has so much of his “native pewter” (so to speak) to revel in; and is so continuously and rapturously alive, making the best of both worlds—water and land. Whenever I look at him—and he is three or four strong just now—I again realize that one of the most satisfactory memories I can indulge is that on the single occasion on which I joined an otter hunt nothing was killed.

It was seventeen years ago. The pack had come all the way to Sussex from Wales, accompanied by an indefatigable owner, who illustrated, curiously, pathetically, almost tragically, the hold that the chase can exert upon an English gentleman. For he was a ruin: he was paralyzed below the waist, and had the use only of one arm; but strapped securely on a tried and faithful pony, he was able to direct and follow the hunt. It was a strange sight: the old placid pony tugging at the lush grass, while its crippled rider, in the grip of the passion of pursuit, yelled like a demon. Hour after hour this stricken centaur patrolled the banks and urged on his hounds with shouts and cries pouring from his twisted lips. Not an otter-haunted stream in England but knew him! I often think of him and wonder.

Dipping the other day in that most agreeable of recent autobiographies, The Reminiscences of Albert Pell, I opened once again at his story of Sir John Lawes’ otters, and, re-reading it, I felt more than ever relieved that that one otter-hunt of my youth ended without bloodshed. “An otter,” wrote Mr. Pell, who knew most things about English woodlands and streams, “is a delightfully amusing pet, and extremely inquisitive. When indoor he pries into every room, upstairs and downstairs, but has, as a famous sportswoman says, a bad habit of getting up early in the morning, having a bath, if there is one in the room handy, then going up a chimney and returning to get into bed with his mistress. My friend Sir John Lawes, as great a man in sport as in science, had a pair of these animals at Rothamsted. They retired by day to a small pool in the park. It was his custom at one time to drive some miles to the railway-station at St. Albans, taking the train there for London. On his return he never failed to bring back a basket of fresh fish for the otters. As the carriage entered the park on the way back to the Hall the creatures, unmoved by any other traffic, recognized the paces of their master’s horses, and coming out of their retreat in haste across the grass, ran ahead of the carriage, jumping up like dogs at the horses’ noses till they reached the Hall, when, the basket being emptied before them, they hurried back with their present. Sir John took them up with him to his forest in Scotland, where the pair enjoyed the forest as much as he did, taking themselves off in the evening on fishing excursions in wild Highland waters, to return without fail before daylight. A wretch of a gillie killed the female, whereupon the disconsolate mate became irregular in his habits, staying out at first for one night, then for two or three, then a week, and finally never came back at all; probably lured away by the enchantments of some wild jade with whom he set up poaching and housekeeping.”

Is not that a charming story? I think the picture of the two creatures frisking ahead of the horses (like porpoises around the prow of a vessel) one of the most joyous it would be possible to conceive.

The sight of otters and kingfishers, alert and glancing, in their native haunts confers distinction; but there is a far more remarkable uniquity even than that; and I recently possessed it. What do you say to a Sunday morning walk in Sussex and coming upon the dead body of a badger lying just in the mouth of its burrow? On the strength of such an adventure I claim to be for the moment a creature enormously apart and loftily pinnacled. That we had badgers within half a mile, we knew. Mus Penfold often sees traces of them, although never has a living one met his sight; and last year, I regret to say, a party of stupid men with eight dogs were allowed by the farmer to dig out two of the young badgers and kill them. I did not watch them at their vile work, but I saw their débris afterwards, and counted the bottles.

How this badger died we shall never know; but there he lay, just like a comfortable sleeping bear: in fact curiously like that little Malayan “Gypsy” whom I found at the Zoo and whom you will find elsewhere in this book. His head, black and yellow, was between his long-clawed paws quite naturally. But he was dead enough, and his skin is now in the house as a bloodless trophy and a proof that England is not yet wholly tamed.

The Owl

To return to the kingfisher and the epoch in one’s life made by the rare appearance of that glancing jewel, although this house is in owlish country, and we hear owls from dusk to dawn, yet the sight of one is hardly less rare and memorable. The effect is, of course, totally different. A kingfisher entrances, thrills; one sees it and glows. But the owl cuts deeper; one feels that one is in the presence of a thing not necessarily of evil but of mystery and darkness. That is to say, an owl at night. In broad day there can be nothing sinister about him, as I happen to know as well as any one.

On this matter I have a true story to tell, which, however, I shall quarrel with no one for disbelieving. One Sunday morning in the early summer a few years ago I was walking in a little pine-wood on a Kentish common. Suddenly, at half-past eleven, I was conscious that I was not alone, and lifting my eyes I saw on a bush close by a young owl. He was looking directly at me with such a stare in his deep orange orbs as only an owl can compass—steady, incurious, implacable. I stopped and stared at him, and thought first of the strangeness of the encounter and then of a humorous poem by an American publisher (Why don’t English publishers write humorous poems?) which I had learnt at school, beginning “Who stuffed that white owl?” This owl, it is true, was not white, but a beautiful arrangement in soft browns; yet he remained as motionless as that other, save that every now and then a shutter, timed to about three seconds exposure, covered his ’wildered lenses and retired again into the machinery of his head.

Seeing how young he was, and thinking it better that he should be looked after than left to the attentions of the Sunday afternoon villagers (who can be very deadly), I determined to take him home. I therefore opened a handkerchief, advanced slowly upon him, and spreading it over him carried him tenderly away. He made no resistance whatever. I was the first human being he had seen and might as easily have been friend as foe.

So far the story makes no great call on credulity. But the remarkable part is to come. I gave the owl to the boys at a neighbouring cottage, who had kept one before and understood feeding and so on, and it was arranged that when he was a little older he should be released. Very well. The next Sunday came and on that morning these boys also abstained from church and walked through this little pine-wood on the common, and at exactly the same time, and in what I take to be exactly the same place, they also found a young owl and captured it. (“You see this wet, you see this dry.”) That’s a very odd circumstance, isn’t it, and worthy of a place in any collection of coincidences?

Now, if I did not believe truth to be the only really interesting thing in the world, I should go on to state that when on the third Sunday I went to the little pine-wood again I found a third owl; but that is not so. Since then, indeed, except of course at the Zoo—where they have all kinds, although no longer any of those fascinating little creatures from some distant land who live in holes in the ground—I had never seen another owl near enough to observe it with any minuteness until the other evening in Sussex. Then, while it was still half light, a large barn-owl emerged from a clump of trees beside the road and flew before us and over us, as we drove along, for two hundred yards, finally disappearing among some ricks. It made no sound whatever; fish swimming in a clear stream are not less audible. Its light underpart gleamed softly like a lamp in a fog, and, like that, seemed almost to diffuse radiance.

This silence is very wonderful and soothing. I would prescribe the spectacle of the flight of owls at twilight for any disordered mind. But he would be a bold physician who recommended for any weak nerves the angry, screaming owls that sweep round this house in the middle of the night, especially when the weather is rough. Then they are ominous indeed.

Our owls live in the belfry, and though I have stood again and again in the gloaming, watching, I have seen them only once. On that occasion there had been some disagreement in the fields, for two of them came back in full flight together, one pursuing and one pursued, uttering terrible cries. I saw them black against the sky for a moment, disordered and beating, and then they disappeared into the masonry as silently and effectually as water into sand. No wonder, I thought, as I stumbled away among the graves, that some rustic minds think them not birds at all, but disembodied spirits.

The difference between these witches of the night returning from their quarrel and that soft glimmering ghost that had flown down the road was wide enough; but how much wider the gulf between those predatory termagants and the poor lost soul in the Kentish pine-wood. Even in his mild countenance, however, one could easily discern the makings of a bogey. To wake up in the small hours and find oneself beneath the scrutiny of such eyes in such a countenance would be enough for many of us.

What owls really are like, we shall, I suppose, never know: whether they are wise as legend would have them, or merely look so; whether they are truly sinister or only weird and carnivorous. These things we shall probably never know, but there is a lady in Hampshire who recently came nearer the secret than any one else has done. Her letter describing her experience was printed in the “Evening Standard” in the summer of 1910. The immediate neighbourhood of her house, she explained, was once a favourite hunting-ground of owls, but latterly they had steadily decreased, until to hear one had become something of a rarity. This she much regretted. When, therefore, one night she was awakened by an owl’s cry she sprang up and ran to the window in pleasure, and while there it amused her to answer it, mimicry of owls being a hobby of hers. But this time she mimicked better than she knew, for instantly out of the blackness came a crowd of owls to her window, angry and threatening and uttering strange sounds. She had, it seems, stumbled on something in the owl tongue of very serious import. Isn’t that interesting? She may have called out some deadly insult. She may have hit on a rally, a summons to arms. Whatever it was, it made her for the moment almost one of this mysterious, uncanny, nocturnal race. Her cry, in short, opened the door on a new world, vastly more enthralling in interest and strange possibilities than aviation or any of our modern inventions can make this. But it instantly shut again.

The Unusual Morning

One is liable day by day to a great many different kinds of surprises; but few persons can have known two in the same morning quite so unusual and diverse....

I was sitting in my room, writing, when a new and mysterious sound caught the ear. It came apparently from the heart of the wall, near the chimney, and was such a sound as in the dead of night would lay an icy hand on the heart. Since it was broad day I had courage and stood by the fireplace waiting. It grew louder and louder, nearer and nearer, and at last culminated in a scurry and clatter in the fireplace itself, from which there emerged a robust, testy, and exceedingly embarrassed starling. After looking round in dismay, he blundered across the room and settled on the highest row of books, where, secure in his altitude, he stared at me and collected his wits. I, too, collected mine and realized that my destiny was, as ever, prosaic. For I thought instantly of an American poet on the one hand, and on the other an English lady, a friend of mine, both of whom under similar conditions achieved romance. For when a bird visited Edgar Allan Poe in his study it was a raven, dark not alone with the sable hue of night but with mystery and fate, and when my friend awoke not long since in her room in a beautiful Wiltshire manor-house, what did she see brooding musically on the frame of an Old Master that hung on the opposite wall but a dove—emblem of peace and sweetness and everything that is fortunate?

How different my luck! A starling.... Of all the fowls of the air, would one not close one’s house to a starling first and foremost? Yet the only visitor from that so near yet so strange world of birds that ever came to me was this, the least poetical, least attractive.

That was the first surprise. For the understanding of the second, which occurred only an hour later, I must explain that this house is on a road which, almost immediately the gate is passed, ceases gradually to be a road at all, first declining to a cart-track, and then dwindling to nothing but a footpath or bridle-path up a South Down of extreme steepness. This means that when, as sometimes happens, a motor-car rushes past, we smile in our beards and await with stoicism and amusement the groanings and shrieks of agony that indicate that a mistake has been made and that a reluctant vehicle is being turned by an angry chauffeur in a space far too narrow for it. On the morning of which I write a car rushed by in the usual way, but as it did not at once return I assumed that the party were not uninstructed, but had come here by intent for a picnic, as has once or twice happened—lobsters’ claws and other alien and sophisticated débris having been found on the turf; and so thinking I forgot them. An hour later, hearing the engine throb in the accustomed manner, I knew that the picnic was over, and again forgot them.

A moment after, however, I was called out into the garden by a series of shouts and whistles, to discover that the car had come to a stop for the very sufficient reason that it was on fire. A motor-car at any time is still—to me—a strange object, but to find one in full blaze close to the gate is really a shock. You must have seen it to appreciate it. There it stood, enveloped in flames, while leaning against the wall, with his head cooling at the bricks, was its dejected owner. “What a calamity! What a calamity!” was all that he could say, as he surveyed first the burning wheels, and then his blackened hands, and then me. “There’s nothing to be done, nothing,” he added.

But I did not wait; at least it was worth the effort of saving, and we brought water in every variety of vessel and hurled it over the conflagration. Here we were wrong, for by watering flaming petrol one simply increases the area of the fire. Having learnt this, we bent all our strength to getting the car a little farther along the road, away from the seat of danger, then hurling the water over it once more. This done, it was soon extinguished, and the owner and driver had an opportunity to explain.

“Such a thing has never happened to me before,” he said. “All these years and no accident. I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me before.”

Meanwhile he had been joined by his friends, two cool and collected ladies, who, all unconscious of the catastrophe, had been engaged in the least incendiary of pastimes—photographing the church—and they added their persuasions to our invitation to him to come in and consume restoratives.

Misfortune handled him curiously. No, he said, he would not drink, would not eat, did not want to wash, hated the idea of resting. And all the while, as he was thus affirming and surveying his blistered hands, he was approaching nearer to the table in the garden on which refreshments had been placed. Vowing he would never sit, he sat; declining the decanter with increased vehemence, he tilted it into his glass; abjuring cake, he conveyed a piece to his mouth. He then refused to drink any more, and was actually reaching out for the decanter as he spoke. Finally, he said that he had not the least desire to smoke, and took a cigarette. This was the last of his apostasies, for to the blackness of his hands he adhered. And all the while, at intervals, he was assuring us that, long as he had driven a car, he had never previously had an accident in his life. Never! “I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best.... Nothing of the kind ever happened to me before....”

That is the story. They were soon gone; the car, a scorched ruin, was pushed into a neighbouring shed to await the repairers; and nothing remained of the incident save a black place in the road and a waste patch where grass had been. Life resumed its routine.

But why, when he came to give me his card, should I discover that he now lived in a house in which, as a child, some of my happiest hours were spent? No need for that added touch of coincidence. Why? He might as easily have inhabited every other house in the world. Here you have the prodigality of chance.

The Embarrassed Eliminators

We were talking about Lamb.

Some one suddenly asked: “Supposing that by some incredible chance all the Essays except one were to be demolished, which one would you keep?”

This kind of question is always interesting, no matter to what author’s work or to what picture gallery it is applied. But for the best resulting literary talk it must be applied to Shakespeare, Dickens or Elia.

“Why, of course,” at once said H., whose pleasant habit it is to rush in with a final opinion on everything at a moment’s notice, with no shame whatever in changing it immediately afterwards, “there’s no doubt about it at all—Mrs. Battle. Absolutely impossible to give up Mrs. Battle. Or, wait a minute, I’d forgotten Bo-Bo,—‘The Dissertation on Roast Pig,’ you know. Either Mrs. Battle or that.”

The man who had propounded the question laughed. “I saw that second string coming,” he said. “That’s what every one wants: one or another. But the whole point of the thing is that one essay and one only is to remain: everything else goes by the board. Now? Let’s leave H. to wrestle it out with himself. What do you say, James?”

“It’s too difficult,” said James. “I was going to say ‘The Old Actors’ until I remembered several others. But I’m not sure that that is not my choice. It stands alone in literature: it is Lamb inimitable. His literary descendants have done their best and worst with most of his methods, but here, where knowledge of the world, knowledge of the stage, love of mankind, gusto, humour, style and imaginative understanding unite, the mimics, the assiduous apes, are left behind. Miles. Yes, I vote for ‘The Old Actors.’”

“But, my dear James,” said L., “think a moment. Remember James Elia in ‘My Relations’; remember Cousin Bridget in ‘Mackery End.’ You are prepared deliberately to have these forever blotted out of your consciousness? Because, as I understand it, that is what the question means: utter elimination.”

James groaned. “It’s too serious,” he said. “It’s not to be thought of really. It reminds me of terrible nights at school when I lay awake trying to understand eternity—complete negation—until I turned giddy with the immensity of dark nothingness.”

Our host laughed. “You were very positive just now,” he said. “But have you forgotten a wistful little trifle called ‘Old China?’”

“Or, more on your own lines,” said W., who hates actors and acting, “the ‘South-Sea House’ or the ‘Old Benchers’? I will grant you the perfection—there is no other word—of the full-lengths of Dicky Suett and Bannister and Bensley’s Malvolio. There is nothing like it—you are quite right. Not even Hazlitt comes near it. One can see oneself with a great effort doing something passably Hazlittian in dramatic criticism, if one were put to it; but Lamb, Lamb reconstructs life and dignifies and enriches it as he does so. That essay in my opinion is the justification of footlights, grease-paint and all the tawdry business. And yet,”—W.’s face glowed with his eloquence, as it always does sooner or later every evening—“and yet if I were restricted to one Elia essay—dreadful thought!—it would not be ‘The Old Actors’ that I should choose, but—I can’t help it—‘Captain Jackson.’ I know there are far more beautiful things in Elia; deeper, sweeter, rarer. But the Captain and I are such old friends that it comes to this, I couldn’t now do without him.”

“Of course,” cried H. “I had forgotten. You remind me of something I simply must keep—the Elliston.” He snatched the “Essays” from our host’s hands and read the following passage, while we all laughed—a double laughter—overtly with him, and covertly at him, for if there is one man living who might be the hero to-day of a similar story, it is H. himself, who has a capriciousness, an impulsiveness, a forgetfulness, and a grandiosity that are Ellistonian or nothing.

“‘Those who knew Elliston,’” he read, “‘will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sorts of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. “I too never eat but one thing at dinner,”—was his reply—then after a pause—“reckoning fish as nothing.” The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savoury esculents which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.’”

“Well,” said our host, reclaiming the book, “my vote if I had one would be for ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’; and I make the declaration quite calmly, knowing that we are all safe to retain what we will. James will of course disagree with the choice; but then you see I am a sentimentalist, and when Lamb writes about his sister and his childhood I am lost. And ‘Mackery End’ delights me in two ways, for it not only has the wonderful picture of Bridget Elia in it, but we see Lamb also on one of his rapturous walks in his own county. I never see a field of wheat without recalling his phrase of Hertfordshire as ‘that fine corn country.’”

“All very well,” said James, “but if you talk like this how are you going to let ‘Dream Children’ go?”

“Ah, yes,” sighed our host, “‘Dream Children’—of course! How could I let that go? No, it’s too difficult.”

“What about this?” said the grave incisive voice of K., who had not yet spoken, and he began to read:—

“In proportion as the years both lessen, and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away ‘like a weaver’s shuttle.’ Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.’

“Who is going to foreswear that passage?” K. asked sternly, fixing his eyes on us as if we were one and all guilty of damnable heresy.

We all sighed.

K. searched the book again, and again began to read:—

“‘In sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool—as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables—not guessing at the involved wisdom—I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor: I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and—prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors—I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins.’

“Who is going to turn his back for ever on that passage? No,” K. went on, “it won’t do. It is not possible to name one essay and one only. But I have an amendment to propose. Instead of being permitted to retain only one essay, why should we not be allowed a series of passages equal in length to the longest essay—say ‘The Old Actors’? Then we should not be quite so hopeless. That, for example, would enable one to keep the page on Bensley’s Malvolio, the description of Bridget Elia, a portion of the ‘Mrs. Battle,’ Ralph Bigod, a portion of ‘Captain Jackson,’ the passages I have read, and—what I personally should insist upon including, earlier almost than anything—the Fallacies on rising with the Lark and retiring with the Lamb.”

“Well,” said the suggester of the original problem, “it’s a compromise and therefore no fun. But you may play with it if you like. The sweepingness of the first question was of course its merit. James is the only one of you with the courage really to make a choice.”

“Oh, no,” said our host. “I chose one and one only instantly—‘Old China.’”

“Nonsense!” said James; “you chose ‘Mackery End.’”

“There you are,” said K. “That shows.”

“Well, I refuse to be deprived of ‘Old China’ anyway,” said our host, “even if I named ‘Mackery End.’ How could one live without ‘Old China’? Our discussion reminds me,” he added, “of a very pretty poem—a kind of poem that is no longer written. It is by an American who came nearer Lamb in humour and ‘the tact of humanity’ than perhaps any writer—the Autocrat. Let me read it to you.”