Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

ON

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ON. II
——
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

ON

ON

ON ACHMET BOULEE BEY

There is a book, I have a book, printed in 1806. It was compiled (rather than written) by a country clergyman, who had before him (so he tells me on the title page) these objects:—"To increase knowledge, to promote virtue, to discourage vice, and to furnish Topics for Innocent and Ingenious Conversation."

On the 208th page I find this passage:

The Pacha Achmet Boulee Bey, Governor of Egypt, was remarkable for a great sensibility of heart. The pleasures permitted to him by law were far from satisfying him. He wanted to meet with a return of love, and had assembled, at a very considerable expense, a numerous seraglio, in hopes of meeting a beauty not only capable of inspiring love but of feeling all its force and impulse. Not one of this disposition did he find among twelve hundred Circassian, Georgian and Greek ladies whom he had purchased at different times.

Oh, admirable excerpt! Oh, Divine anecdote! Oh, perfect theme!

What! You also, Achmet? You also, Boulee? You set out upon that quest, there, among the Levantines so many years ago—and with what advantages!... You also failed?... My soul is fired to exalt the high complaint of man. But stay. First let me savour, point by point, that complete, that inimitable, text.

This Governor of Egypt "was remarkable for a great sensibility of heart." More sensible than the mass of us, was he? Greater in him than in you and me, my brothers, the hunger for the answering tone, for the echo to the soul? Yes, it would seem so. A more active hunger, at least; for it produced action, as we see farther on: he did not dream, he did. He did not ache forlorn, he sought: he hunted. Hence was he "remarkable." All men have wasted for the home of the spirit, for the completion of their being. All, all have waited in vain for the woman that should call them by their name. But in varying degrees. He was at the head of the chase. For him it was a rage, a fury, a crusade. He did not wait, he plunged, he charged. He would discover. He put it to trial and reached the limit of effort. He is our master and our exemplar. My homage is to Achmet Boulee Bey.

"The pleasures permitted him by law were far from satisfying him." There comes in the minor note. After that grand opening, after that crash upon the organ, "remarkable"—even among lovers, still questing lovers—the tone softens to our common dream. It is the weeping of Achilles, it is the sleep of Charlemagne, it is the dog of Ulysses—it is that domestic lesser something in the hero which is common to us all. There are laws: especially laws divine. They permit us this and that—the more gratitude to them. But, oh! my friends, the things they fend away! "Visitors are requested not to touch," says the ordinance in the bazaar; though it also has a sign above it "Entry free," and the same is true of this world. You may desire—desire is put quite lavishly at your disposition. But when it comes to enjoyment, there are restrictions, little friend.

Achmet was, I take it, from his name, employment and longitude (and latitude) (30° 2" N., 31° 16" E.—or thereabouts—I date from Greenwich, not from Paris or the Azores) a servant of Mahound and his law, the Mahoundish law. He might drink no wine—except champagne, if you call that a wine. No liqueur except crême de Menthe. No beer of the Franks. He might not (I understand—but this may be mere legend) exceed four wives. The pastime of divorce was open to him only under certain limitations: for instance, he had to return the dowers. He was under the law. And though this same law gave him much to delight his soul, gardens and good food, adventure, praise and a sort of monotonous music sung through the nose, horseback riding and camel-back riding, the dawn, the sea, the moon, and day and night, and the iron titles of the night—yet was he not satisfied. Nay, these things were far from satisfying him, says the text. For he desired what the law does not forbid, indeed, but also cannot give. He sought the great human converse, the plenitude, the deep embrace. Therefore, did his great soul starve and weaken, and attempt recovery again if only to pursue what never yet was attained: the quarry that fails the hunter, the pearl that slips back into the sea. The law did its best. It said: "I am for your good. I desire your happiness. Come, you may play with dolls and go a walk after lessons," but he turned away and sickened. "He was far from satisfied." He had heard the fairy horn. He had caught the savour of what content might be: a hint, a summons; and "he was far from satisfied."

"He wanted to meet with a return of love." Only that? My word, Achmet, you were easily pleased! You desired the wealth that is beyond the world: not only did you desire it, you claimed it as a matter of course. You wondered why you had it not, you thought it your due: your rightful food—this thing unknown to all the exiled sons of Pithecanthropus, this lost serene of Eden! The simple words give it in its high simplicity. "He wanted." Well! We also want, and we may go on wanting.

But you did not stand halted in mere wanting, strong soldier of the Nile. You struck spurs and rode. You are a model for us here. You set out to conquer and to hold. Life passes while we seek here and there forlornly; and how many little experiments must be tried, each separate, each ending in despair, before the first hint of achievement comes to us. We, the lesser ones, have ourselves to thank for such poor spoil, after such single-handed hunting! Not so you! You swept widely and at once—ranging a vast field, marching on a broad front, taking large sample of the world. Hence those masterly words, that you "had assembled at a very considerable expense a numerous seraglio." What manhood and what courtesy combined; what generosity and largesse, what proper care as well! You did not drive or coerce—for not thus is the unseizable attained. You did not order, no, nor wheedle; and you did not command, though you sat on the throne of a king. You did not coax or threaten, or play a pretended indifference, or protest a passionate worship. You "assembled" them.

And they were ladies. Right, and right, and right again, Achmet! More than right! Twenty thousand times right! If the Thing can be found at all there must be something of leisure perhaps and certainly of equality. Ladies for love, not women: oh! yes! No doubt at all! And so for you, my Lord, they had to be "Ladies." And you "purchased them." Right again! You went about it in the honourable way, with no misunderstanding, no room for false issues on either side: an honourable price was honourably paid. That, if anything, should open the door of the treasure house. You paid high, you paid well. You were at a charge. You made yourself the poorer to make yourself the richer. You proved to them as to the whole world that you held them dearly indeed—"at a considerable expense."

You acted with discretion and with a fine distinction. You purchased not in bulk or by contract, but neatly, carefully, "at different times." You weighed each opportunity, you gauged each transaction.

Achmet, your perseverance alone should have made you the one, the satisfied of lovers. Into how many eyes you looked! How many whispering voices you gauged! The sincerity of how many protestations did you not search with the white-hot flame of your own profound and tortured spirit! Is it she, or she? Is she here at last ...? Twelve hundred of them—the splendid tale, the royal regiment of many and many, and more still, the dwindling perspective of research. "Who knows?" you said. "At last, as the feet stumble in the final excess of weariness, the fountain may be heard ... at last." You deserved it beyond all men, Boulee, and as we read we expect, breathless, the climax of your surpassing endeavour, we expect to hear at the very end the low tones of the beloved voice that answers, "Que tu perdes ou que tu gagnes, tu les aura toujours." Your reward is upon you. You shall be greeted with the divine reply, "Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens."

Achmet, take your ease. To one man Paradise shall be restored, and one man shall be, once in the story of the race, secure. One man shall make harbour. One man shall rest in his home.

* * * * *

But what is this comes at the close of all? Wind of death! I know that chill—and Achmet knew it, too. Alas! Boulee! "Not one of this disposition did he find."

They were twelve hundred, come from the tenderest and the best; chosen out of all the Orient; patiently comprehended one by one; approached, protected, adored each in holy turn, "in hopes of meeting one not only capable of inspiring love but of feeling all its force and impulse" in her own breast.... Mortality returns: "Not one of this disposition did he find."

ON AN EDUCATIONAL REFORM

Since we are determined (as I am not, but as all my colleagues seem to be) that a new world has arisen; since, therefore, all institutions may be remodelled at will, I trust there will appear in the education of wealthy children a reform overdue these many years.

This reform is an addition, of a certain subject, to the curriculum of schools. We have all at one time or another deplored its absence: we all, in one crisis or another of our lives, recognise its necessity. If it be true that we have to-day an opportunity for new things, do let us inaugurate this novelty at least, which would be of such vast advantage to the generation now sprouting. And the new subject is Fraud.

Fraud is the sole basis of the only form of success recognised among us. By Fraud alone are those vast fortunes suddenly acquired which—and which only—are the condition of greatness in a modern man.

Fraud is the master subject, ignorance or inability in which dooms a man to toil and obscurity. Yet Fraud is never taught at school. Men who had the parts for a most brilliant career fail on leaving the Academies because they are outwitted by Guttersnipes who have no letters but can cheat.

There used to be taught in schools Latin and Greek after a grammatical fashion, which made the better pupils true masters of the inwards of these languages. When they were so formed they were called "scholars." To this expertise was added some knowledge of a foreign language (usually French or German, but only a smattering thereof), and latterly also the elements of physical science and of mathematics, until these last branches took up so much time that often a choice was made between them and the older humanities.

So far, so good. Indirectly the young people were taught also the manner of their society, and this especially through the modern discipline of games. But there is not one of them (and I speak with feeling on the matter, for I have experience myself) who upon leaving school or the University has not suddenly found himself in a world where a ready practice in cheating proved the only thing of serious importance and yet was to him quite unfamiliar. He found himself, usually without resources, cast upon a world, wherein survival (or even decent honour and spiritual security) depended upon the exercise of certain arts of deceit to which he had never been trained, and which he must acquire at his peril. In proportion as he failed to acquire these arts he failed altogether and was cast away.

Every one will admit that the swindling of one's fellow-beings is a necessary practice. Upon it is based all really sound commercial success, and through it men arrive at those solid positions which command the honour and respect of our contemporaries. Thus, the chief way of making money is by buying cheap and selling dear, or, rather, by buying cheap and selling dear quickly; but when you buy cheap you only do so by taking in the vendor, and, when you sell dear, the purchaser. Your action may be remote and indirect, as when you gamble upon the Stock Exchange. It is commonly direct and personal as when you acquire under contract the services of another man. But it is essentially an exercise in overreaching. It is of its very nature getting some other human being into a state of mind in which he underestimates what you desire to get out of him or overestimates what you desire to unload upon him. Thus, in my own poor trade, I am a good business man if I can persuade some unhappy publisher or newspaper owner that the public is athirst for my words. Conversely, my honourable employers and masters will be good business men if they persuade me that no one is so base as to want to hear me at all, and that I am only employed as a sort of charity. And so it is with the selling of a boat or a house, or with the buying of land.

Another master-gate to fortune is abuse of confidence: you persuade men to entrust you with money for one purpose and then use it secretly for a very different end. If you bring off the deal it is your gain. If you drop the money the loss is theirs.

Another royal road is "merger"; another false description; another plain straightforward theft.

All these repose on a sound talent in Fraud, and, in general, so it is in all forms of fortune-getting, save in the highly specialised craft or mystery of blackmail. Upon cheating all honour, and therefore all happiness, depends. It is wealth so made which (save for those who inherit wealth and who are securely tied up as well) determines the position of a man to-day among his fellows.

Well, what trace is there of this great truth in the curriculum of our schools? It is entirely neglected! I admit that pomposity, which is a necessary element in all success, is indirectly taught. I admit still more freely and fully that the spirit of falsehood is taught as a sort of general subject, but I maintain that swindling as a particular subject is not taught at all, and even the most elementary forms of it, with which every boy ought to be acquainted in his early 'teens, come upon him with a shock when he is already a young married man launched in life and, as the phrase goes, battling with the world.

This, I say, is a shameful neglect. Here is an instance: the most elementary form of swindling, that which is, as it were, the gambit of every operation, and that which is the sum total of all the simpler operations of commerce, consists in giving a verbal assurance which it is intended to repudiate later by document or action. You promise a man something which you do not intend to perform, or you give a false description which reality will later expose, or in some other way you use the psychology of affirmation to your advantage.

Well, what could be simpler than to have a class (even if it were but half an hour a week) where all boys over a certain age could be trained by example both to be upon their guard against the false affirmation of others and (what is more important) to make false but plausible affirmations themselves with all the boldness which breeds success—to make affirmations particular, affirmations emphatic, affirmations probable, affirmations flattering.

Even the negative side of this very necessary piece of training is omitted, and boys are not taught (at least in any school with which I have acquaintance) the importance of economy in falsehood.

The immature mind will, of course, tend to falsehood as a natural human instinct, but the force of kindly nature is here wasted because it lacks direction. Young men go out into the world lying freely about the grandeur of their acquaintance, their personal prowess, and the rest, all matters conducing in no way to the accumulation of wealth—which is the end of man. Now, what could be simpler than, in such a class as I suggest (I admit that half an hour a week is rather short commons, but everything must have a beginning)—what could be simpler than to give some direction at least to this pseudological factor in the mind and train it to the right end?

Examples should be set before youth. Let the master recite some braggart story of strength or skill such as is common among the young of the rich. Then let him show what a waste of energy it is, and how an equal amount of pseudological force expended in a useful channel, a false description or a flattery, might have earned £100. "It is just as easy," the good preceptor would tell his young charges, "to brag about a horse that you want to sell as about, say, your horsemanship, for which there is no market. It is just as easy to lie about the value of something you have for sale as it is to lie about your lineage. But in the first case you trouser the dibs, while in the second there is no stuff—it is wasted effort. Remember, therefore, my dear boys, to check yourselves when you are about to tell an uneconomical falsehood. Count ten before you speak and consider whether there be not ready to your hand some subject in which you can fully satisfy this natural instinct of lying and at the same time prepare some advantage for your pocket."

It may be objected to me that if this very necessary reform were introduced and the elements of modern commerce were taught in all our schools, the results would cancel out; for since all our youth would be forearmed, there would still be waged in the great world outside the conflict of the better sharper against the worse, with victory as now to the master-thief. But such an objection applies to all forms of learning. My desire is to raise the general level of our gentry in this department, and especially not to leave men in middle age with the bitter memory of lost opportunities: opportunities lost through no personal fault but through the neglect of those who had a sacred trust and who did not fulfil it. At least let the man of fifty be able to say to himself: "I had every advantage. My masters at school (and no one more than my dear old headmaster, Dr. Buggins) repeatedly warned me against the peril of honesty and were at pains to teach me how to overreach the innocent; if I have proved clumsy and am now living as a publisher's hack, the fault is all with me." As things now are, many a man who has sunk to be a proof-reader, or even an author, is, in his heart, bitterly reproaching those who launched him upon the world quite ignorant of affairs.

I conceive that the educationist who is ever eager to improve his changing science will here suggest particular subjects in this new department. He will see an expanding horizon of opportunity. My words have roused enthusiasm in him. He will ask me, for instance, why I have not included special classes in blackmail, monopoly, bullying, bribery, perjury, and so forth.

Yes, certainly; all these should have their place, especially for older boys. But they may well be considered later. Perhaps such subjects would best be left to special institutions, such as those which were so successful in the last generation under the name of "crammers." Blackmail in particular, very like the art of outflanking in military science, requires a judgment of the world to which the mind can hardly attain till it is mature. Napoleon said: "Beware when you attempt to outflank that you be not outflanked yourself"; a sound saying, for any one in process of edging round his opponent extends his own communications, and leaves an opportunity for that opponent to edge round him. And so it is with blackmail; too often the blackmailer just in the act of seizing his prize (a post in the Ministry or what not) feels a sharp bite and discovers to his horror that the tables are turned.

In a word, the teaching of this art of blackmail is the teaching of a very difficult and skilful, complex action which must not be attempted rashly, and that is why I have some hesitation in recommending it for the ordinary curriculum of schools. Nevertheless, the very rudiments of it, or, at any rate, some idea of what it is, might profitably be given even to the younger boys, and for this purpose I would suggest a visit to some neighbouring aquarium, where the slow antics of the crab in his tank so graphically mimic our public life. The attention of the lads could be directed by their master to the alternate furtive movements of two crabs. They will observe how the first pursues the second sideways across the tank and makes a clutch with his claw, how the second eludes this and in his turn chases his opponent off. "This grotesque manœuvre, my dear boys," the Pastor will declaim, "may remain in your minds as an example of what later you will be called upon to do if you are called to serve your country in Parliament."

The youngsters will soon forget all about it, as is the fashion of boys with their lessons; but something, I think, will remain in the mind, though half obscured by time. And when they come to the vast affairs of which Westminster is the theatre, the object-lesson of the two crabs will not be without service to them.

Bribery, I take it, should not be taught except in the point of degree, for it comes naturally enough to all men both to give and to take bribes, and all that you need fix in the young mind is the double importance of avoiding avarice upon the one side and lavishness upon the other. For the taking of a bribe no art or training whatsoever is required, but in the giving of bribes it is of some importance not to give too much, and of absolutely vital importance not to offer too little. It is upon this last point that many a noble career has made shipwreck.

I have in mind one poor fellow whose father had left him a few millions. He was perpetually putting down, with all manner of hesitation, sums just insufficient to purchase the object of his desires. In the long run he had disbursed what should easily have commanded a high administrative position in the Cabinet, a Viceroyalty or a first-class Embassy. Yet he had nothing to show for it all but one private secretaryship, two chairmanships of committee, and a baronetcy: and this last only because he was childless.

ON KIND HEARTS BEING MORE THAN CORONETS

That is true. But a friend having remarked to me that Cash was more than kind hearts, I put the thing down in a formula for myself, thus,

Cash > Kind Hearts > Coronets

and sat gazing at it for a long time, until it awoke other thoughts in me.

And the first was this: "'Kind hearts are more than Coronets.' What an intolerably bad line! What a shocking line—or rather, half-line! What an outrage!"

When verse is concerned one must not mince matters. It is too sacred. One must have no reservations. One must ride roughshod over one's nearest and dearest, and proclaim bad verse aloud, and say, "Aroint! Honi!"

No reverend name, no illustrious label half-mixed with the State itself, should deter one. Nothing should impede the truth on bad verse save a substantial offer of money—and where is the chance of that in such a galley?

No! It is prime duty. Having the thing before you, having seen it, whether your opinion is asked or no, speak out at once and say: "Madam, this is not poetry, it is verse. It is not good verse; it is bad verse."

And what wickedly bad verse!

I remember coming down on to Stamford one July morning (I was following the Roman road across Burleigh Park, and so down to the river), when I saw in the window of a little shop among the first houses of the town, hither of the bridge, a card; an ornamented card; a florally ornamented card, put up for sale. It was a set of verses all about a rich man who owned Burleigh, that great house, and who married a young woman much poorer than himself. I read them and paid little attention to them. I thought they were some local thing made up to sell in a charity. But a little way on I found another set in another window, and then another, all just the same. I read them again, and something familiar echoed in my mind; something of childhood ... I sought.... There was an odd connection with "Locksley Hall." Yet what had "Locksley Hall" to do with Burleigh? Then it broke in on me like an evil-doer breaking sacred locks: Tennyson! Tennyson had written this amazing thing!

And so he did "Lady Clara Vere de Vere." And in Lady Clara comes "Kind Hearts = Coronets + K" ("K" being some positive number)—I had found it!

The answer to all those who ask why great poets (and especially our great poets, and especially our modern great poets) write rubbish is as old as the Higher Criticism. It is because a poet is only a man used by the gods. It is not the man himself who is the poet. He is only the reed. Those Good Poets who don't publish their Bad Verse along with their Poetry are only those who happen to be good critics and at the same time very keen on their reputation as verse-writers. All good Poets have written execrable verse, but as to who writes Poetry I will tell you: it is a god.

A lot might be written, by the way (but I will not write it), on the different kinds of bad verse put out by Good Poets. The "Kind hearts and Coronets" monstrosity is quite, quite different from Wordsworth's prose, or Corneille's dotage. Some might say that each great poet had his own kind of bad verse. It is not so. Their bad verse is not good enough to be individual. They do it in commonplace groups; and I suppose each falls into the group natural to him when the god is not blowing through the reed; or when it proves a broken reed. Thus Hugo left un-godded becomes mere rhetoric and Milton, a stately painter at the best, a tiresome tractarian at the worst—as in the theological bits of "Paradise Regained." Horace (I think—I won't look it up) said that a poet was such that however bad a line might be, you felt the poet in it. If Horace said that, or if any one said that, it isn't true. But talking of truth, "kind hearts are more than coronets" is quite true, and I can imagine that truth being put into fine verse—even into poetry, if and when the god should feel inclined ... and here I pause to praise you, Phœbus Apollo, my protector, my leader, my Capitan; but you have a way of quitting; you leave them in the Scæan Gate....

There is nothing against Truth being expressed in Poetry, even though most Poetry is lies.

"Nox est perpetua una dormiunda" is Poetry—though it is sternly true; at least, it is half true.

And "between a sleep and a sleep" is Poetry, and so is "Our little life is rounded with a sleep" ... where the operative word is "rounded."

("Every English sentence, Gentlemen," said the Professor to his class, "contains an operative word. For instance, in the sentence: 'Every gentleman who hits a cocoanut will receive a good cigar,' the operative word is not 'gentleman,' but 'good.'")

So also is both Poetry and profoundly true that line of granite:

L'amour est un plaisir, l'honneur est un devoir

which I quote again and again; though I suppose a great many people will say it is not Poetry at all, and cannot be, because it is written in a foreign language. Well! Well!

So is also:

Dead honour risen out-does love at last.

That also is Poetry, though in the more formal manner. But that last line has this drawback about it; which is, that only those who have lived to a certain age and in a certain way can know the truth of it; and that those who have not lived the truth of it will not make much of it anyhow. Young people will make nothing of it, nor those who have become old blamelessly, of whom a great number are to be found to this day in the outlying parts and among seafaring men.

But I say that truth is no bar to poetry, nor bad verse to truth either. And I say that this half-line of horribly bad verse, "kind hearts are more than coronets," is as true as true.

Which of you, O my companions, having drunk the wine of this world and half-despaired would not rather fetch up in your dereliction against a kind heart than a coronet? I don't say the two combined are to be despised. I only ask: Which of you having strictly to choose in the dark passage of this life between: (a) a coronet with a bad heart; (b) a kind heart without a coronet—wealth being equal—would not choose (b)? I would. So would you all. I cannot answer for women, but as Mr. Joseph Chamberlain said, "I know my own people," and the bearded ones (or those who would be bearded but for the detestable necessity of shaving) will with one moaning voice reply: "Kind Hearts!... No, thank you; I do not feel inclined for a Coronet this evening; bring me a Kind Heart."

Which of you, O my brethren, having suffered the things of this world and finding yourself sitting lonely on the bank of a stream in some forest place would not desire to have approach him, rather than a shallow, silly, boring, untenacious, stupid, cranky, ill-tempered, nagging, sour, pinched, haggard woman with a little coronet on her wig, a warm, a just, an experienced, a tender, an at-the-right-time-silent, a speaking-the-unexpected-word-of-salvation-at-the-Heaven-sent-moment, true, profoundly-loving, sufficiently admiring, comforting, regally beautiful woman with a kind heart? Which of you would not leave the first to approach the second? (Supposing, of course, equal incomes.)

It is as true a thing as ever was said. But it was said badly. He ought not to have attempted it in metre until he was feeling in the mood.

I can hear arguments on the other side. A coronet is more amenable to the will of man. You can buy a coronet. You cannot buy a kind heart. To call kind hearts "better" than coronets, therefore, is like calling fine weather "better" than a good boat. For the sea the boat is more important than the weather. You can guarantee the one, you can't the other. You can make sure of your coronet, but not of your kind heart.

Again, a coronet does not change or fade—money being always taken for granted. It is incorruptible. It is not subject to our poor mortal years; but what it is on the brow of the infant, that it remains on the senile and wrinkled front of him last ticked off to answer questions in the House of Lords; but a Kind Heart!... Oh! Chronos!

Again, a coronet is heritable. A kind heart hardly so. A coronet is definable. All are agreed upon it. It is there or it is not there, and that's an end of it. Not so the Kind Heart. One having seized on a companion for ever, and all on account of a Kind Heart, many will say, "I can't for the life of me discover what he (she) saw in her (him) to make him (her) marry her (him)." But no one ever says that of a coronet. They may wonder what the coronet saw in the non-coronet, but never what the non-coronet saw in the coronet. When the fellow (or the wench) mates upwards with a coronet everybody knows why; it's plain sailing and there can be no dispute. A coronet, I say, is something objective, substantial, real. It is made of ashwood covered with plush, it has spikes and each spike a ball on the top. But who shall define a Kind Heart? It is one thing to one man, one to another; it is elusive; it is all in the mind like the Metaphysician's Donkey.

More: a Coronet of itself can bring about no evil. It is good in itself absolutely. It conveys a definitely good thing, enjoyable to those who enjoy it and at the worst indifferent to those who do not. It is a steady, unmixed, absolute pleasure to its owner and to others. But a Kind Heart? No! A kind heart suffers; and it causes suffering—more than it heals. It makes its owner as often as not despised, always taken advantage of. It is a perilous, uncertain thing.

Nevertheless, I return to my original judgment; kind hearts are more than coronets. They are less rare; they are more easily captured; they are much cheaper—yet they are more. One may put them somewhere between coronets and good verse, but, of course, nowhere near Poetry.

* * * * *

"Oh! Sir!" cries the Reader of Proofs, "have you verified your references in all this?"

"No, My Child, nor will I. It is an extra labour, and should be charged overtime. Let them go."

ON MUMBO-JUMBO

Mumbo-Jumbo is that department in the ruling of men which is made of dead, false, apparatus; unreasonable; contemptible to the free; unworthy of authority—and Mumbo-Jumbo is the most necessary ingredient in all government.

All government is by persuasion. Odd it is that so many do not yet see this! Perhaps not so odd after all; for words trick the mind, and the words of government are not the words of persuasion.

But think of the matter for a moment, and you will see that government is of necessity by persuasion. Here I catch the voices of two men, an ass and his uterine brother—that sort of braying centaur, half a rational being and half an ass. The ass tells me that government is merely the use of force; the centaur, half man half donkey, tells me that it lives by the threat of force.

Well, take an example. I come to a properly governed State: a State, that is, where government is taken for granted and obeyed; why is it so? Because that government works for the good of the Governed. But an individual desiring to break a commandment even in such a state refrains only from fear of force? True; but who executes that force? Not the person who gave the command; not one man—for one is not strong. No, what executes the force is many; and how are many got to obey the will of one? It is by a process of suggestion, dope; that is, persuasion. While men were persuaded of the rights of private property, private property stood secure. Now that they are in transition it is insecure. If ever they are persuaded that private property is an injury, the institution will no longer be merely insecure; it will perish; and no amount of force will save it. It will perish as a general institution and only millionaires and the mass of their servile dependents will remain.

Now, in this function of persuasion (which is the life of government) mark the imperative power of Mumbo-Jumbo! And mark it not only in political government, but in all those subsidiary forms of government (or persuasion) by which one mind influences another and directs it towards an end not originally its own. When the Police were on their last strike (I forget when it was—they succeed each other and will probably continue), an aged woman of means said in my hearing—seeing a batch go by in civilian clothes—"Surely those can't be policemen!" By these words did the Crone prove how powerfully Mumbo-Jumbo had worked upon her mind. For her the Policeman was the helmet, the coat, the belt.

With soldiers it is even more so (I am prepared to defend the use of this elliptic idiom in private when next I have the leisure). Men used to wearing some particular accoutrement cannot regard another accoutrement as military; what is more, it is with difficulty—unless their profession is to judge armies—that they can see any military qualities in human beings clothed too much out of their fashion. When I was in garrison in the town of Toul in the year 1891, there came an English circus, with the men of which I made friends at once, for I had not heard English for a weary while. One of them said to me sadly: "They seem to have a lot of military about here, but they are not real soldiers." I have no doubt that if you got a man out of the fourteenth century and showed him suddenly a modern regiment in peace (without tin hats), he would think they were lackeys or pages; certainly not soldiers.

Once and again in the history of mankind has there arisen Iconoclasm, which is but a fury against Mumbo-Jumbo. There was a great outburst of it throughout the West at the end of the eighteenth century. Men were too classic then to break statues with hammers, but they were all for tearing the wigs off Judges and the crowns off Kings and patchwork off Lords and Clowns, and for getting rid of titles, and the rest of it. They argued thus—"Such things are unworthy of Authority and even of men. They are lies: they therefore degrade us." And they foamed at the mouth.

Ah, witless! All these things had a strict, even a logical connection with public function. You may put it easily in two syllogisms: (1) Without Mumbo-Jumbo there is no permanent subconscious impression upon the mind, but without some permanent subconscious impression upon the mind there is no permanent persuasion; therefore, without Mumbo-Jumbo there is no persuasion. Now (2) without persuasion there is no government. Therefore (to take a short cut) there is no government without Mumbo-Jumbo. And those excellent men, of whom my own ancestry, French, English, Irish and American, were composed ("And what," you will say, "has that to do with the matter?" Nothing), having got rid of Mumbo-Jumbo in a greater or less degree—less in England, more in France, most in America—immediately proceeded to set it up again.

Carefully did they scoop out the turnip, carefully did they light the candle within, carefully did they dress it up in rags and tinsel, and set it on its pole: there it stands to-day.

Flags in particular got a spurt through the slump in Kings. Formal play-acting in public assemblies got a vast accession through the contempt of Lords; and now, after a hundred years, we have so much fiddle-faddle of ceremonious "rules" and "Honourable gentlemen" and "law of libel" and uniform here and uniform there that the State is now omnipotent, thanks to Mumbo-Jumbo, god and master of the broken Human Heart.

Of the Mumbo-Jumbo of the learned in footnotes I shall later write. And (as you will discover) I shall write also of the Mumbo-Jumbo of technical words—a most fascinating department of my subject.

The Mumbo-Jumbo of the learned is indeed the very life of all teaching, of all academic authority. A man never teaches so well as when he is dressed up in a teaching fashion, and even those who still foolishly refuse so to dress him up (I quote with sorrow the Sorbonne) none the less put him on a raised platform; and he is better with a desk, and I think he is the better also with a certain artificial voice. The really great teachers also invent a certain artificial expression of face and affected unnatural accent, which they adopt at the beginning of a lecture and try to drop at the end of it; but in the process of years these get fixed and may be recognised at a hundred yards. For Mumbo-Jumbo holds his servants tight. So also the authority of religion is badly wounded unless you have an archaic language; and every religion whatsoever adopts one as soon as it can. Some say that the most powerful of these instruments is a dead language; others say old, odd, mouldy forms of a living language, but at any rate Mumbo-Jumbo is of the essence of the contract.

Then there is the Mumbo-Jumbo of command: Thackeray used to ridicule it with the phrase "Shaloo-Hump!" or some such sounds, and there is, as we all know, "Shun" rapidly shouted, and many another. But any one who has had to drill recruits will admit that he would never have got them drilled at all if instead of using these interesting idols of language he had given his commands in a rational and conversational tone with hesitation and urbanity.

Note you the Mumbo-Jumbo which may everywhere be classed under the term "Official." A common lie has no such effect as a lie with "Official" at the top in brackets. Yet no one could tell you exactly what "Official" meant. It suggests only this: that the news has been given by the Officer of some organisation. Thus, if you say that a man has been declared mad, and put "Official," you mean that two members of the Doctors' Guild have been at work; or, if you are told that a funeral will not take place ("Official") you mean that a member of the Undertakers' Union has given you the information, or perhaps even a member of the family of the dead man. In this class we must also put the two phrases "By Order" (used in this country) and "Tremble and Obey," which, till recently stood (I understand) at the foot of Chinese documents.

"By Order" is a Mumbo-Jumbo pearl! How often in lonely walks through the London streets have I mused within my own dear mind and marvelled at "By Order." When I read for instance "No Whistling Allowed (By Order)" I wonder who gave the order and how he climbed to such a novel power. How came he so strong that he could prevent my whistling or in any other way enlivening London? And why did he hide his magic name? I take it that he had no vulgar legal power, but something more compelling and more mysterious, a priestly thing. And there are others. People who own more than 2,000 acres of land love to paint "By Order" in black letters on little white boards. With these they ornament the boundaries of their possessions.

Mumbo-Jumbo has this defect, that if the spell fails through unfamiliarity it looks grotesque; therefore is it essential for all governments to shoe-horn any new Mumbo-Jumbo very carefully into its place.

It must begin with some little habit, hardly acknowledged, hardly noticeable, and it must only gradually grow into admitted authority. Turn Mumbo-Jumbo on too suddenly and people would only laugh. And while I think of it let me say that paint is a main incarnation of Mumbo-Jumbo; paint with varnish—the complete form of paint. People who sail boats know this very well. I will buy you for a few pounds a very rotten old hulk, abandoned in Hamble River, I will stop up the leaks with cement, paint her sides a bright colour, varnish the paint and then varnish her decks, and sell her at an enormous profit. It is done continually; lives are lost through it, of course; the boat bursts asunder in the midst of the sea; but the cheat never fails. Those who understand the art of horse dealing (which I do not) assure me that much the same thing attaches to that also. It seems there are poisons which you can give a horse whereby it acquires a glossy coat, and that even the eyes of the stupid beast can be made vivacious after long dulness. It may be so.

But of all the Mumbo-Jumbos, that which I admire most, because of its excess and potency combined, is the Mumbo-Jumbo of wine. One would think that in such a matter, where the senses are directly concerned, and where every man can and should act for himself, there was no room for this element in persuasion. It would be an error so to think. There is not one man in a hundred who is not almost entirely guided in a matter of wine by Mumbo-Jumbo. There is here the Mumbo-Jumbo of particular terms, very well-chosen metaphors, and a man is told that a Wine is "full," or "curious," or "dry," or "pretty," or "sound," or something of that kind, and even as he tastes the ink he does not doubt, but believes.

And there is the Mumbo-Jumbo of the years ("This is a '75 Brandy!"—What a lie!), and there is the Mumbo-Jumbo of labels. And there is the arch-Mumbo-Jumbo of little wicker baskets and dust. And the whole of that vast trade, the source of so much pleasure and profit to mankind, floats upon an ocean of Mumbo-Jumbo. Most of the claret you drink is either a rough Algerian wine filled out with dirty water of great Garonne, or wine from the Hérault, or the two mixed. But Lord! what names and titles the concoction bears, including the Mumbo-Jumbo of "Bottled at the Chateau."

And do you think that men would be happier in the drinking of wine if they dropped all this? They would not; and that for two reasons. First, that this would be making them work. They would have to judge for themselves. It would be calling upon them for Effort, and that is hateful to all mankind. Secondly, without the Mumbo-Jumbo, most men would not know whether they were enjoying the wine or not. Therefore I say let Mumbo-Jumbo flourish—and even increase—if that be possible.

Let Mumbo-Jumbo flourish, not only in the matter of wine, and not only in the matter of learning, and not only in the matter of positive government (where it is absolutely essential), and not only in the falsehoods of the daily Press, and not only in the Ecclesiastical affair, nor only in that still more Mumbo-Jumbo world of sceptical philosophy, but also in all the most intimate personal relations of men. I am for it! I am for it! I am for it! Born a Mumbo-Jumboite, I propose to die in the happy air which surrounds my nourishing Divinity.

ON FOOTNOTES

It is pleasant to consider the various forms of lying, because that study manifests the creative ingenuity of man and at the same time affords the diverting spectacle of the dupe. That kind of lying which, of the lesser sorts, has amused me most is the use of the footnote in modern history.

It began with no intention of lying at all. The first modest footnote was an occasional reinforcement of argument in the text. The writer could not break his narrative; he had said something unusual; he wanted his reader to accept it; and so he said, in little, "If you doubt this, look up my authority so and so." That was the age of innocence. Then came the serpent, or rather a whole brood of them.

The first big man I can find introducing the first considerable serpent is Gibbon. He still uses the footnote legitimately as the occasional reinforcement of a highly challengeable statement, but he also brings in new features.

I do not know if he is original in this. I should doubt it, for he had not an original mind, but was essentially a copier of the contemporary French writers and a pupil of Voltaire's. But, anyhow, Gibbon's is the first considerable work in which I find the beginnings of the earliest vices or corruptions of the footnote. The first of these is much the gravest, and I must confess no one has used it so well as Gibbon; he had genius here as in much else. It is, the use of the footnote to take in the plain man, the ordinary reader. Gibbon abounds in this use.

His favourite way of doing this is to make a false statement in the text and then to qualify it in the footnote in such words that the learned cannot quarrel with him, while the unlearned are thoroughly deceived. He tells you in the text that the thing was so certainly, when he very well knows that it was not, and that if there is a scrap of evidence for it, that evidence is bad. Then he puts in a footnote, a qualification of what he has just said in the text, so that the critic who really knows the subject has to admit that Gibbon knew it too. As though I should write "The Russians marched through England in 1914," and then put a footnote, "But see the later criticisms of this story in the accurate and fanatical Jones." At other times Gibbon bamboozles the ordinary reader by a reference which looks learned and is inane; so that your plain man says, "Well, I cannot look up all these old books, but this great man has evidently done so."

A first-rate example of both these tricks combined in Gibbon is the famous falsehood he propagated about poor St. George, of whom, Heaven be witness, little enough[1] is known without having false stories foisted upon him. You will find it in his twenty-third chapter, where he puts forward the absurd statement that St. George was identical with George of Cappadocia, the corrupt and disgraceful bacon-contractor and the opponent of St. Athanasius.

This particular, classical example of the Evil Footnote is worth quoting. Here are the words:[2] "The infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England."

And here is the footnote:

This transformation is not given as absolutely certain, but as extremely probable. See Longueruana, Tom. I, p. 194.

That footnote at once "hedges"—modifies the falsehood in the text and assumes peculiar and recondite learning. That long title "Longueruana" sounds like the devil and all! You will be surprised to hear that the reference is to a rubbishy book of guess-work, with no pretence to historical value, run together by a Frenchman of the eighteenth century; from this Frenchman did Gibbon take the absurdity of St. George originating with George of Cappadocia. I was at the pains of looking this up—perhaps the first, and certainly the last, of my generation to do so.

Another vice of the footnote (equally illustrated in that lie of Gibbon's about St. George) is what I may call its use as the "footnote of exception." It is universal to-day. You say something which is false and then you quote in a footnote one or more authorities supporting it. Any one can do it: and if the reader is reasonably ignorant of the subject the trick always succeeds. Thus, one might say that the earth was flat and put in a footnote two or three references to the flat-earth pamphlets of which I have a little collection at home. I am told that a wealthy lady, the widow of a brewer, supported the Flat-Earth society which published these tracts and that upon her death it collapsed. It may be so.

The next step of the footnote in iniquity was when it became a mask. Who started this I know not, but I should imagine that the great German school which remodelled history in the nineteenth century was to blame. At any rate their successors the French are now infinitely worse. I have seen a book purporting to be a history in which of every page not more than a quarter was text, and the rest a dreary regiment of references. There is no doubt at all about the motives, mixed though they are. There is the desire of the fool to say "Though I can't digest the evidence, yet I know it. Here it is." There is the desire of the timid man to throw up fortification. There is the desire of the pedant to show other pedants as well as the general reader (who, by the way, has almost given up reading such things, they have become so dull) that he also has been in Arcadia.

I notice that when anything is published without such footnotes, the professional critic—himself a footnoter of the deepest dye—accuses the author of romancing. If you put in details of the weather, of dress and all the rest of it, minutely gathered from any amount of reading, but refuse to spoil a vivid narrative with the snobbery and charlatanism of these perpetual references, the opponent takes it for granted that you have not kept your notes and cannot answer him; and indeed, as a rule, you have not kept your notes and you cannot answer him.

For the most part, these enormous, foolish, ill-motived accretions are honest enough in their actual references, for the greater part of our modern historians who use them are so incapable of judgment and so lacking in style, so averse from what Rossetti called "fundamental brain-work," that they have not the power to do more than shovel all their notes on you in a lump and call it history. But now and then this temptation to humbug produces its natural result, and the references are false.

The late Mr. Andrew Lang used to say that the writer who writes under the pseudonym of "Anatole France" must have had his footnotes for his Life of Joan of Arc done by contract. The idea opens up a wide horizon. A man of name would sit down to write a general history of something of which he had a smattering, and would then turn it over to a poor man who would hack for him in the British Museum and find references—and they could always be found—for pretty well any statement he had chosen to make.

At any rate, in this particular case of Anatole France's Joan of Arc, Andrew Lang amply proved that the writer had never read his original authorities, though he quoted them in heaps.

And that reminds me of another footnote vice (the subject is a perfect jungle of vices!), which is the habit of copying other people's footnotes. I did it myself when I was young; I was lured into it by Oxford and I ask pardon of God and man. It is very common, and a little ingenuity will hide one's tracks. A learned man who was also civilised and ironical—but much too sparing in wine—told me once this amusing story.

He was reading up an economic question, and he found himself perpetually referred to a pamphlet of the late seventeenth century wherein was a certain economic statement upon the point of his research. Book after book referred him to this supposed statement, but he being, as I have said, a learned, civilised, and ironical man (though too sparing in wine) concluded from his general knowledge—and very few learned men have general knowledge—that, in the words of the Old Kent Road murderer, "There must be some mistake." He couldn't believe any seventeenth-century pamphlet had said what this oft-quoted pamphlet was made responsible for.

He proceeded to look up the pamphlet, the references to which followed him about like a dog through all his research. He found there were two copies—and only two. One was in a certain public library, the other in a rich man's house. The public library was far off, and the rich man was nearer by—an hour's journey in the train. So he wrote to the rich man and asked him whether he might look at this pamphlet in the library which his ancestors had accumulated, but to which the rich man had added nothing, being indeed indifferent to reading and writing. The rich man very politely answered that his library had unfortunately been burnt down, and that the pamphlet had been burnt with it. Whereupon the learned man was at the pains of taking a long journey to consult the copy kept in the public library. He discovered two things: (a) that the copy had never been used at all—it was uncut; (b) that the references always given had hardly any relation to the actual text. Then did he, as is the habit of all really learned people, go and waste a universe of energy in working out the textual criticism of the corruption, and he proved that the last time any one had, with his own eyes, really seen that particular passage, instead of merely pretending that he had seen it, was in the year 1738—far too long ago! Ever since then the reference had been first corrupted and then copied and recopied its corrupted form by the University charlatans.

But I myself have had a similar experience (as the silent man said when his host had described at enormous length his adventure with the tiger). I was pursued for years by a monstrous piece of nonsense about some Papal Bull forbidding chemical research: and the footnote followed that lie. It was from Avignon that the thing was supposed to have come. It seemed to me about as probable as that Napoleon the Third should have forbidden the polka. At last—God knows how unwillingly!—I looked the original Bull up in the big collection printed at Lyons. It was as I had suspected. The Bull had nothing whatever to do with chemical experiments. It said not a word against the honest man who produces a poison or an explosive mixture to the greater happiness of the race. It left the whole world free to pour one colourless liquid into another colourless liquid and astonish the polytechnic with their fumes. What it did say was that if anybody went about collecting lead and brass under the promise of secretly turning them into silver and gold, that man was a liar and must pay a huge fine, and that those whom he had gulled must have their metal restored to them—which seems sound enough.

Here you will say to me what is said to every reformer: "What would you put in its place if you killed the little footnote, all so delicate and compact? How could you replace it? How can we know that the historian is telling the truth unless he gives us his references? It is true that it prevents history from being properly written and makes it, to-day, unreadable. It is true that it has become charlatan and therefore historically almost useless. But you must have some guarantee of original authority. How will you make sure of it?"

I should answer, let a man put his footnotes in very small print indeed at the end of a volume, and, if necessary, let him give specimens rather than a complete list. For instance, let a man who writes history as it should be written—with all the physical details in evidence, the weather, the dress, colours, everything—write on for the pleasure of his reader and not for his critic. But let him take sections here and there, and in an appendix show the critic how it is being done. Let him keep his notes and challenge criticism. I think he will be secure. He will not be secure from the anger of those who cannot write clearly, let alone vividly, and who have never in their lives been able to resurrect the past, but he will be secure from their destructive effect.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I should have said, nothing.

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

A FEW KIND WORDS TO MAMMON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, that is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON TREVES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON THE CATHEDRAL OF SEVILLE AND "THE MISANTHROPE"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

And The Misanthrope.

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

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

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

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

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

"... οἱ ῥἁ μἱν ὡκα

Θἡσουὁ εν Λυκἱηϛ εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμψ."

[Greek: "... oi rha min ôka

Thêsouo en Lukiês eureiês pioni dêmps.">[

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

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

All that!

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

ON THE "BUCOLICS" OF VIRGIL, A CAFÉ IN PARIS, THE LENGTH OF ESSAYS, PHŒBUS, BACCHUS, A WANTON MAID, AND OTHER MATTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me

Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus.

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

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

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

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

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,

Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.

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

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

ON TITLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lord Archibald I grieve to say

Was late for breakfast every day,

And as he slunk upon the scene

His kind papa—a Rural Dean—

Would solemnly remark, 'My son,

Our morning meal is nearly done

And grace will very soon be said.'

Lord Archibald would hang his head

And drop hot tears upon his plate:

And yet next morning would be late."

The poet has here taken poetic licence, for it is exceedingly improbable that the son of a Rural Dean would be called Lord Archibald.