Introductory material (continued 2)

Don't imagine it was only for France that 1870 was fatal. The sad successes of that deadly year sent a wave of triumphant Teutonism over the face of Europe.

I suppose it is natural to man to worship success; but ever since 1870 it is certainly the fact that if you wish to gain respect and consideration for any proposed change of system you must say, "They do it so in Germany." In education and science this is especially the case. Pedants always admire pedants. And Germany having shown herself to be easily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery, all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed with one voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!"

Now, the German is an excellent workman in his way. Patient, laborious, conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the ideal brick-maker. He produces the best bricks, and you can generally depend upon him to turn out both honest and workmanlike articles. But he is not an architect. For the architectonic faculty in its highest developments you must come to England. And he is not a teacher or expounder. For the expository faculty in its purest form, the faculty that enables men to flash forth clearly and distinctly before the eyes of others the facts and principles they know and perceive themselves, you must go to France. Oh, dear, yes; we may well be proud of England. Remember, I have already disclaimed more than once in these papers the vulgar error of patriotism. But freedom from that narrow vice does not imply inability to recognise the good qualities of one's own race as well as the bad ones. And the Englishman, left to himself and his own native methods, used to cut a very respectable figure indeed in the domain of science. No other nation has produced a Newton or a Darwin. The Englishman's way was to get up an interest in a subject first; and then, working back from the part of it that specially appealed to his own tastes, to make himself master of the entire field of inquiry. This natural and thoroughly individualistic English method enabled him to arrive at new results in a way impossible to the pedantically educated German—nay, even to the lucidly and systematically educated Frenchman. It was the plan to develop "mere amateurs," I admit; but it was also the plan to develop discoverers and revolutionisers of science. For the man most likely to advance knowledge is not the man who knows in an encyclopædic rote-work fashion the whole circle of the sciences, but the man who takes a fresh interest for its own sake in some particular branch of inquiry.

Darwin was a "mere amateur." He worked at things for the love of them. So were Murchison, Lyell, Benjamin Franklin, Herschel. So were or are Bates, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace. "Mere amateurs!" every man of them.

In an evil hour, however, our pastors and masters in conclave assembled said to one another, "Come now, let us Teutonise English scientific education." And straightway they Teutonised it. And there began to arise in England a new brood of patent machine-made scientists—excellent men in their way, authorities on the Arachnida, knowing all about everything that could be taught in the schools, but lacking somehow the supreme grace of the old English originality. They are first-rate specialists, I allow; and I don't deny that a civilised country has all need of specialists. Nay, I even admit that the day of the specialist has only just begun. He will yet go far; he will impose himself and his yoke upon us. But don't let us therefore make the grand mistake of concluding that our fine old English birthright in science—the birthright that gave us our Newtons, our Cavendishes, our Darwins, our Lyells—was all folly and error. Don't let us spoil ourselves in order to become mere second-hand Germans. Let us recognise the fact that each nation has a work of its own to do in the world; and that as star from star, so one nation differeth from another in glory. Let each of us thank the goodness and the grace that on his birth have smiled, that he was born of English breed, and not a German child.

"Don't you think," a military gentleman once said to me, "the Germans are wonderful organisers?" "No," I answered, "I don't; but I think they're excellent drill-sergeants."

There are people who drop German authorities upon you as if a Teutonic name were guarantee enough for anything. They say, "Hausberger asserts," or "According to Schimmelpenninck." This is pure fetichism. Believe me, your man of science isn't necessarily any the better because he comes to you with the label, "Made in Germany." The German instinct is the instinct of Frederick William of Prussia—the instinct of drilling. Very thorough and efficient men in their way it turns out; men versed in all the lore of their chosen subject. If they are also men of transcendent ability (as often happens), they can give us a comprehensive view of their own chosen field such as few Englishmen (except Sir Archibald Geikie, and he's a Scot) can equal. If I wanted to select a learned man for a special Government post—British Museum, and so forth—I dare say I should often be compelled to admit, as Government often admits, that the best man then and there obtainable is the German. But if I wanted to train Herbert Spencers and Faradays, I would certainly not send them to Bonn or to Berlin. John Stuart Mill was an English Scotchman, educated and stuffed by his able father on the German system; and how much of spontaneity, of vividness, of verve, we all of us feel John Stuart Mill lost by it! One often wonders to what great, to what still greater, things that lofty brain might not have attained, if only James Mill would have given it a chance to develop itself naturally!

Our English gift is originality. Our English keynote is individuality. Let us cling to those precious heirlooms of our Celtic ancestry, and refuse to be Teutonised. Let us discard the lessons of the Potsdam grenadiers. Let us write on the pediment of our educational temple, "No German need apply." Let us disclaim that silly phrase "A mere amateur." Let us return to the simple faith in direct observation that made English science supreme in Europe.

And may the Lord gi'e us Britons a guid conceit o' oorsel's!

XII.

A SQUALID VILLAGE.

Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!

I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or Vienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed, comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxford with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city, and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.

No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look at London side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of those is a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still, even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist upon that point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London, most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted on this issue, that they really don't know what is meant by a town, or a fine town, when they see one. And don't suppose it's because London is in Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks: for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford, Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine streets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But the Strand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street—good Lord, deliver us!

One more caveat as to my meaning. When I cite among real towns Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of art those beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higher question. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others of less importance—lag behind in those external features and that general architectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broad sense, "This is a fine city." Florence, for example, contains more treasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yet Florence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to be compared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but even with Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far more treasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is a handsome, well-built, regular town, while London—well, I will spare you the further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalid village. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that a town, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works of art or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, its architecture, its external and visible decorations and places—the Louvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, the Place de l'Opéra.

Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has no decorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simply and ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of any sort—in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas—it is only a village, and a painfully uninteresting one.

Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. They become so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulled and blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great towns before I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense of surprise at its unmitigated ugliness.

Get on top of an omnibus—I don't say in Paris, from the Palais Royal to the Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to the Palais de Justice—and what do you see? From end to end one unbroken succession of noble and open prospects. I'm not thinking now of the Grande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection of mediæval buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our one sole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confine myself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, and might have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been any public spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (But unhappily there was neither.) Recall to mind as you read the strikingly handsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the Northern Station down the great central Boulevards to the Gare du Midi—all built within our own memory. Then think of the prospects that gradually unfold themselves as you rise on the hill; the fine vista north towards Sainte Marie de Schaarbeck; the beautiful Rue Royale, bounded by that charming Parc; the unequalled stretch of the Rue de la Régence, starting from the Place Royale with Godfrey of Bouillon, and ending with the imposing mass of the Palais de Justice. It is to me a matter for mingled surprise and humiliation that so many Englishmen can look year after year at that glorious street—perhaps the finest in the world—and yet never think to themselves, "Mightn't we faintly imitate some small part of this in our wealthy, ugly, uncompromising London?"

I always say to Americans who come to Europe: "When you go to England, don't see our towns, but see our country. Our country is something unequalled in the world: while our towns!—well, anyway, keep away from London!"

With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment, there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admire the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even with the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get on the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to lie over all Southern England.

Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks like a shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. And that's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse of hap-hazard houses.

"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue. Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still make the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there was really no London, not even a village; there was only a scratch collection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at the centre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed to the bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the petty scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in making the congeries of villages into—I do not say a city, for that is almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent struggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling.

London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull and marshy bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco, when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries. Then fire destroyed all her mediæval architecture, leaving her only Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to house its metropolis in a squalid village?"

We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful name is Vested Interest.

XIII.

CONCERNING ZEITGEIST.

A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but at any rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss of Bayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner—a gushing young lady, as many such there be—who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at once with her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin," she cried, clasping her hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before I discovered what you meant when you spoke about the supreme unapproachableness of Botticelli." "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well, that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime to discover it."

The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should she, a brand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on the very first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatest critic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for all that, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong—if such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so.

It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistible Zeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distorted by current art and current criticism that they couldn't see Botticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to our fathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an original thinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, except perhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went then to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole artistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David and Thorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemed like a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in the direction of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soul counted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy.

On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and baroque period. There they sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim? Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediævalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.

The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.

It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick, have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners exotic, strange, unconnected, archæological. Gradually, it has been brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden, fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain to piecemeal.

That is just what all great men are for—to make the world accept as a truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the generation before them.

Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people, incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, æsthetic species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi. They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of the same name."

Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The first half is official, like Alex.; the second affectionate and familiar, like Sandy.

Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago, see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges, the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word, what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.

XIV.

THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE.

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel—or a marriage.

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs." "College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal with a primitive instinct—the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions: to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate—because he loves her. It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of vantage of a biological outlook.

Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon quelconque, 'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to investigate.

Taking society throughout—not in the sense of those "forty families" to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford—I doubt whether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certain decrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouring classes, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently. When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays," they mean young men in a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat on Sundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that you and I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within this restricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachment early with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least with the idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that end they endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the long engagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant some persistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire of the man to make this woman his own, the longing to make this woman happy—normal and healthy endowments of our race—had still much driving-power. Nowadays, I seriously think I observe in most young men of the middle class around me a distinct and disastrous weakening of the impulse. They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, as irretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick and choose, they discuss, they criticise. They say themselves these futile foolish things about the club, and the flat, and the cost of living. They believe in Malthus. Fancy a young man who believes in Malthus! They seem in no hurry at all to get married. But thirty or forty years ago, young men used to rush by blind instinct into the toils of matrimony—because they couldn't help themselves. Such Laodicean luke-warmness betokens in the class which exhibits it a weakening of impulse. That weakening of impulse is really the thing we have to account for.

Young men of a certain type don't marry, because—they are less of young men than formerly.

Wild animals in confinement seldom propagate their kind. Only a few caged birds will continue their species. Whatever upsets the balance of the organism, in an individual or a race tends first of all to affect the rate of reproduction. Civilise the red man, and he begins to decrease at once in numbers. Turn the Sandwich Islands into a trading community, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages to fortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were taken to Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born. The Jesuits made a model community of Paraguay; but they altered the habits of the Paraguayans so fast that the reverend fathers, who were, of course, themselves celibates, were compelled to take strenuous and even grotesque measures to prevent the complete and immediate extinction of their converts. Other cases in abundance I might quote an I would; but I limit myself to these. They suffice to exhibit the general principle involved; any grave upset in the conditions of life affects first and at once the fertility of a species.

"But colonists often increase with rapidity." Ay, marry, do they, where the conditions of life are easy. At the present day most colonists go to fairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home by steamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundant provender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country. There is no real upset. Better food and easier life, as Herbert Spencer has shown, result (other things equal) in increased fertility. His chapters on this subject in the "Principles of Biology" should be read by everybody who pretends to talk on questions of population. But in new and difficult colonies the increase is slight. Whatever compels greater wear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductive function. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novel circumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organic balance. The African negro has long been accustomed to agricultural toil and to certain simple arts in his own country. Transported to the West Indies and the United States, he found life no harder than of old, if not, indeed, easier. He had abundant food, protection, security, a kind of labour for which he was well adapted. Instead of dying out, therefore, he was fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth amazingly. But the Red Indian, caught blatant in the hunting stage, refused to be tamed, and could not swallow civilisation. He pined and dwined and decreased in his "reservations." The change was too great, too abrupt, too brusque for him. The papoose before long became an extinct animal.

Is not the same thing true of the middle class of England? Civilisation and its works have come too quickly upon us. The strain and stress of correlating and co-ordinating the world we live in are getting too much for us. Railways, telegraphs, the penny post, the special edition, have played havoc at last with our nervous systems. We are always on the stretch, rushing and tearing perpetually. We bolt our breakfasts; we catch the train or 'bus by the skin of our teeth, to rattle us into the City; we run down to Scotland or over to Paris on business; we lunch in London and dine in Glasgow, Belfast, or Calcutta. (Excuse imagination.) The tape clicks perpetually in our ears the last quotation in Eries; the telephone rings us up at inconvenient moments. Something is always happening somewhere to disturb our equanimity; we tear open the Times with feverish haste, to learn that Kimberleys or Jabez Balfour have fallen, that Matabeleland has been painted red, that shares have gone up, or gone down, or evaporated. Life is one turmoil of excitement and bustle. Financially, 'tis a series of dissolving views; personally 'tis a rush; socially, 'tis a mosaic of deftly-fitted engagements. Drop out one piece, and you can never replace it. You are full next week from Monday to Saturday—business all day, what calls itself pleasure (save the mark!) all evening. Poor old Leisure is dead. We hurry and scurry and flurry eternally. One whirl of work from morning till night: then dress and dine: one whirl of excitement from night till morning. A snap of troubled sleep, and again da capo. Not an hour, not a minute, we can call our own. A wire from a patient ill abed in Warwickshire! A wire from a client hard hit in Hansards! Endless editors asking for more copy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis the life of all of us.

The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through with it somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second generation—that's you and me—felt the strain of it more severely: new machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers, perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles, innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all the same with a third generation. That third generation—ah me! there comes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a family has wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain classes and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race has weakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increase in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On that I say nothing. I only say this—that I think the present crisis in the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervous over-excitement.

XV.

EYE VERSUS EAR.

It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from a vested interest.

Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true of natural science—that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjects worth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, for example, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into the field with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology and botany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting, dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore, of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyes of school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in a room to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less than nothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in." Educational value and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher's ease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil's progress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what is least trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of our modern English education. They call it "education," I observe in the papers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession.

But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can nevertheless be taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it is to get up the history and geography of a country when you are actually in it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and moves before you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, all become real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress the other on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without conscious effort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture, hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarah than in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of the Kings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisks and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal. We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; just as the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at the Uffizi and the Bargello.

These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our public education, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in their wisdom—to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and the visible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible, they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly an education not in things and properties, but in books and reading. They have settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively with language and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the facts it impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools they have insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just a smattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schools they have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equal leaven of algebra and geometry. This mediæval fare (I am delighted that I can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrust down the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so that nowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than a linguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talk with contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what new mental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesque survivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is—modern languages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary element in a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it for granted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you must supply them instead with hay and sawdust.

Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we should have many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is well we should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely mean that they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They are at best but two languages of considerable importance to the student of purely human evolution.

Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects could themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked Æneid. You have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual observation.

And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do anything in the long run by influencing the mass—by securing the co-operation of many among his fellows.

Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls, who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools, having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys, the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of literature and history, and the principal facts about human development. Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musæ, like so many parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for understanding Æschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!

XVI.

THE POLITICAL PUPA.

I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common English butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude, indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which England, and for the matter of that every other European country as well, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in its evolution.

But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is driving at? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within that impassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine. When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp; chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order. Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and then gradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if it philosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little the habit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted young ladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first the melancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over it piecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centres melt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, out of which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to the law of some internal impulse. But when the process is all over, and—hi, presto!—the butterfly emerges at last from the chrysalis condition, what does it find but that instead of having lost everything it has new and stronger legs in place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves and brain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead of mere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos was really nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all component parts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure in evolution. The old must fade before the new can replace it.

Now I am not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy to death, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still, taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, by supplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us really to get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemn argument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such a chrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in their midst as if every component element of the State (but especially the one in which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested) were rushing violently down a steep place to eternal perdition. Chaos appears to be swallowing up everything. "The natural relations of classes" disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bonds fail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the place of old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of the period—call them scribes or augurs—wring their hands in despair, and cry aloud that they don't know what the world is coming to. But, after all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development.

Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain of comfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; for what they want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole social organism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredom and parsonry. That is what they mean by "national welfare;" and any interference with it they criticise in all ages with the current equivalent for the familiar Tory formula that "the country is going to the devil."

Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes, again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak, inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically, ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise; till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a particular butterfly.

Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general and Britain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. And they will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Laws and faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a new heaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strange that people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, when the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatter yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put the Constitution into the melting-pot," said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble opinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, and even beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremely like it, may with great probability be the final outcome of that particular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable, and in any case the melting is general, not special. The one thing we can guess with tolerable certainty is that the melting-pot stage has begun to overtake us, socially, ethically, politically, ecclesiastically; and that what will emerge from the pot at the end of it must depend at last upon the relative strength of those unknown quantities—the various formative elements.

Being the most optimistic of pessimists, however, I will venture (after this disclaimer of prophecy) to prophesy one thing alone: 'Twill be a butterfly, not a grub, that comes out of our chrysalis.

Beyond that, I hold all prediction premature. We may guess and we may hope, but we can have no certainty. Save only the certainty that no element will outlive the revolution unchanged—not faiths, nor classes, nor domestic relations, nor any other component factor of our complex civilisation. All are becoming plastic in the organic plasm; all are losing features in the common mass of the melting-pot. For that reason, I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this, that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy's Utopia or William Morris's Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, is impossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful. For these, after all, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individual wishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours or mine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises most unphilosophical and illogical—a practical reality distasteful in many ways to all us Utopia-mongers. "The Millennium by return of post" is no more realisable to-day than yesterday. The greatest of revolutions can only produce that unsatisfactory result, a new human organisation.

Yet, it is something, after all, to believe at least that the grub will emerge into a full-fledged butterfly. Not, perhaps, quite as glossy in the wings as we could wish; but a butterfly all the same, not a crawling caterpillar.

XVII.

ON THE CASINO TERRACE.

I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps to keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.

Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks are not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables. Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-day at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modest tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!

For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it! Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror. But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail—in order to feel their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way—do I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow resources of The Garret, Grub Street?—it is but a skin-deep surface symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.

"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is only to the kind of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other parties stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in great gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, is considered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large fortunes are made at this other sort of gambling, which, of course, sanctifies and almost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you will find not only that the objection to gambling pure and simple is commonest in the most commercial countries, but also that even there it is commonest among the most commercial classes. The landed aristocracy, the military, and the labouring men have no objection to betting; nor have the Neapolitan lazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is the respectable English counting-house that discourages the vice, especially among the clerks, who are likely to make the till or the cheque-book rectify the little failures of their flutter on the Derby.

Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely it partakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here, on the terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly robes are promenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealth ostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by the constant ping, ping, ping of the pigeon-shooting, and my peace disturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims. Yet how many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced to once or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangled pigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches. That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant or partridge shooting—no better, no worse, in spite of artificial distinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest in denouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when the proprietors of the Casino wished to take measures "pour attirer les Anglais" they held counsel with the wise men whether it was best to establish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting tournament. And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard more than one Anglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have never heard one of them say a good word yet for the boxed and slaughtered pigeons.

Let me take a more striking because a less hackneyed case—one that still fewer people would think of. Everybody who visits Monte Carlo gets there, of course, by the P.L.M. If you know this coast at all you will know that P.L.M. is the curt and universal abbreviation for the Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée Railway Company—in all probability the most gigantic and wickedest monopoly on the face of this planet. Yet you never once heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual complaints get into the Times, of course, about the crowding of the train de luxe, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—and is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does it, regardless—I say "regardless," without qualification, because the P.L.M. regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no righteous indignation, no uprising of the people in their angry thousands, no moral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to be fought tooth and nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a greater aggregate of human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a century. Besides, the one is compulsory, the other optional. You needn't risk a louis on the tables unless you choose, but, like it or lump it, if you're bound for Nice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by no means free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Eastern has not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; the children of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed. (Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the P.L.M. goes much further than these; and I have always held that the one solid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability that its Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after all their iniquities.

I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked, all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head, that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesque architecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting to itself all the idle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the unworthy, from every corner of Europe and America. But Monte Carlo didn't make them; it only gathers to its bosom its own chosen children from the places where they are produced—from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St. Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk, begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles with gold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of land-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of all the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace in the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the very best society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. The dukes and the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. The idlest, the cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successful blood-suckers. But to find fault with them only for trying to win one another's ill-gotten gold at a fair and open game of trente-et-quarante, with the odds against them, and then to say nothing about the way they came by it, is to make a needless fuss about a trifle of detail, while overlooking the weightiest moral problems of humanity.

Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path of his moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should lead him straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little credit either for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at the root of the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on London ground-rents.

XVIII.

THE CELTIC FRINGE.

We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.

What is that you mutter? "A very inopportune moment to proclaim the fact." Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm sorry to hear you say it, for if there is a quality on which I plume myself, it's the delicate tact that makes me refrain from irritating the susceptibilities of the sensitive Saxon. See how polite I am to him! I call him sensitive. But, opportune or inopportune, Lord Salisbury says we are a Celtic fringe. I beg to retort, we are the British people.

"Conquered races," say my friends. Well, grant it for a moment. But in civilised societies, conquerors have, sooner or later, to amalgamate with the conquered. And where the vanquished are more numerous, they absorb the victors instead of being absorbed by them. That is the Nemesis of conquest. Rome annexed Etruria; and Etruscan Mæcenas, Etruscan Sejanus organised and consolidated the Roman Empire. Rome annexed Italy; and the Jus Italicum grew at last to be the full Roman franchise. Rome annexed the civilised world; and the provinces under Cæsar blotted out the Senate. Britain is passing now through the self-same stage. One inevitable result of the widening of the electorate has been the transfer of power from the Teutonic to the Celtic half of Britain. I repeat, we are no longer a Celtic fringe: at the polls, in Parliament, we are the British people. Lord Salisbury may fail to perceive that fact, or, as I hold more probable, may affect to ignore it. What will such tactics avail? The ostrich is not usually counted among men as a perfect model of political wisdom.

And are we, after all, the conquered peoples? Meseems, I doubt it. They say we Celts dearly love a paradox—which is perhaps only the sensible Saxon way of envisaging the fact that we catch at new truths somewhat quicker than other people. At any rate, 'tis a pet little paradox of my own that we have never been conquered, and that to our unconquered state we owe in the main our Radicalism, our Socialism, our ingrained love of political freedom. We are tribal not feudal; we think the folk more important than his lordship. The Saxon of the south-east is the conquered man: he has felt on his neck for generations the heel of feudalism. He is slavish; he is snobbish; he dearly loves a lord. He shouts himself hoarse for his Beaconsfield or his Salisbury. Till lately, in his rural avatar, he sang but one song—

Trite, isn't it? but so is the Saxon intelligence.

Seriously—for at times it is well to be serious—South-Eastern England, the England of the plains, has been conquered and enslaved in a dozen ages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knows what shadowy Belgæ and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serve our purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hibernia free, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. The Saxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over the watershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon in East Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a common servitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudal system—the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, Teutonic England was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it had accommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for the assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man, who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill.

With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall, the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed than conquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages to explain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in the Shocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the origin and evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that the Devonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon for resistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxon kingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the English monarchy—one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury. Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughly annexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under the Welsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised. Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, the Rebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaseless reaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alien Church" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District and Ayrshire—Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde—only accepted by degrees the supremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a Scotch King was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King was Prince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. of Scotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria was no more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered by the accession of James I. or by the Act of Union. That means absorption, conciliation, a certain degree of tribal independence. For Ireland, we know that the "mere Irish" were never subjugated at all till the days of Henry VII.; that they had to be reconquered by Cromwell and by William of Orange; that they rebelled more or less throughout the eighteenth century; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory England through the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held out against the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty; and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon. General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a few trifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it was only for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark and the crofters are its mode of expressing itself.

Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, I am not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race. I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of the unconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozen races; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pict of Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speak of Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper and common to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised and contented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, the Scotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, free men every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without upon the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside, has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.

As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxon lowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and most of the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance of realising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the present century has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance of power from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; from the agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cotton factories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up in the Celtic or semi-Celtic area—Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt—that is to say, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country—reproduces his kind much more rapidly than the Teuton. The Highlander and the Irishman swarm into Glasgow; the Irishman and the Welshman swarm into Liverpool; the west-countryman into Bristol; Celts of all types into London, Southampton, Newport, Birmingham, Sheffield. This eastward return-wave of Celts upon the Teuton has leavened the whole mass; if you look at the leaders of Radicalism in England you will find they bear, almost without exception, true Celtic surnames. Chartists and Socialists of the first generation were marshalled by men of Cymric descent, like Ernest Jones and Robert Owen, or by pure-blooded Irishmen like Fergus O'Connor. It is not a mere accident that the London Socialists of the present day should be led by Welshmen like William Morris, or by the eloquent brogue of Bernard Shaw's audacious oratory. We Celts now lurk in every corner of Britain; we have permeated it with our ideas; we have inspired it with our aspirations; we have roused the Celtic remnant in the south-east itself to a sense of their wrongs; and we are marching to-day, all abreast, to the overthrow of feudalism. If Lord Salisbury thinks we are a Celtic fringe he is vastly mistaken. But he doesn't really think so: 'tis a piece of his ponderous Saxon humour. Talk of "Batavian grace," indeed! Well, the Cecils came first from the fens of Lincolnshire.

XIX.

IMAGINATION AND RADICALS.

Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination.

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for selfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people are apt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish. Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics. Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision, redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to be Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he is likely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted. Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some are Conservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative people are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.

But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely—because they have always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London, such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union, for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained in the school of the French Revolution—which was not carried out by unimaginative pettifoggers.

To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just bristles with difficulties—and that the difficulties are met or got over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and such flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddy as ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbable contingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or the mine-owner." They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is caused at present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and the sunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who are forced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handful of coal-grabbers.

Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makes them fail to realise the good that might be.

I often fancy to myself what such people would say if land had always been communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it over absolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and the coal-owners. "'Tis impossible," they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn't be workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A single landlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke of Westminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion; he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up their residence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them from following their own trades or professions; he might even descend to such petty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And what would you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland, again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tracts into grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists from walking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to that. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish might turn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection of chapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed, there would be nothing to prevent an American alien from buying up square miles of purple heather in Scotland, and shutting the inhabitants of these British Isles out of their own inheritance. Sites might be refused for needful public purposes; fancy prices might be asked for pure cupidity. Speculators would job land for the sake of unearned increment; towns would have to grow as landlords willed, irrespective of the wants or convenience of the community. Theoretically, I don't even see that Lord Rothschild mightn't buy up the whole area of Middlesex, and turn London into a Golden House of Nero. Your scheme can't be worked. The anomalies are too obvious."

They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite have foreseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. But they urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; and they urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existing system exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks. The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine how its far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are not the least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminster or the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister power of a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with the horrors of a fuel famine. But they are staggered by their bogey that State ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobbery and corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that the dukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State should get most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptly embezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want of imagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All your income shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not to yourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, are afraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of it be stolen from you or badly invested." How transparently absurd! We want our income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losing one per cent. of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up by the dukes and the landlords.

It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty they see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really menaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier even they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community. Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered that life comes as a constant æsthetic delight to everybody. They know that that world could be realised to-morrow—if only all others could picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic conception of the feelings of others.

XX.

ABOUT ABROAD.

The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in as England. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They are in every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen.

These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in their tail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out now with a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes are much less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating.

Not that I am sanguine enough to expect I shall irritate Englishmen. Your Englishman is far too cock-sure of the natural superiority of Britons to Foreigners, the natural superiority of England to Abroad, ever to be irritated by even the gentlest criticism. He accepts it all with lordly indifference. He brushes it aside as the elephant might brush aside the ineffective gadfly. No proboscis can pierce that pachydermatous hide of his. If you praise him to his face, he accepts your praise as his obvious due, with perfect composure and without the slightest elation. If you blame him in aught, he sets it down to your ignorance and mental inferiority. You say to him, "Oh, Englishman, you are great; you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble; you are generous; you are the prince among nations." He smiles a calm smile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord, if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I make bold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligent countenance." He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. He responds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on my immaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The sky is as clear there in November as in August. All is pure and serene and beautiful." You answer, "Oh, my lord, I admit the force of your profound reasoning. You light the gas at ten in the morning only to show all the world you can afford to burn it." At that, he gropes his way along Pall Mall to his club, and tells the men he meets there how completely he silenced you.

And yet, My Lord Elephant, there is use in mosquitoes. Mr. Mattieu Williams once discovered the final cause of fleas. Certain people, said he, cannot be induced to employ the harmless necessary tub. For them, Providence designed the lively flea. He compels them to scratch themselves. By so doing they rouse the skin to action and get rid of impurities. Now, this British use of the word Abroad is a smudge on the face of the otherwise perfect Englishman. Perchance a mosquito-bite may induce him to remove it with a little warm water and a cambric pocket-handkerchief.

To most Englishmen, the world divides itself naturally into two unequal and non-equivalent portions—Abroad and England. Of these two, Abroad is much the larger country; but England, though smaller, is vastly more important. Abroad is inhabited by Frenchmen and Germans, who speak their own foolish and chattering languages. Part of it is likewise pervaded by Chinamen, who wear pigtails; and the outlying districts belong to the poor heathen, chiefly interesting as a field of missionary enterprise, and a possible market for Manchester piece-goods. We sometimes invest our money abroad, but then we are likely to get it swallowed up in Mexicans or Egyptian Unified. If you ask most people what has become of Tom, they will answer at once with the specific information, "Oh, Tom has gone Abroad." I have one stereotyped rejoinder to an answer like that. "What part of Abroad, please?" That usually stumps them. Abroad is Abroad; and like the gentleman who was asked in examination to "name the minor prophets," they decline to make invidious distinctions. It is nothing to them whether he is tea-planting in the Himalayas, or sheep-farming in Australia, or orange-growing in Florida, or ranching in Colorado. If he is not in England, why then he is elsewhere; and elsewhere is Abroad, one and indivisible.

In short, Abroad answers in space to that well-known and definite date, the Olden Time, in chronology.

People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that"; "Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee for breakfast." "Indeed," I love to answer; "I've never observed it myself in Central Asia." 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. Nine English people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they call the Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited by Englishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday. "I don't like Abroad," a lady once said to me on her return from Calais. Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians. In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the parts nearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important are those who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below the horizon are hardly worth noticing.

Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? Would it surprise you to learn that most people are poor benighted heathen, and that, of the remainder, most people are Mahommedans, and that of the Christians, who come next, most people are Roman Catholics, and that, of the other Christian sects, most people belong to the Greek Church, and that, last of all, we get Protestants, more particularly Anglicans, Wesleyans, Baptists? Have you ever really realised the startling fact that England is an island off the coast of Europe? that Europe is a peninsula at the end of Asia? that France, Germany, Italy, are the fringe of Russia? Have you ever really realised that the English-speaking race lives mostly in America? that the country is vastly more populous than London? that our class is the froth and the scum of society? Think these things out, and try to measure them on the globe. And when you speak of Abroad, do please specify what part of it.

Abroad is not all alike. There are differences between Poland, Peru, and Palestine. What is true of France is not true of Fiji. Distinguish carefully between Timbuctoo, Tobolsk, and Toledo.

It is not our insularity that makes us so insular. 'Tis a gift of the gods, peculiar to Englishmen. The other inhabitants of these Isles of Britain are comparatively cosmopolitan. The Scotchman goes everywhere; the world is his oyster. Ireland is an island still more remote than Great Britain; but the Irishman has never been so insular as the English. I put that down in part to his Catholicism: his priests have been wheels in a world-wide system; his relations have been with Douai, St. Omer, and Rome; his bishops have gone pilgrimages and sat on Vatican Councils; his kinsmen are the MacMahons in France, the O'Donnels in Spain, the Taafes in Austria. Even in the days of the Regency this was so: look at Lever and his heroes! When England drank port, County Clare drank claret. But ever since the famine, Ireland has expanded. Every Irishman has cousins in Canada, in Australia, in New York, in San Francisco. The Empire is Irish, with the exception of India; and India, of course, is a Scotch dependency. Irishmen and Scotchmen have no such feelings about Abroad and its Foreigners as Londoners entertain. But Englishmen never quite get over the sense that everybody must needs divide the world into England and Elsewhere. To the end no Englishman really grasps the fact that to Frenchmen and Germans he himself is a foreigner. I have met John Bulls who had passed years in Italy, but who spoke of the countrymen of Cæsar and Dante and Leonardo and Garibaldi with the contemptuous toleration one might feel towards a child or an Andaman Islander. These Italians could build Giotto's campanile; could paint the Transfiguration; could carve the living marble on the tombs of the Medici; could produce the Vita Nuova; could beget Galileo, Galvani, Beccaria; but still—they were Foreigners. Providence in its wisdom has decreed that they must live Abroad—just as it has decreed that a comprehension of the decimal system and its own place in the world should be limitations eternally imposed upon the English intellect.

XXI.

WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL.

As I strolled across the moor this afternoon towards Waverley, I saw Jones was planting out that bare hillside of his with Douglas pines and Scotch firs and new strains of silver birches. They will improve the landscape. And I thought as I scanned them, "How curious that most people entirely overlook this constant betterment and beautifying of England! You hear them talk much of the way bricks and mortar are invading the country; you never hear anything of this slow and silent process of planting and developing which has made England into the prettiest and one of the most beautiful countries in Europe."

What's that you say? "Astonished to find I have a good word of any sort to put in for England!" Why, dear me, how irrational you are! I just love England. Can any man with eyes in his head and a soul for beauty do otherwise? England and Italy—there you have the two great glories of Europe. Italy for towns, for art, for man's handicraft; England for country, for nature, for green lanes and lush copses. Was it not one that loved Italy well who sighed in Italy—

And who that loves Italy, and knows England, too, does not echo Browning's wish when April comes round again on dusty Tuscan hilltops? At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned for the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed! Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, the dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love every flower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down, rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one's heartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can love England as those love her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea to her ivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, the berries on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound up in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth? do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries, for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and every petal. You think because I dislike one squalid village—"The Wen," stout English William Cobbett delighted to call it—I don't love England. You think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English tongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford, Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we hewn out of granite, to be cold before England?

Upon my soul, your unseasonable interruption has almost made me forget what I was going to say; it has made me grow warm, and drop into poetry.

England, I take it, is certainly the prettiest country in Europe. It is almost the most beautiful. I say "almost," because I bethink me of Norway and Switzerland. I say "country," because I bethink me of Rome, Venice, Florence. But, taking it as country, and as country alone, nothing else approaches it. Have you ever thought why? Man made the town, says the proverb, and God made the country. Not so in England. There, man made the country, and beautified it exceedingly. In itself, the land of south-eastern England is absolutely the same as the land of Northern France—that hideous tract about Boulogne and Amiens which we traverse in silence every time we run across by Calais to Paris. Chalk and clay and sandstone stretch continuously under sea from Kent and Sussex to Flanders and Picardy. The Channel burst through, and made the Straits of Dover; but the land on either side was and still is geologically and physically identical. What has made the difference? Man, the planter and gardener. England is beautiful by copse and hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep, deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of northern France—though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it. Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery, have made England what she is—the garden of Europe.

Of course there are parts of the country which owed, and still owe, their beauty to their wildness—Dartmoor, Exmoor, the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Surrey hills, the Peak in Derbyshire. Yet even these depend more than you would believe, when you take them in detail, on the art of the forester. The view from Leith Hill embraces John Evelyn's woods at Wotton: the larches that cover one Jura-like gorge were set there well within your and my memory. But elsewhere in England the hand of man has done absolutely everything. The American, when he first visits England, is charmed on his way up from Liverpool to London by the exquisite air of antique cultivation and soft rural beauty. The very sward is moss-like. Thoroughly wild country, indeed, unless bold and mountainous, does not often please one. It is apt to be bare, unattractive, and desolate. Witness the Veldt, the Steppes, the prairies. You may go through miles and miles of the States and Canada, where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. I do not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like a rose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassy lawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare the blank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France with our Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of the vast, the unspeakable difference.