Front matter (continued 2)

A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art—a personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.

THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX

In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning 'Les femmes.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that he understood woman. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to the fact that he too understands women. The one spot on the sun of Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could never draw a woman. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing, apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle, translated

It would seem to be assumed from all this mystification that men are beings clear as daylight, both to themselves and to women.

It may be so, but it is the opinion of some that men's simplicity is no less a fiction than women's mysterious complexity, and that human character is made up of much the same qualities in men and women, irrespective of a merely rudimentary sexual distinction, which has, of course, its proper importance, and which the present writer would be the last to wish away. From that quaint distinction of sex springs, of course, all that makes life in the smallest degree worth living, from great religions to tiny flowers. Love and beauty and poetry; Shakespeare's plays, Burne-Jones's pictures, and Wagner's operas—all such moving expressions of human life, as science has shown us, spring from the all-important fact that 'male and female created He them.'

This everybody knows, and few are fools enough to deny. Many people, however, confuse this organic distinction of sex with its time-worn conventional symbols; just

Sex—the most potent force in the universe—in danger because women wear knickerbockers instead of petticoats, or military men take to corsets and cosmetics!

That parallel with religion may be pursued profitably one step further. In religion, the conventional test of your faith is not how you live, not in your kindness of heart or purity of mind, but how you believe—in the Trinity, in the Atonement; and do you turn to the East during the recital of the Apostles' Creed? These and such, as every

To be truly womanly you must never wear your hair short; to be truly manly you must never wear it long. To be truly womanly you must dress as daintily as possible, however uncomfortably; to be truly manly you must wear the most hideous gear ever invented by the servility of tailors—a strange succession of cylinders from head to heel; cylinder on head, cylinder round your body, cylinders on arms and cylinders on legs. To be truly womanly you must be shrinking and clinging in manner and trivial in conversation; you must have no ideas, and rejoice that you wish for none; you must thank Heaven that you have never ridden a bicycle or smoked a cigarette; and you must be prepared to do a thousand other absurd and ridiculous things. To be truly manly you must be and do the opposite of all these things, with this exception—that with you

In short, to be a true woman you have only to be pretty and an idiot, and to be a true man you have only to be brutal and a fool.

From these misconceptions of manliness

In a dictionary of a date (1856) when everything on earth and in heaven was settled and written in penny cyclopædias and books of deportment, I find these delicious definitions—

Manly: becoming a man; firm; brave; undaunted; dignified; noble; stately; not boyish or womanish.

Womanly: becoming a woman; feminine; as womanly behaviour.

Under Woman we find the adjectives—soft, mild, pitiful and flexible, kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous, modest.

Who can doubt that the dictionary maker defined and distributed his adjectives aright

But surely the essentials of 'manliness' and 'womanliness' belong to man and woman alike—the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion. In art no one would think of allowing fashion any serious artistic opinion. It is usually the art which is out of fashion that is most truly art. Similarly, fashions in manliness or womanliness have nothing to do with real manliness or womanliness. Moreover, the adjectives 'manly' or 'womanly,' applied to works of art, or the artistic surfaces of men and women, are

It was once the fashion for heroes to shed tears on the smallest occasion, and it does not appear that they fought the worse for it; some of the firmest, bravest, most undaunted, most dignified, most noble, most stately human beings have been women; as some of the softest, mildest, most pitiful and flexible, most kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender, timorous and modest human beings have been men. Indeed, some of the bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets, and it needs more courage

THE FALLACY OF A NATION

It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many noughts are marshalled in front of it—though, indeed, in the mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and imperial armies?

A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed

Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and become recognised as a nation—one of the 'Great Powers.'

Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is really no difference between the component units—or rather ciphers—of all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,'vice versa.

So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'—this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with humbler tread—though there is really no need for their doing so. For, as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such as Norway

Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character, people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers, and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no part in what are grandiloquently called national interests—war, politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to manage the gasworks, or to go about

The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas Browne peacefully writing his Religio Medici amid all the commotions of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to distribute his milk—as much after half-past seven as may be inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them. But as for the poet—let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.

The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which there is no name unless it be the Chosen

Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it—the million nobodies—had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to do so.

Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare—as though he himself had written the plays; of India—as though he himself had conquered it. And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public opinion.'

For what is 'national greatness' but the

For how can people in themselves little become great by merely congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding together.

A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous—by whatever brutal physical powers it may be enforced—ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.

THE GREATNESS OF MAN

Ignorant, as I inevitably am, dear reader, of your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, I can hardly guess whether the title of my article will impress you as a platitude or as a paradox. Goodness knows, some men and women think quite enough of themselves as it is, and, from a certain momentary point of view, there may seem little occasion indeed to remind man of his importance.

I refer to your intellectual and spiritual upbringing, because I venture to wonder if it was in the least like my own. I was brought up, I rejoice to say, in the bosom of an orthodox Puritan family. I was led and driven to believe that man was everybody, and that God was somebody—and that not merely the Sabbath, but the whole universe, was made for man: that the stars were his bedtime candles, and that the sun

On this belief I acted for many years. Every young man believes that there is no god but God, and that he is born to be His prophet—though perhaps that belief is not so common nowadays. I am speaking of many years ago.

Science, however, has long since changed all that. Those terrible Muses, geology, astronomy, and particularly biology, have reduced man to a humility which, if in some degree salutary, becomes in its excess highly dangerous. Why should one maggot in this great cheese of the world take itself more seriously than others? Why dream mightily and do bravely if we are but a little higher than the beasts that perish? Nature cares nothing about us, and her giant forces laugh at our fancies. The world has no such meaning as we thought. Poets and saints, deluded by unhealthy imaginations, have misled us, and it is quite likely that the wild waves are really saying nothing more important than 'Beecham's Pills.'

'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a

'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy, falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'

'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life—of all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world passed as in a dream before me,—soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St. Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only leave it together.

The carbon compounds!

I took down Romeo and Juliet, listened

Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of human life.

Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.

In saying this, I do not forget our debt to

No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy is not considered aristocratic. Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God, and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be

'Things of a day!' exclaims Pindar. 'What is a man? What is a man not?'

It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves

Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.

Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar temperament in his Imaginary Portraits. Sebastian van Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'

'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike had been

This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent—so the increase of suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a lack of humour to do so. Whilenoblesse oblige; and while he is happy and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why we should go on living it—except on

Sebastian van Storck refused 'to be or do any limited thing,' but the answer to his mysticism is to be found in a finer mysticism, that which says that there is no limited act or thing, but that the significance, as well as the pathos, of eternity is in our smallest joys and sorrows, as in our most everyday transactions, and the greatness of God incarnate in His humblest child.

This, the old doctrine of the microcosm, seems in certain moments, moments one would wish to say, of divination, strangely plain and clear—when, in Blake's words, it seems so easy to

Perhaps in the street, an effect of light, a passing face, yes, even the plaintive grind of a street organ, some such everyday circum

Matthew Arnold, ever sensitive to such spiritual states, has described these trance-like visitations in 'The Buried Life'—

'To be or do any limited thing'! What indeed, we ask in such hours, is a limited thing, when all the humble interests of our daily life are palpably big with eternity? Is the first kiss of a great love a limited thing? though there is, unhappily, no denying that it comes to an end! When a young husband and wife smile across to each other above the sleep of their little child—is that a limited thing? When the siren voices of the world blend together on the lips of a young poet, and with rapt eyes and hot heart he makes a song as of the morning stars—is that a limited thing? Are love, and genius, and duty done in the face of death—are these limited things? I think not—and man, indeed, knows better.

Greatness is not relative. It is absolute. It is not for man to depress himself by measuring himself against the eternities and the immensities external to him. What he

And the more man sees himself forsaken by the universe, the more opportunity to vindicate his own greatness. Is there no kind heart beating through the scheme of things?—man's heart shall still be kind. Will the eternal silence make mock of his dreams and his idealisms, laugh coldly at 'the splendid purpose in his eyes'? Well, so be it. His dreams and idealisms are none the less noble things, and if the gods do thus make mock of mortal joy and pain—let us be grateful that we were born mere men.

Moreover, he has one great answer to the universe—the answer of courage. He is still Prometheus, and there is no limit to what he can bear. Let the vultures of pain rend his heart as they will, he can still hiss 'coward' in the face of the Eternal. Nay, he can even laugh at his sufferings—thanks to the spirit of humour, that most blessed of ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long since broken, by

But while his courage and his humour are defences of which he cannot be disarmed, whatever be the intention of the Eternal, it is by no means certain that nature does not mean kindly by man. Perhaps the pain of the world is but the rough horseplay of great powers that mean but jest—and kill us in it: as though one played at 'tick' with an elephant!

Perhaps, after all,—who knows?—God is love, and His great purpose kind.

Surely, when you think of it, the existence in man of the senses of love and pity implies the probability of their existence elsewhere in the universe too.

So runs the profoundest thought in modern poetry—and need I say it is Mr. Meredith's?

As the fragrance and colour of the rose must in some occult way be properties of

I confess that this seems to me no mere fancy, but a really comforting speculation. Pain, we say, is inherent in the scheme of the universe; but is not love seen to be no less inherent, too?

There must be some soul of beauty to animate the lovely face of the world, some soul of goodness to account for its saints. If the gods are cruel, it is strange that man should be so kind, and that some pathetic spirit of tenderness should seem to stir even in the bosoms of beasts and birds.

Meanwhile, we cannot too often insist that, whatever uncertainties there be, man has one certainty—himself. Science has

After all the scientific mockery of the old religious ideal of the importance of man, one begins to wonder if his Ptolemaic fancy that he was the centre of the universe, and that it was all made for him, is not nearer the If truth than the pitiless theories which hardly allow him equality with the flea that perishes.

Suppose if, after all, the stars were really meant as his bedtime candles, and the sun's purpose in rising is really that he may catch the 8.37!

For, as Sir Thomas Browne says in his solemn English, 'there is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.'

The long winter of materialistic science seems to be breaking up, and the old ideals are seen trooping back with something more than their old beauty, in the new spiritual spring that seems to be moving in the hearts of men.

After all its talk, science has done little more than correct the misprints of religion. Essentially, the old spiritualistic and poetic theories of life are seen, not merely weakly to satisfy the cravings of man's nature, but to be mostly in harmony with certain strange and moving facts in his constitution, which the materialists unscientifically ignore.

It was important, and has been helpful, to insist that man is an animal, but it is still more important to insist that he is a spirit as well. He is, so to say, an animal by accident, a spirit by birthright: and, however homely his duties may occasionally seem, his life is bathed in the light of a sacred transfiguring significance, its smallest acts flash with divine meanings, its highest moments are rich with 'the pathos of eternity,' and its humblest duties mighty with the responsibilities of a god.

DEATH AND TWO FRIENDS

A DIALOGUE (To the Memory of J.S. and T.C.L.)

PERSONS: SCRIPTOR AND LECTOR.

[This dialogue was written originally as a rejoinder to certain criticisms on a book of mine entitled, The Religion of a Literary Man—Religio Scriptoris—hence the names given to the two 'persons.' It was written in March 1894, before an event in the writer's life to which, erroneously, some have supposed it to refer.]

LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for the life after death?

SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters less to us than we imagine.

LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor. I am sure that it matters

SCRIPTOR. Less than you think, my dear Lector. Besides, you are really too young to know. It is true that, as years go, you are ten years my senior, but what of that? You have that vigorous health which is the secret of perpetual youth. You have not yet realised decay, not to speak of death. The immortality of the soul is a question wide of you, who have as yet practically no doubt of the immortality of the body. But I—well, it would be melodramatic to say that I face death every day. The metaphor applies but to desperate callings and romantic complaints. To some Death comes like a footpad, suddenly, and presents his pistol—and the smoke that curls upward from his empty barrel is your soul.

To another he comes featureless, a stealthily accumulating London fog, that slowly, slowly chokes the life out of you, without allowing you the consolation of a single picturesque moment, a single grand attitude. For you, probably, Death will only come when you die. I have to live with him as well. I

That's you, my dear Lector, for all your forty years.

LECTOR. All the more reason, Scriptor, that you should desire a hereafter. You sometimes talk of the work you would do if you were a robust Philistine such as I. Would it not be worth while to live again, if only to make sure of that magnum opus—just to realise those dreams that you say are daily escaping you?

SCRIPTOR. Ah! so speaks the energetic man, eager to take the world on his shoulders. I know the images of death that please you, Lector—such as that great one of Arnold's, about 'the sounding labour-house vast of being.'

But, Lector, you who love work so well—have you never heard tell of a thing called Rest? Have you never known what it is to be tired, my Lector?—not tired at the end

LECTOR. But you are no fair judge, Scrip

SCRIPTOR. Admitted, so far as my views are the outcome of my particular condition. But you forget that the condition I have been supposing is not merely particular, but, on the contrary, the most general among men. Was it not old age?—which, like youth, is independent of years. You may be young beyond your years, I may be old in advance of them; but old age does come some time, and with it the desire of rest.

LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain hours of its youth over again?—and would the old man not give all he possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity?

SCRIPTOR. He would give everything—but the certainty of rest. After seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us in. Besides, age may not be so

LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice betrays you. In spite of you, it saddens all your words. Tell me, have you ever known what it is actually to lose any one who is dear to you? Have you looked on death face to face?

SCRIPTOR. Yes, Lector, I have—but once. It is now about five years ago, but the impression of it haunts me to this hour. Perhaps the memory is all the keener because it was my one experience. In a world where custom stales all things, save Cleopatra, it is all the better perhaps not to see even too much of Death, lest we grow familiar with him. For instance, doctors and soldiers, who look on him daily, seem to lose the sense of his terror—nay, worse, of his tragedy. Maybe it is something in his favour, and Death, like others, may only need to be known to be loved.

LECTOR. But tell me, Scriptor, of this sad experience, which even now it moves you to

SCRIPTOR. Sad enough, Lector, but beautiful for all that, beautiful as winter. It was winter when she of whom I am thinking died—a winter that seemed to make death itself whiter and colder on her marble forehead. It is but one sad little story of all the heaped-up sorrow of the world; but in it, as in a shell, I seem to hear the murmur of all the tides of tears that have surged about the lot of man from the beginning.

There were two dear friends of mine whom I used to call the happiest lovers in the world. They had loved truly from girlhood and boyhood, and after some struggle—for they were not born into that class which is denied the luxury of struggle—at length saw a little home bright in front of them. And then Jenny, who had been ever bright and strong, suddenly and unaccountably fell ill. Like the stroke of a sword, like the stride of a giant, Death, to whom they had never given a thought, was upon them. It was consumption, and love could only watch and pray. Suddenly my

Ah! her face! How can I describe it? It was much sweeter afterwards, but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling sleep' of a strong narcotic. She would begin a sentence and let it wither away unfinished, and point sadly and almost humorously to her straight black hair, clammy as the feathers of a dead bird lying in the rain. Her hearing was strangely keen. And yet she did not know, was not to know. How was one to talk to her—talk of being well again, and books and country walks, when she had so

Have you never looked ahead towards some trial, some physical trial, maybe an operation?—for perhaps the pains of the body are the keenest, after all—those of the spirit are at least in some part metaphor. You look forward with dread, yet it is at last over. It is behind you. And have you never thought that so it will be with death some day? Poor little Jenny was to face the great operation.

Next time I saw her she was dead. In our hateful English fashion, they had shut her up in a dark room, and we had to take candles to see her. I shall never forget the moment when my eyes first rested on that awful snow-white sheet, so faintly indented by the fragile form beneath, lines very fragile, but oh! so hard and cold, like the indentations upon frozen snow; never forget my strange unaccountable terror when he on one side and I on the other turned down the icy sheet from her face. But terror changed to awe and reverence, as her face came upon us with its sweet sphinx-like smile. Lying there, with a little gold chain round her neck and a chrysanthemum in the bosom of her night-gown, there was a curious regality about her, a look as though she wore a crown our eyes were unable to see. And while I gazed upon her, the sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice. Poor lad!—poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest

LECTOR. But, my friend, this is to feel too much; it is morbid.

SCRIPTOR. Morbid! How can one really feel and not be morbid? If one be morbid, one can still be brave.

LECTOR. But surely, true-lover as you are, it would be a joy to you to think that this terrible parting of death will not be final. We cannot love so well without hoping that we may meet our loved ones somewhere after death.

SCRIPTOR. Hopes! wishes! desires! What of them? We hope, we desire all things.wish it, wish it with a pathetic urgency which is too poignant to bear, and which the wise man bravely stifles. It would all be different if we knew.

LECTOR. But does not science even, of late, hold out the promise of its probability?—and the greatest poets and thinkers have always been convinced of its truth.

SCRIPTOR. The promise of a probability! O my Lector, what a poor substitute is that for a certainty! And as for the great men you speak of, what does their 'instinctive' assurance amount to but a strong sense of their own existence at the moment of writing or speaking? Does one of them anywhere assert immortality as a fact—a fact of which he has his own personal proof and knowledge—a scientific, not an imaginative, theological fact? Arguments on the subject are naught. It is waste of time to read them; unsupported by fact,

LECTOR. Yet may not a dream be of service to reality, my friend? Is it not certain that people are all the better and all the happier for this dream, as you call it?—for what seems to me this sustaining faith?

SCRIPTOR. Happier? Some people, perhaps, in a lazy, unworthy fashion. But 'better'? Well, so long as we believed in 'eternal punishment' no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness' by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise; but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can be moralising I fail to understand. To my mind, indeed, far from being moralising, this belief in immortality is responsible

LECTOR. I am glad to be reminded, Scriptor, that you are a poet, for the line of your argument had almost made me forget it. One expects other views from a poet.

SCRIPTOR. When, my dear Lector, shall we get rid of the silly idea that the poet should give us only the ornamental view of life, and rock us to sleep, like babies, with pretty lullabies? Is it not possible to make facts sing as well as fancies? With all this beautiful world to sing of—for beautiful itcertainties for his theme, we yet beg him to sing to us of shadows!

And you talk of 'faith.' 'Faith' truly is what we want, but it is faith in the life here, not in the life hereafter. Faith in the life here! Let our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it—I would hang them as enemies of society.

LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point—you at least hope for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news?

SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the Strand? You should go and have a pennyworth of the mysteries of time and space! How long will Edison's latest magic toy survive this popularisation, I wonder? For a little moment it awakens the sense of wonder in the idly curious, who set the demon tube to their ears; but if they make any remarks at all, it is of the cleverness of Mr. Edison,

No! let us keep the Unseen—or, if it must be discovered, let the key thereof be given only to true-lovers and poets.

A SEAPORT IN THE MOON

No one is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astronomer, and I trust that you never pay any attention to his remarks on the moon. He knows as much about the moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the fair lady whose beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is but one opinion upon

Science says that the moon is a dead world, a cosmic ship littered with the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat of vitality has long since escaped. It is the ghost that rises from its tomb every night, to haunt its faithless lover, the world. It is a country of ancient silver-mines, unworked for centuries. You may see the gaping mouths of the dark old shafts through your telescopes. You may even see the rusting pit tackle, the ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and shovel. Or you may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in the young fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad half-crown.

As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief—and no one was ever more intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a country of great seaports, whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. They are the ships that sail just when and where you please. You take your passage on that

I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy wharf, and the dark ship was there. It was impatient, like all of us, to leave the world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its engines throbbed against

At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye were out of sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though we should never reach our port in the moon—so it seemed to me as I lay awake in my little cabin, listening to the patient thud and throb of the great screws, beating in the ship's side like a human heart.

Talking with my fellow-voyagers, I was surprised to find that we were not all volunteers. Some, in fact, complained pitifully. They had, they said, been going about their business a day or two before, and suddenly a mysterious captain had laid hold of them, and pressed them to sail this unknown sea. Thus, without a word of warning, they had been compelled to leave behind them all they held dear. This, one felt, was a little hard of

There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two young lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon just after their marriage, and there was another. What a surprise it would be to all three, for I had written no letter to say I was coming. Indeed, it was just a sudden impulse, the pistol-flash of a long desire.

I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they were now living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a sad smile that it would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.

'Oh, well then,' I thought, 'I know what it will be like. There shall be a great restless, tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds for ever ruffling the sails of busy ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on

'If it be early morning, what shall I do? I shall run to the house in which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted again, and kiss my hand to their shrouded window; and then I shall run on and on till the city is behind and the sweetness of country lanes is about me, and I shall gather flowers as I run, from sheer wantonness of joy; and then at last, flushed and breathless, I shall stand beneath her window. I shall stand and listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy curtains, and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid me keep silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning star, and say, "No, I will not

As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes; like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems. Yes, there are seaports in the moon; there are ships to take us there.

THE END

Most of the foregoing essays have made a first appearance either in The Yellow Book, The Nineteenth Century, The Cosmopolitan, The Westminster Gazette, or The Realm, to the editors of which the writer is indebted for kind permission to reprint.