The Savoy, no. 3, 4 and 5  

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The Savoy

• The Savoy, no. 3, 4 and 5[1]

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THE SAVOY

No. 3

AN ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY

July 1896 Price 2/'

EDITED BY ARTHUR SYMONS

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THE SAVOY— N° III

THE SAVOY

EDITED BY ARTHUR SYMONS

No. 3

July 1896

LEONARD SMITHERS

ARUNDEL STREET, STRAND LONDON W.C.

CHISWICK PRESS: — CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON,

EDITORIAL NOTE

NEW volume of "The Savoy" commences with the July number, and it has been decided, in conse- quence of the interest which has been taken in the two numbers already issued, to make the Magazine a Monthly instead of a Quarterly. The policy of " The Savoy " will remain precisely what it has hitherto been, but the opportunities of monthly publication will permit of the issue of a serial, and arrangements are being made with Mr. George Moore for the serial publication of his new novel, " Evelyn Innes."

It is not unreasonably assumed that those who have welcomed " The Savoy " as a Quarterly will welcome it with at least equal interest as a Monthly, and it is confidently hoped that the large public, to which a Quarterly comes with too occasional an appeal, will appreciate the monthly publication of a Periodical whose only aim is to offer its readers letterpress which is literature, and illustrations which are art.

Arthur Symons.

June, 1896.

All communications should be directed to THE EDITOR OF The Savoy, Effingfiam House, Arundel Street, Strand, London, W.C. MSS. should be type-written, and stamps enclosed for their return.

LITERARY CONTENTS

PAGE

EDITORIAL NOTE 7

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S CO URTSHIP. A Story by Hubert Crackan-

THORPE IS

BRETON AFTERNOON. A Poem by Ernest Dowson .... 40 WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE

COMEDY.

I. His Opinions upon Art. (The First of Three Articles by

W. B. Yeats) 41

IN CARNIVAL. A Poem by Arthur Svmons 58

THE CLOWN. A Story by Roman Mathieu-Wierzbinski . 59

a SULLIVAN RUA TO MARY LA VELL. A Poem by W. B. Yeats . 67 FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE— II. (The Second of Three Articles by

Havelock Ellis) 68

FROM THE "IGNEZ DE CASTRO" OF ANTONIO FERREIRA.

Translated into English Verse by Edgar Prestage ..... 82

BERTHA AT THE FAIR. A Sketch 86

THE BALLAD OF A BARBER. A Poem by Aubrey Beardsley (illustrated) 9 1 THE SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE. An Essay by Edward Carpenter . 94 THE FUTURE PHENOMENON. A Prose Poem translated from the

French of Stephane Mallarme by George Moore . . . . . 98 A LITER AR Y CA USERIE —On Some Novels, chiefly French. By Arthur

Symons 100

NOTE 103

I

ART CONTENTS

CO VER . \ t

TITLE PAGE J Desi S ned b >' AuBREY Beardsley j

THE STONE BATH. A Lithograph by Charles H. Shannon

THE PASSING OF DANTE AND VIRGIL THROUGH THE

PORTICO OF HELL. After an unpublished Water-Colour Drawing by

William Blake

FRANCESCA AND PAOLO. After the rare Engraving by William Blake ANGRY SPIRITS FIGHTING IN THE

WATERS OF THE STYX. ANTAEUS SETTING VIRGIL AND

DANTE UPON THE VERGE OF

COCYTUS

CARICATURE OF ARTHUR ROBERTS.

Drawing by Max Beerbohm 65

THE COIFFING \ After Pen-and-ink Drawings by J . . .90

A CUL-DE-LAMPE J Aubrey Beardsley \ . . . .93

After unpublished Water-Colour Draw- ings by William Blake

A Wood-Engraving after the

5 !

55

The Whole of the Reproductions in this Volume, in line and half-tone blocks, and the Wood-Engraving, are by Mr. Paul Naumann.

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTSHIP

i

STAMPEDE of huddled sheep, wildly scampering over the slaty shingle, emerged from the leaden mist that muffled the fell-top, and a shrill shepherd's whistle broke the damp stillness of the air. And presently a man's figure appeared, following the sheep down the hillside. He halted a moment to whistle curtly to his two dogs, who, laying back their ears, chased the sheep at top-speed beyond the brow ; then, his hands deep in his pockets, he strode vigorously forward. A streak of white smoke from a toiling train was creeping silently across the distance : the great, grey, desolate undulations of treeless country showed no other sign of life.

The sheep hurried in single file along a tiny track worn threadbare amid the brown, lumpy grass ; and, as the man came round the mountain's shoulder, a narrow valley opened out beneath him — a scanty patchwork of green fields, and, here and there, a whitewashed farm, flanked by a dark cluster of sheltering trees.

The man walked with a loose, swinging gait. His figure was spare and angular : he wore a battered, black felt hat and clumsy, iron-bound boots : his clothes were dingy from long exposure to the weather. He had close-set, insignificant eyes, much wrinkled, and stubbly eyebrows streaked with grey. His mouth was close-shaven, and drawn by his abstraction into hard and taciturn lines ; beneath his chin bristled an unkempt fringe of sandy-coloured hair.

When he reached the foot of the fell, the twilight was already blurring the distance. The sheep scurried, with a noisy rustling, across a flat, swampy stretch, over-grown with rushes, while the dogs headed them towards a gap in a low, ragged wall built of loosely-heaped boulders. The man swung the gate to after them, and waited, whistling peremptorily, recalling the dogs. A moment later, the animals re-appeared, cringing as they crawled through the bars of the gate. He kicked out at them contemptuously, and mounting a stone stile a few yards further up the road, dropped into a narrow lane.

16 THE SAVOY

Presently, as he passed a row of lighted windows, he heard a voice call to him. He stopped, and perceived a crooked, white-bearded figure, wearing clerical clothes, standing in the garden gateway.

" Good evening, Anthony. A raw evening this."

" Ay, Mr. Blencarn, it 's a bit frittish," he answered. " I've jest bin gittin' a few lambs off t' fell. I hope ye're keepin' fairly, an' Miss Rosa too." He spoke briefly, with a loud, spontaneous cordiality.

" Thank ye, Anthony, thank ye. Rosa 's down at the church, playing over the hymns for to-morrow. How 's Mrs. Garstin? "

" Nicely, thank ye, Mr. Blencarn. She 's wonderful active, is mother."

" Well, good-night to ye, Anthony," said the old man, clicking the gate.

" Good-night, Mr. Blencarn," he called back.

A few minutes later the twinkling lights of the village came in sight, and from within the sombre form of the square-towered church, looming by the roadside, the slow, solemn strains of the organ floated out on the evening air. Anthony lightened his tread : then paused, listening ; but, presently, becoming aware that a man stood, listening also, on the bridge some few yards distant, he moved forward again. Slackening his pace, as he approached, he eyed the figure keenly ; but the man paid no heed to him, remaining, with his back turned, gazing over the parapet into the dark, gurgling stream.

Anthony trudged along the empty village street, past the gleaming squares of ruddy gold, starting on either side out of the darkness. Now and then he looked furtively backwards. The straight open road lay behind him, glimmer- ing wanly : the organ seemed to have ceased : the figure on the bridge had left the parapet, and appeared to be moving away towards the church. Anthony halted, watching it till it had disappeared into the blackness beneath the churchyard trees. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he left the road, and mounted an upland meadow towards his mother's farm.

It was a bare, oblong house. In front, a whitewashed porch, and a narrow garden-plot, enclosed by a low iron railing, were dimly discernible : behind, the steep fell-side loomed like a monstrous, mysterious curtain hung across the night. He passed round the back into the twilight of a wide yard, cobbled and partially grass-grown, vaguely flanked by the shadowy outlines of long, low farm-buildings. All was wrapped in darkness : somewhere overhead a bat fluttered, darting its puny scream.

Inside, a blazing peat-fire scattered capering shadows across the smooth, stone floor, flickered among the dim rows of hams suspended from the ceiling and on the panelled cupboards of dark, glistening oak. A servant-girl, spread-

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTSHIP 17

ing the cloth for supper, clattered her clogs in and out of the kitchen : old Mrs. Garstin was stooping before the hearth, tremulously turning some girdle- cakes that lay roasting in the embers.

At the sound of Anthony's heavy tread in the passage, she rose, glancing sharply at the clock above the chimney-piece. She was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years. Her face was gaunt and sallow ; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness of her features. She wore a black widow's cap above her iron-gray hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled, chequered apron.

" Ye're varra late, Tony," she remarked querulously.

He unloosed his woollen neckerchief, and when he had hung it methodically with his hat behind the door, answered :

" 'Twas terrible thick on t' fell-top, an' them two bitches be that senseless."

She caught his sleeve, and, through her spectacles, suspiciously scrutinized his face.

" Ye did na meet wi' Rosa Blencarn ? "

" Nay, she was in church, hymn-playin', wi' Luke Stock hangin' roond door," he retorted bitterly, rebuffing her with rough impatience.

She moved away, nodding sententiously to herself. They began supper : neither spoke : Anthony sat slowly stirring his tea, and staring moodily into the flames : the bacon on his plate lay untouched. From time to time his mother, laying down her knife and fork, looked across at him in unconcealed asperity, pursing her wide, ungainly mouth. At last, abruptly setting down her cup, she broke out :

" I wonder ye havn'a mare pride, Tony. For hoo lang are ye goin' t' continue settin' mopin' and broodin' like a seek sheep. Ye'll jest mak yesself ill, an' then I reckon what ye'll prove satisfied. Ay, but I wonder ye hav'na more pride."

But he made no answer, remaining unmoved, as if he had not heard.

Presently, half to himself, without raising his eyes, he murmured :

" Luke be goin' South, Monday."

" Well, ye canna tak' oop wi' his leavin's anyways. It hasna coom t' that, has it ? Ye doan't intend settin' all t' parish a laughin' at ye a second occasion ? "

He flushed dully, and bending over his plate, mechanically began his supper.

" Wa dang it," he broke out a minute later, " d'ye think I heed t' cacklin' o' fifty parishes? Na, not I," and, with a short, grim laugh, he brought his fist down heavily on the oak table.

18 THE SAVOY

" Ye're daft, Tony," the old woman blurted.

" Daft or na daft, I tell ye this, mother, that I be forty-six year o' age this back-end, and there be soom things I will na listen to. Rosa Blencarn 's bonny enough for me."

"Ay, bonny enough — I've na patience wi' ye. Bonny enough — tricked oot in her furbelows, gallivantin' wi' every royster fra Pe'rith. Bonny enough — that be all ye think on. She 's bin a proper parson's niece — the giddy, feckless creature, an' she'd mak' ye a proper sort o' wife, Tony Garstin, ye great, fond booby."

She pushed back her chair, and, hurriedly clattering the crockery, began to clear away the supper.

" T'hoose be mine, t' Lord be praised," she continued in a loud, hard voice, " an' as long as He spare me, Tony, I'll na' see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it."

Anthony scowled, without replying, and drew his chair to the hearth. His mother bustled about the room behind him. After a while she asked :

" Did ye pen t' lambs in t' back field ? "

" Na, they're in Hullam bottom," he answered curtly.

The door closed behind her, and by-and-by he could hear her moving overhead. Meditatively blinking, he filled his pipe clumsily, and pulling a crumpled newspaper from his pocket, sat on over the smouldering fire, reading and stolidly puffing.

II

The music rolled through the dark, empty church. The last, leaden flicker of daylight glimmered in through the pointed windows, and beyond the level rows of dusky pews, tenanted only by a litter of prayer-books, two guttering candles revealed the organ-pipes, and the young girl's swaying figure.

She played vigorously. Once or twice the tune stumbled ; and she recovered it impatiently, bending over the key-board, showily flourishing her wrists as she touched the stops. She was bare-headed (her hat and cloak lay beside her on a stool). She had fair, fluffy hair, cut short behind her neck ; large, round eyes, heightened by a fringe of dark lashes ; rough, ruddy cheeks, and a rosy, full-lipped, unstable mouth. She was dressed quite simply, in a black, close-fitting bodice, a little frayed at the sleeves. Her hands and neck were coarsely fashioned : her comeliness was brawny, literal, unfinished, as it were.

When at last the ponderous chords of the Amen faded slowly into the

ANTHONY GARS TIN'S COURTSHIP 19

twilight, flushed, breathing a little quickly, she paused, listening to the stillness of the church. Presently a small boy emerged from behind the organ.

" Good evenin', Miss Rosa," he called, trotting briskly away down the aisle.

" Good night, Robert," she answered, absently.

After a while, with an impatient gesture, as if to shake some importunate thought from her mind, she rose abruptly, pinned on her hat, threw her cloak round her shoulders, blew out the candles, and groped her way through the church, towards the half-open door. As she hurried along the narrow path- way, that led across the churchyard, of a sudden, a figure started out of the blackness.

" Who's that ? " she cried, in a loud, frightened voice.

A man's uneasy laugh answered her.

" It's only me, Rosa. I didna think t' scare ye. I've bin vvaitin' for ye> this hoor past."

She made no reply, but quickened her pace. He strode on beside her.

" I'm off, Monday, ye know," he continued. And, as she said nothing,

" Will ye na stop jest a minnit. I'd like t' speak a few words wi' ye before I go, an to-morrow I hev t' git over t' Scarsdale betimes," he persisted.

" I don't want t' speak wi' ye : I don't want ever to see ye agin. I jest hate the sight o' ye." She spoke with a vehement, concentrated hoarseness.

" Nay, but ye must listen to me. I will na be put off wi' fratchin speeches." And, gripping her arm, he forced her to stop.

" Loose me, ye great beast," she broke out.

" I'll na hould ye, if ye'll jest stand quiet-like. I mean t' speak fair t' ye, Rosa."

They stood at a bend in the road, face to face, quite close together. Behind his burly form stretched the dimness of a grey, ghostly field.

" What is't ye hev to say to me ? Hev done wi' it quick," she said sullenly.

" It be jest this, Rosa," he began with dogged gravity. " I want t' tell ye that ef any trouble comes t' ye after I'm gone — ye know t' what I refer — I want t' tell ye that I'm prepared t' act square by ye. I've written out on an envelope my address in London. Luke Stock, care o' Purcell & Co., Smithfield Market, London."

" Ye're a bad, sinful man. I jest hate t' sight o' ye. I wish ye were dead."

" Ay, but I reckon what ye'd ha best thought o' that before. Ye've changed yer whistle considerable since Tuesday. Nay, hould on," he added, as she struggled to push past him. " Here's t' envelope."

B

20 THE SAVOY

She snatched the paper, and tore it passionately, scattering the fragments on to the road. When she had finished, he burst out angrily :

" Ye cussed, unreasonable fool."

" Let me pass, ef ye've nought mare t' say," she cried.

" Nay, I'll na part wi' ye this fashion. Ye can speak soft enough when ye choose." And seizing her shoulders, he forced her backwards, against the wall.

" Ye do look fine, an' na mistake, when ye're jest ablaze wi' ragin'," he laughed bluntly, lowering his face to hers.

" Loose me, loose me, ye great coward," she gasped, striving to free her arms.

Holding her fast, he expostulated :

" Coom, Rosa, can we na part friends ? "

" Part friends, indeed," she retorted bitterly. " Friends wi' the likes o' you. What d'ye tak me for? Let me git home, I tell ye. An' please God I'll never set eyes on ye again. I hate t' sight o' ye."

" Be off wi' ye, then," he answered, pushing her roughly back into the road. " Be off wi' ye, ye silly. Ye canna say I hav na spak fair t' ye, an' by goom, ye'll na see me shally-wallyin this fashion agin. Be off wi' ye : ye can jest shift for yerself, since ye canna keep a civil tongue in yer head."

The girl, catching at her breath, stood as if dazed, watching his retreating figure ; then, starting forward at a run, disappeared up the hill, into the darkness.

Ill

Old Mr. Blencarn concluded his husky sermon. The scanty congregation, who had been sitting, stolidly immobile in their stiff, Sunday clothes, shuffled to their feet, and the pewful of school-children, in clamorous chorus, intoned the final hymn. Anthony stood near the organ, absently contemplating, while the rude melody resounded through the church, Rosa's deft manipulation of the key-board. The rugged lines of his face were relaxed to a vacant, thoughtful limpness, that aged his expression not a little : now and then, as if for reference, he glanced questioningly at the girl's profile.

A few minutes later, the service was over, and the congregation sauntered out down the aisle. A gawky group of men remained loitering by the church door : one of them called to Anthony ; but, nodding curtly, he passed on, and strode away down the road, across the grey, upland meadows, towards home. As soon as he had breasted the hill, however, and was no longer visible from

ANTHONY GARSTINS COURTSHIP z\

below, he turned abruptly to the left, along a small, swampy hollow, till he had reached the lane that led down from the fellsidc.

He clambered over a rugged, moss-grown wall, and stood, gazing expec- tantly down the dark, disused roadway : then, after a moment's hesitation, perceiving nobody, seated himself beneath the wall, on a projecting slab of stone.

Overhead hung a sombre, drifting sky. A gusty wind rollicked down from the fell — huge masses of chilly gray, stripped of the last night's mist. A few dead leaves fluttered over the stones, and from off the fellside there floated the plaintive, quavering rumour of many bleating sheep.

Before long, he caught sight of two figures coming towards him, slowly climbing the hill. He sat awaiting their approach, fidgetting with his sandy beard, and abstractedly grinding the ground beneath his heel. At the brow they halted : plunging his hands deep into his pockets, he strolled sheepishly towards them.

" Ah ! good day t' ye, Anthony," called the old man, in a shrill, breathless voice. " 'Tis a long hill, an' my legs are not what they were. Time was when I'd think nought o' a whole day's tramp on t' fells. Ay, I'm gittin' feeble> Anthony, that's what 'tis. And if Rosa here wasn't the great, strong lass she is, I don't know how her old uncle 'd manage ; " and he turned to the girl with a proud, tremulous smile.

"Will ye tak my arm a bit, Mr. Blencarn ? Miss Rosa '11 be tired, likely," Anthony asked.

" Nay, Mr. Garstin, but I can manage nicely," the girl interrupted sharply.

Anthony looked up at her as she spoke. She wore a straw hat, trimmed with crimson velvet, and a black, fur-edged cape, that seemed to set off mightily the fine whiteness of her neck. Her large, dark eyes were fixed upon him. He shifted his feet uneasily, and dropped his glance.

She linked her uncle's arm in hers, and the three moved slowly forward. Old Mr. Blencarn walked with difficulty, pausing at intervals for breath. Anthony, his eyes bent on the ground, sauntered beside him, clumsily kicking at the cobbles that lay in his path.

When they reached the vicarage gate, the old man asked him to come inside.

" Not jest now, thank ye, Mr. Blencarn. I've that lot o' lambs t' see to before dinner. It's a grand marnin', this," he added, inconsequently.

" Uncle 's bought a nice lot o' Leghorns, Tuesday," Rosa remarked. Anthony met her gaze ; there was a grave, subdued expression on her face this morning, that made her look more of a woman, less of a girl.

22 THE SAVOY

" Ay, do ye show him the birds, Rosa. I'd be glad to have his opinion on 'em."

The old man turned to hobble into the house, and Rosa, as she supported his arm, called back over her shoulder : " I'll not be a minute, Mr. Garstin."

Anthony strolled round to the yard behind the house, and waited, watch- ing a flock of glossy-white poultry that strutted, perkily pecking, over the grass-grown cobbles.

" Ay, Miss Rosa, they're a bonny lot," he remarked, as the girl joined him. " Are they not ? " she rejoined, scattering a handful of corn before her. The birds scuttled across the yard with greedy, outstretched necks. The two stood, side by side, gazing at them.

" What did he give for 'em ? " Anthony asked. " Fifty-five shillings." " Ay," he assented, nodding absently.

" Was Dr. Sanderson na seein' o' yer father yesterday ? " he asked, after a moment.

" He came in t' forenoon. He said he was jest na worse." "Ye knaw, Miss Rosa, as I'm still thinkin' on ye," he began abruptly, without looking up.

" I reckon it ain't much use," she answered shortly, scattering another handful of corn towards the birds. " I reckon I'll never marry. I'm jest

weary o' bein' courted "

" I would na weary ye wi' courtin'," he interrupted. She laughed noisily.

" Ye are a queer customer, an na mistake."

" I'm a match for Luke Stock anyway," he continued fiercely. " Ye think nought o' takin' oop wi' him — about as ranty, wild a young feller as ever stepped. The girl reddened, and bit her lip.

" I don't know what you mean, Mr. Garstin. It seems to me ye're mighty hasty in jumpin' t' conclusions."

" Mabbee I kin see thing or two," he retorted, doggedly. " Luke Stock 's gone to London, anyway." " Ay, an' a powerful good job too, in t' opinion o' some folks." " Ye're jest jealous," she exclaimed, with a forced titter. " Ye're jest jealous o' Luke Stock."

" Nay, but ye need na fill yer head wi' that nonsense. I'm too deep set on ye t' feel jealousy," he answered, gravely.

ANTHONY G AUSTIN'S COURTSHIP 23

The smile faded from her face, as she murmured :

" I canna mak ye out, Mr. Garstin."

" Nay, that ye canna. An' I suppose it's natural, considcrin' ye're little more than a child, an' I'm a'most old enough to be yer father," he retorted, with blunt bitterness.

" But ye know yer mother's took that dislike t' me. She'd never abide the sight o' me at Houtsey."

He remained silent a moment, moodily reflecting.

" She'd jest ha' t' git ower it. I see nought in that objection," he declared.

" Nay, Mr. Garstin, it canna be. Indeed it canna be at all. Ye'd best jest put it right from yer mind, once and for all."

" I'd jest best put it off my mind, had I ? Ye talk like a child ! " he burst out, scornfully. " I intend ye t' coom t' love me, an' I will na tak ye till ye do. I'll jest go on waitin' for ye, an', mark my words, my day 'ull coom at last."

He spoke loudly, in a slow, stubborn voice, and stepped suddenly towards her. With a faint, frightened cry she shrank back into the doorway of the hen-house.

" Ye talk like a prophet. Ye sort o' skeer me."

He laughed grimly, and paused, reflectively scanning her face. He seemed about to continue in the same strain ; but, instead, turned abruptly on his heel, and strode away through the garden gate.

IV

For three hundred years there had been a Garstin at Houtsey : generation after generation had tramped the gray stretch of upland, in the spring-time scattering their flocks over the fell-sides, and, at the " back-end," on dark, winter afternoons, driving them home again, down the broad bridle-path, that led over the " raise." They had been a race of few words, " keeping themselves to themselves," as the phrase goes ; beholden to no man, filled with a dogged, churlish pride — an upright, old-fashioned race, stubborn, long-lived, rude in speech, slow of resolve.

Anthony had never seen his father, who had died one night, upon the fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in the great snowstorm of 1849. Folks had said that he was the only Garstin, who had failed to make old man's bones.

After his death, Jake Atkinson, from Ribblehead in Yorkshire, had come to live at Houtsey. Jake was a fine farmer, a canny bargainer, and very handy among the sheep, till he took to drink, and roystering every week with

24 THE SAVOY

the town wenches up at Carlisle. He was a corpulent, deep-voiced, free- handed fellow : when his time came, though he died very hardly, he remained festive and convivial to the last. And for years afterwards, in the valley, his memory lingered : men spoke of him regretfully, recalling his quips, his feats of strength, and his choice breed of Herdwicke rams. But he left behind him a host of debts up at Carlisle, in Penrith, and in almost even' market town — debts that he had long ago pretended to have paid with money that belonged to his sister. The widow Garstin sold the twelve Herdwicke rams, and nine acres of land : within six weeks she had cleared off every penny, and for thirteen months, on Sundays, wore her mourning with a mute, forbidding grimness : the bitter thought that, unbeknown to her, Jake had acted dishonestly in money matters, and that he had ended his days in riotous sin, soured her pride, imbued her with a rancorous hostility against all the world. For she was a very proud woman, independent, holding her head high, so folks said, like a Garstin bred and born ; and Anthony, although some reckoned him quiet and of little account, came to take after her as he grew into manhood.

She took into her own hands the management of the Houtsey farm, and set the boy to work for her along with the two farm servants. It was twenty-five years now since his uncle Jake's death : there were gray hairs in his sand} - beard ; but he still worked for his mother, as he had done when a growing lad.

And now that times were grown to be bad (of late years the price of stock had been steadily falling ; and the hay-harvests had drifted from bad to worse) the widow Garstin no longer kept any labouring men ; but lived, she and her son, year in and year out, in a close, parsimonious way.

That had been Anthony Garstin's life — a dull, eventless sort of business, the sluggish incrustation of monotonous years. And until Rosa Blencarn had come to keep house for her uncle, he had never thought twice on a woman's face.

The Garstins had always been good church-goers, and Anthony, for years, had acted as churchwarden. It was one summer evening, up at the vicarage, whilst he was checking the offertory account, that he first set eyes upon her. She was fresh back from school at Leeds : she was dressed in a white dress : she looked, he thought, like a London lady.

She stood by the window, tall and straight and queenly, dreamily gazing out into the summer twilight, whilst he and her uncle sat over their business. When he rose to go, she glanced at him with quick curiosity ; he hurried away, muttering a sheepish good-night

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTSHIP 25

The next time that he saw her was in church on Sunday. lie watched her shyly, with a hesitating, reverential discretion ; her beauty seemed to him wonderful, distant, enigmatic. In the afternoon, young Mrs. Forsyth, from Longscale, dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother, and the two set off gossiping of Rosa Blencarn, speaking of her freely, in tones of acrimonious contempt. For a long while he sat silent, puffing at his pipe ; but, at last, when his mother concluded with, " She looks t'me fair stuck-oop, full o' toonish airs an' graces," despite himself, he burst out : " Ye're jest wastin' yer breath wi' that cackle. I reckon Miss Blencarn 's o' a different clay from us folks." Young Mrs. Forsyth tittered immoderately, and the next week it was rumoured about the valley that " Tony Garstin was gone luny over t' parson's niece."

But of all this he knew nothing — keeping to himself, as was his wont, and being, besides, very busy with the hay harvest — until one day, at dinner-time, Henry Sisson asked if he'd started his courting ; Jacob Sowerby cried that Tony 'd been too slow in getting to work, for that the girl had been seen spooning in Crosby Shaws with Curbison the auctioneer, and the others (there were half a dozen of them lounging round the hay-waggon) burst into a boisterous guffaw. Anthony flushed dully, looking hesitatingly from the one to the other ; then slowly put down his beer-can, and, of a sudden, seizing Jacob by the neck, swung him heavily on the grass. He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead. And henceforward Tony Garstin's courtship was the common jest of all the parish.

As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage. She had given him a frank, friendly smile ; but he had not found the resolution to do more than lift his hat. He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard behind the house, there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn ; but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction mart.

Thus, as the weeks slipped by, he was content with blunt, wistful rumina- tions upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly incredulous ; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant ; but from the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering conception of her difference from the ruck of her sex.

26 THE SAVOY

But one evening, as he passed the vicarage, on his way down from the fells, she called to him, and with a childish, confiding familiarity, asked for advice concerning the feeding of the poultry. In his eagerness to answer her as best he could, he forgot his customary embarrassment, and grew, for the moment, almost voluble, and quite at his ease in her presence. Directly her flow of questions ceased, however, the returning perception of her rosy, hesitating smile, and of her large, deep eyes looking straight into his face, perturbed him strangely, and, reddening, he remembered the quarrel in the hay-field, and the tale of Crosby Shaws.

After this, the poultry became a link between them — a link which he regarded in all seriousness, blindly unconscious that there was aught else to bring them together, only feeling himself in awe of her, because of her school- ing, her townish manners, her ladylike mode of dress. And soon, he came to take a sturdy, secret pride in her friendly familiarity towards him. Several times a week he would meet her in the lane, and they would loiter a moment together ; she would admire his dogs, though he assured her earnestly that they were but sorry curs ; and once, laughing at his staidness, she nicknamed him " Mr. Churchwarden."

That the girl was not liked in the valley he suspected, curtly attributing her unpopularity to the women's senseless jealousy. Of gossip concerning her he heard no further hint ; but instinctively, and partly from that rugged, natural reserve of his, shrank from mentioning her name, even incidentally, to his mother.

Now, on Sunday evenings, he often strolled up to the vicarage, each time quitting his mother with the same awkward affectation of casualness ; and, on his return, becoming vaguely conscious of how she refrained from any comment on his absence, and appeared oddly oblivious of the existence of parson Blencarn's niece.

She had always been a sour-tongued woman ; but, as the days shortened, with the approach of the long winter months, she seemed to him to grow more fretful than ever ; at times it was almost as if she bore him some smouldering, sullen resentment. He was of stubborn fibre, however, toughened by long habit of a bleak, unruly climate ; he revolved the matter in his mind delibe- rately, and when, at last, after much plodding thought, it dawned upon him that she resented his acquaintance with Rosa Blencarn, he accepted the solu- tion with an unflinching phlegm, and merely shifted his attitude towards the girl, calculating each day the likelihood of his meeting her, and making, in her presence, persistent efforts to break down, once for all, the barrier of his own

ANTHONY GARS TIN'S COURTSHIP 27

timidity. He was a man not to be clumsily driven, still less, so he prided himself, a man to be craftily led.

It was close upon Christmas time before the crisis came. His mother was just home from Penrith market. The spring-cart stood in the yard, the old gray horse was steaming heavily in the still, frosty air.

" I reckon ye've come fast. T' ould horse is over hot," he remarked bluntly, as he went to the animal's head.

She clambered down hastily, and, coming to his side, began breathlessly :

" Ye ought t' hev coom t' market, Tony. There 's bin pretty goin's on in Pe'rith to-day. I was helpin' Anna Forsyth t' choose six yards o' sheetin' in Dockroy, when we sees Rosa Blencarn coom oot o' t' " Bell and Bullock " in company wi' Curbison and young Joe Smethwick. Smethwick was fair reelin' drunk, and Curbison and t' girl were a-houldin' on t' him, to keep him fra fallin', and then, after a bit, he puts his arm round t' girl t' stiddy hisself, and that fashion they goes off, right oop t' public street "

He continued to unload the packages, and to carry them, mechanically, one by one, into the house. Each time, when he reappeared, she was standing by the steaming horse, busy with her tale.

" An' on t' road hame we passed t' three on' em in Curbison's trap, with Smethwick leein' in t' bottom, singin' maudlin' songs. They were passin' Dunscale village, an' t' folks coom runnin' oot o' houses t' see 'em go past "

He led the cart away towards the stable, leaving her to cry the remainder after him across the yard.

Half an hour later he came in for his dinner. During the meal not a word passed between them, and directly he had finished he strode out of the house. About nine o'clock he returned, lit his pipe, and sat down to smoke it over the kitchen fire.

" Where' ve ye bin, Tony ? " she asked.

" Oop t' vicarage, courtin'," he retorted defiantly, with his pipe in his mouth.

This was ten months ago : ever since he had been doggedly waiting. That evening he had set his mind on the girl, he intended to have her ; and while his mother gibed, as she did now upon every opportunity, his patience remained grimly unflagging. She would remind him that the farm belonged to her, that he would have to wait till her death before he could bring the hussy to Houtsey : he would retort that as soon as the girl would have him, he intended taking a small holding over at Scarsdale. Then she would give way, and for a while piteously upbraid him with her old age, and with the memory of all the

28 THE SAVOY

years she and he had spent together, and he would comfort her with a display of brusque, evasive remorse.

But, none the less, on the morrow, his thoughts would return to dwell on the haunting vision of the girl's face, while his own rude, credulous chivalry, kindled by the recollection of her beauty, stifled his misgivings concerning her conduct.

Meanwhile she dallied with him, and amused herself with the younger men. Her old uncle fell ill in the spring, and could scarcely leave the house. She declared that she found life in the valley intolerably dull, that she hated the quiet of the place, that she longed for Leeds, and the exciting bustle of the streets ; and in the evenings she wrote long letters to the girl-friends she had left behind there, describing with petulant vivacity her tribe of rustic admirers. At the harvest-time she went back on a fortnight's visit to friends ; the evening before her departure she promised Anthony to give him her answer on her return. But, instead, she avoided him, pretended to have promised in jest, and took up with Luke Stock, a cattle-dealer from Wigton.

V

It was three weeks since he had fetched his flock down from the fell.

After dinner he and his mother sat together in the parlour : they had done so every Sunday afternoon, year in and year out, as far back as he could remember.

A row of mahogany chairs, with shiny, horse-hair seats, were ranged round the room. A great collection of agricultural prize-tickets were pinned over the wall ; and, on a heavy, highly-polished sideboard, stood several silver cups. A heap of gilt-edged shavings filled the unused grate : there were gaudily-tinted roses along the mantelpiece, and, on a small table by the window, beneath a glass-case, a gilt basket filled with imitation flowers. Every object was disposed with a scrupulous precision : the carpet and the red-patterned cloth on the centre-table were much faded. The room was spotlessly clean, and were, in the chilly winter sunlight, a rigid, comfort- less air.

Neither spoke, or appeared conscious of the other's presence. Old Mrs. Garstin, wrapped in a woollen shawl, sat knitting : Anthony dozed fitfully on a stiff-backed chair.

Of a sudden, in the distance, a bell started tolling. Anthony rubbed his eyes drowsily, and, taking from the table his Sunday hat, strolled out across the

ANTHONY GARSTINS COURTSHIP 29

dusky fields. Presently, reaching ;i rude wooden scat, built beside the bridle- path, he sat down and relit his pipe. The air was very still : below him a white, filmy mist hung across the valley: the fell sides, vaguely grouped, resembled hulking masses of sombre shadow ; and, as he looked back, three squares of glimmering gold revealed the lighted windows of the square-towered church.

He sat smoking ; pondering, with placid and reverential contemplation, on the Mighty Maker of the world — a world majestically and inevitably ordered ; a world where, he argued, each object — each fissure in the fells, the winding course of each tumbling stream — possesses its mysterious purport, its inevitable signification. . . .

At the end of the field two rams were fighting ; retreating, then running together, and, leaping from the ground, butting head to head and horn to horn. Anthony watched them absently, pursuing his rude meditations.

. . . And the succession of bad seasons, the slow ruination of the farmers throughout the country, were but punishment meted out for the accumulated wickedness of the world. In the olden time God rained plagues upon the land : nowadays, in His wrath, He spoiled the produce of the earth, which, with His own hands, He had fashioned and bestowed upon men.

He rose and continued his walk along the bridle-path. A multitude of rabbits scuttled up the hill at his approach ; and a great cloud of plovers, rising from the rushes, circled overhead, filling the air with a profusion of their querulous cries. All at once he heard a rattling of stones, and perceived a number of small pieces of shingle bounding in front of him down the grassy slope.

A woman's figure was moving among the rocks above him. The r.cxt moment, by the trimming of crimson velvet on her hat, he had recognized her. He mounted the slope with springing strides, wondering the while how it was she came to be there, that she was not in church playing the organ at afternoon service.

Before she was aware of his approach, he was beside her.

" I thought ye'd be in church — - — " he began.

She started : then, gradually regaining her composure, answered, weakly smiling :

" Mr. Jenkinson, the new schoolmaster, wanted to try the organ."

He came towards her impulsively : she saw the odd flickers in his eyes as she stepped back in dismay.

" Nay, but I will na harm ye," he said. " Only I reckon what 'tis a special

30 THE SAVOY

turn o' Providence, meetin' vvi' ye oop here. I reckon what ye'll hev t' give me a square answer noo. Ye canna dilly-dally everlastingly."

He spoke almost brutally ; and she stood, white and gasping, staring at him with large, frightened eyes. The sheep-walk was but a tiny threadlike track : the slope of the shingle on either side was very steep : below them lay the valley ; distant, lifeless, all blurred by the evening dusk. She looked about her helplessly for a means of escape.

" Miss Rosa," he continued, in a husky voice, " can ye na coom t' think on me. Think ye, I've bin waitin' nigh upon two year for ye. I've watched ye tak oop, first wi' this young fellar, and then wi' that, till soomtimes my heart 's fit t' burst. Many a day, oop on t' fell-top, t' thought o' ye 's nigh driven me daft, and I've left my shepherdin' jest t' set on a cairn in t' mist, picturin' an' broodin' on yer face. Many an evenin' I've started oop t' vicarage, wi' t' resolution t' speak right oot t' ye ; but when it coomed t' point, a sort o' timidity seemed t'hould me back, I was that feared t' displease ye. I knaw I'm na scholar, an' mabbe ye think I'm rough-mannered. I knaw I've spoken sharply to ye once or twice lately. But it's jest because I'm that mad wi' love for ye : I jest canna help myself soomtimes — "

Ha waited, peering into her face. She could see the beads of sweat above his bristling eyebrows : the damp had settled on his sandy beard : his horny fingers were twitching at the buttons of his black Sunday coat.

She struggled to summon a smile ; but her underlip quivered, and her large dark eyes filled slowly with tears.

And he went on :

" Ye've coom t' mean jest everything to me. Ef ye will na hev me, I care for nought else. I canna speak t' ye in phrases : I'm jest a plain, unscholarly man : I canna wheedle ye, wi' cunnin' after t' fashion o' toon folks. But I can love ye wi' all my might, an' watch over ye, and work for ye better than any one o' em "

She was crying to herself, silently, while he spoke. He noticed nothing, however : the twilight hid her face from him.

"There's nought against me," he persisted "I'm as good a man as one on 'em. Ay, as good a man as any one on 'em," he repeated defiantly, raising his voice.

" It 's impossible, Mr. Garstin, it 's impossible. Ye've been very kind to me " she added, in a choking voice.

"Wa dang it, I didna mean t' mak ye cry, lass," he exclaimed, with a softening of his tone. " There 's nought for ye t' cry ower."

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTSHIP 31

She sank on to the stones, passionately sobbing in hysterical and defence- less despair. Anthony stood a moment, gazing at her in clumsy perplexity : then, coming close to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and said gently :

" Cooin, lass, what 'a trouble ? Ye can trust me."

She shook her head faintly.

" Ay, but ye can though," he asserted, firmly. " Come, what is 't ? "

Heedless of him, she continued to rock herself to and fro, crooning in her distress :

" Oh ! I wish I were dead ! . . . I wish I could die ! "

— '• Wish ye could die ? " he repeated. " Why, whatever can 't be that 's troublin' ye like this? There, there, lassie, give ower : it 'ull all coom right, whatever it be "

" No, no," she wailed. " I wish I could die ! . . . I wish I could die ! "

Lights were twinkling in the village below ; and across the valley darkness was draping the hills. The girl lifted her face from her hands, and looked up at him with a scared, bewildered expression.

" I must go home : I must be getting home," she muttered.

" Nay, but there 's sommut mighty amiss wi' ye."

"No, it's nothing ... I don't know — I'm not well ... I mean it's nothing ... it '11 pass over . . . you mustn't think anything of it."

" Nay, but I canna stand by an see ye in sich trouble."

" It 's nothing, Mr. Garstin, indeed it 's nothing," she repeated.

" Ay, but I canna credit that," he objected, stubbornly.

She sent him a shifting, hunted glance.

" Let me get home . . . you must let me get home."

She made a tremulous, pitiful attempt at firmness. Eyeing her keenly, he barred her path : she flushed scarlet, and looked hastily away across the valley.

" If ye'll tell me yer distress, mabbe I can help ye."

"No, no, it's nothing ... it's nothing."

" If ye'll tell me yer distress, mabbe I can help ye," he repeated, with a solemn, deliberate sternness. She shivered, and looked away again, vaguely, across the valley.

" You can do nothing: there 's nought to be done," she murmured, drearily.

" There 's a man in this business," he declared.

" Let me go ! Let me go ! " she pleaded, desperately.

"Who is't that's bin puttin' ye into this distress?" His voice sounded loud and harsh.

32 THE SAVOY

" No one, no one. I canna tell ye, Mr. Garstin. ... It's no one," she protested weakly. The white, twisted look on his face frightened her.

" My God ! " he burst out, gripping her wrist, " an' a proper soft fool ye've made o' me. Who is't, I tell ye ? Who's t' man ? "

" Ye're hurtin' me. Let me go. I canna tell ye."

" And ye're fond o' him ? "

" No, no. He 's a wicked, sinful man. I pray God I may never set eyes on him again. I told him so."

" But ef he 's got ye into trouble, he'll hev t' marry ye," he persisted with a brutal bitterness.

" I will not. I hate him ! " she cried fiercely.

" But is he williri t' marry ye ? "

" I don't know ... I don't care ... he said so before he went away . . . But I'd kill myself sooner than live with him."

He let her hands fall and stepped back from her. She could only see his figure, like a sombre cloud, standing before her. The whole fellside seemed still and dark and lonely. Presently she heard his voice again :

" I reckon what there 's one road oot o' yer distress."

She shook her head drearily.

"There's none. I'm a lost woman."

" An' ef ye took me instead ? " he said eagerly.

" I — I don't understand "

" Ef ye married me instead of Luke Stock ? "

" But that 's impossible — the — the "

" Ay, t' child. I know. But I'll tak t' child as mine."

She remained silent After a moment he heard her voice answer in a queer, distant tone :

" You mean that — that ye're ready to marry me, and adopt the child ? "

" I do," he answered doggedly.

" But people — your mother ? "

" Folks 'ull jest know nought about it. It 's none o' their business. T' child 'ull pass as mine. Ye'll accept that ? "

" Yes," she answered, in a low, rapid voice.

" Ye'll consent t' hev me, ef I git ye oot o' yer trouble."

" Yes," she repeated, in the same tone.

She heard him draw a long breath.

" I said 't was a turn o' Providence, meetin' wi ye oop here," he exclaimed, with half-suppressed exultation.

ANTHONY GARSTIN'S COURTS f IIP 33

Her teeth began to chatter a little: she felt that he was peering at her, curiously, through the darkness.

" An' noo," he continued briskly, " ye'd best be gettin' home. Give me ye're hand, an' I'll stiddy ye ower t' stones."

He helped her down the bank of shingle, exclaiming : " By goom, ye're stony cauld." Once or twice she slipped : he supported her, roughly gripping her knuckles. The stones rolled down the steps, noisily, disappearing into the night.

Presently they struck the turfed bridle-path, and, as they descended, silently, towards the lights of the village, he said gravely :

" I always reckoned what my day 'ud coora."

She made no reply ; and he added grimly :

" There'll be terrible work wi' mother over this."

He accompanied her down the narrow lane that led past her uncle's house. When the lighted windows came in sight he halted.

" Good-night, lassie," he said kindly. " Do ye give ower distressin' yeself."

" Good-night, Mr. Garstin," she answered, in the same low, rapid voice, in which she had given him her answer up on the fell.

" We're man an' wife plighted now, are we not?" he blurted timidly.

She held her face to his, and he kissed her on the cheek, clumsily.

VI

The next morning the frost had set in. The sky was still clear and glittering : the whitened fields sparkled in the chilly sunlight : here and there, on high, distant peaks, gleamed dainty caps of snow. All the week Anthony was to be busy at the fell-foot, wall-building against the coming of the winter storms : the work was heavy, for he was single-handed, and the stone had to be fetched from off the fell-side. Two or three times a day he led his rickety, lumbering cart along the lane that passed the vicarage gate, pausing on each journey to glance furtively up at the windows. But he saw no sign of Rosa Blencarn ; and, indeed, he felt no longing to see her : he was grimly exultant over the remembrance of his wooing of her, and over the knowledge that she was his. There glowed within him a stolid pride in himself: he thought of the others who had courted her, and the means by which he had won her seemed to him a fine stroke of cleverness.

And so he refrained from any mention of the matter ; relishing, as he

FRANCIS E OUNDATION

INCORPORATED

34 THE SAVOY

worked, all alone, the days through, the consciousness of his secret triumph, and anticipating, with inward chucklings, the discomforted cackle of his mother's female friends. He foresaw, without misgiving, her bitter opposition : he felt himself strong ; and his heart warmed towards the girl. And when, at intervals, the brusque realization that, after all, he was to possess her, swept over him, he gripped the stones, and swung them, almost fiercely, into their places.

All around him the white, empty fields seemed slumbering, breathlessly. The stillness stiffened the leafless trees. The frosty air flicked his blood : singing vigorously to himself he worked with a stubborn, unflagging resolution, methodically postponing, till the length of wall should be completed, the announcement of his betrothal.

After his reticent, solitary fashion, he was very happy, reviewing his future prospects with a plain and steady assurance, and, as the week-end approached, coming to ignore the irregularity of the whole business ; almost to assume, in the exaltation of his pride, that he had won her honestly ; and to discard, stolidly, all thought of Luke Stock, of his relations with her, of the coming child that was to pass for his own.

And there were moments too, when, as he sauntered homewards through the dusk at the end of his day's work, his heart grew full to overflowing of a rugged, superstitious gratitude towards God in Heaven who had granted his desires.

About three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon he finished the length of wall. He went home, washed, shaved, put on his Sunday coat ; and, avoiding the kitchen, where his mother sat knitting by the fireside, strode up to the vicarage.

It was Rosa who opened the door to him. On recognizing him she started, and he followed her into the dining-room. He seated himself, and began, brusquely :

" I've coom, Miss Rosa, t' speak t' Mr. Blencarn."

Then added, eyeing her closely :

" Ye're lookin' sick, lass."

Her faint smile accentuated the worn, white look on her face.

" I reckon ye've been frettin' yeself," he continued, gently, " leein' awake o' nights, hev'n't yee, noo ? "

She smiled vaguely.

" Well, but ye see I've coom t' settle t' whole business for ye. Ye thought mabbe that I was na a man o' my word."

ANTHONY GARS TIN'S COURTSHIP 35

" No, no, not that," she protested, " but — but — "

" But what then ? "

"Ye must not do it," Mr. Garstin .... I must just bear my own trouble the best I can " she broke out.

"D'ye fancy I'm takin' ye oot of charity? Ye little reckon the sort o' stuff my love for ye 's made of. Nay, Miss Rosa, but ye cannadraw back noo."

" But ye cannot do it, Mr. Garstin. Ye know your mother will na have me at Houtsey .... I could na live there with your mother .... I'd sooner bear my trouble alone, as best I can .... She 's that stern is Mrs. Garstin. I couldn't look her in the face .... I can go away somewhere .... I could keep it all from uncle."

Her colour came and went : she stood before him, looking away from him, dully, out of the window.

" I intend ye t' coom t' Hootsey. I'm na lad : I reckon I can choose my own wife. Mother'll hev ye at t' farm, right enough : ye need na distress yesclf on that point "

" Nay, Mr. Garstin, but indeed she will not, never .... I know she will not .... She always set herself against me, right from the first."

" Ay, but that was different. T case is all changed, noo," he objected, doggedly.

"She'll support the sight of me all the less," the girl faltered.

" Mother '11 hev ye at Hootsey — receive ye willin' of her own free wish — of her own free wish, d'ye hear. I'll answer for that."

He struck the table with his fist, heavily. His tone of determination awed her : she glanced at him hurriedly, struggling with her irresolution.

" I knaw hoo t' manage mother. An' now," he concluded, changing his tone, " is yer uncle aboot t' place."

" He's up the paddock, I think," she answered.

" Well, I'll jest step oop and hev a word wi' him."

" Ye're .... ye will na tell him."

" Tut, tut, na harrowin' tales, ye need na fear, lass. I reckon ef I can tackle mother, I can accommodate myself t' parson Blencarn."

He rose, and coming close to her, scanned her face.

" Ye must git t' roses back t' yer cheeks," he exclaimed, with a short laugh, " I canna be takin' a ghost t' church."

She smiled tremulously, and he continued, laying one hand affectionately on her shoulder :

" Nay, but I was but jestin'. Roses or na roses, ye'll be t' bonniest bride

C

36 THE SAVOY

in all Coomberland. I'll meet ye in Hullam lane, after church time, to-morrow," he added, moving towards the door.

After he had gone, she hurried to the backdoor furtively. His retreating figure was already mounting the gray upland field. Presently, beyond him, she perceived her uncle, emerging through the paddock gate. She ran across the poultry yard, and mounting a tub, stood watching the two figures as they moved towards one another along the brow, Anthony vigorously trudging, with his hands thrust deep in his pocket ; her uncle, his wideawake tilted over his nose, hobbling, and leaning stiffly on his pair of sticks. They met ; she saw Anthony take her uncle's arm : the two, turning together, strolled away towards the fell.

She went back into the house. Anthony's dog came towards her, slinking along the passage. She caught the animal's head in her hands, and bent over it caressingly, in an impulsive outburst of almost hysterical affection.

VII

The two men returned towards the vicarage. At the paddock gate they halted, and the old man concluded :

" I could not hev wished a better man for her, Anthony. Mabbe the Lord '11 not be minded to spare me much longer. After I'm gone Rosa '11 hev all I possess. She was my poor brother Isaac's only child. After her mother was taken, he, poor fellow, went altogether to the bad, and until she came here she mostly lived among strangers. It's been a wretched sort of childhood for her — a wretched sort of childhood. Ye'll take care of her, Anthony, will ye not ? . . . Nay, but I could not hev wished for a better man for her, and there's my hand on 't."

" Thank ee, Mr. Blencarn, thank ee," Anthony answered huskily, gripping the old man's hand.

And he started off down the lane, homewards.

His heart was full of a strange, rugged exaltation. He felt with a swelling pride that God had intrusted to him this great charge — to tend her ; to make up to her, tenfold, for all that loving care, which, in her childhood, she had never known. And together with a stubborn confidence in himself, there welled up within him a great pity for her — a tender pity, that, chastening with his passion, made her seem to him, as he brooded over that lonely childhood of hers, the more distinctly beautiful, the more profoundly precious. He pictured to himself, tremulously, almost incredulously, their married life —

ANTHONY GARS TIN'S COURTSHIP n

in the winter, his return home at nightfall to find her awaiting him with a glad, trustful smile ; their evenings, passed together, sitting in silent happiness over the smouldering logs ; or, in summer-time, the mid-day rest in the hay fields when, wearing perhaps a large-brimmed hat fastened with a red ribbon beneath her chin, he would catch sight of her, carrying his dinner, coming across the upland.

She had not been brought up to be a farmer's wife : she was but a child still, as the old parson had said. She should not have to work as other men's wives worked : she should dress like a lady, and on Sundays, in church, wear fine bonnets, and remain, as she had always been, the belle of all the parish.

And, meanwhile, he would farm as he had never farmed before, watching his opportunities, driving cunning bargains, spending nothing on himself, hoarding every penny that she might have what she wanted. . . . And, as he strode through the village, he seemed to foresee a general brightening of prospects, a sobering of the fever of speculation in sheep, a cessation of the insensate glutting, year after year, of the great winter marts throughout the North, a slackening of the foreign competition followed by a steady revival of the price of fatted stocks — a period of prosperity in store for the farmer at last. . . . And the future years appeared to open out before him, spread like a distant, glittering plain, across which, he and she, hand in hand, were called to travel together. . . .

And then, suddenly, as his iron-bound boots clattered over the cobbled yard, he remembered, with brutal determination, his mother, and the stormy struggle that awaited him.

He waited till supper was over, till his mother had moved from the table to her place by the chimney corner. For several minutes he remained debating with himself the best method of breaking the news to her. Of a sudden he glanced up at her : her knitting had slipped on to her lap : she was sitting, bunched of a heap in her chair, nodding with sleep. By the flickering light of the wood fire, she looked worn and broken : he felt a twinge of clumsy compunction. And then he remembered the piteous, hunted look in the girl's eyes, and the old man's words when they had parted at the paddock gate, and he blurted out :

" I doot but what I'll hcv t' marry Rosa Blcncarn after all."

She started, and blinking her eyes, said :

" I was jest takin' a wink o' sleep. What was 't ye were saying, Tony ? "

He hesitated a moment, puckering his forehead into coarse rugged lines, and fidgeting noisily with his tea cup. Presently he repeated :

38 THE SAVOY

" I doot but what I'll hev t' marry Rosa Blencarn after all."

She rose stiffly, and stepping down from the hearth, came towards him.

" Mabbe I did na hear ye aright, Tony." She spoke hurriedly, and though she was quite close to him, steadying herself with one hand clutching the back of his chair, her voice sounded weak, distant almost.

" Look oop at me. Look oop into my face," she commanded fiercely.

He obeyed sullenly.

" Xoo oot wi 't. What's yer mean in', Tony ? "

" I mean what 1 say," he retorted doggedly, averting his gaze.

■• What d'ye mean by savin' that y&'xe got t' marry her? "

" I tell yer I mean what I say," he repeated dully.

" Ye mean ye've bin an' put t' girl in trouble ? "

He said nothing ; but sat staring stupidly at the floor.

" Look oop at me, and answer," she commanded, gripping his shoulder and shaking him.

He raised his face slowly, and met her glance.

" Ay, that's aboot it," he answered.

" This '11 na be truth. It '11 be jest a piece o' wanton trickery ? " she cried.

" Nay, but 't is truth," he answered deliberately.

" Ye will na swear t' it ? " she persisted.

■ I see na necessity for swearin'."

" Then ye canna swear t' it." she burst out triumphantly.

He paused an instant ; then said quietly :

Ay. but I'll swear t' it easy enough. Fetch t' Book."

She lifted the heavy, tattered Bible from the chimney-piece, and placed it before him on the table. He laid his lumpish fist on it.

" Say," she continued with a tense tremulousness, " say, I swear t' ye mother, that 't is t' truth, t' whole truth, and noat but t' truth, s'help me God."

" I swear t' ye. mother, it's truth, t' whole truth, and nothin' but t' truth, s'help me God," he repeated after her.

" Kiss t' Book," she ordered.

He lifted the Bible to his lips. As he replaced it on the table, he burst out into a short laugh :

" Be ye satisfied noo ? "

She went back to the chimney corner without a word.

The logs on the hearth hissed and crackled. Outside, amid the blackness the wind was rising, hooting through the firs, and past the windows. .

ANTHONY G AUSTIN'S COURTS/UP 39

After a long while he roused himself, and drawing his pipe from his pocket almost steadily, proceeded leisurely to pare in the palm of his hand a lump of black tobacco.

" We'll be asked in church Sunday," he remarked bluntly.

She made no answer.

He looked across at her.

Her mouth was drawn tight at the corners : her face wore a queer, rigid aspect. She looked, he thought, like a figure of stone.

" Ye're not feeling poorly, are ye, mother ? " he asked.

She shook her head grimly : then, hobbling out into the room, began to speak in a shrill, tuneless voice.

" Ye talked at one time o' takin' a farm over Scarsdale way. But ye'd best stop here. I'll no hinder yc. Ye can have t' large bedroom in t' front, and I'll move ower to what used to be my brother Jake's room. Ye knaw I've never had no opinion of t' girl, but I'll do what 's right by her, ef I break my sperrit in t' doin' on't. I'll mak' t' girl welcome here : I'll stand by her proper- like : mebbe I'll finish by findin' soom good in her. But from this day forward, Tony, ye're na son o' mine. Ye've dishonoured yeself : ye've laid a trap for me — ay, laid a trap, that 's t' word. Ye've brought shame and bitterness on yer ould mother in her old age. Ye've made me despise t' varra seet o' ye. Ye can stop on here, but ye shall niver touch a penny of my money ; every shillin 1 oft shall go t' yer child, or to your child's children. Ay," she went on, raising her voice, " ay, ye've got yer way at last, and mebbe ye reckon ye've chosen a mighty smart way. But time 'ull coom when ye'll regret this day, when ye eat oot yer repentance in doost an' ashes. Ay, Lord 'ull punish ye, Tony, chastise ye properly. Ye'll learn that marriage begun in sin, can end in nought but sin. Ay," she concluded, as she reached the door, raising her skinny hand prophetically, "ay, after I'm deed an' gone, ye mind ye o' t' words o' t' apostle — ' For them that hev sinned without t' law, shall also perish without t' law.' "

And she slammed the door behind her.

HUHF.RT CRACKANTHORl'K.

BRETON AFTERNOON

ERE, where the breath of the scented gorse floats through the sun-stained air, On a steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours

long, and heard Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer, And the river ripple by, and the distant call of a bird.

On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush me and repose : And the world fades into a dream, and a spell is cast on me ; And what was all tlie strife about for tlic myrtle or the ?vse ? And why Jiave I wept for a white girl's paleness, passing ivory ?

Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a world alone, apart, In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of life and death : Here will I lie, while the clouds fly by, and delve a hole, where mine heart May sleep dark down with the gorse above and red, red earth beneath :

Sleep and be quiet for an afternoon, till the rose-white Angelus

Softly steals my way from the village under the hill :

'• Mother of God ! O, Misericord ! look down in pity on us,

Tlu weak and blind, wlw stand in our light, and wreak ourselves such ill/"

Ernest Dowson.

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRA- TIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY

I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART

FIE recoil from scientific naturalism has created in our day the movement the French call symboliste, which, be- ginning with the memorable " Axel," by Villiers de l'lsle Adam, has added to drama a new kind of romance, at once ecstatic and picturesque, in the works of M. Maeter- linck ; and beginning with certain pictures of the pre- Raphaelites, and of Mr. Watts and Mr. Burne-Jones, has brought into art a new and subtle inspiration. This movement, and in art more especially, has proved so consonant with a change in the times, in the desires of our hearts grown weary with material circumstance, that it has begun to touch even the great public ; the ladies of fashion and men of the world who move so slowly ; and has shown such copious signs of being a movement, perhaps the movement of the opening century, that one of the best known of French picture dealers will store none but the inventions of a passionate sym- bolism. It has no sufficient philosophy and criticism, unless indeed it has them hidden in the writings of M. Mallarme, which I have not French enough to understand, but if it cared it might find enough of both philosophy and criticism in the writings of William Blake to protect it from its opponents, and what is perhaps of greater importance, from its own mistakes, for he was certainly the first great symboliste of modern times, and the first of any time to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic imagina- tion, or as Blake preferred to call it, " Vision," is not allegory, being " a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably" : a symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame, while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination ; the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily

42 THE SAVOY

no part of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist between symbol and mind ; for in doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple- persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheep-folds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern culture ; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.

If a man would enter into " Noah's rainbow," he has written, and " make a friend " of one of " the images of wonder " which dwell there, and which always entreat him " to leave mortal things," " then would he arise from the grave and meet the Lord in the air ; " and by this rainbow ; this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet, "painting, poetry and music," " the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the flood ' of time and space ' did not sweep away " ; Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration : shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon " the vegetable glass of nature " ; and because beings, none the less symbols ; blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots ; hands, as it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth. If "the world of imagination" was "the world of eternity " as this doctrine implied, it was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable kind, created by the fantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory and whim ; and this could best be done by purifying one's mind, as with a flame, in study of the works of the great masters, who were great because they had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen world, from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns every way ; and by flying from the painters who studied " the vegetable glass " for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into their own minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they saw and heard and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with " the rotten rags of memory " of older sensations. To distinguish between these two schools, and to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of those who seemed to him to offer a spirit, weary with the labours of inspiration, the sleep of nature, had been the struggle of the first half of his life ; and it was only after his return to London from Felpham

BLAKE S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 45

in 1804 that he finally escaped from "temptations and perturbations" which sought "to destroy the imaginative power" at "the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons." " The spirit of Titian," and one must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and what his disciple, Palmer, has called "picture dealers' Titians," "was particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without a model ; and when once he had raised the doubt it became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time," and Blake's imagination " weakened " and " darkened " until a " memory of nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution " flowing from the vision itself. But now he wrote, " O glory ! and O delight ! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station " — he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind — " whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life .... I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty ; thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was .... suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures," — this was a gallery containing pictures by Albert Durerand by the great Florentines, — " I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and window shutters. . . . Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth."

This letter may have been the expression of a moment's enthusiasm, but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon ; for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated after this date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except remotely and by implication ; but now he wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme. In his " Descriptive Catalogue," in " The Address to the Public," in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in " The Book of Moonlight," of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain ; in beautiful detached passages in " the MS. Book," he explained spiritual art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision ; he was a too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature, and because he believed that the figures seen by the mind's

46 THE SAVOY

eye, when exalted by inspiration, were " eternal existences," symbols of divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least permanent and least characteristic, for " The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this : that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the boundary line, the more perfect the work of art ; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling." Inspira- tion was to see the permanent and characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting. " Great inventors in all ages knew this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and Albert Diirer are known by this and this alone. How do we distinguish the owl from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements ? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and determinate? What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions ? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself ; and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist." He even insisted that " colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but upon where the lights and darks are put, and all depends upon the form or outline ; " meaning, I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding line dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only " the beauty that is appended to folly," a beauty of mere voluptuous softness, " a lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing life," for " the beauty proper for sublime art is lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of intellect," and " the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection." His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard ; and yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 49

part of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in irridescent or glowing colour ; having in the midst of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences ; until form be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence : for is not the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with intel- lectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen on Patmos ?

To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected lights was to fall into the power of his"Vala," the indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in " the prophetic " books as " sweet pestilence," and whose children weave webs to take the souls of men ; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has also a " masculine portion," or " spectre," which kills instead of merely hiding and is continually at war with inspiration. To " generalize " forms and shadows, to " smooth out " spaces and lines in obedience to " laws of composition," and of painting ; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation, which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish uniformity ; as the popular art of Blake's day had done, and as he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into " Entuthon Benithon," or " the Lake of Udan Adan," or some other of those regions where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, and which he names by so many resonant fantastical names. " General knowledge is remote knowledge," he wrote; "it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a paste-board man is human. Everyman has eyes, nose, and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded. . . . As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot or blur."

Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has called " corporeal reason," the desire for a tepid " moderation," for a lifeless " sanity " in both art and life, he had protested years before with a paradoxical violence : " The roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," and we must only " bring out weight and measure in a time of dearth." This protest ; carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the point of dwelling almost with pleasure on the thought that "The Lives of the Painters say that

50 THE SAVOY

Raphael died of dissipation," because dissipation is better than emotional penury ; seemed as important to his old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in 1824: "excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the means — none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can't be too brilliant : but individual tints may be too brilliant ... we must not begin with medium but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive."

These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance, were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called again and again " demons," and " villains," " hired " by the wealthy and the idle ; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find " sources of delight throughout the whole range of art," and was ever ready to praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends no need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in " Jerusalem," in which the merely mortal part of the mind, " the spectre," creates " pyramids of pride," and " pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches," and seeks to discover wisdom in " the spaces between the stars," not " in the stars," where it is, but the immortal part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to " grains of sand," his " pillars " to " dust on the fly's wing," and makes of " his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp." So when man's desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation, and memory, seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration ; and here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talis- mans and symbols.

It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young's " Night Thoughts," in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, become nearly intolerable in plain black and white ; and almost all the illustrations to " the prophetic books," which have an energy like that of the elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 53

Dr. Garth Wilkinson, " the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the Rephaim ; . . . gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and vital " ; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the light from him as " with a door and window shutters," but the shadows of those who gave them battle. He did now, however, the many designs to Milton, of which I have only seen those to " Paradise Regained " ; the reproductions of those to "Comus" ; published, I think, by Mr. Ouaritch ; and the three or four to " Paradise Lost " ; engraved by Bell Scott ; a series of designs which one good judge considers his greatest work ; the illustrations to Blair's " Grave," whose gravity and passion struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial smooth- ness of Schiavonetti's engraving ; the illustrations to Thornton's " Virgil," whose influence is, I think, perceptible in the work of the little group of land- scape painters who gathered about him in his old age and delighted to call him master. The member of the group, whom I have already so often quoted, has alone praised worthily these illustrations to the first Eclogue : " There is in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful artist's work, the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the rest which remains to the people of God." Now, too, he did the two great series, the crowning work of his life, " the illustrations to the book of Job " and the designs to " The Divine Comedy." They were commissioned from him by his patron and disciple John Linnell, who paid him a good price, the best he had yet received ; but the material circumstance of their origin has been often described, and is of less importance than the influence upon his method of engraving of certain engravings of Marc Antonio, which were shown him by Mr. Linnell. Hitherto he had pro- tested against the mechanical " dots and lozenges " and " blots and blurs " of Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both " dot and lozenge," " blot and blur," though always in subordination " to a firm and determinate outline" ; but in Marc Antonio he found a style full of delicate lines, a style where all was living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost his last words, a letter written upon his death-bed, attack the " dots and lozenges " with even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise expressive lines. " I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite .... a line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself, not inter- measurable by anything else .... but since the French Revolution " ; since

54 THE SAVOY

the reign of reason began, that is ; " Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree." The Dante series occupied the last years of his life ; even when too weak to get out of bed he worked on, propped up with the great drawing book before him. He sketched a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some very greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of which the Francesca and Paolo is the most finished. It is given here instead of a photographic repro- duction of the water-colour, although accessible in the engraved set, to show the form the entire series would have taken had he lived. It is not, I think, inferior to any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in its perfection Blake's mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which the lost spirits are hurried, " a watery flame " he would have called it, the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. The luminous globe, a symbol used again in the Purgatory, is Francesca's and Paolo's dream of happiness, their " Heaven in Hell's despite." The other three drawings have never been published before, and appear here, as will those which will follow them, through the courtesy of the Linnell family. The passing of Dante and Virgil through the portico of Hell is the most unfinished and loses most in reproduction, for the flames, rising from the half-seen circles, are in the original full of intense and various colour ; while the angry spirits fighting on the waters of the Styx above the sluggish bodies of the melancholy, loses the least, its daemonic energy being in the contour of the bodies and faces. Both this and the Antaeus setting down Virgil and Dante upon the verge of Cocytus, a wonderful piece of colour in the original, resemble the illustrations to his " prophetic books " in exuberant strength and lavish motion, and are in contrast with the illustrations to the Purgatory, which are placid, marmoreal, tender, starry, rapturous.

All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the technique of wellnigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from remote summits ; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him ; his imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination and technique of any other master. " I am," wrote Blake, " like others, just equal in invention and execution." And again, " No man can

BLAKE S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 57

improve an original invention ; nor can an original invention exist without execution, organized, delineated, and articulated either by God or man. . . . I have heard people say, ' Give me the ideas ; it is no matter what words you put them into ; ' and others say, ' Give me the design ; it is no matter for the execution.' . . . Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution." Living in a time when technique and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in Giotto. The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more fantastical errors in their lives ; as Coleridge's opium cloud ; as Villiers de l'lsle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece '< as Blake's anger against causes and purposes he but half understood ; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers ; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.

W. B. Yeats.

IN CARNIVAL

UT of the multitudinous hours Of life sealed fast for us by fate, Are any hours that yet await Our coming, worthy to be ours ?

Life, in her motley, sheds in showers The rose of hours still delicate, But you and I have come too late Into the Carnival of Flowers.

For us the roses are scarce sweet, And scarcely swift the flying feet

Where masque to masque the moments call ;

All has been ours that we desired, And now we are a little tired Of the eternal carnival.

Arthur Symons

THE CLOWN

A CRAYON SKETCH

A-LALA-I-TI, cried the clown, as he turned to leave the arena with his wee pony. He wore a large false nose of violet hue, a white sack-like costume with black spots dotted about it, and a tiny cylinder-shaped hat poised over one ear upon an elaborate periwig. His arms waved like the sails of a windmill, he turned suddenly to grasp the pony's tail, then lifted it bodily in the air for a second, with another loud " H a-lala-i-ti" made his final bow and retired ; the pony stepping daintily backwards and bowing, too, in obedience to its master's signal, the vast audience applauding voci- ferously.

After a moment's pause, a bell rang, and a ponderous white horse, gay with scarlet trappings and platform on back, was led in, and, tripping close behind, in elaborate ballet dress, came its rider, among a troupe of boisterous Pierrots carrying large paper hoops ; a crowd of servants closed the pro- cession — it was one of the most attractive turns, and the stables were prac- tically deserted.

It was very quiet there in the dim light of a few oil lamps, only an occasional rustle of straw, or the clank of a bridle as some restive steed pawed the ground, or moved across its stall. Here in a long row stood horses of every description, the uncertain light flickering on the silken coats of bay and chestnut thorough- breds, on the shapely limbs of milk-white arabs, and the rippling mane and tail of heavy cart-horses. Beyond these again, in smaller stalls, ponies, donkeys, goats, and performing dogs had their quarters.

More than one head was turned when the clown's voice broke the stillness with a cheery " Well done, Fifi." The pony walked demurely into his own stall, waiting until his master, having discarded his false nose and diminutive hat, pulled down a bundle of hay from the rack overhead and shook it out before him, when Fifi rubbed himself up against his master's leg much as a cat might have done, in a kind of grateful caress. It was a dainty little toy thing,

D

60 THE SAVOY

perfect in build, although the jet black crest reached little higher than the man's knee, and he had to stoop low to stroke the shining silken coat as he murmured, " Like it ? Ah, you rascal, you have nothing to grumble at ! "

Leaving the pony to munch his hay at leisure the clown sat himself down on an overturned bucket, unbuttoned his white costume, loosened its collar, and slowly wiped his thickly powdered face. From some mysterious pocket he next extracted a flask and took a long pull at its contents, then, leaning forward, he let his head sink upon his hands — a well-shaped head set on broad shoulders, the neck muscles all exposed by the open collar.

Sitting so quietly here he seemed a very different being from the mem- maker of the arena. There, with his false nose and the queer black arabesques painted about his eyes, his face wore a look of saucy fooling, of self-satisfaction and impudent self-assertion ; now, the black paint, carelessly smudged off, has stuck in his eyebrows, accentuating the brilliancy of dark eyes deep set in the deadly whiteness of his face, a pallor for which powder alone is not responsible, for deep lines of care are plainly visible in both cheek and brow. His expres- sion has grown hard and stern as though he held himself severely in hand to check some passionate outburst ; lost in thought, and thoughts evidently of no pleasant description. Yet what should make him sad ? A handsome salary, plenty to eat, an ungrudging supply of drinks, should surely make an earthly paradise for this rough son of the stable, to say nothing of the applause that greets his every action, the consciousness of his supremacy in the arena, and of his position as the spoilt child of the company.

Thought, to such as he, is surely a mere physical function ! Why, then, this change ? Is it possible that, apart from the animal side of his existence, there lies within this massive frame some intuition of hidden forces, of longings, hopes, fears, and sudden gleams of passion ? Who, seeing him now, could doubt it ? a whole elegy of pain and reproach is in those dark eyes and in that despondent figure. Is this the real man ? Was all that fooling, despite its spontaneity, mere fooling ? Was he trying to convince himself, as well as his audience, that his buffoonery was really amusing ? Was he laughing, not only for the entertainment of the crowd who laughs — and pays, but also to stifle for the moment the tears that fill his heart ?

By-and-by footsteps and the clinking of spurs resounded on the paved floor, and a tall woman in a riding habit came through the stable, side by side with an officer in the uniform of the Belgian Guards. As they passed the pony's stall, laughing and talking gaily, the woman glanced sharply at the clown, sitting there on his bucket, immovable as a statue, then, as quickly, she

THE CLOWN 6 1

averted her head, a sullen expression on her handsome face. She linked her arm into that of her companion and lent elaborate attention to his next remark. "Dteu ! que dest drdle /" she repeated twice with a shrill laugh and mocking gesture.

The clown's eyes followed her every movement ; hungry eyes that still gazed blankly at the quivering door as it banged to behind her.

There was a convulsive twitch in the clasped hands, a momentary move- ment as of some wild beast ready to spring, then with a deep sigh, the old expression of dumb resignation came over his face, and once more he seemed lost in thought.

After a while " La Belle Clotilde " returned — alone this time, but the clown made no sign, only he dropped his head a little lower upon his hands, so that his red periwig alone was visible above them. She came straight up to him. " Jack ! " she said, imperatively, striking her riding whip sharply against her green riding skirt, " Jack ! I've told you, once for all, I will not stand your prying. What made you come here to sit and stare ? Fool ! Don't do it again, Jack, or my patience will come to an end."

The clown never stirred.

" Do you hear? I forbid you to pass my window, to sit spying upon me. It is all of a piece — nonsense. Listen Jack," she continued, and she pushed up the red periwig with the tip of her whip, dropping her voice to a slightly more ingratiating tone ; " I was only chaffing, Jack. Let me have three louis d'or ! I am in a hurry ! I'm not one to be kept waiting, you know that ; Jack ! do you hear?" she added, in a rapidly rising crescendo, but Jack kept silence.

" Are you drunk, man, or not drunk enough ? Give me the money ! At once ! Have you lost your tongue, you fool ? '

Her face flushed darkly, and as no answer came, she struck him a sharp blow across the back :

'•Jack! you silly fool !" she cried in positive fury. "Don't you hear mc talking to you ? How dare you ? "

Still he did not move.

" La Belle Clotilde" stood there before him, her trailing skirt grasped hard in one clenched hand, her cheeks aflame, her foot tapping angrily, then, with a sudden effort, she so far mastered her temper as to find words again. She returned to the charge :

"Jack,"' she said, "Jack ;" she lingered on the last word until it became almost a caress : " It is so silly of you to give yourself these airs — and I want some money so badly."

62 THE SAVOY

Without raising his eyes, the clown stooped forward to pick up a straw from the floor ; he thrust it between his lips, closed his teeth upon it, and -.nuttered : " For him ? "

" That is nothing to you. Well — if you must know — yes. He has been unlucky — he must back his luck once more — and to-night. He shall stand you a supper."

The clown shook his head.

" Well then, imagine the money is for me, I ask you for it. I will pay it all back together."

Jack shook his head once more.

" You don't want it back ? So much the better, but, Jack, don't be all night about it, hurry up."

Her temper was rising again, but she kept it under.

" Jack, you will stand me a supper to-night ? " she said. Again the bowed head made an emphatic negation.

" Don't you care to ? " She dropped the trailing skirt, let herself slip down on to the straw at his feet, and laid a hand on his knees :

" Don't be stupid, Jack — give over this nonsense, you know I — like you. Lend me the money now, quickly, and " She tried to pull down his hands.

Suddenly he tossed up his head and thrust her away, not roughly, but with the firm touch of one determined to be obeyed, then, drawing from his pocket a clumsy purse, he poured its contents into her lap.

" There, you've got the money," he muttered, hoarsely, " now — go ! "

" Jack, after the performance " She would have touched his hand

again, but he drew it hastily back.

" Go — go, I said," he whispered, almost voiceless with emotion.

" La Belle Clotilde " rose slowly, gathering up her money ; slowly she walked the length of the stable, turning at the end : "Jack ! Jack ! "

She waited in vain for a word, a look, then flounced out with a shrug of her shapely shoulders.

The clown never moved, but the pony thrust his neck over the rail of his stall and grabbed at his arm. " Fifi ! Come along then." There was a sharp whinny of delight, and the tiny stallion pushed up against the swing bar, all impatience. His master stretched out his hand, unfastened it, and, once free, Fifi trotted straight up to him, pushed himself between the clown's knees and laid a black muzzle upon his shoulder. He seemed to know something was amiss.

There came over the stern face an expression of intense, almost pathetic

THE CLOWN 63

joy, the tears welled up in his eyes as in those of a mother when her child of its own accord first stretches out tiny hands to hers. " Fifi, my pet, my only pet ! " His voice failed him and he pressed his lips against the silky mane, and so the stablemen found them later on, Fifi cocking his ears and sweeping his long tail to and fro in delighted satisfaction.

In the arena "La Belle Clotilde" was delighting her audience by a brilliant display " a la haute /cole," sharing pretty equally with her handsome bay stallion the admiration of a group of cavalry officers who stood just within the archway. Foremost among these was the well-known figure of Captain Rene, glass in eye, his dandified features wreathed in smiles of approbation. Here in the circus he was persona grata. A really good judge of horseflesh, he took, or professed to take, as keen an interest in every fresh performer, every novel trick, as did any member of the company. Although known to be practically penniless, he always contrived to be in the smartest, most extravagant set in the regiment, and even here was the most lavish of all. None of his companions gave such champagne suppers, none was so quick to detect the weak points of a horse, nor so ready with compliments and bouquets for a fair Equestrienne. It was easy enough to be generous from a full purse, but Rene alone could stand unlimited drinks from empty pockets. His popularity was unbounded with almost the whole staff. " La Belle Clotilde" rode out amidst thunders of applause. The programme announced " A marvellous somersault trick over eight horses," and Jack the Clown, with the stereotyped grin of his profession once more upon his face, made his bow for the second time.

He busied himself for a few moments dressing three horses into line, playing endless tricks at the expense of the grooms, and indulging in the most extravagant acrobatic feats ; then with a single bound he was upon the spring- board, his lithe figure curled itself into a ball as he turned his somersault once — twice — and landed beyond the horses with a ringing " Ha-lala-i-ti ! "

One by one, more horses were led up, until a prolonged series of somer- saults carried him, thanks to his indefatigable muscles, across the backs of eight big horses, and still he was not satisfied.

He cried out for two more, to the loudly expressed delight of the audience.

There was a momentary deliberation among the stablemen, for none of the other horses were trained for this particular trick, but Jack was not to be denied, he held up two fingers imperatively and evoked a roar of laughter with the words, " Two ! two more horses, not donkeys like yourselves ! two

64 THE SAVOY

horses !" The ring master gave a sign of assent, and to fill up the pause Jack pretended to fall off the board, stood on his head, and proceeded to wriggle himself through the tan to the side of the horse farthest from him. Hand over hand he mounted by its tail, and then stood in well-feigned alarm upon its back. Taking off his hat, he spun it upon his chin, his nose, twirled it round and round, flung it in the air, catching it now on one foot, now on the other, now again on his head, flung it up again, missed it, grabbed at it with one hand, and as he jumped once more into the ring tossed it right away. It made a wide curve and landed — was it merely by accident ? — full in the face of Captain Rene. The clown laughed. " The clown's muzzle ! " he cried, and just then the two fresh horses were trotted in. They were not used to being forced into such close line, and fretted at the contact with the others ; first one, then another got restive, until the whole ten were fidgeting and nervous.

There was a fresh burst of music from the orchestra, a cry of " Steady, steady, now ! " from the grooms, and once more a white figure shot from the spring-board. There was a wild scream, a panic-stricken rush of horses and stablemen, and in the ring there lay a shapeless, inert mass ; a flutter of white frilling, a quiver of painted eyelids — a dead clown.

Roman Mathieu-Wierzeinski.

«w* cuk~„ U^C^Cj

O'SULLIVAN RUA TO MARY LAVELL

HEN my arms wrap you round, I press My heart upon the loveliness That has long faded in the world ; The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled In shadowy pools, when armies fled ; The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth ;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

Before they drowned their lovers' eyes

In twilight shaken with low sighs ;

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where a so sleepy incense rose

That only God's eyes did not close :

For that dim brow and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this ;

And, when you sigh from kiss to kiss,

I hear pale Beauty sighing too,

For hours when all must fade like dew

Till there be naught but throne on throne

Of seraphs, brooding, each alone,

A sword upon his iron knees,

On her most lonely mysteries.

YV. B. Yeats.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

ii

jIETZSCHE was by temperament a philosopher after the manner of the Greeks. In other words, philosophy was not to him, as to the average modern philosopher, a matter of books and the study, but a life to be lived. It seemed to him to have much less concern with " truth " than with the essentials of fine living. He loved travel and movement, he loved scenery, he loved cities and the spectacle of men, above all, he loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him strongly ; he envied Heraclitus his desert study amid the porticoes and peristyles of the immense temple of Diana. He had, however, his own favourite place of work, to which he often alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, amid the doves, in front of the strange and beautiful structure which he " loved, feared, and envied " ; and here in the spring, between ten o'clock and mid-day, he found his best philosophic laboratory.

It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have found himself most at home, although there are no signs that he felt any special sympathy with the Italians, that is to say in later than Renaissance days. For the most part he possessed very decided sympathies and antipathies. His antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature of things. Every prophet's message is primarily directed to his own people. And Nietzsche was unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. He tells somewhere with a certain humour how people abroad would ask him if Germany had produced no great thinker or artist, no really good book of late, and how with the courage of despair he would at last reply, " Yes, Bismarck ! " Nietzsche was willing enough to recognize the kind of virtue personified in Bismarck. But with that recogni- tion nearly all was said in favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. There is little in the German spirit that answered to his demands. He admired clearness, analytic precision, and highly organized intelligence, light, and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why profundity should lack a fine superficies, nor why strength should be ungainly. His instinctive comparison

FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 69

for a good thinker was always a good dancer. As a child he had been struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout life dancing seemed to him the image of the finest culture, supple to bend, strong to retain its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the highest training and energy of all the muscles of a well-knit organism. But the indubitable intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding German are scarcely those which can well be symbolized by an Otero or a Caicedo. " There is too much beer in the German intellect," Nietzsche said. For the last ten centuries Germany has wilfully stultified herself; " nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity," to which he was inclined to add music. (" The theatre and music," he remarked in " Die Frohliche Wissenschaft," " are the haschisch and betel of Europeans, and the history of the so-called higher culture is largely the history of narcotics.") " Germans regard bad writing," he said, " as a national privilege ; they do not write prose as one works at a statue, they only improvise." Even " German virtue" — and this was the unkindest cut of all — had its origin in eighteenth century France, as its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller, fully recognized. Thus it happens that the German has no perceptions — coupling his Goethe with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer with a Hartmann — and no tact, " no finger for nuances," his fingers are all claws. Nietzsche regarded it as merely an accident that he was himself born in Germany, just as it was merely an accident that Heine the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutchman, were born there. Yet, as I have already hinted, we may take these utterances too seriously. There are passages in his works — though we meet them rarely — which show that Nietzsche realized and admired the elemental energy, the depth and the contradictions in the German character ; he attributed them largely to mixture of races.

Nietzsche was not much attracted to the English. It is true that he names Landor as one of the four masters of prose this century has produced, while another of these is Emerson, with whom he had genuine affinity, although his own genius was keener and more passionate, with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also, his admiration was deep. And when he had outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, the fine qualities which he still recognized in that thinker — his concreteness, lucidity, reason- ableness — seemed to him English. He was less flattering towards English thought. Darwinism, for instance, he thought, savoured too much of the population question, and was invented by English men of science who were oppressed by the problems of poverty. The struggle for existence, he said,

70 THE SAVOY

is only an exception in nature ; it is exuberance, an even reckless superfluity, which rules. For English philosophic thought generally he had little but contempt. J. S. Mill was one of his " impossibilities ; " the English and French sociologists of to-day, he said, have only known degenerating types of society, devoid of organizing force, and they take their own debased instincts as the standard of social codes in general. Modern democracy, modern utilitarianism, are largely of English manufacture, and he came at last to hate them both. During the past century, he asserted, they have reduced the whole spiritual currency of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is the English, he also asserted — George Eliot, for instance — who, while abolishing Christian belief, have sought to bolster up the moral system which was created by Christianity, and which must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover, the English, who with this democratic and utilitarian plebeianism have seduced and perverted the fine genius of France.

Just as we owe to England the vulgarity which threatens to overspread Europe, so to France we owe the conception of a habit of nobility, in every best sense of the word. On that point Nietzsche's opinion never wavered. The present subjection of the French spirit to this damnable Anglo-mania, he declared, must never lead us to forget the ardent and passionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which belonged to the France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French, as Nietzsche always held, are the one modern European nation which may be compared with the Greeks. In " Menschliches, Allzumenschliches " he names six French writers — Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Fontenelle (in the " Dialogues des Morts "), Vauvenargues, Chamfort — who bring us nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group of modern authors, and contain more real thought than all the books of the German philosophers put together. The only French writer of the present century for whom he cared much (putting aside Merimee, whom he valued as a master of style, and perhaps as the author of " Carmen ") was Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters of the earlier group. The French, he points out, are the most Christian of all nations, and have produced the greatest saints. He enumerates Pascal (" the first among Christians, who was able to unite fervour, intellect, and candour ; — think of what that means ! "), Fenelon, Mme. de Guyon, Bruno, the founder of the Trappists, who have flourished nowhere but in France, the Huguenots, Port- Royal — truly, he exclaims, the great French freethinkers encountered foemen worthy of their steel ! The land which produced the most perfect types of

FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 71

Anti-Christianity produced also the most perfect types of Christianity. He defends, also, that seeming superficiality which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but the natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, while a great German's profundity is too often strangely bottled up from the light in a dark and contorted phial.

I have briefly stated Nietzsche's feeling as regards each of the three chief European peoples, because we are thus led up to the central points of his philosophy — his attitude towards modern religion and his attitude towards modern morals. We are often apt to regard these matters as of little practical importance ; we think it the reasonable duty of practical social politics to attend to the immediate questions in hand, and leave these wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked at the matter. He was too much of a philosopher, he had too wide a sense of the vital relation of things, to be content with the policy of tinkering society, wherever it seems to need mending most badly, avoiding any reference to the whole. That is our English method, and no doubt it is a very sane and safe method, but, as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy with English methods. His whole significance lies in the thorough and passionate analysis with which he sought to dissect and to dissolve, first, " German culture," then Christianity, and lastly, modern morals, with all that these involve.

It is scarcely necessary to point out, that though Nietzsche rejoiced in the title of freethinker, he can by no means be confounded with the ordinary secularist. He is not bent on destroying religion from any anaesthesia of the religious sense, or even in order to set up some religion of science which is practically no religion at all. He is thus on different ground from the great freethinkers of France, and to some extent of England. Nietzsche was him- self of the stuff of which great religious teachers are made, of the race of apostles. So when he writes of the founder of Christianity and the great Christian types, it is often with a poignant sympathy which the secularist can never know ; and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not the easy indifferent cruelty of the pachydermatous scoffer. When he analyzes the souls of these men and the impulses which have moved them, he knows with what he is dealing : he is analyzing his own soul.

A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not ; he had no moods of joyous resigna- tion. It is chiefly the religious ecstasy of active moral energy that he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is his weapon rather than the merely defensive breastplate of faith. St. Paul is the consummate type of such religious forces, and whatever Nietzsche wrote of that apostle — the inventor

72 THE SAVOY

of Christianity, as he calls him — is peculiarly interesting. He hates him indeed, but even his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sympathy. It is thus in a remarkable passage in " Morgenrothe," where he tells briefly the history and struggles of that importunate soul, so superstitious and yet so shrewd, without whom there would have been no Christianity. He describes the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined " Jewish Pascal," who flagellated himself with the law that he came to hate with the hatred of one who had a genius for hatred ; who in one dazzling flash of illumination realized that Jesus by accomplishing the law had annihilated it, and so furnished him with the instrument he desired to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and to revel in the freedom of his joy. Nietzsche possesses a natural insight in probing the wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also in describing the effects of extreme pain in chasing away the mists from life, in showing to a man his own naked personality, in bringing us face to face with the cold and terrible fact. It is thus that, coupling the greatest figure in history with the greatest figure in fiction, he compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the cross — " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " — with the disillusionment of the dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he speaks no harsh word, but he regarded the atmosphere of Roman decay and languor — though very favourable for the production of fine personalities — as ill-adapted to the development of a great religion. The Gospels lead us into the atmosphere of a Russian novel, he remarks in one of his last writings, " Der Antichrist," an atmosphere in which the figure of Jesus had to be coarsened to be understood, and became moulded in men's minds by memories of more familiar types — prophet, Messiah, wonder-worker, judge ; the real man they could not even see. " It must ever be a matter for regret that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who could understand the enthralling charm of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid, and the child-like." Jesus, he continues, never denied the world, the state, culture, work ; he simply never knew or realized their existence ; his own inner experience — " life," " light," " truth " — was all in all to him. The only realities to him were inner realities, so living that they make one feel " in Heaven " and " eternal ; " this it was to be " saved." And Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before him, that the fact that men should bow the knee in Christ's name to the very opposite of all these things, and con- secrate in the " Church " all that he threw behind him, is an insoluble example of historical irony. " Strictly speaking, there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross. The Gcspel died on the cross."

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 73

There may seem a savour of contempt in the allusion to Jesus as an " interesting decadent" and undoubtedly there is in " Der Antichrist " a passionate bitterness which is not found in Nietzsche's earlier books. But he habitually used the word decadent in a somewhat extended and peculiar sense. The decadent, as Nietzsche understood him, was the product of an age in which virility was dead and weakness was sanctified ; it was so with the Buddhist as well as with the Christian, they both owe their origin and their progress to " some monstrous disease of will." They sprang up among creatures who craved for some " Thou shalt," and who were apt only for that one form of energy which the weak possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may be regarded as sound by those who do not accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche always coupled the Christian and the anarchist ; to him they were both products of decadence. Both wish to revenge their own discomfort on this present world, he asserted, the anarchist immediately, the Christian at the last day. Instead of feeling, "/ am worth nothing," the decadent says, "Life is worth nothing," — a terribly contagious state of mind which has covered the world with the vitality of a tropical jungle. It cannot be too often repeated, Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born of the decay of antiquity, and on the degenerate people of that time it worked like a soothing balm ; their eyes and ears were sealed by age and they could no longer understand Epicurus and Epictetus. At such a time purity and beneficence, large promises of future life, worked sweetly and wholesomely. But for fresh young barbarians Christianity is poison. It produces a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic, childlike and animal natures as the ancient Germans, and to that enfeeblement, indeed, we owe the revival of classic culture ; so that the conclusion of the whole matter is here, as ever, Nietzsche remarks, that " it is impossible to say whether, in the language of Christianity, God owes more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to God, for the way in which things have come about." But in the interaction of the classic spirit and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche's own instincts were not on the side of Christianity, and as the years went on he expresses himself in ever more unmeasured language. He could not take up the " Imitation of Christ " — the very word " imitation " being, as indeed Michelet had said before, the whole of Christianity — without physical repugnance. And in the " Gotzendammerung " he compares the Bible with the Laws of Manu (though at the same time asserting that it is a sin to name the two books in the same breath) : " The sun lies on the whole book. All those things on which Christianity vents its bottomless vulgarity — procreation, for example, woman, marriage — are here handled earnestly and

74 THE SAVOY

reverently, with love and trust I know no book in which so many tender and gracious things are said about women as in the Laws of Manu ; these gray- beards and saints have a way of being civil towards women which is perhaps not overdone." Again in " Der Antichrist " — which represents, I repeat, the unbalanced judgments of his last period — he tells how he turns from Paul with delight to Petronius, a book of which it can be said e tutto festo, ' immortally sound, immortally serene." In the whole New Testament, he adds, there is only one figure we can genuinely honour — that of Pilate.

On the whole, Nietzsche's attitude towards Christianity was one of repulsion and antagonism. At first he appears indifferent, then he becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly hostile. He admits that Christianity possesses the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic to soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men whose souls are physiologically weak. But from first to last there is no sign of any genuine personal sympathy with the religion of the poor in spirit. Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of salvation, had in it an element of Greek energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation, he declares, raises its sublime development of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid foundation. Christianity hates the body ; the first act of Christian triumph over the Moors, he recalls, was to close the public baths which they had everywhere erected. " With its contempt for the body Christianity was the greatest misfortune that ever befell humanity." And at the end of " Der Antichrist " he sums up his concentrated hatred : " I cofidemn Christianity ; I raise against the Christian Church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the most profound of all thinkable corruptions." *

It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche's condemnation of Christianity extended to the Christian God. He even went so far as to assert that it was the development of Christian morality itself — " the father-confessor sensitiveness of the Christian conscience translated and sublimed into a scientific conscience " — which had finally conquered the Christian God. He held, however, that polytheism had played an important part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes, supernatural beings generally, were inestimable schoolmasters to bring us to the sovereignty of the individual. Polytheism opened up divine horizons of freedom to humanity. " Ye shall be as Gods." But it has not been so with monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in whose presence all others were false gods, favours stagnation and unity of type ; monotheism has thus perhaps constituted " the greatest danger which humanity has had to meet in past ages." Nor are we yet freed from its

FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 75

influence. " For centuries after Buddha died men showed his shadow in a cave — a vast terrible shadow. God is dead : but thousands of years hence there will probably be caves in which his shadow may yet be seen. And we — we must go on fighting that shadow ! " How deeply rooted Nietzsche believed faith in a god to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to " Zarathustra." A strange collection of Ucbermcnschen — the men of the future — are gathered together in Zarathustra's cave : two kings, the last of the popes — thrown out of work by the death of God — and many miscellaneous creatures, including a donkey. As Zarathustra returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer and smells the odour of incense ; on entering he finds the Ucbcrmcnsclien all on their knees intoning an extraordinary litany to the donkey, who has " created us all in his own image."

In his opposition to the Christian faith and the Christian God, Nietzsche by no means stands alone, however independent he may have been in the method and standpoint of his attack. But in his opposition to Christian morality he was more radically original. There is a very general tendency among those who reject Christian theology to shore up the superstructure of Christian morality which rests on that theology. George Eliot, in her writings at all events, has been an eloquent and distinguished advocate of this process ; Mr. Myers, in an oft-quoted passage, has described with considerable melodramatic vigour the " sibyl in the gloom " of the Trinity Fellows' Garden at Cambridge, who withdrew God and Immortality from his grasp, but, to his consternation, told him to go on obeying Duty. Nietzsche would have sympathized with Mr. Myers. What George Eliot proposed was one of those compromises so dear to our British minds. Nietzsche would none of it. Hence his contemptuous treatment of George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of Herbert Spencer, and so many more of our favourite intellectual heroes who have striven to preserve Christian morality while denying Christian theology. Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals, whether formulated by bishops or by anarchists, as alike founded on a Christian basis, and when that founda- tion is sapped they cannot stand.

The motive of modern morality is pity, its principle is altruistic, its motto is " Love your neighbours as yourself," its ideal self-abnegation, its end the greatest good of the greatest number. All these things were abhorrent to Nietzsche, or, so far as he accepted them, it was in forms which gave them new values. Modern morality, he said, is founded on an extravagant dread of pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily in others. Sympathy is fellow- suffering ; to love one's neighbour as oneself is to dread his pain as we dread

E

76 THE SAVOY

our own pain. The religion of love is built upon the fear of pain. " On n'est bon que par la pitie ; " the acceptance of that doctrine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome of Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential to Christianity, which rested on the egoistic basis of personal salvation : " One thing is needful." But it remains the most important by-product of Christi- anity, and has ever been gaining strength. Kant stood firmly outside the stream, but the French freethinkers, from Voltaire onwards, were not to be outdone in this direction by Christians, while Comte with his " Vivre pour autrui " even out-Christianized Christianity, and Schopenhauer in Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the same doctrine.

Both the sympathetic man and the unsympathetic man, Nietzsche argues, are egoists. But the unsympathetic man he held to be a more admirable kind of egoist. It is best to win the strength that comes of experience and suffering, and to allow others also to play their own cards and win the same strength, shedding our tears in private, and abhorring soft-heartedness as the foe of all manhood and courage. To call the unsympathetic man " wicked," and the sympathetic man " good," seemed to Nietzsche a fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its day. He believed he was the first to point out the danger of the prevailing fashion as a sort of moral impressionism, the outcome of the hyperesthesia peculiar to periods of decadence. Not indeed that Christianity is, or could be, carried out among us to its fullest extent : " That would be a serious matter. If we were ever to become the object to others of the same stupidities and importunities which they expend on themselves, we should flee wildly as soon as we saw our ' neighbour ' approach, and curse sympathy as heartily as we now curse egoism." Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche remarks elsewhere, remain unrevealed and incomprehensible to nearly all other persons, even to the " neighbour " who eats out of the same dish with us. And even though my grief should become visible, the dear sympathetic neighbour can know nothing of its complexity and results, of the organic economy of my soul. That my grief may be bound up with my happiness troubles him little. The devotee of the " religion of pity" will heal my sorrows without a moment's delay ; he knows not that the path to my Heaven must lie through my own Hell, that happiness and unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up together, or remain stunted together.

" Morality is the mob-instinct working in the individual." It rests, Nietzsche asserts, on two thoughts : " the community is worth more than the individual," and " a permanent advantage is better than a temporary advantage ; " whence it follows that all the advantages of the community are

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE tj

preferable to those of the individual. Morality thus becomes a string of negative injunctions, a series of " Thou shalt nots," with scarcely a positive command amongst them ; witness the well-known table of Jewish command- ments. Now Nietzsche could not endure mere negative virtues. He resented the subtle change which has taken place in the very meaning of the word " virtue," and which has perverted it from an expression of positive masculine qualities into one of merely negative feminine qualities. In his earliest essay he referred to " active sin " as the Promethean virtue which distinguishes the Aryans. The only moral codes that commended themselves to him were those that contained positive commands alone : " Do this ! Do it with all your heart, and all your strength, and all your dreams ! — and all other things shall be taken away from you ! " For if we are truly devoted to the things that are good to do we need trouble ourselves little about the things that are good to leave undone.

Nietzsche compared himself to a mole boring down into the ground and undermining what philosophers have for a couple of thousand years considered the very surest ground to build on — the trust in morals. One of his favourite methods of attack is by the analysis of the " conscience." He points out that whatever we were regularly required to do in youth by those we honoured and feared created our " good conscience." The dictates of conscience, how- ever urgent, thus have no true validity as regards the person who experiences them. " But," some one protests, " must we not trust our feelings ? " " Yes," replies Nietzsche, " trust your feelings, but still remember that the inspiration which springs from feelings is the grandchild of an opinion, often a false one,, and in any case not your own. To trust one's feelings — that means to yield more obedience to one's grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods within our own breasts : our own reason and our own ex- perience." Faith in authority is thus the source of conscience ; it is not the voice of God in the human heart but the voice of man in man. The sphere of the moral is the sphere of tradition, and a man is moral because he is dependent on a tradition and not on himself. Originally everything was within the sphere of morals, and it was only possible to escape from that sphere by becoming a law-giver, medicine-man, demigod — that is to say by making morals. To be customary is to be moral, — I still closely follow Nietzsche's thought and expression, — to be individual is to be wicked. Every kind of originality involves a bad conscience. Nietzsche insists with fine eloquence, again and again, that every good gift that has been given to man put a bad conscience into the heart of the giver. Every good thing was once

78 THE SAVOY

new, unaccustomed, immoral, and gnawed at the vitals of the finder like a worm. Every new doctrine is wicked. Science has always come into the world with a bad conscience, with the emotions of a criminal, at least of a smuggler. No man can be disobedient to custom and not be immoral, and feel that he is immoral. The artist, the actor, the merchant, the freethinker, the discoverer, were once all criminals, and were persecuted, crushed, rendered morbid, as all persons must be when their virtues are not the virtues idealized by the community. Primitive men lived in hordes, and must obey the horde- voice within them. The whole phenomena of morals are animal-like, and have their origin in the search for prey and the avoidance of pursuit.

Progress is thus a gradual emancipation from morals. We have to recognize the services of the men who fight in this struggle against morals, and who are crushed into the ranks of criminals. Not that we need pity them. " It is a new justice that is called for, a new mot d'ordre. We need new philosophers. The moral world also is round. The moral world also has its antipodes, and the antipodes also have their right to exist. A new world remains to be discovered — and more than one ! Hoist sail, O philosophers ! "

" Men must become both better and wickeder!' So spake Zarathustra ; or, as he elsewhere has it, " It is with man as with a tree, the higher he would climb into the brightness above, the more vigorously his roots must strive earthwards, downwards, into the darkness and the depths — into the wicked." Wickedness is just as indispensable as goodness. It is the ploughshare of wickedness which turns up and fertilizes the exhausted fields of goodness. We must no longer be afraid to be wicked ; we must no longer be afraid to be hard. " Only the noblest things are very hard. This new command, O my brothers, I lay upon you — become hard."

In renewing our moral ideals we need also to renew our whole conception of the function and value of morals. Nietzsche advises moralists to change their tactics : " Deny moral values, deprive them of the applause of the crowd, create obstacles to their free circulation ; let them be the shame-faced secrets of a few solitary souls ; forbid morality ! In so doing you may perhaps accredit these things among the only men whom one need have on one's side, I mean heroic men. Let it be said of morality to-day as Meister Eckard said : ' I pray God that he may rid me of God ! ' " We have altogether over- estimated the importance of morality. Christianity knew better when it placed " grace" above morals, and so also did Buddhism. And if we turn to literature, Nietzsche maintains, it is a vast mistake to suppose that, for instance, great tragedies have, or were intended to have, any moral effect. Look at " Macbeth,"

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 79

at "Tristan und Isolde," at " CEdipus." In all these cases it would have been easy to make guilt the pivot of the drama. But the great poet is in love with passion. " He calls to us : ' It is the charm of charms, this exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy, yet often sun-filled existence ! It is an adventure to live — take this side or that, it will always be the same ! ' So he speaks to us out of a restless and vigorous time, half drunken and dazed with excess of blood and energy, out of a wickeder time than ours is ; and we are obliged to set to rights the aim of a Shakespeare and make it righteous, that is to say, to misunderstand it."

We have to recognize a diversity of moral ideals. Nothing is more pro- foundly dangerous than, with Kant, to create impersonal categorical impera- tives after the Chinese fashion, to generalize " virtue," " duty," and " goodness," and sacrifice them to the Moloch of abstraction. " Every man must find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative ; " it must be founded on inner necessity, on deep personal choice. Only the simpleton says : " Men ought to be like this or like that." The real world presents to us a dazzling wealth of types, a prodigious play of forms and metamorphoses. Yet up comes a poor devil of a moralist, and says to us : " No ! men ought to be something quite different ! " and straightway he paints a picture of himself on the wall, and exclaims : " Ecce homo ! " But one thing is needful, that a man should attain the fullest self-satisfaction. Every man must be his own moralist.

These views might be regarded as " lax," as predisposing to easy self- indulgence. Nietzsche would have smiled at such a notion. Not yielding, but mastering, was the key to his personal morality. " Every day is badly spent," he said, "in which a man has not once denied himself; this gymnastic is inevitable if a man will retain the joy of being his own master." The four cardinal virtues, as Nietzsche understood morals, are sincerity, courage, generosity, and courtesy. " Do what you will," said Zarathustra, " but first be one of those who are able to will. Love your neighbour as yourself — but first be one of those who are able to love themselves." And again Zarathustra spoke : " He who belongs to me must be strong of bone and light of foot, eager for fight and for feast, no sulker, no John o' Dreams, as ready for the hardest task as for a feast, sound and hale. The best things belong to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, then we take them : the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women ! " There was no desire here to suppress effort and pain. That Nietzsche regarded as a mark of modern Christian morals. It is pain, more pain and deeper, that we need. The discipline of suffering alone creates man's pre-eminence. " Man unites

So THE SAVOY

in himself the creature and the creator : there is in him the stuff of things, the fragmentary and the superfluous, clay, mud, madness, chaos ; but there is also in him the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine blessedness of the spectator on the seventh day." Do you pity, he asks, what must be fashioned, broken, forged, refined as by fire ? But our pity is spent on one thing alone, the most effeminate of all weaknesses — pity. This was the source of Nietzsche's admiration for war, and indifference to its horror ; he regarded it as the symbol of that spiritual warfare and bloodshed in which to him all human progress consisted. He might, had he pleased, have said with the Jew and the Christian, that without shedding of blood there shall be no remission of sins. But with a difference, for as he looked at the matter, every man must be his own saviour, and it is his own blood that must be shed ; there is no salvation by proxy. That was expressed in his favourite motto : Virescit volnere virtus.

Nietzsche's ideal man is the man of Epictetus, as he describes him in " Mor- genrothe," the laconic, brave, self-contained man, not lusting after expression like the modern idealist. The man whom Epictetus loved hated fanaticism, he hated notoriety, he knew how to smile. And the best was, added Nietzsche, that he had no fear of God before his eyes ; he believed firmly in reason, and relied, not on divine grace, but on himself. Of all Shakespeare's plays, "Julius Csesar " seemed to Nietzsche the greatest, because it glorifies Brutus ; the finest thing that can be said in Shakespeare's honour, Nietzsche thought, was that — aided perhaps by some secret and intimate experience — he believed in Brutus and the virtues that Brutus personified. In course of time, however, while not losing his sympathy with stoicism, it was Epi- cureanism, the heroic aspects of Epicureanism, which chiefly appealed to Nietzsche. He regarded Epicurus as one of the world's greatest men, the discoverer of the heroically idyllic method of living a philosophy ; for one to whom happiness could never be more than an unending self-discipline, and whose ideal of life had ever been that of a spiritual nomad, the methods of Epicurus seemed to yield the finest secrets of good living. Socrates, with his joy in life and in himself, was also an object of Nietzsche's admiration. Among later thinkers, Helvetius appealed to him strongly. Goethe and Napoleon were naturally among his favourite heroes, as were Alcibiades and Caesar. The latest great age of heroes was to him the Italian Renaissance. Then came Luther, opposing the rights of the peasants, yet himself initiating a peasants' revolt of the intellect, and preparing the way for that shallow plebeianism of the spirit which has marked the last two centuries.

FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 81

Latterly, in tracing the genealogy of modern morals, Nietzsche's opinions hardened into a formula. He recognized three stages of moral evolution : first, the pre-moral period of primitive times, when the beast of prey was the model of conduct, and the worth of an action was judged by its results. Then came the moral period, when the worth of an action was judged not by its results, but by its origin ; this period has been the triumph of what Nietzsche calls slave-morality, the morality of the mob ; the goodness and badness of actions is determined by atavism, at best by survivals ; every man is occupied in laying down laws for his neighbour instead of for himself, and all are tamed and chastised into weakness in order that they may be able to obey these prescriptions. Nietzsche ingeniously connected his slave-morality with the undoubted fact that for many centuries the large, fair-haired aristo- cratic race has been dying out in Europe, and the older down-trodden race — short, dark, and broad-headed — has been slowly gaining predominance. But now we stand at the threshold of the extra-moral period. Slave-morality, Nietzsche asserted, is about to give way to master-morality; the lion will take the place of the camel. The instincts of life, refusing to allow that any- thing is forbidden, will again assert themselves, sweeping away the feeble negative democratic morality of our time. The day has now come for the man who is able to rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others not out of his weakness, but out of his strength ; to him nothing is forbidden, for he has passed beyond goodness and beyond wickedness.

Havelock Ellis.

FROM THE "IGNEZ DE CASTRO OF ANTONIO FERREIRA 1

Chorus I. HEN youthful Love was born Into the world came life,

The stars received their light, the sun his rays The Heavens glowed red that morn, And, vanquished in the strife,

Darkness revealed all beauties to the gaze. She that, high-throned, in fee Possesses the third sphere, Born of the angry sea,

Gave Love unto the world, her offspring dear.

'Tis Love adorns the earth

With grass and babbling burns,

Paints every flower, each tree with foliage weights, Fierce war to peace and mirth,

Harshness to softness turns,

Melting in thousand loves a thousand hates. The lives by death, the dure,

O'ercome, he doth renew ; The world's gay portraiture,

So fresh and lovely, unto him is due.

1 This was the first notable tragedy produced in modern Europe under the immediate influence ot Greek art and methods. Its subject — the death of D. Ignez de Castro — is one that has been treated by authors of all nations since the death of Ferreira, but never so happily, if the episode in Canto III. of the Lusiads be excepted. The Chorus here trans- lated comes from the First Act, and is a marked contrast to that in the Second. The former is a light and lovely lyric ; the latter a grave and grandiose chorus in Sapphics. The one was written to be sung, while nothing but recitation could do justice to the other.

FROM "IGNEZ DE CASTRO" OF ANTONIO FERREIRA 83

His flames let no man fear,

Though furious they rise,

For they are loving ; gentle Love and sweet Will dry each amorous tear

That wells up through the eyes,

And gladly grant when love-sick folk entreat. Gold arrows, gleaming bright,

In his full quiver ring, Full deadly to the sight,

Yet they are shot by Love and love they bring.

From every lyre on high

Let loving ditties sound,

And Love's soft name the ambient air serene. Let tears and sorrow fly,

Let peace and joy abound, And make the rivers clear, the vales amene. Let the sweet lyre of Love

Fill Heaven with accents rare, And the great God above,

That love inspires, thence crown thee, Castro fair.

Chorus II.

Rather a Tyrant blind,

Born of the poet's brain, Fierce lust, deceit unkind,

God of the foolish, son of sloth ; the bane And common wreck designed Of glory and fair fame ; He hurls, with reckless aim, On every side his darts, And Mars is burning, while Apollo smarts.

Winging his hurried flight

He sets the earth on fire ; His shafts of deadly might

The more they miss, work mischief yet more dire.

8 4 THE SAVOY

He glories to unite

Tempers the most opposed,

And those for love disposed

And like, to separate ;

His thirst nor tears nor blood can ever sate.

Into the tender breast

Of some pure modest maid, As time and means suggest,

He enters softly, or with force arrayed. Fires long time set at rest

He raises to a glow,

Cool blood and age's snow

He kindles, and his dart,

Shot by some beauteous eye, pierces the heart.

Thence spreads the poisonous blight

Coursing through every vein ; In dreams of fond delight

The soul indulges, weaving webs inane. Chaste modesty takes flight

And virile constancy ;

Death, following misery,

Enters in softest guise,

The heart is hardened and the reason dies.

Who took the iron mace,

Once great Alcides' pride, Seating, in bondmaid's place,

The lion-tamer at a maiden's side ? The spoils of that dread chase

Who changed to soft and fine

Attire of feminine

Estate, and made him learn,

With horny hand, the distaff douce to turn ?

A thousand pictures show,

To shapes a myriad turned, Great Jupiter fallen low,

Far from the Heavens, which, leaving, he has spurned.

FROM "IGNEZ DE CASTRO" OF ANTONIO FERREIRA 85

How strong the charm that so The heart of man converts ! How potent that subverts By craft the loftiest sprite, And plunges in vile sin, a woeful plight !

The Trojan's mighty fame

What other fire consumed ? Or what Spain's holy name

To hand down mournful memories hath doomed ? Blind love the twain o'ercame ;

A cruel Boy that day

Triumphed and both did slay,

With blood and lives untold,

To sate a foolish appetite ill-sold.

How blest is he that knew

With stout heart to oppose The arrow as it flew,

Or quench the flames when first they angry rose ! Beloved of God a few

Have gained from Heaven such grace,

The most, with tearful face,

Repent, whene'er they mind,

Their vain submission to the Infant blind.

Edgar Prestage.

BERTHA AT THE FAIR

O, dear Madame, it has never greatly interested me to be taken for a poet. And that is one reason why I have for the most part shunned poetical persons : you are the exception, of course, but then you are beautiful, and I forgive you for writing poetry : and have lived as much of my life as I could among the ladies who read penny novelettes. And yet I too have been taken for a poet. Shall I tell you about it, before I tell you about Bertha, who did not know what a poet was ?

It was one midnight, in London, at the corner of a somewhat sordid street. I was standing at the edge of the pavement, looking across at the upper windows of a house 'opposite. That does not strike you, dear Muse of ima- ginary cypresses, as a poetical attitude ? Perhaps not ; and indeed I was thinking little enough of poetry at the time. I was thinking only of someone who had quitted me in anger, five minutes before, and whose shadow I seemed to see on the blind, in that lighted upper room of the house opposite. I stood quite motionless on the pavement, and I gazed so intently at the blind, that, as if in response to the urgency of my will, the blind was drawn aside, and she looked out. She saw me, drew back, and seemed to speak to someone inside ; then returned to the window, and pulling down the blind behind her, leant motionless against the glass, watching me intently. In this manner we gazed at one another for some minutes, neither, at the time, realizing that each could be seen so distinctly by the other. As I stood there, unable to move, yet in mortal shame of the futile folly of such an attitude, I realized that my appearance was being discussed by some loungers not many yards distant. And the last, decisive, uncontroverted conjecture was this : " He's a poet ! " That point settled, one of them left the group, and came up to me. He was a prize-fighter, quite an amiable person ; I welcomed him, for he talked to me, and so gave me an excuse for lingering ; he was kind enough to borrow a shilling of me, before we parted ; and the action of slipping the coin into his hand gave me the further excuse of turning rapidly away, -witfiout a last look at the motionless figure watching me from the lighted window. Ah, that was a long

HURT HA AT THE FAIR 87

time ago, Madame ; but you see I remember it quite distinctly, not, perhaps, because it was the occasion when I was taken for a poet. Do you mind if I talk now about Bertha ? I met Bertha much more recently, but I am not sure that I remember her quite so well.

This was at Brussels. It was in the time of the Kermesse, when, as you know, the good Flemish people are somewhat more boisterously jolly than usual ; when the band plays in the middle of the market-place, and the people walk round and round the band-stand, looking up at the Archangel Michael on the spire of the Hotel de Ville, to see him turn first pink and then green, as the Bengal lights smoke about his feet ; when there are processions in the streets, music and torches, and everyone sets out for the Fair. You have seen the Gingerbread Fair at Paris ? Well, imagine a tiny Gingerbread Fair, but with something quite Flemish in the solid gaiety of its shows and crowds, as solid as the " bons chevaux de bois" Verlaine's " bons chevaux de bois" that go prancing up and down in their rattling circles. Quite Flemish, too, were the little mysterious booths, which you have certainly not found in Paris, Madame, and which I should certainly not have taken you to see in Brussels. You paid a penny at the door, and, once inside, were scarcely limited in regard to the sum you might easily spend on very little. What did one see ? Indeed, very little. There was a lady, perched, for the most part, in an odd little alcove, raised a bed's height above the ground. As a rule, she was not charming, not even young ; and her conversation was almost limited to a phrase in which " Mon petit benefice" recurred, somewhat tiresomely. No, there was not much to see, after all.

But Bertha was different. I don't know exactly what was the odd fascina- tion of Bertha, but she fascinated us all : the mild Flemish painter, with his golden beard ; our cynical publisher, with his diabolical monocle ; my fantastical friend, the poet ; and, Madame, be sure, myself. She was tall and lissom : she apologized for taking the place of the fat lady usually on exhibi- tion ; she had strange, perverse, shifting eyes, the colour of burnt topazes, and thin painful lips, that smiled frankly, when the eyes began their queer dance under the straight eyebrows. She was scarred on the cheek : a wicked Baron, she told us, had done that, with vitriol ; one of her breasts was singularly mutilated ; she had been shot in the back by an Englishman, when she was keeping a shooting-gallery at Antwerp. And she had the air of a dangerous martyr, who might bewitch one, with some of those sorceries that had turned, somehow, to her own hurt.

We stayed a long time in the booth. I forget most of our conversation.

88 THE SAVOY

But I remember that our publisher, holding the monocle preposterously between his lips, announced solemnly: " Je sin's un poete Then he generously shifted the credit upon the two of us who were most anxious to disclaim the name. Bertha was curious, but bewildered. She had no conception of what a poet was. We tried French, Flemish, and English, poem, verse, rhyme, song, everything, in short, and in vain. At last an idea struck her : she understood : we were cafe-chantant singers. That was the nearest she ever came.

Do but think of it, Madame, for one instant : a woman who does not so much as know what a poet is ! But you can have no idea how grateful I was to Bertha, nor how often, since then, I have longed 'to see her again. Never did any woman so charm me by so celestial an ignorance. The moments I spent with Bertha at the Fair repaid me for I know not how many weary hours in drawing-rooms. Can you understand the sensation, Madame, the infinite relief? .... And then she was a snake-like creature, with long cool hands.

THE BALLAD OF A BARBER

ERE is the tale of Carrousel, The barber of Meridian Street. He cut, and coiffed, and shaved so well, That all the world was at his feet.

The King, the Queen, and all the Court, To no one else would trust their hair, And reigning belles of every sort Owed their successes to his care.

With carriage and with cabriolet Daily Meridian Street was blocked, Like bees about a bright bouquet The beaux about his doorway flocked.

Such was his art he could with ease Curl wit into the dullest face ; Or to a goddess of old Greece Add a new wonder and a grace.

All powders, paints, and subtle dyes, And costliest scents that men distil, And rare pomades, forgot their price And marvelled at his splendid skill.

The curling irons in his hand Almost grew quick enough to speak, The razor was a magic wand That understood the softest cheek. F

92 THE SAVOY

Yet with no pride his heart was moved ; He was so modest in his ways ! His daily task was all he loved, And now and then a little praise.

An equal care he would bestow On problems simple or complex ; And nobody had seen him show A preference for either sex.

How came it then one summer day, Coiffing the daughter of the King, He lengthened out the least delay And loitered in his hairdressing ?

The Princess was a pretty child, Thirteen years old, or thereabout. She was as joyous and as wild As spring flowers when the sun is out.

Her gold hair fell down to her feet And hung about her pretty eyes ; She was as lyrical and sweet As one of Schubert's melodies.

Three times the barber curled a lock, And thrice he straightened it again ; And twice the irons scorched her frock, And twice he stumbled in her train.

His fingers lost their cunning quite, His ivory combs obeyed no more ; Something or other dimmed his sight, And moved mysteriously the floor.

He leant upon the toilet table, His fingers fumbled in his breast ; He felt as foolish as a fable, And feeble as a pointless jest.

THE BALLAD OF A BARBER 93

He snatched a bottle of Cologne,

And broke the neck between his hands ;

lie felt as if he was alone,

And mighty as a king's commands.

The Princess gave a little scream, Carrousel's cut was sharp and deep ; He left her softly as a dream That leaves a sleeper to his sleep.

He left the room on pointed feet ; Smiling that things had gone so well. They hanged him in Meridian Street. You pray in vain for Carrousel.

Aubrey Beardsi.i v.

AB

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE

HE editor asks me to say " a few words " about " Simplifica- tion " — a subject which seems somehow to have got itself connected with my name, though I should think it only a comparatively-speaking small part of my programme. I remember, in that highly moral tale " Sandford and Merton," that there is an affecting account of a certain Miss Simpkins who, after some frivolous charmer has executed the usual fireworks on the piano, sits down and plays " a few simple chords " which " bring tears to all eyes." I suppose our editor expects me to produce a similarly touching effect on the readers of the " Savoy."

But I really have no sentimentalities to give utterance to on this subject, nor any moral tale to unfold. People (of the kind that carry reticules) sometimes coming into my study and finding it a moderately bright room with a few objects in it worth looking at, take it upon themselves to say, " but I thought it was against your principles to have ornaments ; " and then I have to explain, for the hundredth time, that I have never said anything of the kind, that I have never set up duty as against beauty, and thai:, anyhow, I have not the smallest intention of boxing my life, or that of others, within the four corners of any mere cut-and-dried principle.

It is just a question of facts, and of the science of life. And the facts are these. People as a rule, being extremely muddle-headed about life, are under a fixed impression that the more they can acquire and accumulate in any department, the " better off" they will be, and the better times they will have. Consequently when they walk down the street and see nice things in the shop windows, instead of leaving them there, if they have any money in their pockets, they buy them and put them on their backs or into their mouths, or in their rooms and round their walls ; and then, after a time, finding the result not very satisfactory, they think they have not bought the right things, and so go out again and buy some more. And they go on doing this in a blind habitual way till at last their bodies and lives are as muddled up as their brains are, and they can hardly move about or enjoy themselves

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF LIFE 95

for the very multitude of their possessions, and impediments, and duties, and responsibilities, and diseases connected with them.

The origin of this absurd conduct is of course easy to see. It is what the scientific men call an "atavism." In the case of most of us, our ancestors, a few generations back, were no doubt actually in want (and if one goes far enough this is true of everybody) — in want of sufficient food or sufficient clothing. Consequently it became a fixed " principle " in those days, when you saw a chance, to accumulate as much as you could ; which principle at last became a blind habit. Savages when they come across a good square meal — in the shape of a dead elephant — just stuff as much as ever they can, knowing it doubtful when they will get another chance. In decent society nowadays the fixed idea of stuffing has been got over to some extent, but the other fixed ideas mostly remain ; and, without knowing exactly why, people cram their houses, their rooms, their shelves, with " goods," their backs with clothes, their fingers with rings, and so forth, to the last point that can be borne.

Of course if the good folk really enjoy doing so, it's all right. But, from the wails and groans one constantly hears, this seems to be an open question. The gratification of fixed ideas, unlike the gratification of a living need, seems to be a kind of mechanical thing, supposed to be necessary, but certainly burdensome, and bringing little enjoyment with it. And progress seems frequently to consist in just getting rid of such ideas as best one can, by surgical operation or otherwise.

There are different ways of dealing with this question of Accumulation, which so harasses modern life. The first may be called the method of Thoreau. Thoreau had an ornament on his shelf, but finding it wanted dusting every day, and having to do the dusting himself, he ultimately came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the trouble, and threw the ornament out of the window. That was perfectly sensible. There was no question exactly of sentiment or of principle, but just a question of fact — was the pleasure worth the trouble ?

Personally I like to have a few things of beauty about me ; and as it happens that I dust and clean out my room myself, I know exactly how much trouble each thing in it is, and whether the trouble is compensated by the pleasure. It is merely a personal question. Some people might like their rooms crowded up with objects, and still be willing to spend a good part of their lives in keeping them in order ; but no one surely could quarrel with them on that account.

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That is all easy enough to see. But now there is another class of folk who, experiencing the pleasure of having certain possessions, are not willing to undergo the labour of keeping them in order. They want the pleasure without the trouble or pains attaching to it. That is, they want to make water run up-hill. They therefore buy servants and attendants to keep the things in order for them. And they do this because they think the method will be a " simplification " in their sense, i.e., that it will save them trouble. But in general they think this only because they are muddle-headed and do not think clearly.

The problem is not escaped ; for most people, being partly human, cannot have other folk living under the same roof without feeling bound to and even concerned about them, to consider them and their needs, their interests, their troubles, sicknesses, and so forth. Thus, after a time, they find that instead of reducing complications they have only added a fresh responsibility to their lives. Having got a housemaid to look after your rooms for you, you find that she has to be instructed constantly in her work, that even so she does things wrong, breaks the china, and quarrels with the other servants ; that she has an invalid mother at home, and a young man in a neighbouring public house, and no end of griefs and grievances, fads and fancies, of her own ; so that now, instead of dusting and cleaning your own rooms, the only difference is that you have to dust and clean the housemaid every day, which turns out to be a much more complicated and serious job.

If on the other hand, as is the case with some people, you are really a little less than human, and are in the habit of treating your servants and attendants as a kind of cattle, and can consent to live in a house with them on such terms — you are still no better off by this method. For naturally they revenge them- selves on you at every point. In one of those suburban villas whose endless rows run out like rays of sweetness and light from the centre of the civilized world, I heard the other day a charming duet between husband and wife. It was founded on the old subject. " Brutes ! " at last exclaimed the husband. " They do all they can to annoy you. Now there's that cook, she's always singing — always singing at her work. And I'm certain she does it because she knows I don't like it ! " Well, of course you are lucky if you come in for nothing worse than singing — though that, no doubt, is trying enough when out of tune. But it is exhausting work anyhow, trying to make water run up-hill, and at the best it is work that's never finished.

All this however does not prove that servants are necessarily a mistake. Because you get rid of one idee fixe it does not follow that you must enslave

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yourself to its opposite. If you were sufficiently attached to your attendants it might turn out that the pleasure their presence gave you compensated for the trouble they caused. And it might happen that you were really doing more useful and congenial work in dusting your housemaid's mind than in dusting your room. In this case there would be a sensible and natural exchange of services, with a gain to both parties ; and the relation would actually be a " simplification." These things are so very obvious that I feel quite ashamed to put them down ; but it is not my fault that I am called upon to do so.

Life is an art, and a very fine art. One of its first necessities is that you should not have more material in it — more chairs and tables, servants, houses, lands, bank-shares, friends, acquaintances, and so forth, than you can really handle. It is no good pretending that you are obliged to have them. You must cut that nonsense short. It is so evidently better to give your carriage and horses away to someone who can really make use of them than to turn yourself into a dummy for the purpose of " exercising" them every day. It is so much better to be rude to needless acquaintances than to feign you like them, and so muddle up both their lives and yours with a fraud.

In a well-painted picture there isn't a grain of paint which is mere material. All is expression. And yet life is a greater art than painting pictures. Modern civilized folk are like people sitting helplessly in the midst of heaps of paint-cans and brushes — and ever accumulating more ; but when they are going to produce anything lovely or worth looking at in their own lives, Heaven only knows !

In this sense Simplification is the first letter of the alphabet of the Art of Life. But it is only that ; it is no more than the first letter. And as there are so many other letters to learn, I trust that we may now pass on ; and that we may be spared further queries on the subject from our friends, with reticules or without.

Edward Carpenter.

THE FUTURE PHENOMENON

{From tlie French of Stcphane Mallarmf)

HE pale sky that lies above a world ending in decrepitude will perhaps pass away with the clouds : the tattered purple of the sunset is fading in a river sleeping on the horizon submerged in sunlight and in water. The trees are tired ; and, beneath their whitened leaves (whitened by the dust of time rather than by that of the roads,) rises the canvas house of the Interpreter of Past Things : many a lamp awaits the twilight and lightens the faces of an unhappy crowd, conquered by the immortal malady and the sin of the centuries, of men standing by their wretched accomplices quick with the miserable fruit with which the world shall perish. In the unquiet silence of every eye supplicating yonder sun, which, beneath the water, sinks with the despair of a cry, listen to the simple patter of the showman : " Xo sign regales you of the spectacle within, for there is not now a painter capable of presenting any sad shadow of it. I bring alive (and preserved through the years by sovereign science) a woman of old time. Some folly, original and simple, an ecstasy of gold, I know not what ! which she names her hair, falls with the grace of rich stuffs about her face, which contrasts with the bloodlike nudity of her lips. In place of the vain gown, she has a body ; and the eyes, though like rare stones, are not worth the look that leaps from the happy flesh : the breasts, raised as if filled with an eternal milk, are pointed to the sky, and the smooth limbs still keep the salt of the primal sea." Remembering their poor wives, bald, morbid, and full of horror, the husbands press fonvard : and the wives, too, impelled by melancholy curiosity, wish to see.

When all have looked upon the noble creature, vestige of an epoch already accursed, some, indifferent, not having the power to comprehend, but others,

THE FUTURE PHENOMENON 99

whelmed in grief and their eyelids wet with tears of resignation, gaze at each other ; whilst the poets of these times, feeling their dead eyes brighten, drag themselves to their lamps, their brains drunk for a moment with a vague glory, haunted with Rhythm, and forgetful that they live in an age that has outlived beauty.

George Moore.

A LITERARY CAUSERIE:

ON SOME NOVELS, CHIEFLY FRENCH

NOVEL used once to be a story. When the story required padding, the novelist would introduce descriptions of scenery, philosophical reflections, and other irrelevant matters. To-day, especially in France, the country of good fiction, a novel is rather an essay, in which the padding consists of irrelevant fragments of story, introduced when the descriptions and reflections run short. Take, for instance, Zola's last book, the immense, fatiguing " Rome," as fatiguing as a Cook's personally conducted tour through the actual city. It has been said that Zola has written a bad story, that his talent is in collapse. Not in the least. He has not tried to write a story at all, he has (unfortunately for his readers) written an encyclopaedical essay on Rome, on the Rome of the Caesars, of the Popes of the Renaissance, of the modern Kings ; on Catholicism as a system, on its social and political influence, on its ancient history and its prospects for the future ; on the Rome which survives in architecture, and the Rome which survives in its cardinals ; but a story, no. The essay is not merely of immense length, it is of great ability ; it is full of ideas, admirable in its arrangement and interpretation of facts. But its effect is that of a canvas all background, a canvas in which the figures have not been fitted in. Do but contrast it for a moment with that exquisite novel of Goncourt, " Madame Gervaisais," in which the very soul of Rome seems to animate the pages. Never was a background more elaborately, more delicately painted, with a more precise and unwearying care of detail ; yet the book, with all its marvellous descrip- tions, is first of all a study of the soul of a woman, in its communion with that invading and conquering soul of the eternal city. The soul is a " particle ' with which Zola has never greatly troubled himself. His priest, who visits Rome in order to see the Pope and prevent the interdiction of his book, is not so much as a coherent bundle of sensations. He acts, at most, as the " personal conductor " of Cook's tour. In the tiny mesh of intrigue which he

A LITEKARY CA US ERIE 101

finds himself caught in, there is just one quality to be commended, yet with reserve. As I was reading the book, nothing struck me more than the mastery of what might be called the atmosphere of character, as well as of surroundings. These Boccaneras and the rest, they are undoubtedly Italians, not Frenchmen dressed up in Italian garb ; they have the voice and gesture of their race. Yet after all is not this one piece the more of that talent for exteriority which is certainly the great, conspicuous talent of Zola ? It is something to paint the tint of the Italian. But that is only the beginning of creation. Othello, though you play him with a blackened face, is universal jealousy, not merely a jealous Moor. And you may play him without his properties, and only the costumier will be the loser.

Another, and a far greater novel, in which the revolt against the story is carried with finer violence to a further point of conquest, is Huysmans' " En Route," of which a translation, written and published by Mr. Kegan Paul, has just appeared ; a translation as conspicuously and conscientiously admirable as Mr. Vizetelly's translation of " Rome " is conspicuously and carelessly in- competent. Here is a novel which is but the record of wanderings through all the churches of Paris and a brief rest in a Trappist retreat ; and it is a great book. For it is the study of a conscience, a new Pilgrim's Progress through all the devious and perilous pathways of the soul. Mr. Kegan Paul tells us he has translated it partly for purposes of edification, at which M. Huysmans, if I know him rightly, will perhaps be a little amused. But it is a book, certainly, which, as a document of the soul, is more valuable than any book lately written. A story ? Not in the least ; less of a story than " Rome ; " but, in the modern acceptance of the word, it would appear, a novel.

I sometimes wonder whether there is any reason for keeping the tradition of a name when we have abandoned the tradition of the thing which that name once signified. Look at Balzac (and English readers are for the first time able to look at something which is approximately Balzac, in the complete translation which we owe to the enterprise of Messrs. Dent), and you will see that, in spite of the interminable pages of essay-writing, of the prodigal casting adrift of ideas and reflections, all through this vast analysis of the Human Comedy, it is always for Balzac, as it was always for his less complex pre- decessors, the story which counts. And yet Balzac certainly led the way (with Stendhal, to whom, no less, the story is everything) to that final development in which story evaporates in analysis (as in Bourget), in atmosphere (as in Pierre Loti), or, as I have already said, in essay-writing and the confessions of

102 THE SAVOY

the soul. Even in England, where ideas penetrate slowly, it is coming to be felt that, at all events, the point of view of a novel is of considerable importance, not only as we see that question of the point of view, crudely and with intention to instruct, in a writer such as Mrs. Humphrey Ward, but as we see it also, artistically and with a studious, unbiassed intelligence, in Mr. Thomas Hardy's " Jude, the Obscure." In all this it must be for individual preference to decide how much we lose, how much we gain. Scarcely in some fantastical country of romance is it now possible for a narrative, which is only a narrative, to be written by any writer of brains. Dumas, if he returned to France, would have to publish his stories in the feuilleton of the " Petit Journal." Is this because we are getting too serious to be amused, too conceited with our seriousness to even desire amusement? Possibly, and no doubt it is all for the good of the race, the benefit of the wiser among us. It gives, certainly, new opportunities of approach to the vivid thinker on life, who had once to content himself with the meagre platform and the scanty audience of the essay. But, much as I may personally prefer " En Route " to " Monte Cristo," it is a little difficult for me to speak of them both under the same name, or to feel that the former has any right to the title of the latter. It is merely a question of terms, but I think terms are better for conveying a precise sense. And if, not merely " Monte Cristo," but " Le Pere Goriot," or " Le Rouge et le Noir," or " L'Edu- cation Sentimentale," even, is to be described as a novel, then " En Route," if we call it a novel, must be called a bad novel. And yet it is undoubtedly a great book.

Arthur Symons.

NOTE

In consequence of Mr. Beardsley's severe and continued illness, we have been compelled to discontinue the publication of " Under the Hill," which will be issued by the present publisher in book form, with numerous illustrations by the author, as soon as Mr. Beardsley is well enough to carry on the work to its conclusion.

THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 105

THE SAVOY.

No. 1. JANUARY, 1896. 170 pages, 18 full-page Illustrations, and 5 Illustrations in the Text.

No. 1 contains literary contributions by G. Bernard Shaw, Frederick Wedmore, Paul Verlaine, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Bcardsley, Havelock Ellis, W. B. Yeats, Rudolf Dircks, Mathilde Blind, Joseph Pennell, Humphrey James, Selwyn Image, and the Editor. The illustra- tions include work by Charles H. Shannon, Charles Conder, Joseph Pennell, Louis Oury, \V. Rothenstein, F. Sandys, J. McNeill Whistler, Max Beerbohm, Jacques E. Blanche, J. Lemmen, and Eleven Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.

Crown 4to, bound in pictorial cover, 2s. 6d. net.

No. 2. APRIL, 1896. 202 pages, and 20 full-page Illustrations.

No. 2 includes a story entitled "A Mere Man" (by a new writer) and literary contribution, by Cesare Lombroso ("A Mad Saint"), Paul Verlaine("My Visit to London"), Edmund Gosse, W. B. Yens, Havelock Ellis (" Friedrich Nietzsche"), Frederick Wedmore, Selwyn Image, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, Vincent O'Sullivan, Leila Macdonald, Aubrey Beardsley, and the Editor. The illustrations include work by Joseph Pennell, C. H. Shannon, W. T. Horton, W. Rothenstein, Ph. Caresme, Albert Sterner, W. Sickert, J. Lemmen, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley Printed at the Chiswick Press.

Crown 4to, bound in new pictorial cover, 2s. 6d. net.

EXTRACTS FROM PRESS NOTICES ON No. 2 OF "THE SAVOY."

"The new number of ' The Savoy ' is printed admirably by the Chiswick Press, and is perhaps the cheapest thing that has been done at half-a-crown. Indeed, Mr. C. H. Shannon's lithograph of ' The Dive' would itself— and it is but one of many illustrations — be cheap at the money : it is an exquisite thing. . . . Whatever may be said against one or other of the contributions, this new quarterly miscellany, as a whole, has great character. ' The S IVOy ' has caught on." — Academy.

" The best things in it are Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's pictures in black and white .... his drawings are a never- ending source of pleasure and admiration. He contributes a cover and title-page to this number and four new pen- and-ink drawings, all extraordinary in the daring with which they sail so near the grotesque without ever stepping across the line of beauty. Perhaps the most noticeable of them is 'The Rape of the Lock,' a subject which give Mr. Beardsley a good opportunity of showing his peculiar power of putting romance into the stiffness and statelines- of the artificial politeness of the eighteenth century .... The number, as a whole, keeps up the character of the publication as an organ of riotous cleverness, and is most entertaining when taken least seriously." — Scotsman.

" Everything in it by W. B. Yeats is artistic and readable. John Gray's poem of ' The Forge ' is splendid, and l.imbroso's 'Mad Saint' is quite in the best vein of those salpctriere experiences you sometimes read in 'The Nineteenth Century' .... Undoubtedly the best thing in the number is the triptych on Paul Verlaine, a series of three articles — one in which Edmund Gosse tells how he tracked the great decadent to his lair in the Cafe Soleil d'Or. one in which Mr. Yeats tells of his afternoon tea with Verlaine, and one (translated) by Verlaine himself, telling all about his visit to London in 1893, and giving a verbatim report of his lecture, which is unique and valuable." — G'asgoiv Evening A'ezvs.

" It would not be difficult, however, to detect differences between even the unreformed ' Yellow Book ' and the new publication, though it might be rather more difficult to describe them briefly. For one thing there is a more pronouncedly literary quality in 'The Savoy,' for which, in spite of a fair amount of crudeness, it deserves credit .... Altogether, 'The Savoy' is a creditable performance, and typical of the art and literature of the day." — Glasgow Record.

" The second number of 'The Savoy ' reaches us in a more worthy and attractive guise than did the first. The paper is better, while the printing bears the hall-mark of the Chiswick Press. The contents are good. Quite a galaxy of really excellent writers." — Bookselling.

"Altogether, 'The Savoy' is worth half-a-crown, and is upholding the traditions which the ' Yellow Book' started, and which it soon lost sight of. The January part of the 'Yellow Book' was of special interest t'> Glaswegians, the new part, just out, is stale and humdrum, and not to be compared to 'The Savoy' in interest ami attractiveness. " — Glasgtr.v Quiz.

" Unequalled originality, magnificence, and beauty of design and brilliance of execution, all these has Mr. I'eardsley got, and would-be imitators would do well to bear in mind his other qualifications in addition to that of

1 06 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS

originality of conception. There are several beautiful samples of his work in this issue, notably — 'The Rape of the Lock ' and one of the illustrations to his extraordinary story, ' Under the Hill.' " — Northern Figaro.

" ' The Savoy ' is ever interesting. One never knows what new eccentricity it will bring ; it has the charm of giving the unexpected." — New York Echo.

" In 'The Savoy,' No. 2, we have the same quest of the new and strange, pursued by writers of greater vitality. The editor, Mr. Arthur Symons, professes himself delighted with the ' fluttering reception ' accorded to the first number. It is to be feared, therefore, that he will be less pleased with the reception likely to be given to this second, which is in so many ways — and not least in paper and print — a better number than the first ; for it runs a great risk of being praised and bought. . . . Subjects and writers are alike well chosen — subjects we want to read about, treated by writers it is always a pleasure to read. The article, perhaps, of most interest at the moment is Mr. Havelock Ellis's, on Nietzsche, who it is prophesied is to make the next philosophical invasion of England. . . . Mr. Arthur Symons's ' New Year's Eve ' is the strongest, most dignified poem he has printed for some time ; though, in saying this, I hint nothing against ' Patchouli,' agreeing as I do with his contention in a preface to a new edition of his ' Silhouettes,' that freedom of choice in art should include ' Patchouli,' and what it stands for. ' If Patchouli pleases one, why not Patchouli ? ' " — Daily Courier.

" Le Courrier Francais reproduit des images du numero dernier du Savoy cette si artistique revue dont j'ai deja essaye de faire l'eloge a propos du numero I paru il y a trois mois. Ce laps de trois mois me parait une chose excellente pour une revue a tendances formelles, qui ne se contente pas de quelques pages d'amusement leger, mais qui veut que chacun de ses fascicules soit un volume interessant. Et si le Savoy des le premier jour ne nous avait paru une revue excellente, je dirais que le numero d'aujourd'hui est en progres. II faudrait insister sur cette forme de publication, volumineuse, avec de nombreuses illustrations, que nous n'avons pas en France, et que les Anglais n'avaient jusqu'ici, me semble-t-il, que dans le genre populaire. ... La contribution de notes sur Verlaine, le plus grand poete francais contemporain, plus connu, comme il convient, en Angleterre qu'en France, est aussi abondante que dans le premier numero. . . . Arthur Symons traduit un article de Verlaine lui-meme : ' Ma visite a Londres,' plein de notes substantielles et de citations. II se trouve que les vers reproduits dans cet article forment le plus rare choix d'apres l'ceuvre du poete. II y a la une dizaine de pieces qui sont justement celles qui les amis de Verlaine savent par cceur. Je veux insister sur une nouvelle de W.-B. Yeats, ' Rosa Alchemica,' oil se marque une preoccupation des choses occultes digne de nous interesser. Une revue actuelle ne serait pas complete sans le souci de ces recherches bizarres que notre epoque a remises en honneur. II souffle un vent d'occultisme sur la fin de ce siecle positif. ^ Le recit que fait W.-B. Yeats est celui d'une sorte d'initiation, avec des details fort curieux, et la preuve d'une erudition profonde cachee sous le charme d'un style des plus colores. Les illustrations sont aussi nombreuses et curieuses que dans le premier numero. II est bien entendu que la plus grande part des images sont dues a Aubrey Beardsley." — Gabriel de Lautrec in the Courrier Francais.

Nocturnes and Pastorals. Poems by A. Bernard

MlALL.

Four Hundred copies on Large Post 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in dark green cloth, at Five Shillings net per copy. Printed at the Chiswick Press.

" The clearness and daintiness of many of his verse pictures remind one of the silver-point in a kindred art. . . . One of the prettiest and sincerest books of verse that have come from the press for some time." — Glasgow Herald.

"A series of impressive sonnets. . . . Brings to a conclusion a volume that shows throughout a studiously cultivated gift." — Scotsman.

" A book which vibrates from cover to cover with poetry which has been genuinely felt and spontaneously uttered." — Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, in The Star.

London Nights. Poems by Arthur Symons.

Five Hundred Small Paper copies on Large Post 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in dark green cloth, at Six Shillings net per copy ; and 50 Large Paper copies on Royal 8vo hand-made paper, bound in dark green buckram, at One Guinea net per copy. Printed at the Chiswick Press.

" 'Nuits de Londres,' ainsi s'intitule le nouveau livre du delicat et vivant poete. Mais n'allez pas en conclure a des tenebres de 'fog' et de 'mist,' a des scenes lugubres ou brutales. Imaginez ou, comme dit l'Anglais, 'realisez,' au contraire, tout le raffinement et tout l'eclat de la vie nocturne d'un fantaisiste elegant, epris du joli, du coquet — et du Beau, parmi les splendeurs d'un Londres intelligemment viveur, d'un Londres moderne a l'extreme et le plus parisien possible, avec la nuance anglaise, toutefois, distinction supreme, veux-je le dire, dans le style, joyeux parfois, leger, qui sait sourire et badiner sans jamais 's'emballer' jusqu'a meme un soupcon de gaiete quelque peu grasse." — Paul Verlaine, in the Revue Encyclopedit/ue.

THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 107

Silhouettes. By Arthur Symons.

Second edition. Carefully revised and enlarged by the addition of Nineteen New Poems. Uniform in style with " London Nights." 400 Small Paper copies at Five Shillings net per copy ; and 15 Large Paper copies at One Guinea net per copy. Printed at the Chiswick Press.

" Mr. Arthur Symons' ' Silhouettes' are graceful and musical poems, with the finish beseeming their briefness. They are choicely executed miniatures rather than silhouettes. For the especial quality which almost all possess — and some in a great degree — there is no other description so appropriate as that vague word 'charm.' . . . Mr. Symons may lie frankly accepted as a genuine poet." — Athenaum.

" In their richness of suggestion and felicity of presentment they remind one of the work of Mr. Whistler. Perhaps this is how, if he chose verse as the medium for his expression, he might appeal to our mental eye." — Academy.

"There is enough new matter in the new edition of Mr. Arthur Symons' 'Silhouettes' to make the second edition of that collection of decadent lyrics a different book from what it was when it first came out." — Scotsman.

"There may be foretold, therefore, for Mr. Symons a future more worthy of his genius as a poet than his present position, notable as that undoubtedly is." — Glasgow Herald.

"In short, all that Mr. Symons needs, to take any position he chooses, is to forget the affectation of the French school, the burden of dishonour unto which he was not born, and to look at the world, sorry or glad, through English eyes, and set down the record as he so well knows how. . . . Meanwhile, let it be clearly understood that Mr. Symons is unquestionably a poet of no mean order, and one to be reckoned with whenever he enters himself seriously as a candidate for the laureateship." — Bookselling.

The Rape of the Lock. By Alexander Pope. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.

Edition de Luxe of the above famous Poem, printed at the Chiswick Press, in Crown 4to size, on old style paper, illustrated with nine elaborate drawings by Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, and bound in a specially designed cloth cover. The edition is a limited one, and the price is Ten Shillings and Sixpence net per copy. Twenty-five copies are printed on Japanese Vellum, and are offered at Two Guineas net per copy. Only 2 copies on Japanese Vellum now remain unsold.

"The prim fashions of the so-called Augustan age give excellent scope for that peculiar treatment of drapery wherein Mr. Beardsley is perhaps seen at his best. . . . The female faces, too, are better than those to which we have been accustomed from the artist ; Belinda and her maid, indeed, are quite attractive. . . . Altogether these drawings are about the most pleasing things that Mr. Beardsley has yet given to the public." — Glasgow Herald.

"In illustrating Pope's elaborate piece of poetical persiflage, Mr. Beardsley has been well inspired .... the book on the whole, is the most noticeable thing that he has yet done; and is sure to add to his reputation." — Scotsman.

"Mr. Beardsley's admirers will take heart of grace from these illustrations, which are of the very spirit of the poem they adorn." — St. James's Budget.

" II est difficile de voir un plus joli livre que celui-la que je viens de recevoir ... la couverture est bleu et or. L'impression est d'une nettete parfaite. Enfin neuf dessins de Beardsley en font un album unique. Le talent maniere et delicat de notre ami s'accorde bien avec la forme des vers de Pope. Le dessinateur, comme pourront s'en con- vaincre mes lecteurs, a ete rarement mieux inspire. Je ne me lasserai pas de profiler de toutes les occasions pour celebrer la louange de l'artiste divin Aubrey Beardsley." — Gabriel de Lautrec in the Courrier Francois.

Orchids. Poems by Theodore Wratislaw.

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LITERARY CONTENTS

PAGE

BEAUTY'S HOUR. A Phantasy. By O. Shakespear. {In Two Parts) . n WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE

COMEDY.

II. His Opinions on Dante. (The Second of Three Articles by

\V. B. Yeats) 25

" VENITE, DESCEND AMUS." A Poem by Ernest Dowson . . .41 TWO FOOLISH HEARTS. A Scene of Rustic Life. By George Morlev 45 IN PIOUS MOOD. A Translation by Osman Edwards into English Verse

of Emile Verhaeren's Poem " Pieusement " 56

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE— III. (The Third of Three Articles by

Havelock Ellis) . . . . . . . . . . -57

STELLA MALIGNA. A Poem by Arthur Symons 64

THE D YING OF FRANCIS DONNE. A Study. By Ernest Dowson 66 THREE SONNETS. (Hawker of Morwenstow.— Mother Ann': Foundress of

the Shakers. — Miinster : a.d. 1534.) By Lionel Johnson 75

THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES. A Colour Study.

By Arthur Symons .......... 79

THE SONG OF THE WOMEN. A Wealden Trio. By Ford Madox

Hueffer §5

DOCTOR AND PATIENT. A Story by Rudolf Dircks . ... 87 A LITERARY CAUSERIE.—On a Book of Verses. By Arthur Symons 91 NOTE 94

ART CONTENTS

Y Designed by Aubrey Beardsley j

COVER

TITLE PAGE J ' { 5

THE NO VEL. A Lithograph by T. R. Way 9

DANTE AND UBERTI. After an unpublished Water-Colour Drawing by

William Blake . . . . . . . . . . • 2 7

THE CIRCLE OF THE THIE VES. After the rare Engraving by William

Blake 3 1

DANTE AND VIRGIL CLIMBING THE \ After unpublished

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PURGATORY j ings by William . 35

DANTE, VIRGIL, AND STATIUS . ) Blake { . 39

A FRONTISPIECE TO BALZAC'S "LA FILLE AUX YEUX D'OR."

A Wood Engraving after an unpublished Crayon Drawing by Charles

Conder . ...... 43

A FAIR AT CHARTRES. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by Joseph

Pennell 78

A VIGNETTE . ) ( 85

„ „ , „ \ By William T. Horton -{

A CUL-DE-LAMPE y 86

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.

BEAUTY'S HOUR

A PHANTASY

CHAPTER I

REMEMBER very well the first time the strange thing happened to me : on a winter's day in January. I reached home tired, and sat down in front of the looking-glass to take off my hat ; and remained looking, as I so often do, at my own unsatisfactory face.

Gerald Harman had come up to his mother's stud)' that afternoon, while I was at work after lunch ; ostensibly on business ; really, because there was a frost which had driven him from Leicestershire to London, leaving him with nothing to do ; and we had begun talking of irrelevant matters.

" A woman must be good," he said reflectively.

"Only a plain woman," said I. "Who has been behaving ill now? " " I was generalizing ; or, to be frank, I was thinking of Bella Sturgis." " So am I. You surely don't expect her to possess all the virtues, and that face ? "

" To be sure, the face is enough," answered he ; and sat staring full at me ; but thinking, as I knew, of Bella Sturgis. " Does she amuse you ? " I asked.

"Amuse me?" said Gerald. " I'm sure I can't say. One doesn't think- about being amused when one is with her."

" She just exists, and that 's enough," I suggested.

Possibly my voice was ironical ; for Gerald looked at me then, with a sort of jerk.

" She 's not intellectual, and she 's not really sympathetic, and I don't like her one quarter as much as I do you, Mary," said he.

Now it is an understood thing that he is not to call me Mary ; and so I reminded him ; but he only answered that we had been over the ground

12 THE SAVOY

before, and that it was time I owned myself defeated. I was beginning to remark that nothing short of death would induce me to do so, when Lady Harman came in, and Gerald was somewhat abruptly dismissed.

" I wish that idle, mischievous boy would marry Bella, and settle down," said she.

"Yes," said I, and went on writing.

"Why, Mary, how ill you look!" she cried then. "Is anything the matter ? "

I hate being told I look ill ; it only means that I look ugly : but I answered cheerfully, " Nothing in the world ; " and she, being easily satisfied, went off to another subject, which lasted till it was time for me to go away. The post of secretary to Lady Harman was not altogether a bed of roses : she has a wide range of interests, and a soft heart ; but her other faculties are not quite in proportion. I was generally weary, by the time I reached home, with the endeavour to reconcile her promises and her practice in the eyes of the world — that most censorious of worlds, the philanthropic.

I repeated Gerald's words as I sat before the glass in my bedroom. " To be sure, the face is enough," he had said.

My own face, pale, with no salient points to make it even impressively ugly, gave me back the speech as I uttered it. I have neither eyelashes, nor distinction ; I do not look clever, or even amiable ; my figure is not worthy of the name ; and my hands and feet are hopeless.

The concentrated bitterness of years swept over me ; I loved Gerald Harman, as Bella Sturgis, with her perfect face, was incapable of loving ; but my love was rendered grotesque by the accident of birth which had made me an unattractive woman. Given beauty, or even the personal fascination, which so often persuades one that it is beauty, I could have held my own against the world, in spite of my poverty, my lack of friends, or of social position. As things were, I saw myself condemned to a sordid monotony ; ever at a disadvantage ; cheated of my youth, and of nearly all life's sweeter possi- bilities. I was considered clever, by the Harmans, it is true ; but the world in general, had it noticed me at all, would have refused to believe that such a face as mine could harbour brains. Gerald, I knew, had proclaimed in the family that Mary Gower had wits ; and looked on me as his own special discovery : for though I had but a plain head on my shoulders, it was an accurate thinking machine ; and could occasionally produce a phrase worthy of his laughter.

I have a certain dreary sense of humour which prevents my being, as a

BEAUTY'S HOUR 13

rule, quite overwhelmed by this aspect of my life ; but on the January after- noon of which I write, I was fairly mastered by it ; and when Miss Whateley came up to light the gas, which she generally did herself, she found me with my head on the dressing-table, in an attitude of abject despair. Miss Whateley was my landlady ; and had been my governess in better days.

" My dear," said she, " what 's the matter ? "

" Only my face," said I.

" Glycerine is the best thing," said she, and began pulling the curtains.

She knew perfectly well what I meant.

" VVhatty," said I, musingly, "how different my life would be if I were a pretty woman — though only for a few hours out of the twenty-four."

"Oh, yes," she answered. "Yet you might be glad sometimes when the hours were over."

I only shook my head ; and fell to looking into my own eyes again, with the yearning, stronger than it had ever been before, rising like a passion into my face.

Then something unforeseen happened : Miss Whateley, standing behind me, saw it ; and I saw it myself as in a dream. My reflected face grew blurred, and then faded out ; and from the mist there grew a new face, of wonderful beauty ; the face of my desire. It looked at me from the glass, and when I tried to speak, its lips moved too. Miss Whateley uttered a sound that was hardly a cry, and caught me by the shoulder.

" Mary — Mary — " she said.

I got up then and faced her ; she was white as death, and her eyes were almost vacant with terror.

" What has happened ? " said I.

My voice was the same ; but when I glanced down at my body, I saw that it also had undergone transformation. It struck me, in the midst of my immense surprise, as being curious that I should not be afraid. No explana- tion of the miracle offered itself to me ; none seemed necessary : an effort of will had conquered the power of my material conditions, and I controlled them ; my body fitted to my soul at last.

" I'm going mad ! " cried poor Miss Whateley.

" We can't both be mad," said I. " Don't be afraid ; tell me what I look like."

" You are perfectly beautiful," she gasped.

I began walking up and down the room : I was much taller, and my dress hung clear of my ankles ; when I noticed that, I began to laugh.

14 THE SAVOY

" Whatty, I've grown," I cried out.

She sat down. " Do you feel strange ? " she asked.

" Just the same ; only a little larger for my clothes. What are we going to do ? Will it last ? "

" I think you had better just sit down again, and wish yourself back."

" Never, never. If beautiful I can be, beautiful I will remain. Let us put down the hour and the date."

I took up my diary, and made a great cross against the day ; then I noticed that the sun set at twenty-seven minutes past four ; it was now twenty-five minutes to five.

" I wonder what we can do to prove to ourselves that we've not been dreaming, if I go back again ? " I questioned.

" Let us first spend the evening as usual," answered Miss Whateley. " I will tell Jane that you are out, and that a young lady is coming to supper with me."

Jane was our one servant : her powers of observation were limited ; and we did not think it would be difficult to deceive her. So the stranger, whose appearance seemed to bereave her of even her usual small allowance of sense, sat that night at Miss Whateley's table ; at ten o'clock we slipped up to my bedroom ; and when Jane's tread was heard in the room above, we breathed freely.

" She's gone to bed," said I. " Now we can brew tea, and keep ourselves awake. We must not sleep ; that is imperative."

We did not sleep ; though to poor Miss Whateley, who had no sense of a triumphant new personality to sustain her, the task must have been difficult.

Then, suddenly, at the hour of sunrise, I felt a sensation as of being in darkness, in thick cloud ; from which I emerged with my beauty fallen from me like a garment.

We neither of us said anything. I was conscious only of a physical craving for rest and sleep, which overpowered me : I think Miss Whateley was struck dumb in the presence of a wonder she could not understand. We kissed one another silently ; and I went to bed and slept for a couple of hours, a dreamless sleep.

BEAUTY'S HOUR 15

CHAPTER II

When I reached Lady Harman's that morning, I found the two girls, Clara and Betty, alone in their mother's study.

Betty, with the face of a Romney, and the manners of an engaging child, is wholly attractive : Clara is handsome too ; she rather affects a friendship with me on intellectual grounds, which bores me : her theories are the terror of my life, being always in direct opposition to my own, for which I have to try and account.

But on this particular morning she had nothing more momentous on her mind than a dance, which her mother was giving the next evening.

" You must come to it," Betty cried. " It will be such fun talking it over afterwards. Onlookers always see most of the game, you know."

" You are very kind, Betty," I said. They had long ago insisted that I should call them by their Christian names. " Has it ever struck you that onlookers would sometimes like to be in the game, instead of outside it ? "

Betty looked a little confused.

" Well, somebody must look on," said she. " And it 's lucky when they see how funny things are ; as you always do, Mary."

" Is there any particular game going on just now ? " I inquired. " Can I be of any use ? "

"There's Bella," said both girls.

I was very anxious to know the precise sum of Bella's iniquities. I shoved away my papers with an entire lack of conscience ; and sat expectant.

" Of course Bella is very young," Clara began : she being about twenty- one herself. " One mustn't judge her too hardly."

" Has she beendoing anything you would not have done yourself?" I asked.

Betty looked at me, and raised her eyebrows. Clara was apt to pose as an example to her younger sister.

" Well," said Clara, "if I were engaged to someone as nice as Gerald, and handsome, and well off, and all the rest of it, I don't think I'd encourage a little wretch like Mr. Trench."

Clara's social ethics are of a wonderful simplicity.

" Because you'd think it wrong ? " I suggested.

" Well — so silly," said Clara.

" I think Bella has a perfect right to do as she likes," broke in Betty.

16 THE SAVOY

" She 's not engaged to Gerald ; he hasn't proposed to her ; and he ought to, for she 's awfully fond of him."

" I agree with you both," said I. " Miss Sturgis is silly, but not altogether to be blamed. Am I to observe her and Mr. Trench together, and report the phases of the flirtation to you ? "

Yes : that was what they wanted.

" Do you seriously think I'm coming to your dance ? " I went on. " Why, I haven't got a dress, or a face fit to show in a ball-room ; and I've not been to a ball for years."

They fought this statement inch by inch : they would lend me a dress ; my face didn't matter ; and after all, I was only twenty-eight, not really old. I ended the discussion by promising to go ; for an idea had flashed into my mind, that made me dizzy.

Supposing the other, the beautiful Mary, renewed her existence again that evening, might she not enjoy a strange, a brief triumph? Would there not be a perfect, though a secret pleasure in seeing the look in Gerald Harman's eyes, in surprising the altered tones of his voice? For beauty drew him like a magnet.

I fell into such a deep silence over this thought, that Clara and Betty grew weary, and went away ; and I did not see them again till luncheon-time.

There were three visitors : the man who was in love with Betty, and the man with whom Betty was in love ; the juxtaposition of the two always delighted me : I don't believe they hated one another ; but each believing him- self to be the favoured lover, had a fine scorn for the other's folly. The third guest was Bella Sturgis.

Gerald sat at the end of the table, opposite his mother. As I have said, the frost kept him from hunting, and he was disconsolate. With him, as with many finely bred, finely tempered Englishmen, sport was a passion ; more, a religion. He put into his hunting, his shooting, his cricket, all the ardour, all the sincerity that are necessary to achievement : I respected this in him, even while it moved me to a kind of pity ; for I felt instinctively that though he might have skill and courage to overcome physical difficulties or danger, he was totally unfitted to cope with the more subtile side of life ; and would be helpless in the face of an emotional difficulty. On this day of which I write, he was evidently suffering from some jar to the even tenour of his life ; of which the continued frost was a merely superficial aggravation.

By his side sat Bella Sturgis : I looked at her with a more critical eye than usual : she had a great air of languid distinction ; everything about her was

BEAUTY 'S HOUR \J

perfect ; from the pose of her head to the intonation of her voice. She very rarely looked at me, and I don't think she had ever clearly realized who I was : I felt sure Gerald had not imparted his discoveries to her with regard to my wits. I never spoke at luncheon when she was there.

But to-day, the memory of that face in the glass the night before, made mc reckless and audacious.

" I've been constituted the girl's special reporter to-morrow night," said I to Gerald. " I am to observe the faces, and the flirtations."

" Then you may constitute yourself my special reporter too," said he, gloomily.

" It will be the next best thing to dancing," I went on.

" Why don't you dance ? " Miss Sturgis asked, lifting her eyes, and looking at me for an instant.

I confess I was a little surprised at the cleverness of her thrust

" Because nobody asks me," I said, with a smile.

My candour had no effect on her : she turned to Gerald with an air that dismissed the whole subject. I noticed that he would hardly answer her ; and I supposed that the breach between them had widened. So she addressed her- self to the man with whom Betty was in love ; thereby throwing the table into a state of suppressed agitation ; with the exception of Lady Harman, who professed to notice none of the details of domestic life : she left such things to the girls, or the servants ; and devoted herself to the care of people in Billings- gate, or in the Tropics, who had need of her, she said. But she was really kind ; and always had a joint for lunch, " because it was Mary's dinner ; " and though I often yearned for the other more interesting dishes, I never dared to suggest any deviation from beef and mutton : to-day it was mutton.

" Won't you have some more ? " said Lady Harman. " I can't help thinking how much we waste. Some of my poor families would be so glad of this, and here 's only Mary touches it."

" Oh, mother," said Betty, " your poor people are always starving ; and a leg more or less wouldn't make much difference."

" What 's an arm or a leg, compared with a face ? " said the young man who was in love with Betty, with his eyes fixed on her. His remark had no direct bearing on the subject, which he had but half followed ; and it sent her into a fit of suppressed laughter, with which Clara remonstrated in an under- tone.

" I don't care," said the rebellious Betty. " It 's Gerald's house, and as long as he doesn't mind my giggling, I shall giggle."

i8 THE SAVOY

" I mind nothing," said the master of the house. His mood was obviously overcast. I saw Bella throw a look at him out of her deep eyes ; the eyes of a woman who has always lived under emotional conditions. I began to realize dimly what such conditions might be like.

He got up, and pushed his chair from the table.

" Will you excuse me," said he. " I have an engagement."

" Do go," said Lady Harman, " you are always late, Gerald. I'm sure you ought to go at once."

Bella held out her hand to him.

" It 's au revoir, not good-bye," said he, and did not take it.

That evening my transformation took place again ; under the same con- ditions of ardent desire on my part.

" To-morrow," said I to Miss Whateley, " I shall go to the Harman's ball in the character of Mary Hatherley." Hatherley had been my mother's maiden name.

" But you have no dress," said Miss Whateley. " And how can you account for yourself?"

" I must do it," I cried. " You must think of some plan."

" Let us go," said she, " to Dr. Trefusis."

CHAPTER III

Dr. Trefusis was the only man who had ever loved me. He was my father's great friend ; but I feel sure he must once have been in love with my mother ; at least, I can only account for his great affection for myself, on some such sentimental hypothesis. When my father died, four years ago, and I was involved in money difficulties, it was Dr. Trefusis who took me in, and eventually got me my secretaryship with Lady Harman. He wanted me to share his home ; but this I refused to do ; believing that his affection for me would not stand the test of losing his liberty, and his solitude.

When we reached his house, he was out ; and we waited some time in the library.

" He won't believe us," Miss Whateley kept saying ; and this seemed so likely, that I was shivering with nervousness when he at last came in.

"You won't believe it," said Miss Whateley, "but this is Mary Gower."

BEAUTY 'S HOCK 19

He looked very blank ; but recovering his presence of mind, turned to me and said,

" A cousin, I presume, of my old friend, Mary Gower ? "

" Oh, Dr. Trefusis," cried I, " we have come to you with the most extra- ordinary story : don't you know my voice ? I am Mary ; but I have got into another body."

" The voice is Mary's," said he, in the tone of one balancing evidence.

Then Miss Whateley began telling him what had happened : while I sat in silence, watching the mixture of wonder and scepticism on his face. I noticed also another look, when his eyes met mine, a look that was almost devout — he had always been a worshipper of beauty.

When the story was done, he began asking questions : my answers seemed unsatisfactory : we sat at last without speaking, while he looked at me, and drummed on the table.

" You are very plausible people," he said, at length ; " but you can't expect me to believe all this ; though I'm at a loss to imagine why you should take the trouble to play such a practical joke on a poor old fellow like myself. Still, I'll not be ungracious, and grumble ; for it has given me a great deal of pleasure to see anything so charming in this dull place."

He got up, as though he wished to end the interview.

I was in despair : his determination not to recognize me struck like a blow at my sense of identity : then the thought came : could I, by a supreme effort of will, induce a transformation under his very eyes ?

I held out my right hand — long and beautiful ; with delicate fingers, that yet were full of nervous strength.

"That," said I, "is not the hand of Mary Gower." He shrugged his shoulders.

" It is not," said he.

" Look at it," I cried.

Then came an awful moment during which I concentrated my whole will in a passion of energy ; the room went black ; I was dimly conscious that Dr. Trefusis had fallen on his knees by the table ; and was watching the hand I held under the lamp, with suspended breath : for it had begun to change ; some subtile difference passed over it, like a cloud over the face of the sun : its beauty of line and colour faded ; the long fingers shrunk, and widened ; the blue-veined whiteness darkened into a coarser tint ; the fine nails lost their shape, and grew ugly, stunted, and opaque.

Dr. Trefusis spoke no word : I felt his fingers were ice-cold as he turned

B

20 THE SAVOY

up my sleeve, and noted how the coarsened wrist grew into the perfect arm ; he held my hand, and swung it to and fro ; then he left the room abruptly, saying " don't move."

I sat still at the table : Miss Whateley came and stood by me.

" Mary," she said, " it must be wrong ; it is playing with some terrible power you don't understand."

" Probably we've all got it," I answered dreamily. " It is perhaps a spark of the creative force — but Dr. Trefusis and all his science won't be able to explain it."

Then the doctor came back, with instruments, and microscopes, and I know not what, and began to examine the miracle. At last he looked up at me.

" I can make nothing of it," said he. " But it is the hand of Mary Gower. That is beyond dispute. Now let it go back."

He held it in his own : this time the change was quicker ; and he dropped it with a shudder.

" Now do you believe me ? " I asked.

He answered, " yes ; " and sat lost in thought.

" You had better go home now," he said presently. " I must think over all this ; there must be some hypothesis — miracles don't happen — you must let me see you every day."

I never have understood, and never shall understand, the scientific theories which he had first built up, in order to account for what had happened to me. I was grateful for the curiosity and interest that my case roused in him, because they led him to help me in practical ways ; but any attempt at a scientific explanation of the mystery struck me as being irrelevant, and not particularly interesting. This attitude on my part at once amused, and irritated him ; he gave up trying to make me understand the meaning of his investigations ; and of the experiments which he made me try ; for it was not till later, that he came to look upon the matter as beyond any scientific solu- tion ; and only to be accounted for on grounds which he would at first have rejected with scorn.

I pass these things over ; because I could not write of them intelligibly, and I might be doing Dr. Trefusis some injustice by an imperfect exposition.

On this occasion, I burst in suddenly, and scattered his reflections by declaring that I must go to the Harman's ball the next night, in my new character.

The idea seemed to divert him.

BEAUTY S HOUR 21

" Ha ! " said he. " Mary Govver wants to taste the sweets of success, does she ! Upon my soul, it would be worth seeing you, my dear. Hut it would be difficult to account for the sudden rising of such a star."

" Not if you took me, and chaperoned, and uncled me," I said.

He took a turn or two in the room.

" Why not ? " he said then, with a laugh.

" Oh, Dr. Trefusis, would you really ! " I cried out, and seized him by both hands.

He held them and looked at me oddly ; he is a man of nearly sixty, and my old friend ; so I could not be angry when he bent down and kissed me.

" I would do anything for a pretty woman," said he.

I felt a sudden pang : this was the first tribute offered to my beauty, and it hurt. Was Mary Gower beginning already to be jealous of Mary Hatherley ?

We settled the matter, with jests and laughter. Dr. Trefusis has the spirit of a child, and the capacity for making abrupt transitions from the serious to the absurd ; and he now entered into the plot as though it were a game ; as though nothing had happened to unnerve and startle him but a short time before. I was to be his niece, a niece from the country ; if further inquiries were made, and my non-appearance during the day had to be accounted for, I was to be a devoted art student ; an eccentric ; who gave her days to painting, and her evenings to pleasure. Miss Whateley's faint objections were soon silenced : we parted with a promise to meet the next morning ; when the Harman household would be upset and I should not be wanted ; to choose a ball dress.

" Not that that face of yours needs any artificial setting," were his last words.

" I only hope you won't repent all this," were Miss Whateley's, as we went up to bed.

CHAPTER IV

My father had taken me, as a young girl, to balls: I had sat out unnoticed, but observant ; and it had seemed to me that, under apparently artificial con- ditions, women grouped themselves into three distinct types ; which were almost primitive in their lack of complexity. The beauty ; the woman whose claims to beauty are not universally acknowledged ; and the plain woman.

22 THE SAVOY

The beauty always pleased me the most: she was unconscious; using her divine right of sovereignty with a carelessness only possible to one born in the purple ; experience had bred in her a certainty of pleasing that made her indifferent to the effect she produced ; which indifference made her the more effective. That she had her secret moments of scorn, I never doubted ; a scorn of that lust of the eye which held her beauty too dear ; and I wondered whether any such woman had ever felt tempted in some moment of outraged emotion, to curse the loveliness that men loved, careless of the heart, or head.

The woman with disputable claims annoyed me : she seemed to me like a queen dependent on the humour of the mob, from whose brows the uneasy crown might be torn, and trampled under foot ; and then replaced at a caprice. She was uncertain of herself; too much affected by the opinions of others to be easy or unconscious. I was sorry for her too; I felt sure that she often married the man who thought her beautiful, out of gratitude ; for she was always unduly grateful ; her attitude towards the world being one of mingled depreciation and assertion.

As for the plain woman, had I not stood hand in hand with her outside the gates of Paradise all my life, the angel with the two-edged sword looking on us, with eyes that held both pity and satire ! Oh, kind angel — stand aside, and let us look through the bars, and see gracious figures going to and fro ; and listen to strange music, and to the sound of voices moved by a keen, sweet passion. We look ; we fall back ; and know the angel by his several names : Fate : Injustice : Mercy.

I had always recognized the subtile emotional intoxicant that is distilled from the atmosphere of a ball-room. It seemed to come in great waves about me, as I walked up the Harman's ball-room, followed by Dr. Trefusis.

He had written for permission to bring his niece, and they were prepared to see me. No, I am wrong ; they were not prepared. Lady Harman was visibly taken aback ; and Clara and Betty had something deferential in their manner, which showed a desire to be unusually pleasing. Then Gerald came forward. His eyes met mine, with the look of one who sees something he has long sought, and despaired of finding.

" Can you spare me a dance — " he asked, pausing at the name.

" My name is Hatherley," said I.

My voice struck him ; he glanced at me with a puzzled expression, and hesitated — for a moment.

" I must have more than one," he said.

BEAUTY S HOUR 23

That was so like Gerald, I nearly laughed.

" The page is blank, you see," I answered.

He took advantage of my remark, and wrote his name several times in my programme. I have the programme still.

Dancing had begun again : a crowd had emerged from the stairs and the anterooms. A number of men were introduced to me ; some of whom I had already seen at the house. The first with whom I danced was a Colonel Weston ; I knew him, on Betty's authority, to be a beautiful dancer, but he was a head shorter than I, and I smiled involuntarily when he said, " Shall we dance ? "

He caught my smile.

" Why are you so divinely tall, O daughter of the gods ? " said he. " And from what Olympian height have you descended this evening? Why have I never met you before ? "

" I will answer no questions," said I, " till we have danced. My feet ache to begin."

" Then they don't dance on Olympus ? "

" The gods must come among the mortals to make merry," I said.

" For which thing let us be thankful," he answered. Then we moved away : I had been hitherto a bad dancer, but to-night I felt a spirit in my feet ; and realized, for the first time, the mysterious joy of perfect motion. As we paused near the door, I saw Bella Sturgis coming slowly up the stairs. She did not take her eyes off me ; I saw her question the man on whose arm she was leaning ; but he looked at me, without answering. It was a revelation, that look in their eyes ; I saw it repeated, in other faces, over and over again, as I walked slowly across the ball-room after the dance was over.

The next was with Gerald : my pulses beat thickly, and I was hardly conscious of the outside world, till we stopped dancing, and he led me into a little room, which I did not at the moment recognize as Lady Harman's study.

" And so I have met you at last," he said ; and I asked him what he meant.

" Yours is the face I have been looking for all my life," he answered.

There was a strange simplicity in his voice, and words ; as though he spoke on an impulse that overruled all conventions, all fear of offence.

" But what of the woman behind the face ? " I questioned.

" Can I ever hope to know her ? "

" If you know her, you will be disappointed : she is like any other woman."

24 THE SAVOY

He shook his head.

" I don't believe it. Tell me what she is really like."

I looked round vaguely, my thoughts intent on what I should say to him : then I suddenly noticed the pictures on the walls, and remembered that this was the room in which Mary Gower sat every day.

" She is not without heart, and she has a head that can think," said I.

" That is not like every other woman."

" Would you credit her with either, if she had another face ? " I asked him.

Something in my voice struck him, for the second time ; he looked at me, with a quickened attention.

" The face is an indication of the soul, surely," he answered.

"That is a lie," said I. " A lie invented to cover the injustice done alike to the beautiful woman, and the woman who is not beautiful."

" Injustice ? " he echoed.

"The thing is so simple," said I, with a bitterness I could not hide. " You place beauty on a pedestal ; her face is an index to her soul, you say : what happens if you find she does not possess the soul, which she never claimed to have, but which you insisted on crediting her with ? You dethrone her with ignominy. The case of the other woman is as hard : she has a face that does not attract you, so you deny her the soul that you forced on the other one. She goes through life, branded ; not by individuals, I allow, but by public opinion. The vox populi is the voice of nature, 'tis true ; but nature is very hard, very ruthless."

I stopped : Gerald sat looking at me, with a rapt gaze, but I saw he had not listened to a word I said. The Hungarian band had begun playing again in the ball-room. As I listened, and watched the phantastic whirl of the dancers through the open door, they seemed to me to symbolize the burden of all the ages : desire and satiety ; illusion and reality ; dancing hand in hand, to a music wild and tender as love ; sad and stern as life : partners that look ever in one another's eyes, and dance on, in despite of what they see.

" Let us go and dance too," said Gerald.

I have no very clear recollection of the rest of that evening : there was unreality in the air, and a glamour, and an aching pain. Men and women said gracious things to me ; yet seemed to watch me with cruel faces ; I was only conscious, at the last, of an imperative desire to fly, to hide myself, to escape even from Gerald's presence ; and to be alone.

O. Shakespear. ( To be continued.)

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRA- TIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY

II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE

S Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his designs to " The Divine Comedy," he was very certain that he and Dante represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity. Dante, because a great poet, was " inspired by the Holy Ghost " ; but his inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up out of his age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal things, and which from the earliest times has sat in high places and ruled the world. This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of men of the world, of priests busy with government, of all who, because of their absorption in active life, have been persuaded to judge and to punish ; and partly also, he admitted, the philosophy of Christ ; who, in descending into the world, had to take on the world ; who, in being born of Mary, a symbol of the law in Blake's symbolic language, had to " take after his mother," and drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Opposed to this was another philosophy, not made by men of action, drudges of time and space, but by Christ when wrapped in the divine essence, and by artists and poets, who are taught by the nature of their craft to sympathize with all living things, and who, the more pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the further from all limitations, to come at last to forget good and evil in an absorbing vision of the happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was worldly, and established for the ordering of the body and the fallen will, and, so long as it did not call its " laws of prudence " " the laws of God," was a necessity, because " you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call moral virtue " ; the other was divine, and established for the peace of the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with a too literal reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality than prudence. He called the followers of the first

26 THE SAVOY

philosophy pagans, no matter by what name they knew themselves ; because the pagans, as he understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in what he called " war, princedom, and victory," than in the secret life of the spirit : and the followers of the second philosophy Christians, because only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed by- art and poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited forgiveness. Blake had already found this " pagan " philosophy in Swedenborg, in Milton, in Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many persons, and it had roused him so constantly and to such angry paradox, that its overthrow became the signal passion of his life, and filled all he did and thought with the excitement of a supreme issue. Its kingdom was bound to grow weaker so soon as life began to lose a little in crude passion and naive tumult ; but Blake was the first to announce its successor, and he did this, as must needs be with revolutionists who also have "the law" for " mother," with so firm a conviction that the things his opponents held white were indeed black, and the things they held black indeed white ; with so strong a persuasion that all busy with government are men of darkness and " some- thing other than human life" ; with such a fluctuating fire of stormy paradox, that his phrases seem at times to foreshadow those French mystics who have taken upon their shoulders the overcoming of all existing things, and say their prayers " to Lucifer, son of the morning, derided of priests and of kings." The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge ; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of Life : men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets ; men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art.

In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings he wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others, still more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has treasured in his diary. The sayings about the forgiveness of sins have no need of further explanation, and are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent commentator, Herr Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at the tale of Francesca, will only " sympathize " with her "to a certain extent," being taken in a theological net. "It seems as if Dante," Blake wrote, " supposes God was something superior to the Father of Jesus ; for if he gives rain to the evil and the good, and his sun to the just and the unjust, he can never have builded Dante's Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible,

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 29

as our parsons explain it. It must have been framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I understand it." And again, " Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser, the father of Hell." And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, " Dante saw devils where I saw none. I see good only." " I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good about him." This forgiveness was not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from afar off; but of the mystical artist-legislator who believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, that " the imagination is the man him- self," and believes he has discovered in the practice of his art, that without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life. At another moment he called Dante, "an atheist, a mere politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old age, he returned to God whom he had had in his childhood." " Everything is atheism," he had already explained, " which assumes the reality of the natural and unspiritual world." Dante, he held, assumed its reality when he made obedience to its laws the condition of man's happiness hereafter, and he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief for calling Nature, " the ultimate of Heaven," a lowest rung, as it were, of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by Satan to entangle our wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity. There are certain curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there among the now separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is one which, had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would have been a systematic exposition of his animosities, and of their various intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante emerges from the earthly Paradise, is written, " Homer," and in the next circle, " Swedenborg," and on the margin these words : " Everything in Dante's Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of all, and its goddess Nature, memory," memory of sensation, " not the Holy Ghost. . . . Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum. Homer is the centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen." The statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence of his ideas and of his curiously literal understanding of his own symbols ; for it is but another form of the charge made against Milton many years before in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." "In Milton the Father is destiny, the son a ratio of the five senses," Blake's definition of the reason which is the enemy of the imagination, " and the Holy Ghost vacuum." Dante, like the Kabalists, symbolized the highest order of created beings by the fixed stars, and God by the darkness beyond them, the Prttnum Mobile.

30 THE SAVOY

Blake, absorbed in his very different vision, in which God took always a human shape, believed that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer world was in itself idolatry ; but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled im- mensity was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His essence; it being a creation of the ruining reason, "generalizing" away " the minute particulars of life." Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called "the abstract void," he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the ordering of the world ; and the more he was absorbed in emotion ; and, above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion ; the nearer did he come to Eden's "breathing garden," to use his beautiful phrase, and to the unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of God existed but the inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many names, " Jerusalem," " Liberty," " Eden," " The Divine Vision," " The Body of God," " The Human Form Divine," " The Divine Members," and whose most intimate expression was Art and Poetry. He always sang of God under this symbol :

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is God Our Father dear ; And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart ;

Pity a human face ; And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,

That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine —

Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the sun, the father of light and life ; and set in the darkness beyond the stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.

By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no great truth hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from times and generations ; and to us one half

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 33

of the philosophy of Dante is less living than his poetry ; while the truth Blake preached, and sang, and painted, is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and never yet to last more than a little season ; the life those Phaeacians — who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in " the dance, and changes of raiment, and love and sleep " — lived before Poseidon heaped a mountain above them ; the lives of all who, having eaten of the tree of life, love, more than the barbarous ages when none had time to live, " the minute particulars of life," the little fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space at all. " Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood," he wrote, "opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow." And again, " Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal in its tenor and value to six thousand years, for in this period the poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth, and are conceived : in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of the artery." Dante, indeed, taught, in the " Purgatorio," that sin and virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God ; but this love he would restrain by a complex external law, a complex external Church. Blake, upon the other hand, cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty, rapture, and labour. " I know of no other Christianity, and of no other gospel, than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their spiritual gifts ? What is the divine spirit ? Is the Holy Ghost any other than an intellectual fountain ? What is the harvest of the gospel and its labours ? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide ? What are the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for our- selves ? Are they any other than mental studies and performances ? W hat are all the gifts of the gospel, are they not all mental gifts ? Is God a spirit who must be worshipped in spirit and truth ? And are not the gifts of the spirit everything to man ? O ye religious ! discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you in the name of Jesus ! What is the life of man but art and science ? Is it meat and drink ? Is not the body more than raiment ? What is mortality but the things relating to the body which dies ? What is immortality but the things

34 THE SAVOY

relating to the spirit which lives eternally ? What is the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit ? What are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the devastation of the things of the spirit ? Answer this for yourselves, and expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not this plain and manifest to the thought ? Can you think at all, and not pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build Jerusalem, and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders ? And remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in another, calling it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrites as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not sin in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem." I have given the whole of this long passage, because, though the very keystone of his thought, it is little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound thoughts, in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else, they are always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and again. " I care not whether a man is good or bad," are the words they put into the mouth of God, " all that I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off holiness and put on intellect." This cultivated life, which seems to us so artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of the simple world in which Christ taught and lived, and its lawlessness is the lawlessness of Him " who being all virtue acted from impulse, and not from rules,"

And his seventy disciples sent Against religion and government.

The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of the artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for the last time ; but before that hour man must labour through many lives and many deaths. "Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the price of entering into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 37

their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's by the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you hypocrites." After a time man has " to return to the dark valley whence he came and begin his labours anew," but before that return he dwells in the free- dom of imagination, in the peace of " the divine image," " the divine vision," in the peace that passes understanding, and is the peace of art. " I have been very near the gates of death," Blake wrote in his last letter, " and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and stronger as this foolish body decays . . . Flaxman is gone and we must all soon follow, everyone to his eternal home, leaving the delusions of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws of the numbers," the multi- plicity of nature, " into the mind in which everyone is king and priest in his own house." The phrase about the king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform, with the beauty and the peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we put off the limited mortal man more and more, and put on the unlimited " immortal man." " As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array ; so man looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of everything that grows. ... In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds." Mere sympathy for all living things is not enough, because we must learn to separate their " infected " from their eternal, their satanic from their divine part ; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty ; the one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We must then be artists in all things, and under- stand that love and old age and death are first among the arts. In this sense, he insists that " Christ's apostles were artists," that " Christianity is Art," and that " the whole business of man is the arts." Dante, who deified law, selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified imaginative freedom, held " corporeal reason " for the most accursed of things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty of beautyand pass under the sovereignty

38 THE SAVOY

of corporeal law, and this is " the captivity in Egypt." True art is expressive and symbolic, and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a signature of some unanalyzable, imaginative essence. False art is not expres- sive but mimetic, not from experience, but from observation ; and is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and which seeks to burn all things until they " become infinite and holy."

Blake's distaste for Dante's philosophy did not make him a less sympathetic illustrator, any more than did his distaste for the philosophy of Milton mar the beauty of his illustrations to " Paradise Lost." The illus- trations which accompany the present article are, I think, among the finest he ever did, and are certainly faithful to the text of " The Divine Comedy." That of Dante talking with Uberti, and that of Dante in the circle of the thieves, are notable for the flames which, as always in Blake, live with a more vehement life than any mere mortal thing : fire was to him no unruly offspring of human hearths, but the Kabalistic element, one fourth of creation, flowing and leaping from world to world, from hell to hell, from heaven to heaven ; no accidental existence, but the only fit signature, because the only pure substance, for the consuming breath of God. In the man, about to become a serpent, and in the serpent, about to become a man, in the second design, he has created, I think, very curious and accurate symbols of an evil that is not violent, but is subtle, finished, plausible. The sea and clouded sun in the drawing of Dante and Virgil climbing among the rough rocks at the foot of the Purgatorial mountain, and the night sea and spare vegetation in the drawing of the sleep of Virgil, Dante and Statius near to its summit, are symbols of divine acceptance, and foreshadow the land- scapes of his disciples Calvert, Palmer, and Linnell, famous interpreters of peace.

The faint unfinished figures in the globe of light in the drawing of the sleepers are the Leah and Rachel of Dante's dream, the active and the contemplative life of the spirit, the one gathering flowers, the other gazing at her face in the glass. It is curious that Blake has made no attempt, in these drawings, to make Dante resemble any of his portraits, especially as he had, years before, painted Dante in a series of por- traits of poets, of which many certainly tried to be accurate portraits. I have not yet seen this picture, but if it has Dante's face, it will convince me that he intended to draw, in the present case, the soul rather than the

'•

r.'-i ~v ' ■ -f

BLAKE'S ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 41

body of Dante, and read "The Divine Comedy" as a vision seen not in the body but out of the body. Both the figures of Dante and Virgil have the slightly feminine look which he gave to representations of the soul.

W. B. Yeats.

"VENITE, DESCENDAMUS"

ET be at last : give over words and sighing, Vainly were all things said : Better, at last, to find a place for lying, Only dead.

Silence were best, with songs and sighing over ; Now be the music mute : Now let the dead, red leaves of autumn cover A vain lute !

Silence is best : for ever and for ever,

We will go down to sleep, Somewhere, beyond her ken, where she need never Come to weep.

Let be at last : colder she grows, and colder ;

Sleep and the night were best ; Lying, at last, where we cannot behold her, We may rest.

Ernest Dowson.

A Frontispiece to

Balzac's " La Fille aux Yeux d'Or "

A Wood Engraving after an unpublished Crayon Drawing

by

Charles Conder

-- ~» ■ ■ ■

3r

■ ?*

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS

A SCENE OF RUSTIC LIFE

UMMER had passed, the harvest was ingathered, and the days began to close in.

At the Hill Farm was heard the euphonious boom of the threshing machine. It was music to many in the neighbourhood, but to none more than to the little boy Reggie.

He had become a fixture, so to speak, at the Farm. Since the day when he crept through the hole in the orchard hedge, he had grown to be one of the family. Everybody liked the boy : two on the farm — Letty and Clem — had come to love him.

There is so much to love in a child — his smile, his general prettiness, his bright and often saucy tongue, his way of looking at things, his mode of doing them, and his highly ingenious plan of obtaining his desires. These are some of the arts and charms of child life, and they win, yes, they win — often against the adult's better judgment.

Letty had grown to love the boy as her own. If he had not made his appearance on the Farm just after breakfast, she would go out first into the Croft and then into the Pond Close and call " Reg — gie, Reg — gie," in the same cooing sort of way as she used to call Clem in his childhood ; and if the little fellow was within earshot, he would gallop to her and spring into her open arms with a warbling laugh which did the heart good to hear.

He was the revived sweets of old days to Letty ; a new bit of colouring on her picture. He was more than this to her sometimes — he was Luce in knickerbockers.

She did not like that fancy so well, though her feeling against Luce was softening through contact with her child. She had not seen Luce, however. Though Reggie had been a daily visitor to the farm since the end of June, and it was now the end of September, the red-haired flame of Clem had not once put in an appearance.

46 THE SAVOY

Her Rubens-like beauty had blushed unseen by Letty. She bestowed it chiefly upon her mother in their little cottage in Radbrooke Bottom ; it was only at times — in the silent and long summer nights when few people were visible — that she went more than a stone's threw from her home.

The shorter days drew her out more. It was natural that it should be so, though eminently displeasing that so fair a flower should perforce have to exist under a cloud. This angered Clem. Luce at Radbrooke, indoors, and away from him and the farm, was no better than Luce at Brookington.

Many girls, similarly situated to Luce, would have " brazened it out." Luce might, perhaps, have felt less the necessity of hiding herself away from everybody, had she not heard the opinion entertained of her by Letty Martin. She had heard that — and it was sufficient for her to almost nail herself to the table leg in her mother's kitchen.

But now that the days began to be chary of their light towards six o'clock in the evening, Luce began to be a little more prodigal of her presence. Three years ago, or rather more, she used to court the sunlight ; now she haunted the shades. To a really pure girl the knowledge of having committed an offence against society, if not against Nature, is all that is needed to bring the blush to the cheek at every awkward or trivial meeting. Luce, though a mother, had by no means lost her purity. In the evening dusk she could blush without detection.

So she sauntered down the garden path on this warm and calm evening at the end of September ; on the evening of the annual village wake.

" You baint goin' to the wake, be ye, Luce, lass ? " said her mother as she stepped out.

" I should like to go, mother, for sake of the dancin' ; but I donna think I will."

" If I was thee, my gel, I should'na. Theer'll be all the village theer, besides Brookington folk ; an' summat 'ull be sure to be said 'bout thee. An' as for dancin', Luce — well, you might nor be short o' partners, my gel ; but I should'na — no, I should'na."

" I'll walk i' the lane a bit, mother," replied Luce, slowly. " If Reg cries, I'll come in."

" Donna thee fret about little waxwork, deary ; I'll see to 'im."

When Luce was out of hearing, Mrs. Cowland wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye, and sighed to herself: "The beautifulest peaches be the fust to goo spect. Poor Luce, beautiful Luce ! To think as I should hev 'ad

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS 47

such a beauty, the envy of all the mothers i' Radbrooke, an' then for she to hev come to this. It breaks me heart when I think on't."

True, honest, motherly instinct is not so common that one can afford to smile at the simple sentiments of Mrs. Cowland. They are rare in humble spheres, far rarer in higher circles. The lowliest flowers are the tenderest, the sweetest, the truest, the purest.

Meanwhile, with a full heart, and a set of confusing thoughts, which seemed born only to be killed, Luce sauntered along the lane.

There were no dwellings eastward beyond Luce's cottage. There was a pond, called " The Green Pond " by the children, on account of its entire surface being covered with a thin green film, on the north side, dangerously near the footpath, and left open for any luckless child to fall into ; there was also a curve in the lane northward ; but no more domiciles.

Beyond Luce's cottage the lane was a pure lane : hedges each side, com- posed of hawthorn, blackthorn, buckthorn, blackberry, bramble, and elder ; with, at intervals, a tall elm, ash, or oak, whose spreading branches almost shut out the sky from above, and made the lane shady even in the strongest light.

It was a pure lane — a leafy lover's lane.

To-night it wore an intensely delightful aspect. It was moonlit. Few trees grew at the west end, and when the moon reached a certain altitude it shot a ray of effulgence down that avenue-like Warwickshire lane like a light in a railway tunnel. Luce looked like an animated poppy walking through the light into darkness, for the moonrays did not penetrate to the lane's end.

Luce had no intention of going to the wake. There were reasons why she should not. Yet she had implanted in her the natural rustic longing to attend the annual festivity on the green waste near the church.

The wake was a great occasion at Radbrooke : a loved occasion, a merry occasion, and an occasion looked forward to for weeks beforehand. It was the one time of the year when all the villagers and the occupants of the surround- ing farms met together for a day's junketting and pleasantry. There were shows, merry-go-rounds, shooting galleries, cocoa-nut throwing, and, to crown all, dancing on the green to the often discordant music of the Brookington band.

These pleasures are rustic, Bohemian if you will ; but they are the natural pleasures of Strephon and Phyllis, and they attract — yes, they attract. They are the sole amusements of the peasant, isolated in his own greenwood ; and though the gaily-painted caravan and roundabout are incongruous ex-

4 8 THE SAVOY

crescences upon the landscape, their coming is an exciting event in the life of the villager.

The roadway or street of the village ran parallel with Radbrooke Bottom, and at its eastward end it sloped southward so decidedly that the lane and the street at that end were not more than twenty yards apart. As Luce stood at the junction the sounds of the blaring music of the roundabouts floated to her ear, mingled with the peals of laughter and the shouts of merry-makers.

She was but a young thing, full of life, and with a taste for enjoyment. She did not intend to take part in the wake, but the alluring sounds of the pleasures provided there drew her feet round the bend of the road to a point where it joined the village street, and commanded a fine view of the motley fair.

What a sight it was, just on the outskirts of silence !

To the contemplative being who stood where Luce was standing, the contrast between the two scenes would have seemed extraordinary, not to say terrible. Two distinct worlds, they were separated from each other only by a few yards. Luce was standing in a silent world, which gave forth no sound ; the world before her blazed with light, colour, and movement, and dinned the ears with its noise.

And above the flaming oil-lamps, the madly-circling roundabouts, the wildly dancing people, who seemed never to tire through dance after dance, above the shouts of the showmen, the scream of the steam-whistle, the laugh of the light-hearted, looking down on a scene so foreign to the landscape in which it was set, was the square, lichen-grown tower of the parish church of Radbrooke ; looking down with a calm, dignified, and venerable air through its eye-like window upon this saturnalia of village life.

Luce was transfixed at her point of vantage. She never moved an inch more forward, but stood there gazing wistfully at the scene, and especially at the dancers, like one who would have liked to mingle with them, but was too shy to enter. If anyone on the edge of the fair and in its full blaze of light, had looked towards the bend in the road which led downward to Radbrooke Bottom, they would have beheld a lovely young face framed in a garland of red hair, looking out through the darkness — Luce's Rubens-like face.

" Thy partner inna theer, Luce," said a voice in the shadow behind her.

Luce turned quickly round, for she was rather startled, and saw beside her the fine face and large form of Moll Rivers. She, like Luce, was without her hat, and when she came forward and stood on a level with Luce, so that the

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS 49

light from the fair flashed full upon their faces, the contrast in their appearance was very striking.

Moll with her superb height and mass of raven black hair might have passed for the Queen of Night ; she was in her element, her latitude, her clime — lusty-limbed and strong. Luce, with her smaller stature and red hair could pass for Aurora, the Queen of the Morning. She had the appearance of being out of her element, her latitude, her clime ; she was dainty-limbed and younger in years than Moll.

Roth looked at each other curiously and in some confusion. Moll had a melancholy look and a rather untidy air ; the hooks of her bodice were undone, showing a portion of her rounded breasts panting beneath. A cloud of inexpressible weariness sat in her eyes and upon her forehead. She looked tired of living.

" Thy partner inna theer, Luce," she repeated, inclining her head towards the dancers.

" My partner, Molly ? " replied Luce, in some surprise.

"Yes, I've bin all round the wake, in an' out the footers, round the dobby horses, an' by the shooting galleries, an' canna find 'im. Let 's go away."

They turned down the lane into the shadow. Then Luce spoke.

" It seems from what you say, Moll, that you've been lookin' for a partner. I hanna got no partner, an' hanna been seeking for one."

" Maybe you might soon hev 'ad one, Luce ? " returned Moll with a mean- ing look.

" May be," said Luce, with some attempt at dignity.

" That is if you hanna left youm behind at Brookington."

It was one of those deadly thrusts often dealt out by uncultured natures. If it had been daylight the beholder would have seen the colour rush headlong into Luce's face and spread all down her neck ; as it was moonlight, the effect of Moll's words was not observed in her face, though her voice shook when she next spoke.

" My business is my business, Moll, if so be it 's at Radbrooke or Brooking- ton. I donna think you ought to trouble yourself about it."

" Perhaps not," said Moll. " I've no call to say anything, I hevn't. I must see all an' say nothing. I mun bear all an' do nothin'."

" I donna know what you mean."

" No, nobody knows what I mean. 'Tis as the parson said in his sarment on Sunday — yes, Miss Luce, I did go to church on Sunday, an' you've no call to look so dubersome, for some folks inna so black as they're painted ; he said

50 THE SAVOY

in his sarment as none be so blind as them as wunna see, an' that's it. You know what I mean, you can see what I mean, yet you make believe ye donna know."

Luce did not reply. She was burning and trembling at the same time.

She sauntered quietly on, with the commanding figure of Moll at her side like her elongated shadow. Every now and then they walked out of the darkness into a thin line of moonlight which came through a gap in the trees ; then it was seen that both their faces were flushed, and that Moll's in particular had a cloud of anger growing over it.

" You donna speak, Luce ? " she went on. " Perhaps you be ashamed to. You were such a good little gell once, an' — I wish I may die if I'm tellin' a lie — I was very fond on thee. But you've turned out a faggot, Luce ; yes, a very faggot."

" And pray, what hev I done to thee, Moll, to be called a faggot by thee ? "

Luce was nearly breaking down ; the vehemence of Moll she had not bar- gained for. Poor girl, she was receiving punishment for her sin all round — from her own sex. It was first her mother, then Letty Martin, and now Moll. Why was it, she inwardly inquired, that women are so cruel to women ? She expected pity and obtained punishment.

A ray of moonlight fell upon her while Moll was in shadow. It glorified her. It even lit up the glistening tears in the corners of her eyes and made them shine like diamonds. Moll looked out of the darkness at her with great admiration.

" Thou art a pretty faggot, Luce, a very pretty faggot ; but thou'rt a faggot all the same. I canna wonder at men bein' fond on thee. Giv' me thy hair, Luce, thy bonnie red hair as he be so in love with, an' I'll never call thee a faggot no more."

She caught hold of Luce's hair, and held it by her own, comparing the colours.

"Mine's longer and thicker nor yourn, beautiful hair, inna it? But not showy like yourn. Men like showy things. Then you've got blue eyes, Luce, an' mine be dull an' dark. You're altogether more pretty to look at nor I am. Men like pretty things, little toy things like you, an' I'm big an' bold, an dowdy — no wonder he doesna like me."

She paused a moment, looking steadfastly at Luce.

" But he might hev come to like me, if you had'na turned up here agen like the bad penny that you are. Yes," she added almost fiercely, and with uncontrollable bitterness, " you are a faggot, Luce, else you'd hev stopped at

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS 51

Brookington with your misgotten brat, an' not come here agen with your winnin 1 ways, pretty face, an' carrotty hair, to 'ang yourself on Clem agen."

Luce's spirit was bent but not broken. She looked at Moll with an awakening glance and with a flushed and defiant air.

" Oh ! I see what you mean now, Molly. You want Clem, an' because I've come back you think you shanna get him. Well, my home 's at Radbrooke. I came home, not to try and win Clem away from you or anyone else, but to try and live in peace."

" You've bewitched 'im — you, another man's light-o'-love."

That epithet again ! It stabbed Luce to the heart like a knife.

She had done wrong, she had sinned, she had prayed for forgiveness. Was her punishment never to be completed ? Why should she be condemned to be brow-beaten by this girl ? Had she not suffered enough in her own heart for her folly, but that she must be let down before every villager and made to ask pardon from them all ?

Here was this girl, this Moll Rivers, who was known by all the village to have been many and many a time at the New Inn ; she was pointing the finger of scorn at her. And no doubt all the others would do it as well. She had been " the good girl " of the village, the girl who had been cited by the parson as an example of pure and upright girlhood ; she had been the belle of Radbrooke : and now she had come to be taunted and insulted by everybody in the parish.

Oh ! virtue, virtue, what a severe shape you do assume in such little Bethels as the village of Radbrooke ! Luce felt it, bent to it, and broke under it.

" I won't hear you, Moll, I won't hear you," she sobbed, placing her hands to her ears, and taking quicker steps down the lane towards her home. " You are bitter, cruel, and wicked to me. I have done you no wrong ; I've done nobody wrong but myself. I have not come back to Radbrooke to 'ang myself on Clem. I don't 'ang myself on him. You know very well I have not bin to the Farm once since I came home."

" But he comes to see thee."

" I canna help it ; I canna order him not to come ; I canna send him away. It's too bad on all of you to be at me for comin' back home again. Did you want me to die at Brookington ? It seems like it ; an' I wish I had, I wish I had. I should have been better off now. An' all on you used to be so fond on me, or said so. Belike all the time you was glad to be shut on me."

52 THE SAVOY

" Wunce in awhile I was very fond on thee, Luce ; very fond indeed."

Moll was not a bad girl ; she had in her the makings of a grand character. Education would not have done it ; changed circumstances might. If she had been able to look upon life from a different standpoint, if her life had been a little less hard or her feelings less in opposition to the surroundings of her existence, she might have been held forward as the type of a great-hearted woman.

But Nature had fettered her. She had bound her down to narrow circumstances, and for one strong trait in her character, she had given her six weak ones. Moll was nevertheless a soft-hearted girl — hot, hasty, passionate, and not entirely selfish ; yet she was a very woman, full of her mother's milk, ready to cry out one minute and storm the next ; ready to sacrifice others to her selfishness, and in turn to sacrifice herself to the selfishness of others.

" Yes," she went on, looking down from her superb height at Luce with a pitying and tender glance, " wunce in a while, Luce, I loved thee well. Doesna remember the day when thou were made the Queen o' May, an' how it come on to drizzle wi' rain ? An' how thy mother were afeard for thee, 'cause thou wert a bit nesh an' tisiky i' the chest? Dost mind how I, such a slummock as I were i' my work-a-day clothes, cotched thee up an' covered thee wi' my 'urden apron to keep the wet off on thee, an' carried thee to the housen i' that way, wi'out gettin a spot on thee ; an' how, when we went to Letty's, she had all we gels in an' gived us a drop o' beistin's all round ? "

" I mind it, Luce, gel," she said sadly, after a pause. " Thou wert as innercent as a cade lamb, an' as pretty as one o' they tulips i' thy mother's gardin. Yea, thou wert as sweet as a little angel then — like one on them round the christening basin i' the church yon."

" Oh ! Molly, donna, donna," implored Luce.

•' Donna what, Luce ? "

" Donna liken me to a angel. I'm not that ; I'm not that."

" You was then."

If Luce was stung into anger and bitterness before by the insulting and bold words of Moll, she suffered martyrdom now.

The picture which her companion had drawn of her — no more than a thumb-nail sketch of her as she really was when they made her Queen of the May — brought back with vivid colouring and acute pain the days of her innocence : the days of her purity ; and it sufficed to crush her.

It was like looking back on a lost Heaven.

Being blessed or cursed with a sense of the power of goodness and

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS 53

virtue, Luce saw from what sublime heights she had fallen. The sight over- whelmed her. To the right-thinking mind there is such a gulf between unsullied innocence and sin-stained beauty ! Luce saw this and shivered.

" If you liked me then, Moll," she said in a manner exquisitely pretty and touching, " why donna you like me now? I like you just the same."

" I love Clem," replied Moll ; that was the answer to everything.

Luce sighed and so did Moll ; it was an awkward and painful position for them both. Few positions can be more painful than that in which two girls, associated with each other since childhood, and being fairly fond of one another, are brought to the awkward point of loving the same man.

To quick anil pregnant minds which know no other impulses than those given them by bounteous and indiscriminating Nature, there is tragedy in that position. There are elements in it worse and more deadly even than the actual blood-spilling on the village green. There are withered and broken hearts in it ; dispositions warped and made ugly ; good natures destroyed ; warm blood congealed.

This was the position of Moll and Luce, and the influences of it had made themselves felt. Moll had grown ugly and ill-gendered excrescences upon a disposition which, in its natural state, was kind, warm, open, and loving. For her the position was worse and more trying than for Luce ; and the Rad- brookc field-girl, though unblessed with the cleverness and polish which education is supposed to give, had the discernment to see it.

She loved Clem with a consuming passion which threatened to seriously affect her health, as it had already affected her well-being ; she knew also, only too well, that he loved another, and thought no more of her than the lady-smock — typical of her physical elegance — which he crushed beneath his heel in field, croft, and meadow.

The thought, nay, the absolute knowledge of this, was as gall and worm- wood to the passionate village girl. Vague fancies arose from the knowledge. She had one fancy that if Luce had not come back, she could in time have moulded Clem to her will. She encouraged this fancy till it became a faith, decided, strong, and durable. Luce had come back ; that was the cause of it all. And there she stood beside her, so sweet, pretty, and winning, that even a masculine anger became almost gentleness under her influence.

" I love Clem ! "

What could Luce say to that ? She had been weak, vain, foolish, and as her own sad heart told her, downright wicked. She had been led astray ; she bore about with her the burden of a knowledge that the fidelity of Clem was

54 THE SAVOY

of such a quality as to be worth a far better girl than she was — yet there was the awkward fact that Clem had no eyes for any girl but her — that he still loved her as dearly as before her falling away ; and, to crown all, and make the position more painful than ever, there was the fact that she loved Clem with a feeling which she could never have for any other man !

" I am so sorry, Moll," she said, simply and earnestly, looking at her companion.

" Art thee so, Luce ? Then perhaps thee 'It 'elp, lass, in this ill-con- venient kaszhulty. I canna abear my life as it be now. I've bin thinkin', Luce, as belike Clem 'ood look on me wi' more favourable eyes if it weren't for thee bein' here. Couldst thee not go rimming to thy uncle's at Rodbridge ? "

Luce did not speak, and Moll paused. The silver light of the moon which now moved from Luce's face and settled upon hers, showed upon it an intensely wearied and helpless expression. Moll looked like one upon whom an inexorable fate had passed sentence of death ; her face was a picture of deeply-rooted, permanent, and melancholy resignation.

" Nay," she said, " I see that wunna do. Two miles apart 'ood be nothin' for 'im to walk o' nights. He'd come an' see thee theer every day arter the work were done. I could'na bear that as much as this. Now I can meet 'im sometimes an' see 'im unbeknown to 'im ; but then I could'na. He'd be entirely away from Radbrooke, an' I should be moilin' mysen to death at not seein' a sight on 'im. No, Luce, 'twood never do for thee to go rimming to thy uncle's at Rodbridge. You mun stay here, such be my unaccountable fortin'."

" But, Luce," she added more quietly, and with a more dejected air, " remember that you be differend to me. I hanna got anythink to love, not a single livin' thing i' the world — not, I mean, i' the way that you love — not the same sort o' love, like as people feels to one another when they be young like as we be. I've got my poor old dad, an' Fan, o' course, but they donna bring the same feeling as what I mean. You've got 'im, Luce, an' you've got that little cade lamb o' thine as comes on the farm every day like a flash o' sun- shine. Remember me then, lass, an' donna let 'im see thee oftener than be needed, for I shall know it, an' 'twill be 'ard for me to bear, lovin' 'im as I do. Oh ! Luce, Luce, give me thy red hair. Give me — Oh ! why dinna God mek 'im love me instead o' thee ! "

She bent down with the anguish she was enduring, right over the form of Luce, and clasped her big arms round her smaller companion's neck. It was

TWO FOOLISH HEARTS 55

like a great oak wrapping its shielding limbs round a tender sapling — like Despair clinging to the smallest Hope.

Luce was herself moved to tears.

" I dinna know you loved him like this, Moll. Poor wench, I'll ease it for thee if I can. Yes, I will, lass, I will," and the little red-haired girl there and then formed a resolution, which she was determined to keep, if — if — the power within her lay.

" Luce, Luce ! " cried a voice at that moment from the direction of Mrs. Cowland's cottage, " come in, lass, the little 'un's waked up, an' I canna coax 'im off agen."

It was the voice of Luce's mother. As the girls separated from their embrace, Mrs. Cowland in person met them at the foot of the dark stretch of lane.

" What, Molly ! Be you wi' Luce, then ? Well, 'tis as glorious a night as I've sin for some time, an' you canna do much harm rimming about. But the dag's fallin' now, an' you hanna no 'ats on yeryeds. Come in, Luce. You mun hev bewitched the little waxwork, for I canna manage to raggle on wi' 'im nohow. He wants 'is muther, 'is muther, an' no 'un else 'ull do for he. You mun surely hev bewitched 'im wi' your winnin' ways, I doubt."

" Her bewitches all on us, Mrs. Cowland, Luce do," said Moll, with a sad smile.

" Oh, Moll ! " cried Luce, prettily.

George Mori.ev.

KM

1

PIEUSEMENT

A nuit d'hiver eleve au ciel son pur calice.

Et je leve mon cceur aussi, mon coeur nocturne, Seigneur, mon cceur ! vers ton pale infini vide, Et neanmoins, je sais que rien n'en pourra l'urne Combler, et que rien n'est dont ce cceur meurt avide ; Et je te sais mensonge et mes levres te prient Et mes genoux ; je sais et tes grandes mains closes Et tes grands yeux fermes aux desespoirs qui crient, Et que c'est moi, qui, seul, me reve dans les choses ; Sois de pitie, Seigneur, pour ma toute demence, J'ai besoin de pleurer mon mal vers ton silence! . . .

La nuit d'hiver eleve au ciel son pur calice !

Emile Verhaeren.

IN PIOUS MOOD

HE winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.

And I uplift my heart, my night-worn heart, in turn, O Lord, my heart ! to thy pale, infinite Inane, And yet I know that nought the implenishable urn Ma)' plenish, that nought is, whereof this heart dies fain And I know thee a lie, and with my lips make prayer And with my knees ; I know thy great, shut hands averse, Thy great eyes closed, to all the clamours of despair ; It is I, who dream myself into the universe ; Have pity on my wandering wits' entire discord ; Needs must I weep my woe towards thy silence, Lord !

The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.

Osman Edwards.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

in

O far I have attempted to follow with little or no comment what seems to me the main current of Nietzsche's thought. It may be admitted that there is some question as to which is the main current. For my own part I have no hesitation in asserting that it is the current which expands to its fullest extent between 1876 and 1883 in what I term Nietzsche's second or middle period ; up to then he had not gained complete individuality ; afterwards came the period of uncontrolled aberrations. Thus I am inclined to pass lightly over the third period, during which the conception of " master-morality " attained its chief and most rigid emphasis, although I gather that to Nietzsche's disciples as to his foes this con- ception seems of primary importance. This idea of " master-morality " is in fact a solid fossilized chunk, easy to handle for friendly or unfriendly hands. The earlier and more living work — the work of the man who truly said that it is with thinkers as with snakes : those that cannot shed their skins die — is less obviously tangible. So the " master-morality " it is that your true Nietzschian is most likely to close his fist over. It would be unkind to say more, for Nietzsche himself has been careful to scatter through his works, on the subject of disciples and followers generally, very scathing remarks which must be sufficiently painful to the ordinary Nietzschian.

We are helped in understanding Nietzsche's philosophic significance if we understand his precise ideal. The psychological analysis of every great thinker's work seems to reveal some underlying fundamental image or thought — often enough simple and homely in character — which he has carried with him into the most abstract regions. Thus Fraser has found good reason to suppose that Hegel's main ideas were suggested by the then recent discovery of galvanism. In Nietzsche's case this key is to be found in the persistent image of an attitude. As a child, his sister tells us, he had been greatly impressed by a rope-dancer who had performed his feats over the market-place at Naumburg, and throughout his work, as soon as he had

58 THE SAVOY

attained to real self-expression, we may trace the image of the dancer. " I do not know," he somewhere says, " what the mind of a philosopher need desire more than to be a good dancer. For dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed his only piety, his ' divine worship.' " In all Nietzsche's best work we are conscious of this ideal of the dancer, strong, supple, vigorous, yet harmonious and well-balanced. It is the dance of the athlete and the acrobat rather than the make-believe of the ball-room, and behind the easy equipoise of such dancing lie patient training and effort. The chief character of good dancing is its union of the maximum of energetic movement with the maximum of well- balanced grace. The whole muscular system is alive to restrain any excess, so that however wild and free the movement may seem it is always measured ; excess would mean ignominious collapse. When in his later years Nietzsche began, as he said, to " philosophize with the hammer," and to lay about him savagely at every hollow " idol " within reach, he departed from his better ideal of dancing, and his thinking became intemperate, reckless, desperate.

Nietzsche had no system, probably because the idea that dominated his thought was an image, and not a formula, the usual obsession of philosophers, such as may be clapped on the universe at any desired point. He remarks in one place that a philosopher believes the worth of his philosophy to lie in the structure, but that what we ultimately value are the finely carven and separate stones with which he builded, and he was clearly anxious to supply the elaborated stones direct. In time he came to call himself a realist, using the term, in no philosophic sense, to indicate his reverence for the real and essen- tial facts of life, the things that conduce to fine living. He desired to detach the " bad conscience " from the things that are merely wicked traditionally, and to attach it to the things that are anti-natural, anti-instinctive, anti-sensuous. He sought to inculcate veneration for the deep-lying sources of life, to take us down to the bed-rock of life, the rock whence we are hewn. He held that man, as a reality, with all his courage and cunning, is himself worth)' of honour, but that man's ideals are absurd and morbid, the mere dregs in the drained cup of life ; or, as he eventually said — and it is a saying which will doubtless seal his fate in the minds of many estimable persons — man's ideals are his only partie lionteuse, of which we may avoid any close examination. Nietzsche's " realism " was thus simply a vigorous hatred of all dreaming that tends to depreciate the value of life, and a vivid sense that man himself is the ens rcalissimum.

To recognize the free and direct but disconnected nature of Nietzsche's many-sided vision of the world is to lessen the force of his own antagonisms as well as of the antagonisms he has excited. The master-morality of his later

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days, on which friends and foes have alike insisted, is a case in point. This appears to have been hailed, or resented, as a death-blow struck at the modern democratic regime. To take a broad view of Nietzsche's philosophic development is to realize that both attitudes are alike out of place. On this matter, as on many others, Nietzsche moved in a line which led him to face an opposite direction in his decay from that which he faced in his immaturity. He began by regarding democracy as the standard of righteousness, and ended by asserting that the world only exists for the production of a few great men. It would be foolish to regard either of the termini as the last outpost of wisdom. But in the passage between these two points many excellent things are said by the way. Nietzsche was never enamoured of socialism or democracy for its own sake ; he will not even admit, reasonably enough, that we have yet attained democracy ; though the horses, indeed, are new, as yet "the roads are the same eld roads, the wheels the same old wheels." But he points out that the value of democracy lies in its guarantee of individual freedom : Cyclopean walls are being built, with much toil and dust, but the walls will be a rampart against any invasion of barbarians or any new slavery, against the despotism of capital and the despotism of party. The workers may regard the walls as an end in themselves ; we are free to value them for the fine flowers of culture which will grow in the gardens they inclose. To me, at least, this attitude of Nietzsche's maturity seems the ample defence of democracy.

Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested in questions of govern- ment ; he was far more deeply interested in questions of morals. In his treat- ment of morals — no doubt chiefly during the last period — there is a certain element of paradox. He grows altogether impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist, fervently exhorts us to become wickeder. But if any young disciple came to the teacher asking, "What must I do to become wickeder? " it does not appear that Nietzsche bade him to steal, bear false witness, commit adultery, or do any other of the familiar and commonly-accepted wicked- nesses. Nietzsche preached wickedness with the same solemn exaltation as Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired was far indeed from any rehabili- tation of easy vice ; it was the justification of neglected and unsanctified virtues.

At the same time, and while Nietzsche's immoralist is just as austere a person as the mere moralists who have haunted the world for many thousand years, it is clear that Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the sphere of morals. He never fails to point out how large a region of life and art lies legitimately

D

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outside the moral jurisdiction. In an age in which many moralists desire to force morals into every part of life and art — and even assume a certain air of virtue in so doing — the " immoralist " who lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation is engaged in a proper and wholesome task.

No doubt, however, there will be some to question the value of such a task. Nietzsche the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every camp, although he remains always a force to be reckoned with. The same may be said of Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps, the typical freethinker of the age that comes after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing of Renan's genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment ; he was less tender to human weak- ness, for all his long Christian ancestry less Christian than the Breton seminarist remained to the last. He seems to have shaken himself altogether free of Christianity — so free, that except in his last period he even speaks of it without bitterness — and he remained untouched by any mediaeval dreams, any nostalgia of the cloister such as now and then pursues even those of us who are farthest from any faith in Christian dogma. Heathen as he was, I do not think even Heine's visions of the gods in exile could have touched him ; he never felt the charm of fading and faded things. It is remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that, far as he was from Christianity, he was equally far from what we usually call " paganism," the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulgence and cheerful irresponsibility. It was not so that he under- stood Hellenism. In a famous essay, Matthew Arnold once remarked that the ideal Greek world was never sick or sorry. Nietzsche knew better. The greater part of Greek literature bears witness that the Hellenes were for ever wrestling with the problems of pain. And none who came after have more poignantly uttered the pangs of human affairs, or more sweetly the con- solations of those pangs, than the great disciples of the Greeks who created the Roman world. The classic world of nymphs and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The real classic world, like the modern world, was a world of suffering. The difference lies in the method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche chose the classic method from no desire to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but because he had known forms of torture for which the mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to offer no relief. If we must regard Nietzsche as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism. The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful and hopeful than the believer, but there is the same tragic sincerity, the same restless self-torment, the same sense of the abyss.

There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of culture, the philosopher engaged in the criiicism of life. From first to last, wherever you open his

FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 61

books, you light on sayings that cut to the core of the questions that every modern thinking man must face. I take, almost at random, a few passages from a single book : of convictions he writes that " a man possesses opinions as he possesses fish, in so far as he owns a fishing-net ; a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he has his own fish, his own opinions ; I speak of living opinions, living fish. Some men are content to possess fossils in their cabinets — and convictions in their heads." Of the problem of the relation of science to culture he says well : " The best and wholesomcst thing in science, as in mountains, is the air that blows there. It is because of that air that we spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science ; " and he points out that the work of science — with its need for sincerity, infinite patience, complete self- abnegation — calls for men of nobler make than poetry needs. When we have learnt to trust science and to learn from it, then it will be possible so to tell natural history that " everyone who hears it is inspired to health and gladness as the heir and continuer of humanity." This is how he rebukes those foolish persons who grow impatient with critics : " Remember that critics are insects who only sting to live and not to hurt : they want our blood and not our pain." And he utters this wise saying, himself forgetting it in later years : " Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness." Nietzsche desires to prove nothing, and is reckless of consistency. He looks at every question that comes before him with the same simple, intent, penetrative gaze, and whether the aspects that he reveals are new or old he seldom fails to bring us a fresh stimulus. Culture, as he understood it, consists for the modern man in the task of choosing the simple and indispensable things from the chaos of crude material which to-day overwhelms us. The man who will live at the level of the culture of his time is like the juggler who must keep a number of plates spinning in the air ; his life must be a constant training in suppleness and skill so that he may be a good athlete. But he is also called on to exercise his skill in the selection and limitation of his task. Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simplification of culture. Our suppleness and skill must be exercised alone on the things that are vital, essential, primitive ; the rest may be thrown aside. He is for ever challenging the multifarious materials for culture, testing them with eye and hand ; we cannot prove them too severely, he seems to say, nor cast aside too contemptuously the things that a real man has no need of for fine living. What must I do to be saved ? what do I need for the best and fullest life? — that is the everlasting question that the teacher of life is called upon to answer. And we cannot be too grateful to Nietzsche for the stern penetration — the more acute for his ever

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present sense of the limits of energy — with which he points us from amid the mass to the things which most surely belong to our eternal peace.

Nietzsche's style has often been praised. The style was certainly the man. There can be little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any other German style to compare with it, though such eminence means far less in a country where style has rarely been cultivated than it would mean in France or even England. Sallust awoke his sense for style, and may account for some characteristics of his style. He also enthusiastically admired Horace as the writer who had produced the maximum of energy with the minimum of material. A concentrated Roman style, significant and weighty at every point, cere perennius, was always his ideal. Certainly the philologist's aptitudes helped here to teach him the value and force of words, as jewels for the gold- smith to work with, and not as mere worn-out counters to slip through the fingers. One may call it a muscular style, a style wrought with the skilful strength of hand and arm. It scarcely appeals to the ear. It lacks the restful simplicity of the greatest masters, the plangent melody, the seemingly un- conscious magic quivering along our finest-fibred nerves. Such effects we seem to hear now and again in Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any other German. This style is titanic rather than divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly possesses in fullest measure : robust and well-tempered vigour, con- centration, wonderful plastic force in moulding expression. It becomes over- emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw aside the dancer's ideal in order to " philosophize with the hammer," the result on his style was as disastrous as on his thought ; both alike took on the violent and graceless character of the same implement. He speaks indeed of the virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it is a less skilled form of virtue than good dancing.

Whether he was dancing or hammering, however, Nietzsche certainly converted the whole of himself into his work, as in his view every philosopher is bound to do, " for just that art of transformation is philosophy." That he was entirely successful in being a "real man" one may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the commonplace in life, and his deficiency in the sexual instinct — however highly he may have rated the importance of sex in life — largely cut him off from real fellowship with the men who are most " real " to us. He was less tolerant and less humane than his master Goethe ; his incisive insight, and, in many respects, better intellectual equipment, are more than compensated by this lack of breadth. But every man works with the limita- tions of his qualities, just as we all struggle beneath the weight of the super- incumbent atmosphere ; our defects are even a part of our qualities, and it

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would be foolish to quarrel with them. Nietzsche succeeded in being himself, and it was a finely rare success. Whether he was a " real man " matters less. With passionate sincerity he expressed his real self and his best self, abhorring, on the one hand, what with Verlaine he called " literature," and, on the other, all mere indigested material, the result of that mental dyspepsia of which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme warning. A man's real self, as he repeated so often, consists of the things which he has truly digested and assimilated ; he must always " conquer " his opinions ; it is only such conquests which he has the right to report to men as his own. His thoughts are born of his pain ; he has imparted to them of his own blood, his own pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself held that suffering and even disease are almost indispens- able to the philosopher ; great pain is the final emancipator of the spirit, those great slow pains that take their time, and burn us up like green wood. " I doubt whether such pain betters us," he remarks, " but I know that it deepens us." That is the stuff of Nietzsche's Hellenism, as expressed in the most light-hearted of his books. Virescit voltiere virtus. It is that which makes him, when all is said, a great critic of life.

It is a consolation to many — I have seen it so stated in a respectable review — that Nietzsche went mad. No doubt also it was once a consolation to many that Socrates was poisoned, that Jesus was crucified, that Bruno was burnt. But hemlock and the cross and the stake proved sorry weapons against the might of ideas even in those days, and there is no reason to suppose that a doctor's certificate will be more effectual in our own. Of old time we killed our great men as soon as their visionary claims became inconvenient ; now, in our mercy, we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to the bitter close. The devils to whom the modern Faustus is committed have waxed cunning with the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most relentless form, the fate of Pascal and Swift and Rousseau. That fact may carry what weight it will in any final estimate of his place as a moral teacher : it cannot touch his position as an immensely significant personality. It must still be affirmed that the nineteenth century has produced no more revolutionary and aboriginal force.

Havelock Ellis.

STELLA MALIGNA

A Woman speaks :

Y little slave ! Wouldst thou escape me ? Only in the grave.

I will be poison to thee, honey-sweet, And, my poison having tasted, Thou shalt be delicately wasted,

Yet shalt thou live by that delicious death

Thou hast drunken from my breath,

Thou didst with my kisses eat.

I will be thy desire, and thou shalt flee me,

Thy enemy, and thou shalt seek :

My strength is to be weak,

And if through tears, not through thy tears, thou see me,

Beware, for of my kisses if thou tire,

Not of my tears,

Not of my tears shalt thou put off desire

Before the end of years.

What wouldst thou of me, little slave ? my heart ?

Nay, be content, here are mine arms around thee,

Be thou content that I have found thee,

And that I shall not suffer thee depart.

Ask nothing more of me.

Have I not given thee more than thou canst measure?

Take thou thy fill of pleasure.

Exult that thou art mine : think what it is

To be without my kiss ;

Not to have known me is to know not love.

Think, to have known me not !

Heart may indeed from heart remove,

Body by body may not be forgot.

STELLA MALIGNA 65

Thou hast been mine : ask nothing more of me. My heart is not for thee.

Child, leave me then my heart ;

I hold it in a folded peace apart,

I hold it for mine own.

There, in the quietness of dreams, it broods

Above untroubled moods,

No man hath been so near me as to have known.

The rest is thine : ah, take

The gift I have to give, my body, lent

For thy unsatisfied content,

For thy insatiable desire's compelling,

And let me for my pleasure make

For my own heart a lonely dwelling.

Thou wilt not ? Thou wilt summon sorrow

From morrow unto endless morrow ?

Thou wilt endure unto the uttermost ?

Ah ! little slave, my slave,

Thou shalt endure until desire be lost

In the achievement of the grave.

Thou shalt endure, and I, in dreams, behold,

Within my paradise of gold,

Thy heart's blood flowering for my peace ;

And thy passion shall release

The secret light that in the lily glows,

The miracle of the secret rose.

Arthur Symons.

THE DYING OF FRANCIS DONNE

A STUDY

" Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulvercm reverteris "

' E had lived so long in the meditation of death, visited it so often in others, studied it with such persistency, with a sentiment in which horror and fascination mingled ; but it had always been, as it were, an objective, alien fact, remote from himself and his own life. So that it was in a sudden flash, quite too stupefying to admit in the first instance of terror, that knowledge of his mortality dawned on him. There was absurdity in the idea too.

" I, Francis Donne, thirty-five and some months old, am going to die," he said to himself; and fantastically he looked at his image in the glass, and sought, but quite vainly, to find some change in it which should account for this incongruity, just as, searching in his analytical habit into the recesses of his own mind, he could find no such alteration of his inner consciousness as would explain or justify his plain conviction. And quickly, with reason and casuistry, he sought to rebut that conviction.

The quickness of his mind — it had never seemed to him so nimble, so exquisite a mechanism of syllogism and deduction — was contraposed against his blind instinct of the would-be self-deceiver, in a conflict to which the latter brought something of desperation, the fierce, agonized desperation of a hunted animal at bay. But piece by piece the chain of evidence was strengthened. That subtile and agile mind of his, with its special knowledge, cut clean through the shrinking protests of instinct, removing them as surely and as remorselessly, he reflected in the image most natural to him, as the keen blade of his surgical knives had removed malignant ulcers.

" I, Francis Donne, am going to die," he repeated, and, presently, " / am going to die soon; in a few months, in six perhaps, certainly in a year."

THE DYING OF FRANCIS DONNE 67

Once more, curiously, but this time with a sense of neutrality, as he had often diagnosed a patient, he turned to the mirror. Was it his fancy, or, perhaps, only for the vague light that he seemed to discover a strange gray tone about his face ?

But he had always been a man of a very sallow complexion.

There were a great many little lines, like pen-scratches, scarring the parchment-like skin beneath the keen eyes : doubtless, of late, these had multiplied, become more noticeable, even when his face was in repose.

But, of late, what with his growing practice, his lectures, his writing ; all the unceasing labour, which his ambitions entailed, might well have aged him somewhat. That dull, immutable pain, which had first directed his attention from his studies, his investigations, his profession, to his corporal self, the actual Francis Donne, that pain which he would so gladly have called inexplicable, but could explain so precisely, had ceased for the moment. Nerves, fancies ! How long it was since he had taken any rest ! He had often intended to give himself holiday, but something had always intervened. But he would do so now, yes, almost immediately ; a long, long holiday — he would grudge nothing — somewhere quite out of the way, somewhere, where there was fishing ; in Wales, or perhaps in Brittany ; that would surely set him right.

And even while he promised himself this necessary relaxation in the immediate future, as he started on his afternoon round, in the background of his mind there lurked the knowledge of its futility ; rest, relaxation, all that, at this date, was, as it were, some tardy sacrifice, almost hypocritical, which he offered to powers who might not be propitiated.

Once in his neat brougham, the dull pain began again ; but by an effort of will he put it away from him. In the brief interval from house to house — he had some dozen visits to make — he occupied himself with a medical paper, glanced at the notes of a lecture he was giving that evening at a certain Institute on the " Limitations of Medicine."

He was late, very late for dinner, and his man, Bromgrove, greeted him with a certain reproachfulness, in which he traced, or seemed to trace, a half- patronizing sense of pity. He reminded himself that on more than one occasion, of late, Bromgrove's manner had perplexed him. He was glad to rebuke the man irritably on some pretext, to dismiss him from the room, and he hurried, without appetite, through the cold or overdone food which was the reward of his tardiness.

His lecture over, he drove out to South Kensington, to attend a reception

68 THE SAVOY

at the house of a great man — great not only in the scientific world, but also in the world of letters. There was some of the excitement of success in his eyes as he made his way, with smiles and bows, in acknowledgment of many compliments, through the crowded rooms. For Francis Donne's lectures — those of them which were not entirely for the initiated — had grown into the importance of a social function. They had almost succeeded in making science fashionable, clothing its dry bones in a garment of so elegantly- literary a pattern. But even in the ranks of the profession it was only the envious, the unsuccessful, who ventured to say that Donne had sacrificed doctrine to popularity, that his science was, in their contemptuous parlance, " mere literature."

Yes, he had been very successful, as the world counts success, and his consciousness of this fact, and the influence of the lights, the crowd, the voices, was like absinthe on his tired spirit. He had forgotten, or thought he had forgotten, the phantom of the last few days, the phantom which was surely waiting for him at home.

But he was reminded by a certain piece of news which late in the evening fluttered the now diminished assembly : the quite sudden death of an eminent surgeon, expected there that night, an acquaintance of his own, and more or less of each one of the little, intimate group which tarried to discuss it. With sympathy, with a certain awe, they spoke of him, Donne and the others ; and both the awe and the sympathy were genuine.

But as he drove home, leaning back in his carriage, in a discouragement, in a lethargy, which was only partly due to physical reaction, he saw visibly underneath their regret — theirs and his own— the triumphant assertion of life, the egoism of instinct. They were sorry, but oh, they were glad ! royally glad, that it was another, and not they themselves whom something mysterious had of a sudden snatched away from his busy career, his interests, perhaps from all intelligence ; at least, from all the pleasant sensuousness of life, the joy of the visible world, into darkness. And he knew the sentiment, and honestly dared not blame it. How many times had not he, Francis Donne himself experienced it, that egoistic assertion of life in the presence of the dead — the poor, irremediable dead ? . . . And now, he was only good to give it to others.

Latterly, he had been in the habit of subduing sleeplessness with injec- tions of morphia, indeed in infinitesimal quantities. But to-night, although he was more than usually restless and awake, by a strong effort of reasonable- ness he resisted his impulse to take out the little syringe. The pain was at

THE DYING OF FRANCIS DONNE 69

him again with the same dull and stupid insistence ; in its monotony, losing some of the nature of pain and becoming a mere nervous irritation. But he was aware that it would not continue like that. Daily, almost hourly, it would gather strength and cruelty ; the moments of respite from it would become rarer, would cease. From a dull pain it would become an acute pain, and then a torture, and then an agony, and then a madness. And in those last days, what peace might be his would be the peace of morphia, so that it was essential that, for the moment, he should not abuse the drug.

And as he knew that sleep was far away from him, he propped himself up with two pillows, and by the light of a strong reading-lamp settled himself to read. He had selected the work of a distinguished German savattt upon the cardial functions, and a short treatise of his own, which was covered with recent annotations, in his crabbed hand-writing, upon " Aneurism of the Heart." He read avidly, and against his own deductions, once more his instinct raised a vain protest. At last he threw the volumes aside, and lay with his eyes shut, without, however, extinguishing the light. A terrible sense of helplessness overwhelmed him ; he was seized with an immense and heart-breaking pity for poor humanity as personified in himself; and, for the first time since he had ceased to be a child, he shed puerile tears.

II

The faces of his acquaintance, the faces of the students at his lectures, the faces of Francis Donne's colleagues at the hospital, were altered ; were, at least, sensibly altered to his morbid self-consciousness. In every one whom he encountered, he detected, or fancied that he detected, an attitude of evasion, a hypocritical air of ignoring a fact that was obvious and unpleasant. Was it so obvious, then, the hidden horror which he carried incessantly about with him ? Was his secret, which he would still guard so jealously, become a byword and an anecdote in his little world ? And a great rage consumed him against the inexorable and inscrutable forces which had made him to destroy him ; against himself, because of his proper impotence ; and, above all, against the living, the millions who would remain when he was no longer, the living, of whom many would regret him (some of them his personality, and more, his skill), because he could see under all the unconscious hypocrisy of their sorrow, the exultant self-satisfaction of their survival.

And with his burning sense of helplessness, of a certain bitter injustice

70 THE SAVOY

in things, a sense of shame mingled ; all the merely physical dishonour of death shaping itself to his sick and morbid fancy into a violent symbol of what was, as it were, an actually moral or intellectual dishonour. Was not death, too, inevitable and natural an operation as it was, essentially a process to undergo apart and hide jealously, as much as other natural and ignoble processes of the body ?

And the animal, who steals away to an uttermost place in the forest, who gives up his breath in a solitude and hides his dying like a shameful thing, — might he not offer an example that it would be well for the dignity of poor humanity to follow?

Since Death is coming to me, said Francis Donne to himself, let me meet it, a stranger in a strange land, with only strange faces round me and the kind indifference of strangers, instead of the intolerable pity of friends.

Ill

On the bleak and wave-tormented coast of Finistere, somewhere between Quiberon and Fouesnant, he reminded himself of a little fishing-village : a few scattered houses (one of them being an auberge at which ten years ago he had spent a night,) collected round a poor little gray church. Thither Francis Donne went, without leave-takings or explanation, almost secretly, giving but the vaguest indications of the length or direction of his absence. And there for many days he dwelt, in the cottage which he had hired, with one old Breton woman for his sole attendant, in a state of mind which, after all the years of energy, of ambitious labour, was almost peace.

Bleak and gray it had been, when he had visited it of old, in the late autumn ; but now the character, the whole colour of the country was changed. It was brilliant with the promise of summer, and the blue Atlantic, which in winter churned with its long crested waves so boisterously below the little white light-house, which warned mariners (alas ! so vainly), against the shark- like cruelty of the rocks, now danced and glittered in the sunshine, rippled with feline caresses round the hulls of the fishing-boats whose brown sails floated so idly in the faint air.

Above the village, on a grassy slope, whose green was almost lurid, Francis Donne lay, for many silent hours, looking out at the placid sea, which could yet be so ferocious, at the low violet line of the Island of Groix, which alone interrupted the monotony of sky and ocean.

He had brought many books with him but he read in them rarely ; and

THE DYING OF FRAXCIS DONNE 71

when physical pain gave him a respite for thought, he thought almost of nothing. His thought was for a long time a lethargy and a blank.

Now and again he spoke with some of the inhabitants. They were a poor and hardy, but a kindly race : fishers and the wives of fishers, whose children would grow up and become fishermen and the wives of fishermen in their turn. Most of them had wrestled with death ; it was always so near to them that hardly one of them feared it ; they were fatalists, with the grim and resigned fatalism of the poor, of the poor who live with the treachery of the sea.

Francis Donne visited the little cemetery, and counted the innumerable crosses which testified to the havoc which the sea had wrought. Some of the graves were nameless ; holding the bodies of strange seamen which the waves had tossed ashore.

"And in a little time I shall lie here," he said to himself; "and here as well as elsewhere," he added with a shrug, assuming, and, for once, almost sincerely, the stoicism of his surroundings, " and as lief to-day as to-morrow."

On the whole, the days were placid ; there were even moments when, as though he had actually drunk in renewed vigour from that salt sea air, the creative force of the sun, he was tempted to doubt his grievous knowledge, to make fresh plans of life. But these were fleeting moments, and the reaction from them was terrible. Each day his hold on life was visibly more slender, and the people of the village saw, and with a rough sympathy, which did not offend him, allowed him to perceive that they saw, the rapid growth and the inevitableness of his end.

IV

But if the days were not without their pleasantness, the nights were always horrible — a torture of the body and an agony of the spirit. Sleep was far away, and the brain, which had been lulled till the evening, would awake, would grow electric with life and take strange and abominable flights into the darkness of the pit, into the black night of the unknowable and the unknown.

And interminably, during those nights which seemed eternity, Francis Donne questioned and examined into the nature of that Thing, which stood, a hooded figure beside his bed, with a menacing hand raised to beckon him so peremptorily from all that lay within his consciousness.

He had been all his life absorbed in science ; he had dissected, how many bodies ? and in what anatomy had he ever found a soul ? Yet if his avocations,

72 THE SAVOY

his absorbing interest in physical phenomena had made him somewhat a materialist, it had been almost without his consciousness. The sensible, visible world of matter had loomed so large to him, that merely to know that had seemed to him sufficient. All that might conceivably lie outside it, he had, without negation, been content to regard as outside his province.

And now, in his weakness, in the imminence of approaching dissolution, his purely physical knowledge seemed but a vain possession, and he turned with a passionate interest to what had been said and believed from time immemorial by those who had concentrated their intelligence on that strange essence, which might after all be the essence of one's personality, which might be that sublimated consciousness — the Soul — actually surviving the infamy of the grave ?

Animula, vagula, blandula !

Hospes comesque corporis,

Qua? nunc abibis in loca?

Pallidula, rigida, nudula.

Ah, the question ! It was an harmony, perhaps (as, who had maintained ? whom the Platonic Socrates in the " Phaedo" had not too successfully refuted), an harmony of life, which was dissolved when life was over ? Or, perhaps, as how many metaphysicians had held both before and after a sudden great hope, perhaps too generous to be true, had changed and illuminated, to count- less millions, the inexorable figure of Death — a principle, indeed, immortal, which came and went, passing through many corporal conditions until it was ultimately resolved into the great mind, pervading all things? Perhaps? . . . But what scanty consolation, in all such theories, to the poor body, racked with pain and craving peace, to the tortured spirit of self-consciousness so achingly anxious not to be lost.

And he turned from these speculations to what was, after all, a possibility like the others ; the faith of the simple, of these fishers with whom he lived, which was also the faith of his own childhood, which, indeed, he had never repudiated, whose practices he had simply discarded, as one discards puerile garments when one comes to man's estate. And he remembered, with the vividness with which, in moments of great anguish, one remembers things long ago familiar, forgotten though they may have been for years, the triumphant declarations of the Church :

" Omnes quidem resurgemus, sed non omnes immutabimnr. In momento, in ictu oculi, in novissima tuba : canet cnim tuba : et mortui resurgent incorrupti, et nos immutabimur. Oportet cnim corruptibile hoc induere immortalitatem. Cum

THE DYING OF FRANCIS DONNE 73

autem mortalt hoc induerit immortalitatem tunc fiet scrmo qui scriptus est : Absorpta est mors in victoria. Ubi est, mors, victoria tua ? Ubt est, mors, stimulus titus ? "

All, for the certitude of that ! of that victorious confutation of the apparent destruction of sense and spirit in a common ruin. . . . But it was a possibility like the rest ; and had it not more need than the rest to be more than a possibility, if it would be a consolation, in that it promised more? And he gave it up, turning his face to the wall, lay very still, imagining himself already stark and cold, his eyes closed, his jaw closely tied (lest the ignoble changes which had come to him should be too ignoble), while he waited until the narrow boards, within which he should lie, had been nailed together, and the bearers were ready to convey him into the corruption which was to be his part.

And as the window-pane grew light with morning, he sank into a drugged, unrestful sleep, from which he would awake some hours later with eyes more sunken and more haggard cheeks. And that was the pattern of many nights.

One day he seemed to wake from a night longer and more troubled than usual, a night which had, perhaps, been many nights and days, perhaps even weeks ; a night of an ever-increasing agony, in which he was only dimly con- scious at rare intervals of what was happening, or of the figures coming and going around his bed : the doctor from a neighbouring town, who had stayed by him unceasingly, easing his paroxysms with the little merciful syringe ; the soft, practised hands of a sister of charity about his pillow ; even the face of Bromgrove, for whom doubtless he had sent, when he had foreseen the utter helplessness which was at hand.

He opened his eyes, and seemed to discern a kw blurred figures against the darkness of the closed shutters through which one broad ray filtered in ; but he could not distinguish their faces, and he closed his eyes once more. An immense and ineffable tiredness had come over him, but the pain — oh, miracle ! had ceased. . . . And it suddenly flashed over him that this — this was Death ; this was the thing against which he had cried and revolted ; the horror from which he would have escaped ; this utter luxury of physical exhaustion, this calm, this release.

The corporal capacity of smiling had passed from him, but he would fain have smiled.

74 THE SAVOY

And for a few minutes of singular mental lucidity, all his life flahsed before him in a new relief; his childhood, his adolescence, the people whom he had known ; his mother, who had died when he was a boy, of a malady from which, perhaps, a few years later, his skill had saved her ; the friend of his youth who had shot himself for so little reason ; the girl whom he had loved, but who had not loved him. . . . All that was distorted in life was adjusted and justified in the light of his sudden knowledge. Bead mortui . . . and then the great tiredness swept over him once more, and a fainter con- sciousness, in which he could yet just dimly hear, as in a dream, the sound of Latin prayers, and feel the application of the oils upon all the issues and approaches of his wearied sense ; then utter unconsciousness, while pulse and heart gradually grew fainter until both ceased. And that was all.

Ernest Dowson.

THREE SONNETS

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

TRONG shepherd of thy sheep, pasturers of the sea : Far on the Western marge, thy passionate Cornish land ! Ah, that from out thy Paradise thou couldst thine hand Reach forth to mine, and I might tell my love to thee ! For one the faith, and one the joy, of thee and me, Catholic faith and Celtic joy : I understand

Somewhat, I too, the messengers from Sion strand ; The voices and the visions of the Mystery.

Ah, not the Chaunt alone was thine : thine too the Quest ! And at the last the Sangraal of the Paschal Christ Flashed down Its fair red Glory to those dying eyes : They closed in death, and opened on the Victim's Breast. Now, while they look for ever on the Sacrificed, Remember, how thine ancient race in twilight lies !

MOTHER ANN: FOUNDRESS OF THE SHAKERS

HITE were the ardours of thy soul, O wan Ann Lee ! Thou spirit of fine fire, for every storm to shake ! They shook indeed the quivering flame ; yet could not make Its passionate light expire, but only make it flee : Over the vast, the murmuring, the embittered sea, Driven, it gleamed : no agonies availed to break That burning heart, so hot for heavenly passion's sake ; The heart, that beat, and burned, and agonized, in thee ! E

76 ' THE SAVOY

Thou knewest not : yet thine was altar flame astray :

Poor exiled, wandering star, that might'st have stayed and stood

Hard by the Holy Host, close to the Holy Rood,

Illumining the great one Truth, one Life, one Way !

O piteous pilgrim pure amid night's sisterhood :

For thee doth Mother Mary, Star of Morning, pray

MUNSTER: a.d. 1534

E are the golden men, who shall the people save :

For only ours are visions, perfect and divine ;

And we alone are drunken with the last best wine ;

And very Truth our souls hath flooded, wave on wave.

Come, wretched death's inheritors, who dread the grave !

Come ! for upon our brows is set the starry sign Of prophet, priest, and king : star of the Lion's line ! Leave Abana, leave Pharpar, and in Jordan lave !

It thundered, and we heard : it lightened, and we saw : Our hands have torn in twain the Tables of the Law : Sons of the Spirit, we know nothing more of sin. Come ! from the Tree of Eden take the mystic fruit : Come ! pluck up God's own knowledge by the abysmal root : Come ! you, who would the Reign of Paradise begin.

Lionel Johnson.

THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES

A COLOUR-STUDY .

I

MM

HE tram rolls heavily through the sunshine, on the way to Vincennes. The sun beats on one's head like the glow of a furnace ; we are in the second week of May, and the hour is between one and two in the afternoon. From the Place Voltaire, all along the dingy boulevard, there are signs of the fair : first, little stalls, with the refuse of ironmonger and pastry-cook, then little booths, then a few roundabouts, the wooden horses standing motionless. At the Place de la Nation we have reached the fair itself. Already the roundabouts swarm in gorgeous inactivity ; shooting- galleries with lofty names — Tir Metropolitan!, Tir de Lutece — lead on to the establishments of cochonnerie, the gingerbread pigs, which have given its name to the Foire an pain (fcpice. From between the two pillars, each with its airy statue, we can look right on, through lanes of stalls and alleys of dusty trees, to the railway bridge which crosses the other end of the Cours de Vincennes, just before it subsides into the desolate boulevard Soult and the impoverished grass of the ramparts. Hardly anyone passes : the fair, which is up late, sleeps till three. I saunter slowly along, watching the drowsy attitudes of the women behind their stalls, the men who lounge beside their booths. Only the pho- tographer is in activity, and as you pause a moment to note his collection of grimacing and lachrymose likenesses (probably very like), a framed horror is thrust into your hand, and a voice insinuates : " Six pour un sou, Monsieur ! " To stroll through the fair just now is to have a sort of "Private View." The hour of disguises has not yet begun. The heavy girl who, in an hour's time, will pose in rosy tights and cerulean tunic on those trestles yonder in front of the theatre, sits on the ladder-staircase of her " jivin wardo," her " living

8o THE SAVOY

waggon," as the gipsies call it, diligently mending, with the help of scissors and thread, a piece of canvas which is soon to be a castle or a lake. A lion- tamer, in his shirt-sleeves is chatting with the proprietress of a collection of waxworks. A fairy queen is washing last week's tights in a great tub. And booths and theatres seem to lounge in the same desliabille. With their vacant platforms, their closed doors, their too visible masterpieces of coloured canvas, they stand, ugly and dusty, every crack and patch exposed by the pitiless downpour of the sunlight. Here is the show of Pezon, the old lion-tamer, who is now assisted by his son ; opposite, his rival and constant neighbour, Bidel. The Grand Theatre Cocherie announces its " grande feerie " in three acts and twenty tableaux. A " concert international " succeeds a very dismal- looking " Temple de la Gaiete." Here is the Theatre Macketti ; here the " Grande Musee Vivant " ; here a " Galerie artistique " at one sou. " Laurent, inimitable dompteur (pour la premiere fois a Paris)," has for companion " Juliano et ses fauves : Fosse aux Lions." There is a very large picture of a Soudanese giant — " il est ici, le geant Soudanais : 2 m 20 de hauteur" — outside a very small tent ; the giant, very black in the face, and very red as to his habiliments, holds a little black infant in the palm of his hand, and by his side, carefully avoiding (by a delicacy of the painter) a too direct inspection, stands a gendarme, who extends five fingers in a gesture of astonishment, somewhat out of keeping with the perfect placidity of his face. " Theatres des Illusions " flourish side by side with " Musees artistiques," in which the latest explosive Anarchist, or " le double crime du boulevard du Temple," is the " great attrac- tion " of the moment. Highly coloured and freely designed pictures of nymphs and naiads are accompanied by such seductive and ingenuous recommendations as this, which I copy textually : I cannot reproduce the emphasis of the lettering : " Etoiles Animees. Filles de l'Air. Nouvelle attraction par le pro- fesseur Julius. Pourquoi Mile. Isaure est-elle appelee Deesse des Eaux ? C'est par sa Grace et son pouvoir mysterieux de paraitre au milieu des Eaux limpides, devant tous les spectateurs qui deviendront ses Admirateurs. En Plein Theatre la belle Isaure devient Syrene et Nayade ! charme par ses jeux sveltes et souples, apparait en Plein Mer, et presentee par le professeur Julius a chaque representation. Plusieurs pales imitateurs essayent de copier la belle Isaure, mais le vrai Public, amateur du Vrai et du Beau, dira que la Copie ne vaut pas l'original." And there is a " Jardin mysterieux " which represents an improbable harem, with an undesirable accompaniment of performing reptiles. Before this tent I pause, but not for the sake of its announcements. In the doorway sits a beautiful young girl of about sixteen, a Jewess, with a face that

THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 8l

Leonardo might have painted. A red frock reaches to her knees, her thin legs, in white tights, are crossed nonchalantly ; in her black hair there is the sparkle of false diamonds, ranged in a tiara above the gracious contour of her forehead ; and she sits there, motionless, looking straight before her with eyes that see nothing, absorbed in some vague reverie, the Monna Lisa of the Gingerbread Fair.

II

It is half-past three, and the Cours de Vincennes is a carnival of colours, sounds, and movements. Looking from the Place de la Nation, one sees a long thin line of customers along the stalls of bonbons and gingerbread, and the boulevard has the air of a black-edged sheet of paper, until the eye reaches the point where the shows begin. Then the crowd is seen in black patches, sometimes large, extending half across the road, sometimes small ; every now and then, one of the black patches thins rapidly, as the people mount the plat- form, or as there is a simultaneous movement from one point of attraction to another. At one's back the roundabouts are squealing the " repertoire Paulus," in front there is a continuous, deafening rumble of drums, with an inextricable jangle and jumble of brass bands, each playing a different tune, all at once, and all close together. Shrill or hoarse voices are heard for a moment, to be drowned the next by the intolerable drums and cornets. As one moves slowly down the long avenue, distracted by the cries, the sounds, coming from both sides at once, it is quite another aspect that is presented by those dingy platforms, those gaping canvases, of but an hour ago. Every plat- form is alive with human frippery. A clown in reds and yellows, with a floured and rouged face, bangs a big drum, an orchestra (sometimes of one, sometimes of fifteen) " blows through brass " with the full power of its lungs ; fulgently and scantily attired ladies throng the foreground, a man in plain clothes squanders the remains of a voice in howling the attractions of the interior, and in the back- ground, at a little table, an opulent lady sits at the receipt of custom, with the business-like solemnity of the dame du comptoir of a superior restaurant. Occasionally there is a pas seul, more often an indifferent waltz, at times an impromptu comedy. Outside Bidel's establishment a tired and gentle drome- dary rubs its nose against the pole to which it is tied ; elsewhere a monkey- swings on a trapeze ; a man with a snake about his shoulders addresses the crowd, and my Monna Lisa, too, has twined a snake around her, and stands holding the little malevolent head in her fingers, like an exquisite and harmless Medusa.

82 THE SAVOY

Under the keen sunlight every tint stands out sharply, and to pass between those two long lines of gesticulating figures is to plunge into an orgy of clashing colours. All the women wear the coarsest of worsted tights, meant, for the most part, to be flesh-colour, but it varies, through all the shades, from the palest of pink to the brightest of red. Often the tights are patched, sometimes they are not even patched. The tunic may be mauve, or orange, or purple, or blue ; it is generally open in front, showing a close- fitting jersey of the same colour as the tights. The arms are bare, the faces, as a rule, made up with discretion and restraint. There is one woman (she must once have been very beautiful) who appears in ballet skirts ; there is a man in blue-grey cloak and hood, warriors in plumes and cuirass ; but for the most part it is the damsels in flesh-coloured tights and jerseys who parade on the platforms outside the theatres. When they break into a waltz it is always the most dissonant of mauves and pinks and purples that choose one another as partners. As the girls move carelessly and clumsily round in the dance, they continue the absorbing conversations in which they are mostly engaged. Rarely does anyone show the slightest interest in the crowd whose eyes are all fixed — so thirstingly ! — upon them. They stand or move as they are told, mechanically, indifferently, and that is all. Often, but not always, well-formed, they have occasionally pretty faces as well. There is a brilliant little creature, one of the crowd of warriors outside the Theatre Cocherie, who has quite an individual type of charm and intelligence. She has a boyish face, little black curls on her forehead, a proud, sensitive mouth, and black eyes full of wit and defiance. As Miss Angelina, " artiste gymnasiarque, equilibriste et danseuse," goes through a very ordinary selection of steps (" rocks," " scissors," and the like, as they are called in the profession), Julienne's eyes devour every movement : she is learning how to do it, and will practise it herself, without telling anyone, until she can surprise them some day by taking Miss Angelina's place.

Ill But it is at night, towards nine o'clock, that the fair is at its best. The painted faces, the crude colours, assume their right aspect, become harmonious, under the artificial light. The dancing pinks and reds whirl on the platforms, flash into the gas-light, disappear for an instant into a solid shadow, against the light, emerge vividly. The moving black masses surge to and fro before the booths ; from the side one sees lines of rigid figures, faces that the light shows in eager profile. Outside the Theatre Cocherie there is a shifting light

THE GINGERBREAD FAIR AT VINCENNES 83

which turns a dazzling glitter, moment by moment, across the road ; it plunges like a sword into one of the trees opposite, casts a glow as of white fire over the transfigured green of leaves and branches, and then falls off, baffled by the impenetrable leafage. As the light drops suddenly on the crowd, an instant before only dimly visible, it throws into fierce relief the intent eyes, the gaping mouths, the unshaven cheeks, darting into the hollows of broken teeth, pointing cruelly at every scar and wrinkle. As it swings round in the return, it dazzles the eyes of one tall girl at the end of the platform, among the warriors : she turns away her head, or grimaces. In the middle of the platform there is a violent episode of horse-play : a man in plain clothes belabours two clowns with a sounding lath, and is in turn belaboured ; then the three rush together, pell-mell, roll over one another, bump down the steps to the ground, return, recommence, with the vigour and gusto of schoolboys in a scrimmage. Further on a white clown tumbles on a stage, girls in pink and black and white move vaguely before a dark red curtain, brilliant red breeches sparkle, a girl en garcon, standing at one side in a graceful pose which reveals her fine outlines, shows a motionless silhouette, cut out sharply against the light ; the bell rings, the drum beats, a large blonde-wigged woman, dressed in Louis XIV., cries her wares and holds up placards, white linen with irregular black lettering. Outside a boxing booth a melancholy lean man blows inaudibly into a horn ; his cheeks puff, his fingers move, but not a sound can be heard above the thunder of the band of Laurent le Dompteur. Before the ombres chinoises a lamp hanging to a tree sheds its light on a dark red background, on the gendarme who moves across the platform, on the pink and green hat of Madame, and her plump hand supporting her chin, on Monsieur's irre- proachable silk hat and white whiskers. Near by is a theatre where they are giving the " Cloches de Corneville," and the platform is thronged with lounging girls in tights. They turn their backs unconcernedly to the crowd, and the light falls on pointed shoulder-blades, one distinguishes the higher vertebra; of the spine. A man dressed in a burlesque female costume kicks a print dress extravagantly into the air, flutters a ridiculous fan, with mincing airs, with turns and somersaults. People begin to enter, and the platform clears ; a line of figures marches along the narrow footway running the length of the building, to a curtained entrance at the end. The crowd in front melts away, straggles across the road to another show, straggling back again as the drum begins to beat and the line of figures marches back to the stage.

In front, at the outskirts of the crowd, two youngsters in blouses have begun to dance, kicking their legs in the air, to the strains of a mazurka ; and

84 THE SAVOY

now two women circle. A blind man, in the space between two booths, sits holding a candle in his hand, a pitiful object ; the light falls on his straw hat, the white placard on his breast, his face is in shadow. As I pause before a booth where a fat woman in tights flourishes a pair of boxing gloves, I find myself by the side of my Monna Lisa of the enchanted garden. Her show is over, and she is watching the others. She wears a simple black dress and a dark blue apron ; her hair is neatly tied back with a ribbon. She is quite ready to be amused, and it is not only I, but the little professional lady, who laughs at the farce which begins on a neighbouring stage, where a patch-work clown comes out arm in arm with a nightmare of a pelican, the brown legs very human, the white body and monstrous orange bill very fearsome and fantastic. A pale Pierrot languishes against a tree : I see him as I turn to go, and, looking back, I can still distinguish the melancholy figure above the waltz of the red and pink and purple under the lights, the ceaseless turning of those human dolls, with their fixed smile, their painted colours.

IV It is half-past eleven, and the fair is over for the night. One by one the lights are extinguished ; faint glimmers appear in the little square windows of dressing-rooms and sleeping-rooms ; silhouettes cross and re-cross the drawn blinds, with lifted arms and huddled draperies. The gods of tableaux vivants, negligently modern in attire, stroll off across the road to find a comrade, rolling a cigarette between their fingers. Monna Lisa passes rapidly, with her brother, carrying a marketing basket. And it is a steady movement town- wards ; the very stragglers prepare to go, stopping, from time to time, to buy a great gingerbread pig with Jean or Suzanne scrawled in great white letters across it. Outside one booth, not yet closed, I am arrested by the desolation of a little frail creature, with a thin, suffering, painted face, his pink legs crossed, who sits motionless by the side of the great drum, looking down wearily at the cymbals that he still holds in his hands. In the open spaces roundabouts turn, turn, a circle of moving lights, encircled by a thin line of black shadows. The sky darkens, a little wind is rising ; the night, after this day of heat, will be stormy. And still, to the waltz measure of the round- abouts, turning, turning frantically, the last lingerers defy the midnight, a dance of shadows.

Arthur Svmoxs.

THE SONG OF THE WOMEN

A WEALDEN TRIO

\st Voice: HEN ye've got a child 'at 's whist for want of food, And a grate as grey 's y'r 'air for want of wood, And y'r man and you ain't nowise not much good ;

Oh-

Together .

It's hard work a-Christmassing,

Carolling,

Singin' songs about the " Babe what 's born."

2nd Voice : When ye've 'eered the bailiff's 'and upon the latch, And ye've feeled the rain a-trickling through the thatch An' y'r man can't git no stones to break ner yit no sheep to watch-

86

Oh-

THE SAVOY Together :

We got to come a-Christmassing,

Carolling,

Singin' of the " Shepherds on that morn."

yd Voice, more cheerfully : 'E was a man 's poor as us, very near, An' 'E 'ad 'is trials and danger,

An' I think 'E '11 think of us when 'E sees us singing 'ere ; For 'is mother was poor like us, poor dear, An' she bore him in a manger.

Togetlier : Oh—

It 's warm in the heavens but it 's cold upon the earth ;

An' we ain't no food at table nor no fire upon the hearth ;

And it 's bitter hard a-Christmassing ;

Carolling ;

Singin' songs about our Saviour's birth ;

Singin' songs about tJw Babe w/iat's born ;

Singin' of the slieplierds on that morn.

Ford Madox Hueffer.

DOCTOR AND PATIENT

Pi=

HE doctor sat at the bedside of his old friend, now his patient, who was dying, inevitably dying. Accustomed as he was to the presence of death, this passing away of a man to whom he was bound by the tie of a thousand common associations added a freshness to its aspect, to its profound mysteries, its terrors. He was inexpressibly sorry. Still, at this critical moment, with the pale image of the invalid before him, while breathing the atmosphere of the sick room, his thoughts were remote from the bedside ; he was preoccupied by another grief.

The patient had realized his fate, he knew that he was on the point of dying, that the thing was inevitable, and he was reconciled. He waited on the threshold of death, calmly, without fear ; he seemed to feel the gradual absorption of his soul into the unknown, to be conscious of a gradual efface- ment, and the sensation filled him only with a benign curiosity.

With the quickened sensitiveness of an invalid the sick man understood that his companion at his bedside was troubled, his good friend who had nursed him with so eager a devotion ; and at first he thought, and the thought occasioned him a tranquil, warming sense of gratitude, that it was the con- templation of the slender link which held him to life that was the cause. But a little later, with still quicker intuition, he divined that the trouble had its origin in another source, that he himself was not concerned in it. The com- prehension of this did not embitter his mind nor diminish its tranquillity ; he was, indeed, this dying man, sorry for the man of life, for the man of robust health, sorry that he should be in some unknown pain.

" What is the matter with you, Philip ? Something has not gone well with you ; something is bothering you," he said at last.

The doctor took his hand and caressed it quietly. " Are you not ill my friend ? " he said.

" Yes, yes ; but it is not that. There is something else. Tell me. You will not withdraw your confidence from me now ? Come: let me know. You

88 THE SAVOY

have done your best for me ; perhaps — who knows ! — I may be of some use to you."

" Will it be more effectual ? " the doctor said rather bitterly.

" Nonsense ! You would have saved me, if you could. It was taken out of your hands. With you it is different. Physical ills, believe me, are alone incurable ; and are not you a miracle of health ? "

Still the doctor hesitated.

" You would do something for me ? " the patient went on.

" I would give my life for yours, you know."

" Then give me your life, your heart, your full confidence. Give yourself to me now, old friend, as we have always given ourselves to each other, unreservedly, without restraint, without evasion. For taking us together, you and I have been, as men go, tolerably frank towards each other, have we not ? We have not concealed from each other our little introspective perplexities, our trivial vanities, our scarcely trivial meannesses. Ours has been a very true comradeship. Let me feel, while all things are slipping away from me, that it still exists ; that you have not already come to regard me as a thing apart ; come, let me carry the memory of it away — away with me."

" Very well, then, I shall tell you .... Frank ! Yes, we have been rarely open with each other ! Yet, there are many things, the joy and misery of which at once is, that they are unrevealed and unrevealable."

" Am I at last, at this stage, only becoming to know you ? "

The doctor pressed his hand gently. " And it is more difficult than ever to tell you now," he said. He got up and walked noiselessly about the room. "You know, at least, that I have not been a loose-living man," he said hesitatingly, as if he were formulating a justification, " that I have certain ideas, that my vagaries have never at any time been excessive, and that even they have ceased these fourteen years or so, since my marriage. Before then, before my marriage — well, was I not wild, inconsiderate of others, indiscreet ! But one, after all, has a tender memory for these precious escapades of youth, for these gay irresponsible love episodes, of sometimes so melancholy an ending In one instance, I am not sure that I was entirely to blame. I loved the creature ardently enough at the time." Something which he observed in the face of the ill man made him hesitate. " But how can I talk to you of these matters, of love, when "

" When death is knocking at my door. Pray continue. Even I, who am too weak to lift my hand, can feel the strength of love, realize its imperishable power."

DOCTOR AND PA TIENT. 89

" Even you who have never loved."

Even I who have loved in vain, thought the patient. " Go on," he said aloud.

" I loved her youthfully, tempestuously, unthinkingly ; and when the reaction came it was too late."

" You had married ? "

" No : I am speaking of before Catherine's time, or, at least, before the time of my marriage with her."

" Ah ! "

" I began to mistrust her."

" You are not speaking of Catherine? "

" No. I doubted her fidelity, her love for me. It seemed somehow that I had been entrapped by her into a difficult position. The idea of marriage, at any rate, was particularly distasteful to me at the time ; and I would not marry her. She tried very hard before the child was born ; I was sorry for her, but immovable. I could not, you see, come quite to believe in her ; her pro- testations failed to convince me. There may have been some sort of tempera- mental antagonism at the bottom of it all, which was responsible for the vague, undefined suspicions which restrained me."

" She allowed me to contribute to the support of the child — a boy, although with a wilful independence, or, perhaps, to cause me pain, she would take nothing from me for herself. Well, some time after this incident I married Catherine, — a discreet, respectable affair which settled me in my practice. Catherine and I have rubbed along pretty happily, but we have had no children. Was there a sort of judgment in that, I wonder? Perhaps. I have at times half thought so."

" However that may be, I came in time to be instinctively drawn towards her child — and mine. She consented to my seeing him, a fine brave little fellow, with my own eyes looking at me from his head. To see him, this part of me, to be with him, was the greatest happiness I had known : to watch his gradual development, to listen to his ingenuous prattle, to be vanquished by him in a bout of repartee, to take him, all unsuspected, to the Zoo or to a pantomime. You can't realize it ! how the impulses and objects of his little life became entwined in mine, inseparably, always ! Little ! He has grown ; his ideas already bear the impress of manhood. I have had him as decently educated as possible ; she would not let him be out of her sight for long. And I hoped eventually to be able to send him to Oxford and give him the chance of a career."

90 THE SAVOY

" You hoped ? . . . Has he died then, too ? "

" He is alive and well, I trust ! only she has never forgiven me. Perhaps I was mistaken, unreasonable ; perhaps I should have married her. It might have been happier. If one could only foresee ! "

" Who was she ? Do I know ? "

" Possibly. I think so, if you can now remember."

" Who ? "

" Beatrice " —

" West ! "

" Ah ! You remember ! "

" I remember," said the patient with closed eyes.

" You are in pain ? "

" No, no ; go on."

" She has never forgiven me ! " The doctor's voice ringing out in all its natural vigour sounded strangely unnatural in the silence of the sick room. " She has, after all these years, taken her revenge, a triumph of ingenious cruelty. ... I had not seen him— them — for a few weeks, and yesterday, I received a letter from her inclosing a photograph of the boy, refusing any further assistance from me on his account, as he can now earn a little for him- self, and forbidding my ever seeing him again. Of course — you will under- stand — I went immediately, but they had gone ! . . . What will become of him — of me ! "

" Does Catherine know ? "

" Yes — now. She came across her letter and the boy's photograph. In my anxiety I had been careless. She bore it very well. I don't think it will make much difference. Women — all but Beatrice — are indulgent ; they understand and forgive. But I shall feel a difference."

The doctor was silent.

By-and-by he heard the voice of his patient, which had become suddenly feeble, sunk to the faintest whisper, so inaudible that he had to put his ear close to the struggling lips to catch what was said :

" Yes, I — knew Beatrice West — I loved her — I would — have married her — "

The doctor shot a quick, startled look of inquiry into his friend's eyes in which there beamed a brilliant light, a light, which, as he looked, became fainter and fainter, flickered a little, and then went out for ever.

Rudolf Dircks.

A LITERARY CAUSERIE:

ON A BOOK OF VERSES

BOOK of delicate, mournful, almost colourless, but very fragrant verses was lately published by a young poet whom I have the privilege to know somewhat intimately. Whether a book so essentially poetic, and at the same time so fragile in its hold on outward things, is likely to appeal very much to the general public, for which verse is still supposed to be written, it scarcely interests me to conjecture. It is a matter of more legitimate speculation, what sort of person would be called up before the mind's eye of any casual reader, as the author of love-poetry so reverent and so disembodied. A very ghostly lover, I suppose, wandering in a land of perpetual twilight, holding a whispered " colloque sentimental " with the ghost of an old love :

" Dans le vieux pare solitaire et glace Deux spectres ont evoque le passe?'

That is not how I have seen my friend, for the most part ; and the con- trast between the man as I have seen him and the writer of verses as I read them, is to me the most attractive interest of a book which I find singularly- attractive. He will not mind, I know, if I speak of him with some of that frankness which we reserve usually for the dead, or with which we sometimes honour our enemies ; for he is of a complete indifference to these things, as I shall assure myself over again before these lines are printed.

I do not remember the occasion of our first meeting, but I remember seeing him casually, at railway-stations, in a semi-literary tavern which once had a fantastic kind of existence, and sometimes, at night, in various parts of the Temple, before I was more than slightly his acquaintance. I was struck then by a look and manner of pathetic charm, a sort of Keats-like face, the face of a demoralized Keats, and by something curious in the contrast of a manner exquisitely refined, with an appearance generally somewhat dilapi- dated. That impression was only accentuated, later on, when I came to know

F

92 THE SAVOY

him, and the manner of his life, much more intimately. I think I may date my first real impression of what one calls " the real man " — as if it were more real than the poet of the disembodied verses ! — from an evening in which he first introduced me to those charming supper-houses, open all night through, the cabmen's shelters. There were four of us, two in evening dress, and we were welcomed, cordially and without comment, at a little place near the Langham ; and, I recollect, very hospitably entertained. He was known there, and I used to think he was always at his best in a cabmen's shelter. Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings, he was never quite com- fortable, never quite himself; and at those places you are obliged to drink nothing stronger than coffee or tea. I liked to see him occasionally, for a change, drinking nothing stronger than coffee or tea. At Oxford, I believe, his favourite form of intoxication had been haschisch ; afterwards he gave up this somewhat elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for readier means of oblivion ; but he returned to it, I remember, for at least one afternoon, in a company of which I had been the gatherer, and of which I was the host. The experience was not a very successful one ; it ended in what should have been its first symptom, immoderate laughter. It was disappointing, and my charming, expectant friends, disappointed.

Always, perhaps a little consciously, but at least always sincerely, in search of new sensations, my friend found what was for him the supreme sensation in a very passionate and tender adoration of the most escaping of all ideals, the ideal of youth. Cherished, as I imagine, first only in the abstract, this search after the immature, the ripening graces which time can but spoil in the ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some of his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never of their opinion. I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me of the most exquisite and appropriate impossibility. She had the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet, but with one small, carefully-tended flower-bed, luminous with lilies. I used to think, sometimes, of Verlaine and his " girl-wife," the one really profound passion, certainly, of that passionate career ; the charming, child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end of his life, with an unchanged tenderness and disappointment : " Vous n'avez rien compris a ma

A LITERARY CAUSERIE 93

simplicitc," as he lamented. In the case of my friend there was, however, a sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna ; and I think had things gone happily, to a conventionally happy ending, he would have felt (dare I say ?) that his ideal had been spoilt.

But, for the good fortune of poets, things never do go happily with them, or to conventionally happy endings. So the wilder wanderings began, and a gradual slipping into deeper and steadier waters of oblivion. That curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so expressively genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into yet more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly " gay " to him. And now, indifferent to most things, in the shipwrecked quietude of a sort of self- exile, he is living, I believe, somewhere on a remote foreign sea-coast. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation where in truth there is as poignant a note of personal sincerity as in the more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in these few, evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which has itself had much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal energy of genius.

Arthur Symons.

NOTE

A COMMITTEE has been formed, in Paris, under the presidency of M. Stephane Mallarme, and the vice-presidency of M. Auguste Rodin, for the erection of a monument to Paul Verlaine. The members of the Committee are : MM. Edmond Lepelletier, Catulle Mendes, Henry Bauer, Raoul Ponchon, Georges Rodenbach, Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, Maurice Barres, Ernest Delahaye, Alfred Valette, editor of the " Mercure de France," Leon Deschamps, editor of" La Plume." Alexandre Natanson, editor of the " Revue Blanche." The treasurer is M. Fernand Clerget ; the secretary, M. F. A. Cazals. I have been asked by M. Mallarme to act as English representative of this Committee, and to receive subscriptions, which may be sent to me at the office of " The Savoy," Effingham House, Arundel Street, Strand, London, W.C.

Arthur Symons.

THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 95

THE SAVOY.

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No. 1. JANUARY, 1896. 170 pages, 18 full-page Illustrations, and 5 Illustrations in the Text.

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96 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS

Nocturnes and Pastorals. Poems by A. Bernard

MlALL.

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THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 97

Verses. By Ernest Dowson.

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98 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS

From MESSRS. HENRYS LIST. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

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Medium Svo, in a dark blue buckram binding, designed by Gleeson White, ijs. net.

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Translated by Thomas Common.

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" Nietzsche is worse than shocking, he is simply awful : his epigrams are written with phosphorus or brimstone. The only excuse for reading him is that before long you must be prepared either to talk about Nietzsche or else retire from society, especially from aristocratically minded society. . . . His sallies, petulant and impossible as some of them are, are the work of a rare spirit and pregnant with its vitality." — Mk. George Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review.

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THE SAVOY

No. 5

AN ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY

September 1896 Price 2/-

EDITED BY ARTHUR SYMONS

THE SAVOY— N° V

All communications should be directed to The EDITOR OF The Savoy, 4 & 5, Royal Arcade, Old Bond Street, London, W. MSS. should be type-written, and stamps enclosed for their return.

THE SAVOY

No. 5

September 1896

EDITED BY ARTHUR SYMONS

LEONARD SMITHERS

4 & 5, ROYAL ARCADE, OLD BOND STREET LONDON W.

PRESS: — CHARLES WHITTINGIIAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCER

LITERARY CONTENTS

BEAUTY S HOUR. A Phantasy. By O. Shakespear. (In Two Parts) . n " O PETITES FEES . . ." A Translation by Gabriel Gillett into English

Verse from the French of Jean Moreas ....... 28

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE

COMEDY.

III. The Illustrations of Dante. (The Third of Three Articles by

W. B. Yeats)

A SONG. By Ernest Dowson

MUTABILITY. A Story by Theodore Wratislaw .

Q SULLIVAN RUA TO THE SECRET ROSE. A Poem by W

Yeats

THE OLD WOMEN. A Poem by Arthur Symons . A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS. A Story by Ernest Rhys IN SCITUATE. A Poem by Bliss Carman .... AT THE ALHAMBRA : IMPRESSIONS AND SENSATIONS.

Arthur Symons

EASTERN DANCERS. A Poem by Sarojini Chattopadhyay

A LITERARY CAUSERIE.—On Edmond de Goncourt. By Arthur

Symons 85

By

31 36 39

5*

55 57

ART CONTENTS

PAGE

COVER . ) r i

TITLE P4GE I Des 'S ned ^ AuBREV Beardslev -.

LE CHANSON. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by A. Kay Womrath . . 9 THE CAR OF BEATRICE. After an unpublished Water-Colour Drawing

by William Blake . . . . . . . . . • 29

THE CAR OF BEATRICE. After the Drawing by Botticelli . . 33 THE CAR FOLLOWING THE SEVEN CANDLESTICKS. After a Tracing by John Linnell from an unpublished Drawing by William

Blake 37

THE WOMAN IN WHITE. A Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley . .53

A DRYAD. After a Pen-and-ink Drawing by M. Dearmer .... 73

The Reproductions of the eight unpublished Water-Colour Drawings by William Blake in Nos. 3, 4, and 5 of "The Savoy" are by the kind permission of Messrs. Linnell ; and the Reproduction of Aubrey Beardsley's sketch, " The Woman in White," in this Number, is by the kind permission of F. H. Evans, Esq.

The Reproduction of " The Woman in White," in half tone, is by the Swan Electric Engraving Company. The remaining Reproductions in this Number, in line and half-tone blocks, are by Mr. Paul Naumann.

BEAUTY'S HOUR

CHAPTER V

HERE was confusion in the Harman's house the next day. I did no work, but sat idly with the girls in their sitting- room, while they talked over the ball. They were full of the new beauty, Miss Hatherley.

" And such an odd thing, Mary. Gerald says she reminds him of you." " Quite impossible," said I. " But I thank him."

" Something in her voice and way of talking," Betty went on. " You ftave a nice voice, you know. Gerald says she is very original ; and good- ness knows he had opportunity enough of finding out ; he danced with no one else."

I nearly contradicted that statement, but saved myself in time. " I'm so sorry I couldn't go," I said instead. " Did Miss Sturgis enjoy herself? "

"And are you really better ? " said Betty. "You didn't seem ill in the

afternoon. As for Bella "

" Oh, Bella ! " interrupted Clara. " Bella had best look to her laurels. No one noticed her while Miss Hatherley was in the room." I went on with my questions.

" Do you suppose Miss Hatherley enjoyed her success ? " They laughed.

" Why, yes, if she's like other girls."

" Perhaps she isn't. Do all girls enjoy being admired at the expense of some one else ? "

Clara looked out of the window, with an assumption of unconsciousness. Betty, who is more candid, answered at once, " One can't help liking it." I laughed outright.

" Does Miss Hatherley seem nice ? " I asked next. " Charming," said Clara. " We have taken quite a fancy to her. Mother

12 THE SAVOY

is writing to-day to ask her to dine and go to the theatre with us to-morrow. That was Gerald's idea."

I received this piece of news in silence.

" Everyone wants to know her," Clara went on. " Dr. Trefusis was over- whelmed with questions and inquiries as to whether people might call, and so on. She paints all day through ; works quite hard, as though she had to do it. Odd, isn't it?"

"Why odd?" said I. " I suppose she likes it. But a passion for art is unnecessary in a pretty woman, no doubt." And Betty broke in with, " Oh, there you go again, Mary ! Always finding fault with pretty women."

" Not with them, my dear, but with the world," I said, laughing. " You can't say I find fault with you, Betty."

"Oh, I'm not pretty," said she, " by Miss Hatherley." I was touched by her speech.

" You're a generous creature," I said. " I have always supposed it a mistake to think that one pretty girl is jealous of another."

Betty put her head on one side, and, with an odd mixture of wisdom and drollery, answered:

" Well, we like beauty — and we don't We like it because it's interesting, and exciting, and successful ; and a pretty girl gives one's house a certain reputation. We don't approve when she annexes people who belong to us, naturally ; all the same, we can't help feeling she must do as she pleases — she's privileged."

" I had no idea you were so profound," said Clara, a little sharply ; and I wondered whether it is possible that women are more tenacious of an in- tellectual than of a physical superiority. Betty only laughed.

" I'm off," said she. " I promised to meet the Sturgises in the park ; but Gerald won't come, and I'm half afraid to face Bella alone. Good-bye, Mary. We'll ask you to meet Miss Hatherley when we know her better."

When I got home I found that Dr. Trefusis had sent on Lady Harman's letter. I sat over it for some time, thinking ; then I wrote and said I would go. Miss Whateley looked at me wistfully when I told her.

" I'm afraid you will get into some trouble, Mary," she said, " and you can't possibly wear the ball dress."

" I must go," I retorted. " I am at last seeing life as a woman ought to see it I can't give up the privilege ; at least not yet."

BEAUTY'S HOUR 13

" You won't give it up till you have paid the penalty," Miss Whateley answered.

I shrugged my shoulders, as though I did not believe her.

" I must have another dress," I cried.

Miss Whateley would have given me the clothes off her back, she said ; but as that would not avail me much, she offered to lend me some money. I accepted the offer with a recklessness born of my strange position ; and we went out shopping, after sunset ; Mary Hatherley and Miss Whateley.

The people in the shops seemed anxious to please me, even when they found that I could afford to pay but little for what I wanted ; they probably looked upon me as a good advertisement, and I enjoyed the novelty of being treated with a deferential consideration.

It was a very cold night ; as we passed along the freezing, gas-lit streets we met but few people ; we had to cross the square in which Dr. Trefusis lived on our way home ; I noticed, before we reached his door, that a man in a fur over- coat was pacing slowly up and down the pavement. Why did he linger in such weather? I wondered vaguely. Then I saw it was Gerald Harman. I put my muff up to my face and passed him by. I knew, too well, that he was waiting on the chance of seeing Mary Hatherley on herway home from a day'swork at the studio.

" You do not work very late these foggy days, I suppose ? " he asked me, tentatively, the next evening at dinner.

" I make gaslight studies," said I, shortly.

" Is it permitted to anybody to go and see you at work ? "

" Oh no," I answered, with a smile. " I paint in earnest."

" I waited an hour in Dorchester Square last night," he went on, very low, " in the hope of seeing you."

"That was misplaced heroism," said I, "in such weather. I should advise you not to do it again."

" I shall do it every evening," he declared ; and I only laughed a little, as though the subject were not of the remotest interest, and turned to my neighbour.

Gerald sat by me at the play. I went so seldom to the theatre that I was always arrested by the interest of the piece, and of the actors. I sat in the front of the box by Lady Harman ; who, I was certain, suffered under the uneasy sensation that she was taking a leap in the dark in encouraging a young unknown woman, with nothing to recommend her but her looks ; though, on the other hand, she was upheld by the authoritative voice of society, which had pronounced a favourable verdict on me.

i 4 THE SAVOY

Behind us were Gerald and Betty. It was such an intimate family party that I had great difficulty in not using the familiar tone of every day. When I had only just saved myself from calling Betty by her Christian name, and pointing out an acquaintance of Gerald's, whom I knew by sight, in the stalls, I was sobered.

Silence fell upon me : I was so acutely aware of Gerald's presence, which seemed like a light at which I could not bear to look, that I tried to distract myself by noting the faces of the other people in the house till the curtain should rise. Here and there I caught glimpses of a pretty head ; the graceful turn of a neck ; an expression of happiness or of vivacity ; but the audience was mostly ugly, dull, and uninteresting : yet I felt sorry for all these people ; for their inarticulate dumb way of going through life, untouched by passion, save in its baser aspects, and only apprehending the ideal through some conventionalized form of religion, or some dim discontent.

The play was "Romeo and Juliet": the Juliet was beautiful, but she could only look the part ; and the young man who acted Romeo was no ideal lover ; yet the immortal, golden play of youth and passion drew tears, and quickened heartbeats ; for each woman in the house was Juliet, tasting some rapture, perhaps lost, perhaps never realized, of first love.

The curtain dropped : I sat in a dream, and Lady Harman's voice seemed to come from very far away.

" It's a pretty play," she said. " But don't you think it's rather a muddle ? I never can make out who is who."

" It doesn't matter," answered Betty. " Don't trouble, mother dear. What a lovely thing it would be for private theatricals, parts of it, that is. Gerald, wouldn't Bella make a good Juliet?"

Her remark might, or might not have been malicious ; but Gerald started. "Bella!" he ejaculated, and looked at me. His look said plainly what his lips had not yet dared ; no man had ever yet looked at me with entreaty, passion, humility, in his eyes. I looked back at him, the soul of Mary Gower speaking through the eyes of Mary Hatherley. He flushed, and went pale again, and I regretted what I had done. For the rest of the evening I devoted my- self to Lady Harman : Gerald seemed lost in thought, and only roused himself when the carriage stopped at Dr. Trefusis' door.

" I shall never see you alone," said he, as we stood on the doorstep. " I cannot talk to you — I must write to you," he ended, with a sort of despairing impatience.

" Do not write," said I : and then the door was opened by the doctor in

BEAUTY'S HOUR 15

person. Gerald seemed hardly able to speak to him ; when a few words had passed he went back abruptly to the carriage.

" Mary," said Dr. Trefusis, " you are a great trouble to me. Now I've got to take you home, and interrupt my studies in Rosenkrantz and the Pope Honorius, most absorbing old impostors — no, I won't say that ; for I'm beginning to think there may be some method in their madness. You have led me into devious paths, Mary Hatherley. By the way, who's that good- looking young fellow? "

" That's Gerald Harman," said I.

The doctor looked at me with a sort of inquisitive sympathy ; and shrugged his shoulders. When he left me at my own house, " You are playing with fire, my dear," he said ; " and I'm an old fool to help you."

" You are helping me to buy the experience that teaches," I said, " and it teaches bitter lessons enough : don't fear for me."

CHAPTER VI

I had never received a love-letter ; and the only scrap of Gerald Harman's writing that I possessed was a little note, which said :

" Dear Miss Gower, my mother asks me to write and tell you that she will be back to-morrow, and expects you on Thursday as usual. Yours very truly,

" Gerald Harman."

I sat comparing this letter, with the letter he had written to Mary Hatherley, and I do not think I have ever known a more miserable moment.

" I ought to begin by asking you to forgive me," the letter ran. " I am afraid of your thinking me too bold in writing ; yet you must know that love comes sometimes in a sort of flash that makes one see life quite differently in a moment. That is what happened to me the first time I ever saw you. Since then I have thought of nothing else. If you would be kind, if you would care what becomes of me, I might be able to make a better thing of life. I have been very idle and useless always, and now I feel ashamed of it. I dare not ask if you could ever care for me — not yet. You know how I love you, and am ever yours

" Gerald Harman."

16 THE SAVOY

I was sitting in my bedroom, at the little dressing-table which did duty for a writing-table too : I looked again into my own eyes in the glass, as I had done on that memorable evening that seemed such a very long while ago : we knew one another's bitterness, my reflection and I, and laughed aloud.

" Man's love," said I to the face in the glass, " man's humility, man's cry of ' trample on me, and re-mould me,' what does it all amount to ? Here am I ; the same woman, with two faces ; the woman counts for nothing ; the face determines my life. A man can only see inspiration in eyes that are beautiful ; words can only influence him when the lips that say them have curves and a smile that delight. I, Mary Gower, could love him, could help him, as far as my soul and will go ; but he cannot see this : a man sees only with the outer, never with the inner eye."

" Perhaps we are unjust," I went on again presently. " There are, no doubt, men to whom the outside of a woman is not the whole ; but they must have learnt discernment, either through some special suffering, or they are perhaps lacking in sensuous instincts, and care but little for women at all, either from the intellectual or the emotional side. Gerald is not one of these ; he is like other men ; his point of view may be fairly taken as representing a normal one — and he loves Mary Hatherley ! "

" Come in," I went on, in answer to a knock at the door. " There's going to be no transformation to-night, Whatty. I'm tired of masquerading ; I am very tired of life ; I was born too serious. I can't live in the passing hour, and enjoy it ; I think of yesterday, and of to-morrow. Why can't I fling all care to the winds and make merry, with the other Mary's beautiful face, and all it brings me ! "

Miss Whateley put her hands on my shoulder, and I turned to her, and wept.

I did not answer Gerald's letter ; nor did I see him till a few days later, when he strolled into Lady Harman's study in his usual careless way.

" I'm out of sorts, Mary," said he. " Let me sit here, while you talk to me. I like the sound of your voice."

I knew why he liked the sound of my voice, and it hardened me against him.

"Why out of sorts?" said I. "Haven't you eaten, drunk, and been merry ? What more does a man want ? "

" I've eaten less, drunk considerably more, and not been in the least

BEAUTY 'S HOUR 17

merry," he answered. "Just now I wish that I might die — to-morrow, or even to-day."

I looked at him with a sudden pity mixed with my anger — that pity which is at once the root and the flower of love.

" You are unhappy, really ? " I asked, knowing that Mary Hatherley had not answered his letter.

" I'm miserable ! " he cried out.

Then he began walking up and down the room, and I felt, with a quicken- ing of fear and interest, that he was going to speak to me of her. I yielded then to a strange impulse, which was almost like jealousy of myself.

"What has Bella Sturgis been doing?" said I.

He stopped dead.

" Bella . . . she seems to have drifted a thousand miles away. She belongs to the old life, from which I am cut off : there's a gulf opened between me and it ; she is on the other side."

" I don't understand, then," said I.

" O Mary," Gerald cried, " I'm very hard hit this time ! Haven't you heard of Mary Hatherley ? "

" Tell me about her," I said.

There was a great fire in the room, and I sat close to it ; but my hands were like ice. Gerald leant against the mantelpiece, and looked down on me. He was full of that intoxicating spirit of youth and enthusiasm, which carries such an irresistible appeal to those whose own youth is clouded, and who cannot rise above a resigned cheerfulness. Even now, when he declared himself to be miserable, there was an ardour in his discouragement which made it almost a desirable emotion.

" Mary Hatherley," he began, " reminds me in some strange way of you : she says things so like what you say, and the very voice is like."

" But she's very lovely," I interposed. " And you've fallen seriously in love at last ? "

He did not resent my remark.

" Seriously — at last," he answered, with a smile.

" Why have you never fallen in love with me ? " I asked then.

He began to laugh, with genuine amusement.

" You're an amazing person," said he ; " I shall, if you're not careful."

"Well, but why not?" I persisted. "It's true that I am only your mother's secretary, but you say I'm like Miss Hatherley in my ideas and way of talking. Is it the face that makes the difference ? "

B

i8 THE SAVOY

" I know you are following up something infernally abstruse," said he, " that has no relation to the facts of life ; that's so like you. I daresay the face does make a difference : it make a difference in the whole personality."

" I wanted to find out the facts," said I. " And you have given me a fairly direct answer, which can serve as a premise from which I shall draw my conclusions."

" And your conclusions are ? "

" That justice is an ironical goddess, whose eyes are never really bandaged."

" Your vein is too deep for me to-day. I wanted to tell you all my troubles, and you talk to me as though I were a professor."

" I didn't mean to be unkind," said I. " If you are really serious, I'm sorry."

" Sorry, why sorry ? " he asked, quickly.

" It's such an old story. You fall in love with a girl's beautiful face — it's not the first time you've done it ; you endow her with all sorts of qualities ; you make her into an idol ; and the whole thing only means that your aesthetic sense is gratified. That's a poor way of loving."

" It's a very real way," said Gerald, with some warmth. " I think you are horribly unsympathetic."

" I am in earnest," I answered. " A very short while ago you were quite taken up with Bella Sturgis ; you don't care the least .for her feelings ; you simply follow your impulses, and desert her for a more attractive woman."

I do not know what made me espouse Bella's cause ; perhaps I was hurt, more than I had time to realize, and seized on the first weapon to my hand.

" You don't spare my feelings," Gerald said, in a low voice. " All I can say is, that if Mary Hatherley won't have anything to do with me, I shall go away ; I shall go and shoot big game — anything to get out of this horrible place. I am in earnest. I wasn't in earnest about Bella ; I admired her very much, and all that, and mother is always urging me to marry ; I should pro- bably have drifted into marrying her ," he broke off.

I felt an unreasoning anger against him.

" Poor Bella ! " I cried. " You may drift into marrying her yet."

That finished our conversation. He went away without another word, leaving me alone with my anger and my heartache.

BEAUTY >S HOUR 19

CHAPTER VII

I CONFESS that about this time I was led astray and over-mastered by con- flicting emotions. My work, and my battles with Lady Harman's peculiarities, became unutterably irksome. I forgot how to efface myself; I spoke at the wrong moment, and on the wrong subject : I did not remember to be sympa- thetic, and I expected sympathy ; in fact, I confused what was permitted to Mary Hatherley, with what was permitted to Mary Gower, with the result that I drank the cup of bitterness each day, the cup of triumph each night.

At this time I was much sought after ; my devotion to art was supposed to denote genius, though it was hardly respectable, and wholly unnecessary ; but people forgave me my persistent refusal to see anyone, or to go anywhere during the day, and asked me to their houses in the evening.

I was often chaperoned by Lady Harman, sometimes by Dr. Trefusis himself. I had many admirers, but I only remember them vaguely, like figures in a dream. The golden key that opened their hearts led me into strange places ; some had never been tenanted, and were so cold and bare that I felt they could never be really warm or pleasant ; others had been swept and garnished, and I was asked to believe that all traces of their former occupants were gone ; others were full of rust and cobwebs, and old toys broken and thrust away ; there was no room even for a new plaything. The key unlocked no sanctuary, with altar-lights and incense burning, waiting for the one divinity that was to fill its empty shrine. Those who loved me had loved before, and would love again.

Women, whose idol is success, worshipped me too, in their curious fashion ; it became desirable in their eyes to be known as the friend of Mary Hatherley ; a note of distinction was thus sounded : they were proud to de- monstrate the fact that they were above jealousy, or fear of rivalry.

I liked many of them, with a liking tempered by amusement. I am glad to think now that I did not interfere wantonly with their lovers, their husbands, or their sons. I was discreet, to the verge of being disagreeable : indeed, had it not been for my face, I think they might almost have resented my indiffer- ence to their male belongings ; and taken it as a personal affront.

I saw a great deal of Gerald, in the character of Mary Hatherley : the frost held, and he remained in London without a murmur ; he was not much at home during the day ; and Mary Gower had no speech with him alone.

20 THE SAVOY

" Something has happened to Gerald," Betty said one day. " I mean besides this business about Mary." They called her Mary by this time. " He wanders about picture galleries, I've found out ; and some one saw him the other day in the British Museum. Isn't that somewhere in the city? "

" Not quite so bad," said I. The city had been Betty's terror, ever since she had been taken to the Tower as a child. " But isn't Mr. Harman merely improving his mind ? "

" Yes, but why ? " cried his sister. " He's done very well all these years without it. It isn't as though he were the sort of man who could do nothing else. He can ride and shoot better than any man I know. Why should he want to improve his mind ? "

Her somewhat incoherent speech amused me ; and it was true : a super- ficial culture would have sat oddly on Gerald Harman ; whose charm lay in his simplicity, and a certain gallant bearing that might have fitted him to be the hero of a romance of the Elizabethan age ; in which men were either knights or shepherds ; full of a natural bravery, and keenly susceptible to the influence of women's beauty.

" Miss Hatherley is an artist," I suggested, in answer to Betty's remarks. She shrugged her shoulders.

" Mary Hatherley's just flirting with him," said she.

This was true : I had answered his letter ; not in writing, nor indeed by any explicit word of mouth ; but I had been kind, and had let him see that the letter had not displeased me ; I had also led him to understand that the time was not yet come for any more open speech on his part. I was capricious : I used my power with but little mercy : these were days when I made him miserable ; and days when I knew the world was re-created for him by my kindness.

Yet I was more wretched than I had ever been when I was only Mary Gower : I grew to hate the other Mary's beautiful face ; her smile ; the gracious turn of her head ; her shapely hands : I grew to hate all this with a passionate intensity that frightened me. I seemed to have realized Mary Hatherley in a strange, objective way, as distinct from myself: she was the woman Gerald Harman loved ; she was the woman I should have been, and was not ; and then came a heart-stricken moment when I knew she was the woman who had done both Gerald and another a wrong that might never be undone.

It happened in this wise : I had gone down one day to the girls' sitting- room to fetch a book I had left there, when I met Gerald on the stairs. He

BEAUTY S HOUR 21

passed me by with the briefest possible word ; and with a look of annoyance on his face, that I was at a loss to account for, till I reached the sitting-room, and found Bella Sturgis there.

She was sitting with her face on her arms, by the writing-table, and I could see that she was crying. My instinct was to leave her ; but I was not quick enough to escape her notice, and she turned upon me with an angry movement.

" Why didn't you knock?" said she.

In her confusion and distress she mistook me for a servant : I should have laughed, had I not been overcome by the conviction that Gerald had just left her ; and that something had passed between them, which was connected with Mary Hatherley.

" I am sorry if I disturbed you," said I. " I have come for a book I left here."

Then she saw her mistake, and flushed red.

" I beg your pardon ; I really didn't see — " she said ; and then, as though bowed down by the weight of her own distress, she dropped her head again on her hands.

I did not know what to do : it seemed an intrusion to remain ; and impossible to go.

" Forgive me," I said, at last. " You are in some trouble. I have intruded upon you unknowingly ; I can't go away without saying I wish I could do something for you."

She looked up at me, with manifest surprise ; tears shone still upon her face, and in her eyes : I wondered that Gerald had left her, even for Mary Hatherley.

" Why should you care ? " she asked.

" I'm always sorry for another woman," I said.

She looked at me again, with a miserable, uncertain air ; her haughty self-confidence had gone from her, and I felt emboldened to speak again.

" You may not know that I am Lady Harman's secretary. I have been in the house all day for a long while ; and I can't help seeing a great deal of what goes on in it. I know your trouble, Miss Sturgis."

She got up at that ; and looked for a moment as though she would have struck me ; then she suddenly lost her self-control, and burst into tears. Those tears were dreadful to me : I took her hand, and soothed her as though she had been a child ; and presently she sat down beside me.

" How do you know ? " she said. " You can't know."

22 THE SAVOY

" I've heard them talk of Mary Hatherley," said I.

"And I suppose they say I'm breaking my heart?" cried she, with a desperate attempt at scorn.

" They would not be far wrong," I answered.

She gave a long sigh.

" It hurts," she said, quite simply.

Shame and an aching remorse seized me. I had taken him from her ; and had roused in him a love which must be always barren. I had surely put a knife into Bella's heart ; and her simple words stabbed me back. Did I not know it hurt ! I carried the self-same wound.

" Do you care for him so much ? " I said.

At first she would not answer, and frowned, while the tears came into her eyes ; then she said, brokenly.

" Yes — but we used to quarrel, and now it's all over."

"Do you think," I went on, "that if Mary Hatherley were to go away you could win him back ? "

She pondered : I watched her beautiful face, and thought that I had hitherto misjudged her : her pride, the insolence of her beauty, her caprices, had been but the superficial manifestation of a passionate spirit ; led astray by a world which cared only for the outer woman. Now that these things had been flung back in her face, her heart spoke : she lost the sense of her beauty, and its rights ; and was more lovely than she had ever been, and did not know it.

" He used to love me, I'm sure," she said. " I believe he would again — I would not be so unkind — Oh, but what's the use of talking ! "

I hardly heard the sound of my own voice as I answered her ; there was a singing in my ears.

" I think he has been led away by a pretty face. I daresay he does not care for the real Mary Hatherley ; he may return ; be kind to him when he does."

" Oh, I will, I will," said she. " You have made me feel happier — I was so unhappy."

She bent forward impulsively, and kissed me. I kissed her back. " I am so glad," I said, and left the room hurriedly, to hide my emotion.

On my way home I went to see Dr. Trefusis. I found him alone, sitting over a pile of great folio volumes. His study, where I had so often found a refuge from the ills of life, looked warm and cheerful, with its shelves of books

BEAUTY S HOUR 23

from floor to ceiling, and great, open hearth. He appeared to rouse himself with some difficulty, and I noticed he looked older, and very wearied.

" I'm not come to disturb you," said I. " Let me sit by the fire whilst you read. I have something I want to think out."

" It will do me good to talk, child," he answered. " I've been poring over these books for too long. What is it you have to think over, Mary ? "

" Only the old thing."

He looked at me with a quickened attention.

" I've been thinking over it too," he said.

Then he sat down on the other side of the fire-place ; the room was aglow with the flames, and the bright light of two lamps ; there seemed also to be a strange light on Dr. Trefusis' face.

" You know, Mary," he began solemnly, " that this case of yours has led me into strange studies, and strange speculations. They are all wicked ; I am going to put away my books, for I begin to fear lest they should take me into places where madness lies, outside the phenomenal, where we were never meant to penetrate. You have shown me how human longing, if it be powerful enough, is nearly omnipotent, for evil as well as for good. Here, in these old books, in the Magia Naturalisoi Johannes Faust, in this old Latin of Cornelius Agrippa, and many others, I learn how spirits ' can be dragged out of the air' ; how alchemy can turn metal to gold : these things have a terrible fascination ; but it is of the devil ; I shall put them all away. Your longing turned Mary Gower, whom God made, into Mary Hatherley in whom He has no part."

He looked at me, with a shudder.

" The church put the alchemists to death for a less sin," he said. " This power you have brings you nothing but trouble : it may bring trouble to those you do not wish to injure. Mary, I implore you to stop, before it is too late."

All this in the mouth of Dr. Trefusis ; the keen scientist, the ardent advo- cate of materialism ; surprised me much. The gravity of his tone, so far removed from his ordinary carelessness, carried authority. All he said was my own inward, but unformulated conviction, put into words.

I asked him why he thought it might bring trouble to others.

" I have seen enough," he answered, " to understand your relations with the Harmans. It won't do, Mary. That young Harman ought not to be sacrificed to your love of experimentalizing."

At that I got up, and walked about the room.

" You do me injustice," said I. " I may have given way to a curiosity

24 THE SAVOY

which, taken alone, would not be legitimate, but my heart was concerned in this matter."

" Ah," said he. " I feared so."

I sat down on a stool at his feet, and gave him all my confidence. He did not interrupt me ; and when I had finished, we were both silent for a long while.

" Do you not feel yourself, that such a state of things cannot go on ? " he said, at last.

" I am determined to give it up," I answered. " To-morrow night shall be Mary Hatherley's last appearance."

" Why let her appear again at all ? " he asked.

" Because I'm a woman : and I want to say good-bye to Gerald Harman."

The doctor laughed ; I think to cover some emotion.

" Well, well, well," he said. " Have it so if you will. But be done with the thing : it's unholy : it's a work of the devil. There are more things in heaven and earth than ever I dreamt of in my philosophy ; things I dare not tamper with. Now, Mary, will you climb to the top of the ladder, and put away Faustus, and Agrippa, and the rest ? I've had enough of them."

We spent some time putting away the books : strange volumes ; full of odd, symbolical drawings, and with wonderful titles, such as : " The Golden Tripod " : " The Glory of the World, or the Gate of Paradise " : " The All- Wise Doorkeeper."

The doctor crossed himself, as I put the last one in its place ; and I laughed, in spite of my trouble.

" I've one thing more to say," he cried, turning suddenly on me. " I'm getting old, Mary, and I want a housekeeper, and a daughter. You refused me these once ; you shall not refuse again. You and Miss Whateley must come and take charge of me. I promise you I'll age rapidly, and then you'll feel you are fulfilling a duty — a sensation dear to the soul of woman, I know."

We sat there over the fire for another hour. Before I left him, my promise had been given.

BEAUTY'S HOUR 25

CHAPTER VIII

I woke the next morning with something of that indifference to life, which is the secret of so many peaceful deaths.

Mary Hatherley was condemned ; she had but a brief hour left, and I knew not how she was to spend it : I only knew that she had to bid good- bye to Gerald Harman. The present hung before me like a veil ; I could see the dim future moving behind it ; a spectral army of figures all in gray ; but they marched, this colourless procession of the years, with a monotony that grew into peace.

The thought of Mary Hatherley hardly troubled me ; I did not care ; I had passed through many deaths since that night when she had been born in all her beauty ; for is not, "every step we take in life a death in the imagina- tion " ? I had held Beauty's sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it : I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned that it was an empire for which it might well be worth paying : I held no theories based on mere sentiment ; I owned that beauty might not possess all things ; yet the woman who has not beauty neither has, nor pays. To this philosophy, or cynicism, I know not which to call it, had Mary Hatherley's experiences brought me.

I spent a strange day at Lady Harman's : the familiar place seemed un- real : in a week or two I should be gone, and all my days there would fade into the past ; for I knew that I had no real hold on the lives of any of them ; having come only as it were by accident into their midst ; when they had treated me with as much kindness as was consistent with their education, their traditions, and the world in which they lived. Betty would marry one of her many lovers ; and Clara some one who fed her intellectual vanity. And Gerald ? I held my heart in check at the thought of Gerald.

I had met him first, as Mary Hatherley, in a crowd : it seemed like the logic of fate that I should take leave of him in a crowd ; for our relations belonged to no world of peace and quietness, but to an order of life where Beauty, with her attendant pomp and circumstance, moved to the sound of music, and under the glare of a revealing light.

That evening we did not dance : there was singing, and stringed instru- ments ; we moved about white stately rooms, where the music followed us like a memory. I spoke to many people, and knew nothing of what I said : at my

26 THE SAVOY

heart was torture, in my soul peace. The rest of the world was blotted out when I saw Gerald coming to me.

At first he spoke but little ; he had the desperate air of a man who is determined to know his fate — and his silence was charged with suggestion. We stood for a long while near the musicians, and the aching sweetness of one of Schubert's melodies pierced me with the sword of pain and pleasure where- with music wounds her lovers. The whole measure of my grief seemed con- tained in that searching, divine air ; in the human, passionate note of the strings ; in the purer, more radiant tone of the flutes and hautboys.

Then Gerald looked into my eyes, and said, " Let us come away " ; and I went blindly with him through the rooms, till we reached a door that opened into a garden.

The night was hardly cold, and very still ; only a faint throbbing from the far-away streets lay at the heart of the silence, and troubled it. I could see the outline of Gerald's face in the starlight ; he said nothing, but took me suddenly in his arms and kissed me ; and in that moment I tasted the essence of life. Then he let me go. " Now send me from you if you can — if you dare," said he.

'Tis I who am going," I said.

" I am in earnest," answered he, " and I must have your answer."

" Oh, my answer," I cried, " is easily given. I do not lo\'e you. I can add something to that which you will not acknowledge. You have never loved me ; you loved my face, but of my heart and soul you have known nothing."

I had not meant to say such words to him ; I had meant to let him go with something like a benediction ; but my bitterness rose up and made me speak.

" It is true I love your face," he said, quite gently. " But more than that. Why are you so unkind to me ? "

Then there came a wild moment in which I was near telling him all ; and asking him if he could not love the soul of me, and take no thought for my body : but I paused, and remembered I had resolved never to let him know.

" I am not as unkind as I seem," I said. " It is kinder to tell you the truth. I am not made for love, or to be happy, and have children. I must live apart : do not ask me why ; I cannot tell you. I shall not forget you ; I hope you will forget me — at least, think of me without pain. And now, good- bye." I moved away.

" Is this your last word? Are you going to leave me so ? " he cried out.

BEAUTY" S HOUR 27

I stopped then, and looked back at him : the notes of a violin came through the silence like a shaft, and struck at my heart ; they mingled with a woman's voice, in a love-song. I went to his side.

" I have one last word to leave you," I said to him. "You will forget me. When I am only a memory, go back to Bella ; for you loved her."

He said nothing, and I was glad of the darkness, which covered my face. I turned back into the house, leaving him standing there ; and went away, bidding no farewells.

I sat through that long night, and waited for the dawn ; and when the dawn came, I kissed the wonderful reflected face of Mary Hatherley, and wished her a long good-bye.

" O face of my dreams," I said, " it is well that you should go back into nothingness ; your hour is over ; each moment held a possible joy ; a surer pain : a brief triumph ; a long regret. Let me decline into the lesser ways of life, where Beauty's flying feet have never passed ; but where Peace may be seen stealing, a shadowy figure, with eyes looking towards the sun."

O. Shakesfear.

FROM THE FRENCH OF JEAN MO RE AS

" O petites fees ."

TINY fays with the long gold hair,

You sang, as I slept, with a tender grace ;

O tiny fays with the long gold hair,

In a spell-bound forest, a charmed place.

In a forest enchanted with spells untold Compassionate gnomes as I slept the while Offer'd me gently a sceptre of gold, A sceptre of gold as I slept the while.

I know they are dreams and deceits of sleep The sceptres of gold and the forest songs ;

Yet still like a credulous child I weep,

And my heart for the rest of the woodland longs : And I care not now tho' I know the songs

Are only the dreams and deceits of sleep.

Gaeriel Gillett.

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRA- TIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY

III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE

HE late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote ; in a preface to certain Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth century artist of no great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892 ; that the illustrations of Gustave Dore, "in spite of glaring artistic defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art." One can only account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art, an art heavy as with the rank breath of the mob, by supposing that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy is of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work of what he called " the graceful and affected Botticelli " although " Dore was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for pure beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy with the supreme poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom," but preferring them because " he created a fanciful world, which makes the movement of Dante's dramatis persona: conceivable, introducing the ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies of souls and creeds and empires." When the ordinary student finds this ordinary intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text, while the work of extraordinary intelligences is merely an expres- sion of their own ideas and feelings. Dore and Stradanus, he will tell you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante's : as if Dante's world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an intense and romantic life that is not

32 THE SAVOY

theirs ; as if it was not one's own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage ; as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment, that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a light as of a wild and terrible dawn.

Let us therefore put away the designs to " The Divine Comedy," in which there is " an ordinary intelligence," and consider only the designs in which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the magical light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque world of our own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs to Dante, and there are a good number, need not busy anyone for a moment. Genelli has done a copious series, which is very able in the " formal " " generalized " way which Blake hated, and which is spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has transformed the Inferno into a vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do not find in the biographical dictionaries, but who was apparently a German, has prefaced certain flaccid designs with some excellent charts ; while Stradanus has made a series for " The Inferno " which has so many of the more material and unessential powers of art, and is so extremely undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to have touched in the sixteenth century the same public Dore has touched in the nineteenth.

Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the " Inferno," the " Purgatorio," and the " Paradiso," only a little above the best of these ; because he does not seem to have ever been really moved by Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a reflection of the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to "The Divine Comedy" will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in that immortal waste paper basket in which Time carries with many sighs the failures of great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman even at his best has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever hope to escape this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli does not seem greatly more interesting, except here and there, as in the drawing of the Angel, full of innocence and energy, coming from the boat which has carried so many souls to the foot of the mountain of purgation, can only be because one knows him through poor reproductions from frescoes half mouldered away with damp. A little known series,drawn by Adolph

B LAKES ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 35

Stiirler, an artist of German extraction, who was settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in invention, and full of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. Certain groups of figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in the last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of the evil that neither loves nor hates ; and a Cerberus full of patient cruelty ; are admirable and moving in the extreme. All Sttirler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind that does its work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions rather than the decision and energy of true creation, and are more a curious contribution to artistic methods than an imaginative force.

The only series that compete with Blake's are those of Botticelli and Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete ; for Blake did not live to carry his " Paradiso " beyond the first faint pencillings, the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think, became supremely imaginative in his " Paradiso," and Clovio never attempted the " Inferno " and " Purgatorio " at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace which is not the world's peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli ; but he could sympathize with the persons, and delight in the scenery of " The Inferno " and " The Purgatorio " as Botticelli could not, and could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps of a mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion, and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the church led by the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature, but is a fragment of some mediaeval pageant pictured with a merely technical inspira- tion. Clovio, working in the manner of the illuminators of missals, has created a marvellous vision, a paradise of serene air reflected in a little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness, the heaven of children and of monks ; but one cannot imagine him deeply moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound understanding of all creatures and things; a profound sym- pathy with passionate and lost souls; made possible in their extreme intensity by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason ; which made Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the Inferno and the Purgatorio : in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante's Paradise he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems ; and he had no love for the abstract ;

36

THE SAVOY

and with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice and Virgil, he would have

prospered less than did Clovio and Botticelli.

The drawing of the car of Beatrice, following the seven candlesticks in slow

procession along the borders of Lethe, is from a tracing made many years

ago by the late John Linnell and his son, John Linnell also, from a drawing

which is too faint for reproduction. The Botticelli is reproduced with the

permission of Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen from their admirable edition of his

designs to " The Divine Comedy."

W. B. Yeats.

A SONG

LL that a man may pray,

Have I not prayed to thee ? What were praise left to say, Has not been said by me, O ma mie ?

Yet thine eyes and thine heart, Always were dumb to me :

Only to be my part,

Sorrow has come from thee, O ma mie !

Where shall I seek and hide My grief away with me ?

Lest my bitter tears should chide, Bring brief dismay to thee, O ma mie !

More than a man may pray Have I not prayed to thee?

What were praise left to say, Has not been said by me, O ma mie f

Ernest Dowson.

.V

•-1

MUTABILITY

HE strong sweet south-wester, fresh and vigorous as a god, after its journey across the Channel which flashed blue and white to the horizon and broke in chalky waves at the foot of the down, flung the girl's hair, loose and wet from the sea, across her chin and throat, fluttering its straggling gold into her eyes. The man who lay at her feet watched her with admiration and desire as she stood sideways to the wind that threatened to blow the sailor-cap on her head, a hundred yards down the grassy slope into the discoloured breakers. They had been together a good deal since the day when Algernon Deepdale — a young man well known to exist only on his expectations and an aunt — came to the hotel at which the Grays had been staying, and had recognized her as the partner of a dance some weeks back. Her friendship had made the time go rapidly, and he had thrown up an invitation in order to stay longer in the seaside town which her presence alone made endurable. Hers was an exceptional beauty, but it was not her only charm. She was possessed of an intelligence not very common among women, nor was ever at a loss for ideas or words. She talked with her eyes and hands as well as her lips, as if the momentary thought that she expressed moved her body to the cadence of her words, her gestures giving strength to the phrase. She was a living being, thought Deepdale, contrasting her mentally with the lack of animation and ideas which is the portion of the majority. Moreover, she was fond of being well dressed, as even the French muslin blouse tied at throat and waist with an unobtainable vieux-rose-colour ribbon attested. His eyes followed her every movement, and a little tempest of desire went through him, as his gaze at last unconsciously attracted her and she turned with a smile.

" The wind is too strong," she said, as she sat down, throwing her hair from her face and pulling her skirts over her ankles.

" Helen, will you marry me?" he said, taking his cigarette out of his mouth, and looking up into her eyes.

" Apropos of what ? How dreadfully abrupt you are ! " she replied.

C

4 o THE SAVOY

" Apropos of my thoughts and in logical sequence. May I have an answer ? "

" Why do you ask me that ? " she answered, somewhat awkwardly.

" For several reasons," he replied. " First, because I am going away this afternoon : then because I should like you to be my wife ; and the third reason I think you have known for some time."

" I am so sorry," she said, gently. " It is quite impossible."

" I don't see why," he answered.

" It is quite impossible," she continued. " My people would be dead against it, and I am much too extravagant for you. Besides, I don't want to marry anyone."

" Do you not care for me at all, Helen ? " he asked.

" I like you very well," she replied, " but how long have I known you ? Three months ? In another three you will have forgotten me."

"You mean you don't like me enough to marry me? Is that it?"

She was silent. Then suddenly she said :

" Why cannot you be patient ? You have only known me for this little time and yet you want everything or nothing, at once."

" Oh no, not at once. I would wait for you, if there was any chance. Is there, Helen ? "

She shook her head.

" How can I tell ? There is none now," she said.

" But if there was ? " he persisted.

" I can't say. Forget me. It will be much better. There can be no use in looking forward for a year."

" I think there would be — for me," he answered.

She laughed lightly.

" How long have you thought of me like this ? " she asked.

" Since the first time I saw you," he said, " that afternoon, when it was so dark I could barely make out your face, but I fell in love with your mouth, the loveliest mouth in the world."

A smile came back to her face. The flag on the coastguard's cottage flapped in the wind, and, far below, the blue waves curled silently into innumerable points of foam. A steamer, infinitesimal though it seemed, left a track of pale smoke behind it, and the sun shone joyously over all.

" How sweet it is," he said, yielding himself up to the sensuous delight of summer centering in the beauty of the girl at his side. " Let me look at it all once more, since I must leave it all to-day. How you are to be envied, you

MUTABILITY 41

who remain. And I have to go back to that intolerable, dusty, sultry, horrible town ! "

He turned to look at the downs behind, and turned back again.

" No, there is nothing like the sea," he continued. " Oh, Helen, if I could take back some hope of you ! "

" You are so impatient ! " she said. " You must wait and see if there is a chance. I don't suppose there will be. You had better forget me altogether. You can easily."

"Will you decide which I shall do ? " he asked.

" No, it is for you to decide."

" I shall wait then," he answered. " You will not promise, Helen ? "

"No," she said, shaking her head. "We must go back,'" she added, abruptly. " Are you ready ? "

" Yes," he said, springing up and stretching his hands to her. She took them and rose.

" We are good friends," he asked, still holding her hands. She smiled in his eyes with a " Yes."

"You are not angry?" she asked. "You won't be bitter against me, will you ? I should be so sorry."

" Bitter ? " he repeated. " No, certainly not. How could I be ? "

" Don't be bitter about it," she continued, " I should hate to think that you could be angry with me."

" I can well promise you that," he said, bending his face towards hers. How beautiful she was, with her little round face, her exquisite mouth and her eyes ! " And I shall not forget you. I shall wait."

She smiled, and then added more seriously :

" Don't wait for me. It would be foolish of you to give up anything for my sake. I can promise you nothing."

" You cannot prevent my hoping, can you ? " he asked.

" I suppose not," she answered, as they turned down the hillside and rejoined their party without more delay.

II

The chalky downs faded behind the train, and Deepdale found himself back

again in the town which he imagined that he hated so much. In fact, it was

desolate — with that lamentably seedy desolation which London wears for three

months out of the twelve. Piccadilly without a well-dressed man or woman is

42 THE SAVOY

not a pleasant sight, and Deepdale reached his rooms near that thoroughfare in an exceedingly bad temper. His letters — including several bills and a note from Mrs. Westham to warn him that she was coming to see him immediately on his arrival — also displeased him.

Mrs. Westham was the only woman out of the innumerable women with whom he had had relations of some kind who was utterly devoted to him, and who therefore bored him beyond all others. Though their relationship was of long standing he hesitated to break it off, partly from the vanity of being so able to dominate her, and partly from the desire of causing her as little pain as possible. So long as he could keep her at a distance he was content, but when a meeting became inevitable it was for him an unpleasant experience. Fortunately she had her house to attend to, and he managed to arrange that his spare hours as a rule should not coincide with hers. Her husband was abroad for six months out of the year or her movements would have been even more restrained. But at last he found himself at the end of his patience. Let come what would, with the receipt of her note he determined to break off the affair altogether.

With his return to the everyday world of London, on the other hand, his attraction towards Helen Gray had speedily faded. He had almost forgotten the incident of the morning. At the bottom, he had been insincere in profess- ing love for her. She was certainly beautiful, she would in all probability, as an only child, be fairly rich, and she was a woman he would be proud to have for his wife, for purposes of display at Ascot or the opera. Moreover, the gracious beauty of her form and face were a promise of deeper happiness to the man whom she could love. But he was not very deeply hurt, he thought, by her refusal, which, after all, was extremely sensible. His income of nine hundred a year would be mere poverty in marriage, and it was doubtful if he would have more for several years.

His man announcing Mrs. Westham disturbed his thoughts.

She came in hesitatingly. When the door had closed he kissed her, and drew a chair to the window. She turned up her veil.

" Good God ! " he exclaimed, " how ill you look ! What is the matter ? "

Her face, which once had had a certain charm for him, was drawn and yellow. He would hardly have recognized her.

" I am ill," she said, " but never mind that now. Are you glad to see me?" she asked, kissing his hands.

" Of course I am," he answered.

" How changed you are, Algy," she answered. " But you can't help not

MUTABILITY 43

being as fond of me now as you were a year ago ! I wonder why you have changed ? "

It was the same scene he had been through before, over and over again. She always asked the same questions and he always made the same replies. She had very little tact, he thought ! He was prepared for another unpleasant quarter of an hour, but he hoped that it would result in his being able to pre- vent its recurrence in the future.

" Who were the people you saw so much of while you were away ? " she asked. " You never told me their names."

" The Grays," he answered, briefly.

" Oh ! " she said. " It was that Gray girl who was talked about in con- nection with you. To think that I didn't know. I suppose you are engaged to her now ? "

" I am not," he replied, coldly.

" Did you propose to her ? "

" No."

" I don't believe you," she said. " Well, I am going, you don't want me. I will not bore you again." She choked a little. " You are not worth my love. I wonder if you will ever find a woman to love you as I have done. But I won't bore you again."

" Don't be a fool, Milly," he said. " Sit down."

" I told you that I would give you up when you found another woman," she continued, standing. " When I heard you talked about with that Gray- girl I did not even feel jealous. I was so sure of you. But you are quite changed. Oh, God help me ! Algy, how can I live without you ? " she cried, as she sank back into the chair.

He leaned forward and stroked her hand.

" You don't even kiss me now ! " she exclaimed, passionately, throwing back his caress. " And I had so much to tell you ! Are you tired of me ? Is that the truth ? "

" No," he said, indifferently.

" It is," she retorted. " Yet even now I cannot see it. I love you too much to believe it. Tell me and let me know. Are you tired of me?"

At all events, it was his duty to hurt her as little as possible. " Of course, I am not," he answered. Then a thought struck him which made him look curiously at her. The same thought at that moment came uppermost in her mind, crushing out her misery for the time. She lay back in the chair and half closed her eyelids.

44 THE SAVOY

" There is one thing I wanted to tell you," she said, " I have a child ! "

The announcement was not unforeseen, but it was a shock. To conceal the fact he flicked the end of his cigarette carefully into the grate before answering. Then he said :

" Are you quite sure now ? "

She nodded. Her heart was beating a tattoo and she could barely speak.

" What an infernal complication ! " he exclaimed, frowning, although a vague feeling of pride which appeared to him to be wholly stupid, but which he could not check, rose in him. " What are you going to do ? "

" I shall have to kill myself," she replied. Why did he not throw himself at her feet, she thought, beseeching her not to do such a thing ? He did not answer, but stared hard at the end of the cigarette, still frowning.

" I believe you would be glad if I did ! " she exclaimed. Then as her excitement grew, she continued, " Algy, you are not so brutal as to wish that, are you ? "

"Don't be absurd. I was thinking what on earth is to be done. When is he coming back ? "

" Not for three months."

Abruptly and without tangible cause, the whole story of their relationship unfolded itself before him, bare of the imagined beauty with which his thought had once bedecked it, in its plain and squalid ugliness. He was filled in spite of himself with horror of the woman before him. It seemed — in this crisis of his nerves — as if he could not tolerate her presence for a moment longer. Though his face did not show his feeling, she seemed to grasp his thought. She felt that there was no mercy to be expected from him, no hope for her to cling to. She rose bravely.

" Good-bye, Algy," she said. " We shall not meet again. Don't speak to me. Let me go. Good-bye."

He took her hand for a moment and then opened the door. As she went out he called his servant to open the street door for her and returned to his room.

" Thank God that is finished," he muttered, as he moved about, nervously touching things on the tables or the mantelpiece. Then, after a time, he went out. At his club he found the only man he looked on as a friend, Lord Reggie Cork, a philosophical young man whose eternal tranquillity of temper was extremely pleasing to the nervous temperament of Deepdale.

MUTABILITY 45

" Hullo, Deepdale," he said, " come and dine with me. What are you doing in town at this time ? Do you feel inclined to go to Norway ? "

" Norway ? Are you going ? "

" To-morrow, ten-thirty. Come with me, there's a good chap ! "

Deepdale thought for a moment. Then he answered :

"Right! I will come with you. I shall not come back here till next year. I am sick of town and of England too. I have been getting into trouble."

Deepdale proceeded to expound matters to his friend and to ask his advice.

Whatever Lord Reggie's opinion may have been, the two men left England on the morrow, Deepdale having arranged to let his chambers during his absence.

Ill

He kept his word and did not return till the following year. When he did the season was well under weigh. It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, and London was — in Deepdale's eyes at least — its central and most perfect flower. To one who had been away from it so long, the city seemed to give a promise of new life, and, as his cab flashed down Piccadilly, the sight of the crush of carriages, the crowd at Hyde Park Corner, lifted his heart like a draught of wine. Lady Audley, on whom he called, was delighted to see him. She reproached him for his long disappearance and his tardy return.

" You haven't seen the new beauty," she said, laughing. In answer to his inquiry, she continued —

" She's an old friend of yours, I hear. In society? No ; she used not to be, but Lady Rivers, people say, met her somewhere or other in the winter, and was so fascinated that she has had her under her wing for the last three weeks. We are all raving about her."

" You say I know her ? " he asked.

" If that isn't like you men ! " she laughed. " You have met this girl, fallen in love with her, I believe, and have forgotten all about it. Well, you will fall in love with her again. That is my prophecy."

" When am I likely to see her ?" he asked.

" If you like to bore yourself by coming here to-night you are sure to see her. Come any time after eleven."

" Won't you tell me who she is ?" he said.

46 THE SAVOY

" No. She will surprise you ; and you will have to be grateful to me for giving you an emotion."

He took his leave presently, and made his way into the Park. The subject slipped out of his mind, and he did not mention it to any of the num- berless acquaintances he met. Most of them seemed glad to see him, but a few appeared to his sensitive egoism to be somewhat strange in manner. He was wondering at this, a little annoyed, when he ran up against Lord Reggie, whom he had not seen for several months.

" Hullo, Deepdale ! " he exclaimed. " Just back ? I say, you've come at a bad time."

" How's that ? " asked Deepdale.

" Haven't you heard, or are you trying to play deep ? " he answered. " I have heard nothing," was the answer.

" Good Lord ! I'll have to tell you then. Come and sit down." Deepdale obeyed.

" It's pretty serious, old chap," Cork continued. " It's all over the place, or it wouldn't matter so much. You remember a woman I saw at your place once or twice — Mrs. Westham — the woman you told me about ? " Deepdale nodded.

"Well, she poisoned herself a month ago," said the other, lowering his voice. " But that isn't all. These women are so confoundedly theatrical. She couldn't make her exit from this world without letting people know why. I dare say she didn't mean to harm you, but it looks as if she wanted a little revenge at the last moment. She wrote a letter to you and left it on her table before drinking the stuff. It came out at the inquest ; I've a paper at my rooms, but I daresay you can guess what it was."

Deepdale, with his head bent, was gazing at the point of his stick in the gravel.

" Damn her," he said, in a low voice, choking with anger, yet stunned with the shock. He had nearly forgotten her, but the news of her death was like a violent blow. " How far has it gone ? "

" Everywhere, naturally. You can't prevent people reading newspapers." " I saw Lady Audley just now," he muttered. " She said nothing." "Very likely she hadn't heard. But she won't be nice when she does." " Let us go to your rooms," he said, standing up a little shakily. It cost him an effort not to break down altogether. His knees seemed to have lost all sensation : he could hardly steady himself, his hands shook, and his face had gone suddenly white.

MUTABILITY 47

Lord Reggie drew his arm through his own.

" Steady, old man," said he, as they crossed the Row. " It's no good showing 'em how you've been hit. Get into this cab," he added as they emerged from the archway.

" No, we'll walk !" exclaimed Deepdale, with an oath. " Damn the woman ! I thought I was going to have a good time of it this season. You know my aunt is dead? No? she died a week ago and left me nearly everything. I've been scraping along all this time on a few beggarly hundreds a year, and now that it's thousands, this infernal woman steps in and spoils all my hand ! Damn her ! "

" You needn't swear," said Cork. " You were pretty well gone on her once, weren't you ? "

Deepdale made no answer as his thoughts went back into the past. He walked with his head bent down. Suddenly he exclaimed :

" My God, what a thing to happen to a man ! "

His first feeling of anger had passed. He was overwhelmed now with remorse. Why had he not stayed and helped her ? He forgot how weary of her presence he had been, and reproached himself only for his leaving her to her trouble. What misery she must have endured ! What a beast he was ! Would he have to go through life with the consciousness of having committed the most callous of murders, of having caused the death of the one woman who had really loved him, wearisome though she was !

" What am I to do, Reggie ? " he asked, to break the silence.

" Wait and see what happens," replied Cork philosophically. He was a believer in Fate.

" What an infernal scandal it will be," Deepdale murmured under his breath. He was too fond of society to be as unconventional as he wished, and he by no means wished to give up his season.

When they reached Lord Reggie's chambers, he sank into a chair.

" Give me the paper and get me a drink — brandy and soda," he said.

The lines were a misty blur, and he could not read at first. After a time some of the sentences became legible. He was reading her letter ; the letter that was meant only for him, and yet was printed for everyone's eyes ; trying to skip the details of her death, though they forced themselves under his notice and burnt themselves on his mind. It was a much saner and less effusive letter than he expected, and was both dignified and pathetic.

Lord Reggie sat opposite his friend, dreading an outburst of frantic grief. He was relieved when Deepdale lifted his head and merely remarked,

48 THE SAVOY

" I don't believe the thing has gone or will go as far as you try to make out. Haven't you exaggerated ? "

A sudden revulsion of feeling had come upon him. The sober sentences had calmed him, and he had recovered his nerve. After all, what did it matter ? He was not responsible for her death. He had tired of her and left her. That was nothing unusual. Her foolishness was no fault of his. So far he satisfied himself : and as to the scandal, he would have to live it down or go away if it became necessary.

Deepdale's temperament was one that is not rare. He could take things easily or badly, almost as he chose. Though the catastrophe might, if he had allowed it to do so, have broken him down, yet by an effort of will he managed to throw it on one side. The shock remained, like a wound that annoys when the first pain has gone by, but he had determined to let it gain no ascendancy over him. He was able to forget very easily, and he relied on this ability to preserve him from any future outbreaks of conscience.

Instead of answering, Lord Reggie, relieved to find that there was to be no scene, proceeded to discourse with some warmth to his friend on his callous- ness and brutality. Deepdale listened meekly, and when Lord Reggie had come to the end of his disquisition, they arranged to dine and pass the even- ing together. It was not far from midnight when they appeared at Lady Audley's party. Deepdale was relieved to find that there was no change towards him in any of the people to whom he spoke. A weight seemed lifted from his heart.

" Where is your new beauty ? " he asked his hostess, when there was a momentary cessation of arrivals.

" She's here. That is all I know," she answered, glancing with pretended dismay into the hopelessly crowded room. " Oh, there she is," she exclaimed, as some movement opened a momentary space in the crush. His eyes followed the direction of hers, and lighted on a tall fair girl with blonde hair and enormous pale yellow sleeves.

" What ? Miss Gray ? " he asked.

" Go and talk to her," she replied. " I am a confirmed match-maker, you know," she added, good humouredly, as she turned to smile on some new guests.

Deepdale edged his way towards his old acquaintance. He made slow progress, but at last he succeeded in reaching her. Her welcome was more cordial than he could have hoped, and the man to whom she had been speak- ing moved away unwillingly.

MUTABILITY 49

"Where have you been all this time?" she said. "You ought to be punished. You look ever so much older, and you don't look well."

" No," he answered, " I'm rather seedy. But you are more beautiful than ever," he added, lowering his voice.

She laughed. " You have not forgotten your old sin of paying untrue compliments !"

" Untrue ? " he replied. "Will you never believe me? Can't we get out of this crowd ? Shall we go on the balcony ? "

The balcony was large, and by good luck they found two chairs.

" Tell me all about yourself," she said as she sat down. He obeyed as far as he could, and did not omit to mention the death of his aunt and his consequent increase of fortune.

" How delightful for you," she said. " And now you are perfectly happy, I suppose."

" Do you think I am so inconstant ? " he asked. " Or have you forgotten the downs ? "

" No, I don't forget. It is you who forget, and go away for three-quarters of a year without a word."

" It was an unpardonable sin," he replied ; " but will you forgive me? It was really very necessary, and perhaps, perhaps you remember why it was of no use for me to come back sooner ? "

" I forgive you," she said softly.

" Are you any happier now that you have achieved success ? " he asked. " You used to long for success."

" No, I think not," she answered. " It seems only natural. And then everything appears just as stupid as before. There is always something want- ing to my life. I don't know what."

"It is the same with me," he said, "with a difference. I know what I want."

" I should have thought you had everything you wanted," she answered.

" No, there is always one thing," he said, touching her hand. She with- drew it gently, and stood up.

" Let us go in," she said ; " I am cooler now, and I am afraid of catching cold."

" When may I come and see you ? " he asked, as he rose.

She thought for a moment.

" On Friday," she answered.

" And to-day is Monday ! " he exclaimed.

50 THE SAVOY

" Friday is the only possible day this week. I am staying with Lady Rivers, you know, and I have to go out with her. But I can be in on Friday, about four, if you like."

" On Friday, then," he answered. " I want to ask you a question I asked you once before," he added, as they re-entered the room, and further talk became impossible.

She turned away with a smile.

" Who was that you were on the balcony with ? " asked Lady Rivers an hour later, as they were driving home.

" A Mr. Deepdale," Helen answered, " an old friend. I have asked him to come on Friday to tea."

" My dear Helen ! " exclaimed Lady Rivers, " he is quite impossible. You ought not to know such a man."

" Why not ? " she queried.

" Haven't you heard about his wickedness ? It is really too dreadful."

" No, I have heard nothing against him," she answered frigidly, while some strange fear made her tremble. " I believe he is going to ask me to marry him."

" Helen ! You must not think of it," said Lady Rivers in an agonizing tone. " It would be very wrong of you. I don't know the whole tale, but my husband told me a good deal of it."

" I wish to hear nothing," she replied, coldly.

" Oh, yes, you must, and I shall tell you."

IV

The three following days were like nightmares to Helen. She had listened to the story without the least change of expression, but in her own room she had broken into a passion of tears. Until that moment she had scarcely realized that she loved the man at all. She knew it at last, conquered by jealousy of the woman he had killed. To her own despair, she was not overwhelmed with horror for his crime. It did not seem unnatural. She only hated the woman who had come between them. But her own state of mind seemed like dishonour, and she suffered all the tortures of remorse for what she could not help.

Before Friday, however, she had regained some tranquillity. She would refuse, if he proposed to her, and would forget him. When Deepdale called, she therefore welcomed him very frigidly. But she was alone, and he had determined not to let the opportunity slip.

MUTABILITY 51

" Why arc you so changed, so cold ? " he asked, after a time. The truth suddenly flashed upon him, and he swiftly decided on his course of action. " Have people been telling you tales about me?" he added.

" Tales that are true, I am afraid," she answered.

" I would have told you myself," he said, gently. " It is too dreadful for words, isn't it ? You should pity me, rather than blame me ; my life is quite ruined. I have nothing left me now on earth."

" Don't say that," she murmured. " You will forget, and so will others. But it is very sad."

"It is much more ; it is my ruin. But you, at least, may pity me. My life is hard enough to bear, without losing you even as a friend — for you were my friend once, were you not ? "

She did not answer, but her lips moved inaudibly.

" You know now why I went away. Can you not guess what I suffered all the time, knowing that I had lost you, you who were ever like a star in my dark heaven ? Think now what my life will be, without the one hope that filled me for so long, the one thing that made me live. I have lost that — and I have lost everything. It is my own fault — and yet not so much my fault as perhaps you think. It was my sin, and I must pay for it. In these days there is no Elizabeth to forgive Tannhauser."

She listened immovably, but her eyes were moist, and her lips parted, as she breathed rapidly.

" I will go," he said, rising. " Shall I ever see you again, I wonder ? Oh, Helen," he cried, taking her hands as she stood before him, " I could have loved you so well ! "

She did not move away, and he bent his head to cover her hands with kisses.

" Helen," he said, looking into her eyes, "is it all over? Will not your forgiveness cover even me ? Cannot the past be the past ? I am broken- hearted for my crime. You and you only can give me new life. Will you forgive me ? Will you not love me as I love you ? "

He placed his arm round her neck, tentatively. She did not resist, and as he drew nearer, her head sank on his shoulder, and she uttered a little sigh of content.

He smiled to himself in triumph ; then he bent his head and kissed her on the mouth.

Theodore Wratislaw.

O'SULLIVAN RUA TO THE SECRET ROSE

AR off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours ; where those Who sought thee at the Holy Sepulchre, Or in the wine vat, dwell beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams ; and deep Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep

Men have named beauty. Your heavy leaves enfold

The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold

Of the crowned Magi ; and the Hound of Cu

Who met Fand walking among flaming dew,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss ;

And him who drove the gods out of their liss,

And till a hundred morns had flowered red

Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead ;

And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown

And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods ;

And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,

And sought through lands and islands numberless years,

Until he found, with laughter and with tears,

A woman, of so shining loveliness,

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

A little stolen tress. I, too, await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die ?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

W. B. Yeats.

THE OLD WOMEN

^ul$

m

zlMi

HEY pass upon their old, tremulous feet, Creeping with little satchels down the street, And they remember, many years ago, Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow And solitary, through the city ways, And they alone remember those old days Men have forgotten. In their shaking heads A dancer of old carnivals yet treads The measure of past waltzes, and they see The candles lit again, the patchouli

Sweeten the air, and the warm cloud of musk

Enchant the passing of the passionate dusk.

Then you will see a light begin to creep

Under the earthen eyelids, dimmed with sleep,

And a new tremor, happy and uncouth,

Jerking about the corners of the mouth.

Then the old head drops down again, and shakes,

Muttering.

Sometimes, when the swift gaslight wakes

The dreams and fever of the sleepless town,

A shaking huddled thing in a black gown

Will steal at midnight, carrying with her

Violet little bags of lavender,

Into the tap-room full of noisy light ;

Or, at the crowded earlier hour of night,

Sidle, with matches, up to some who stand

About a stage-door, and, with furtive hand,

Appealing : " I too was a dancer, when

Your fathers would have been young gentlemen ! "

And sometimes, out of some lean ancient throat,

A broken voice, with here and there a note

56 THE SAVOY

Of unspoilt crystal, suddenly will arise Into the night, while a cracked fiddle cries Pantingly after ; and you know she sings The passing of light, famous, passing things. And sometimes, in the hours past midnight, reels Out of an alley upon staggering heels, Or into the dark keeping of the stones About a doorway, a vague thing of bones And draggled hair.

And all these have been loved, And not one ruinous body has not moved The heart of man's desire, nor has not seemed Immortal in the eyes of one who dreamed The dream that men call love. This is the end Of much fair flesh ; it is for this you tend Your delicate bodies many careful years, To be this thing of laughter and of tears, To be this living judgment of the dead, An old grey woman with a shaking head.

Arthur Symons.

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS

T was the year when Marie Barrone sang for a season at the " Folly," never to be forgotten by those who heard her ; when London, or the idler part of it, was very much in love with her, and her spirit of waywardness and all mischief. 1 1 was a year of romances ; and of them all, that in which Marie played the part of amused heroine and our famous three were the heroes, was quite the most entertaining.

At this time, the leader of the three, Jack Barry, or as most of us knew him, " Jack Momus," that being the name under which he wrote the little comedies and lyrical burlesques chiefly associated with him, — was at the height of his singular career. The success of his latest work, " Sweet Cinderella," at the " Folly," thanks to Marie's delightful singing and dancing, had for once filled his pockets to overflowing ; and it must be said they overflowed excessively. He was reckless in his extravagance of good-luck now, as he had been reckless before from ill-luck ; and he showed his quality in nothing more than in the choice of his two companions, who did not tend, on the whole, to restrain him.

Young Pavier — the Hon. Tom Pavier — was certainly not the kind of young man to be an economical factor in anybody's equation. A thrice mortgaged peer's third son, who has been disowned by his noble father, who has com- promised more than his purse because of his infatuation for the turf, and who has taken, half out of bravado, to driving a hansom for a living before he is thirty, is not likely to be over much in love with respectability, and the social virtues, for their own sake. His name, in truth, was by this become something of a byword with the latest incarnation of Mrs. Grundy — Lady Kyo : " Like young Pavier ! " she would say, and close her eyes. As for the third of the three, " Sinister " Smith, — him we know better now as John Smith, R.A. ; but at this time he chiefly drew comic pictures for that short-lived paper, the " Babbler," besides occasionally painting extraordinary portraits of modern people in a medi.eval manner.

A more excellent trio for the amusement of a spirited heroine could not

D

58 THE SAVOY

well be imagined. All three were of accord in their devotion to Miss Marie. Almost every other night, for Jack Momus, to call him so, was never tired of hearing his jokes in their histrionic setting, they arrived, sooner or later, at the theatre. They usually came in the hansom which Momus had purchased in the exuberance of his pockets, and had leased to Tom Pavier on very un- businesslike terms. This remarkable vehicle was suggested by that which appeared nightly on the stage in " Sweet Cinderella," and like that, was always at Marie's service ; she greatly appreciated it, and often drove home in it to her lodgings in Westminster, after theatre. It was not, indeed, until she had twice running experienced the sensation of a street collision, under Tom Pavier's reckless driving, that she showed any hesitation about it. Thereafter, one night, when Tom drove Barry to the stage-door to meet her, they found a suspicious private brougham waiting there. When Miss Marie at length tripped out, she gave an odd little glance at the two vehicles, and at Barry bowing at her elbow ; and then turning towards the brougham, she stammered out a naive explanation that she felt it was not at all right, " you know, to be always taking your hansom ; though, to be sure, a hansom was better fun than anything ! "

This was the beginning of disaster. She had always been rather mys- terious in her comings and goings ; but after this she became more and more elusive, while the attentions of other admirers were nightly more obvious. The brougham itself did not long remain a mystery : it was only one of many attentions from the same admirer, Lord Merthen ; while the bouquets of Captain Jolywell made it like a pot-potirri on wheels. So time went, and the pleasant early summer began to lose its greenness in London, while Marie Barrone still drew tears by her song of the country flowers which, in a state of nature, her audience might have cared for much less. One evening, late in June, Momus, who grew more dejected as Marie grew more elusive, made a desperate effort to get her to come to a little supper at Fantochetti's. But no ! not even that ; though as she said " No ! " her voice had the sympathetic thrill which was so effective in " Sweet Cinderella," and her eyes looked sorrow- fully at him where he stood, hat off, his cherubic visage absurdly wrinkled in his wistful anxiety. However, on the following Saturday, after performance, when Sinister was present, she seemed to relent. Momus and Sinister had been driven up by Tom, and stood at the brougham step a moment, while Tom looked on from his driver's perch, a few yards off.

" I'm going to have two days' holiday," said Marie. " I'm rather tired ; my voice was like a crow's to-night. Didn't you notice in my

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 59

primrose song ? My doctor says I may have to give up singing, if I don't take care ! "

" You never sang better, I swear ! " responded Momus, and Sinister corroborated with his lips. But she went on gaily :

" I'm so sorry I can't come to Fantochetti's ! Ah, you've been so kind, all of you," — here her voice had that little quiver again. " Well, I suppose Thomas, — my Thomas I mean, not yours," she explained, with a mischievous smile at Tom Pavier, — " is impatient, and wants to be off. You know, I never like to say good-bye, even only for a day or two. Au revoir is better ! "

" A Demain is better still," ingeniously interposed Momus. She shook her pretty head.

" No, I'm afraid it will have to be good-bye London to-morrow, for a while at least."

" And Olva's fete?" asked Momus. The fete was a fancy dress ball, at Count Olva's, which among certain less particular sections of frivolous society was to be a great event in its way.

" Ah, Olva's fete," said Marie, adjusting her flowers, " I had forgotten :

it will be fun to meet there. But in case ; " she hesitated, putting the

flowers to her face, as it might be to hide a furtive smile, " in case my voice is still hoarse ? "

" No, no," interposed Momus, "you must come ! So an revoir ! "

" Au revoir ! " she echoed. And the brougham drove off.

Some days later Momus heard from Mrs. Harriet at the Folly — Mrs. Harriet being Miss Marie's tire-woman— that Marie was likely to resume her part on the very evening of the fete, and was having a new frock, very pretty and fantastic, in white and blue and gold, no doubt for the Olva occasion. At this, he decided to give her a bouquet, simple and costly ; which he ordered forthwith at Centifiori's. His plans were, to see the last act of " Cinderella " that evening, present Marie with the bouquet as she left the theatre, humbly begging her to bear it to Count Olva's ; then don his own fancy-dress — a clown's motley, very carefully copied from an old Italian print — and so meet Marie at the fete at midnight. The chief lion of the occasion, it should be explained, was an African one, — the black Prince of Xula. It struck him as an ingenious idea, which Marie would appreciate, that they should make the Prince himself the point of assignation in the crowd at Olva's.

" The Prince at midnight ! " He was so pleased with the idea, that he kept repeating the words to himself in his excitement.

60 THE SAVOY

Finding on reflection that he would barely have time to prepare for the fete after theatre, he decided, when the evening in question came, to attire himself in advance, hide his Italian motley under his great-coat, hear a little of Marie's singing from the back of the first circle, and then go round and intercept her with his bouquet. At a little after ten-thirty, Tom Pavier drove him to the " Folly " — a box containing the precious bouquet by his side — through a slow downpour of rain. The hansom drew up at the main entrance with a characteristic dash, just as Sinister was alighting from another cab. It was the hour of Marie's best song, and Momus, in his haste and excitement, after briefly exchanging a friendly word with Sinister, ran upstairs eagerly. From within, the familiar noise of the violins and oboe, playing the opening strains of Marie's song, reached his ears seductively. Another second, and to this boyish access of expectancy there ensued a cold thrill of dismay. On the corridor wall, a square placard, red-lettered, was fastened, which ran thus :

" In consequence of continued indisposition, Miss Marie Barrone is again unable to appear this evening. Miss Nelly Cavotte has consented to take the part of Cinderella in her unavoidable ab settee."

He did not wait to see more, not having the heart to look at the stage itself, where Marie's pretty figure and bright eyes usually faced him. He pointed out the placard to Sinister (who had followed), with a grotesque grimace and an indescribable air of disappointment.

" I wish I may die ! " he began, with an hysterical little laugh. But Sinister, whose emotions never showed on his colourless, expressionless face, interposed gently :

" If I were you, I'd go behind and see Mrs. Harriet, my boy ! It's only a cold she has got. You will hear her sing on many a night to come ! " Sinister further consoled him by seizing his arm and conducting him round the house until they found Mrs. Harriet, who was hastily putting on a black bonnet over her black curls with the aid of a cracked looking-glass, as she stood at the door of Miss Barrone's dressing room. She told them that Marie had arrived at the theatre half an hour before performance, and had had an interview with the stage-manager, who had been in a rage ever since.

" Too bad to sing ; not too bad to dance at that what-d'ye-call it to- night, I know ! " said Mrs. Harriet, shaking her curls. " I daresay she has a cold ; but cold or not, she cares for nobody — not she, when she takes it into her head ! " This was all Mrs. Harriet had to say.

They did not wait to see the angry manager, or inquire further. Momus

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 6l

took the wild resolution of driving off straightway to her rooms, to make sure of her. So he resumed the hansom, parting with Sinister, who did not like these undignified flights. By this time there were other reasons for haste than the fact of their being late. A heavy rain began to come down with great determination. They careered through Palace Yard in a perfect deluge, and Tom turned into the narrow street where Marie lived, half-blinded by the storm. But here his sense of vision might well be quickened. Under the rainy gas-light, one thing he saw clearly : Marie's familiar brougham ! which was being driven rapidly out of the turning at the other end of the street, an ominous brace of trunks on top. He drew up, and cried through the slit to Mom us :

" There she goes — her blessed brougham's just turned the corner." " Nonsense, man ! " screamed Momus. " It's not — it can't be ! Drive on to the door ! "

Tom drove on, and stopped at Marie's door. Momus leapt out, and knocked furiously. After a delay, that seemed hours, a grimy little house- maid opened the door.

" Miss Barrone? " he cried.

The maid blinked her eyes at him, and drew back : " She've gone aw'y, sir ! "

Momus could have wept. " Why, she said she would be in ; — has she just gone ? " He fumbled out half-a-crown.

The child, who knew him of old, smiled sagaciously. She probable- thought him an actor from the " Folly." " Miss Berewn didn't be at the theeayter

to-night " she was beginning to explain.

" The devil ! " ejaculated he, " I know that, — but see ; " he put the coin in her dirty little hand : " Was — that — her — carriage?"

She nodded reluctantly, and Momus turned and leapt back into the hansom. "You're right — 'twas the brougham," he cried to Tom. " After it> man ! Go it, Peg ! "

The hansom whirled off furiously in the direction of Whitehall, causing consternation there in the stream of buses and cabs. At the top of Whitehall Tom thought he caught a glimpse at last of the vanished brougham, and whipped up Peg to a still hotter pace. So following along Pall Mall, at the foot of the Haymarket he made it out distinctly, halfway up that thoroughfare At Piccadilly Circus he was almost within hail, and Momus was chuckling as he saw ; when, lo ! another hansom, crossing at right angles, was surprised by Tom's wild and irresponsible irruption, so that the two vehicles cannoned

62 THE SAVOY

with astonishing effect. Peg went down as if she was shot, while the other horse pawed the footboard for a moment in front of Momus, and then, recoiling, went down in turn. Momus, for his part leapt out, slipped, pitched headlong ; while his hat flew one way, the precious box with the flowers another, where it was hurled under Peg's lively heels, as she lay a-kicking, and there speedily yielded up its little golden orchids and other rare blossoms to a muddy doom. It was a cruel stroke, which might have upset the quest of a less devoted, or a less mercurial, knight errant. But not so Momus. He still, in all this wreck, had his eye on the brougham, now rapidly disappearing down Piccadilly, all unconscious of the confusions it had wrought behind it. Mopping hastily the mud off his coat and doublet, picking up his volatile crush-hat, he hailed another hansom, and retook the pursuit, leaving Tom to his fate. As he was now whirled along Piccadilly, to add to his misfortunes, a drop that fell from somewhere on his nose, suddenly connected itself with a peculiar sensation in his head and hair, which, he remembered, he had first noticed after his fall. Putting his hand up, he found his well-arranged locks disturbed by a very pretty stream of crimson, which had been all this while slowly trickling through them, and was now combining with the mud to add a new and original adornment to his piebald doublet. But little he cared in his mad pre-occupation, so long as he did not lose Marie too. Once, at the foot of Bond Street, a block of carriages cost him a profane expense of breath, but he had again come within hailing distance of the fugitives by the time they had reached the top and emerged in Oxford Street. So the pursuit was maintained along Oxford Street, and up Edgware Road, until the brougham turned towards Paddington Station. Here another small delay, caused by two passing omnibuses, allowed the gap between the two to widen again. However, in the end, Momus dashed up, just as Marie, having dismounted, was seen dis- appearing through the portico of the station, a dark blue travelling dress and a veil proving a very transparent disguise. Momus hurled himself, in his mud and motley, a startling figure enough, out of his hansom, and was rushing through after her, intent only on overtaking her, when a strong hand caught his arm, and stopped him violently. He wriggled and turned as if on a pivot, and as he did so, in turning, saw the impassive good-natured face of a Herculean railway policeman.

" Pardon, sir ! " said this amiable, irresistible giant. " Afraid you are hurt, sir ! Not so fast ! "

" Now, by all that's wicked," screamed his captive, " let me go ! See — wait — wait ! That lady, see ! O Lord ! "

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 63

With this, Momus fainted.

Next day, about noon, Sinister was roused from a profound sleep, proper to a man who had been up till four that morning, by a loud knocking at his door. This door, it should be said, gave entrance to two small rooms and a large studio at the top of a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The knocking proved to be from the vigorous fist of Tom Pavier, who explained last night's pursuit, the upset, and the disappearance of our hero-in-chief after it. Finally , as Tom discovered at Paddington, poor Momus had been conveyed from the station in a state of collapse to a hospital near by. There, suffering from the effects of his accident in Piccadilly Circus, and the excitement of Miss Marie's disappearance under his very eyes, he had spent the night in a fine fever. Sinister lost no time now in getting into his clothes, and making his way there.

He found his friend sitting up in bed in an accident ward, between two much more seriously damaged fellow-patients. When Momus saw him, he held out his hand with a deprecatory gesture.

" We lost her after all, old chap ! " he cried, with a half-sob, " A damned railway bobby collared me in the station. I must have been a pretty sight. I don't know how I came here ! "

After a little comforting philosophy from Sinister, he grew calmer ; and that evening they were allowed to take him home, with one arm in bandages, and some sticking-plaster on his head. Indeed, his condition was not serious, his excitement growing less feverish. Half that night, however, Sinister sat by his bedside, and humoured him when he talked, still half-deliriously, of following Marie — to the world's end if need be.

This idea was still dominant when Momus had recovered sufficiently to resume his usual ways. The very first thing he did was to set out in quest of Miss Marie's address, which at last he was lucky enough to procure from her landlady in Westminster, in consideration of a certain bribe. The address ran :

" Aberduly Arms,

Aberduly,

North Wale-;."

Procuring next a guide to North Wales, he discovered that Aberduly was a rising seaside place. He discovered, moreover, what he thought significant, that Marie's friend, Lord Merthen, had a seat in the same county. Revolving these things in his inventive mind, he presently evolved a delightful scheme ;

64 THE SAVOY

nothing more nor less than a driving tour across country, and in the hansom itself, into Wales (d la Jack Mytton, who was one of Momus's favourite heroes), ending with a descent upon Aberduly and Miss Marie.

It was in pursuance of this scheme, that three days later, at the impossible hour of seven in the morning, the early milkmen in Chelsea were startled by an unusual spectacle. This was the arrival at Mr. Barry's door of the hansom, resplendent in black and yellow, drawn tandem by Tom Pavier's mare " Peg," and a well-matched bay horse, while Tom himself, in an amazing suit of light check, a red rose in his button-hole, handled the reins to masterly effect. All this Momus, already up and in the act of shaving his pink cheeks, saw from his window ; and he found the sight inspiring. Meanwhile Tom might have been observed dismounting, when, having found two delighted loafers to hold his horses, he made his way into the house, humming the familiar hunting ditty from " Jack Straw " :

" I hear the horn a blowin',

And oft* they'll soon be throwin'.

But first of all I'm goin'

To taste the hunting cup :

A cup 'tis, well compounded,

As I have always found it,

That many a care have drownded —

But Yoicks ! the hunt is up ! "

On arriving upstairs, he found a breakfast table laid for three in Barry's room, but as that hero did not at once appear, he threw up the window, and lighting a pipe, sat himself down on the window-sill. From this point of vantage he regarded with great satisfaction the inspiring sight below, where Peg and her leader stood pawing and fretting to be off, their bright harness and bay coats agleam in the early sun. He was still absorbed in this satisfying contemplation, when Momus, descending, found him there ; where- upon, as Sinister delayed to appear, they proceeded to breakfast Ere they finished, another hansom rattled up, and their party was complete ; and as the clock struck eight, they started on their journey, the hansom and its team deploying gracefully on the embankment, ere it went off at a smart pace westward. How their journey thereafter startled Oxford one day, Leamington another, and Shrewsbury on a third, may be better imagined than described. On the fourth day, however, when they had crossed the Welsh border, there befell a climacteric adventure which is essential to their history.

On that afternoon, it was a Saturday, the last in July, Tom was whipping up his dusty horses with every intention of reaching the village of Croeslwyd

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 65

in time for dinner. There had been a great fair in the village on the day before, and various waggons of roundabouts, and other such rural amusements, met our adventurers from time to time. They had successfully passed several of these vehicles — a matter of some difficulty in a narrow country by-road — when, turning a corner, Tom found before him a steep descent of a quarter of a mile or less, ending at a narrow bridge over a small stream in the hollow. Down this Tom drove, with an insufficient brake, at a somewhat exciting pace, and about half-way down the hill, he and his two companions were startled by a rattle of wheels on the opposite bank, where the road turned sharply and disappeared amid some trees in the middle distance. At this turn now suddenly appeared a descending vehicle, which in colour far outshone the hansom, and in reckless speed quite equalled it. An ungainly chariot, with tarnished gold and green and red decorations, and of fantastic shape — evidently some part of a travelling show ! Drawn by a wildly galloping white horse, of a gaunt appearance, it was driven by a little rubicund man, in a grey overcoat, with another smaller man, in the grotesque attire and white paint of a circus clown, and an immense negro, clad in irreproachable black, at his side. Thus accoutred, the chariot-in-advance of Mr. Hopkins' "Combination Zoological Circus and Panopticon," dawned on our three heroes in its ungainly descent as a very doubtful apparition indeed. For, obviously, something had gone wrong. The clown was distorting his white paint by his cries, while the grey man tugged desperately at the reins as the caravan charged the bridge. Tom Pavier, for his part, as the hansom, too, neared the bottom of the hill, and the bridge grew imminent, waved them aside with wild gestures. All in vain. He might as well have waved the wayside trees out of the way.

In another second, as the two vehicles made desperate assay together of the narrow bridge, there was a frightful crash, and circus-chariot and hansom, men and horses, were chaos under a cloud of dust. At the collision, Tom's leader had swerved, broken the traces, and leapt into the stream below. Peg had gone down heavily, and the hansom, after a wild twirl, had fallen over on its side against the parapet. As for the chariot, it fell into a grotesque rattling ruin of plank and pasteboard, wheel and shaft, amid which the grey, white, and black figures of the unfortunate Mr. Hopkins, the clown, and the gentleman of colour, sprawled disastrously. It was not a dignified catastrophe ; as Sinister felt when, rescuing himself, and feeling his left arm ruefully, he looked round. Except the clown, however, everybody was good-humoured ; he alone fell to a furious vituperation of Tom Pavier, who took no notice as he first liberated

66 THE SAVOY

his hapless mare from the ruins, and got her on to her feet, and then ran to his other horse, which lay half in the stream below with a broken leg.

" What's to be done ? " he cried out to the party above.

Whereupon the gentleman of colour, who had been bandaging a damaged knee with a great unconcern, limped down from the bridge, and drew a Colt's revolver from his breast-pocket. This he discharged, on a nod from Tom, into the poor beast's brain. In other ways, and in spite of his bandaged and seriously damaged leg, he proved the most capable man of the six. He directed the operation of drawing the cracked shell of the hansom, which was an irretrievable ruin, off the bridge, and then set to, to throw the ruins of the circus chariot over the parapet on to the grass below. He, too, it was who intervened when the dispute over the rights and wrongs of the catastrophe had made Momus all but hysterical, and the little grey man irreligious ; and arranged a small transaction by which Momus paid out five yellow coins to the credit of the " Combination Zoological Circus and Panopticon." When, within an hour, Momus and Sinister were setting off as a relief party for Croeslwyd, to further arrange for the disposition of the wreckage, he pre- sented a card to Momus with some ceremony. This card Momus carefully treasured up for possible future use, in case he might come to require such a functionary some day in some spectacular way. It was inscribed :

Professor Charlie Jonson, LION-KING. [Hopkins' Circus]

Momus and Sinister made a sorry-looking couple enough as they limped up painfully at last to the Castle Inn. When they had repaired their costumes and their nerves a little under its hospitable roof, they must needs, with return- ing energy, fall to quarrelling over their predicament. Sinister, long-suffering as he was, felt mortified for once. Like other humorists, used to serving up other people in a comic dish, he disliked extremely to be made comic himself. A hundred times he confounded himself for having given the fates that make for ridicule such an absurd opportunity. As it was, his precious top-hat, smashed out of all dignity, that had barely served to cover his head on the way from the scene of accident, might well serve as a symbol of his state of mind

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 67

Momus was unfeeling enough to chuckle over it as he played a dusty tattoo with his fingers on its indented crown. This was the finishing stroke. When now Momus went on to carol forth, with provoking light-heartedness, a favourite stave from " Cinderella " :

" The world is full of girls, I know, But only one's the perfect girl, To set the sorry world aglow With a laughing eye and a golden curl — Ah, Cinderella ! "

Sinister lost patience altogether.

" Damn Cinderella ! " he exclaimed, and announced with some spleen that he did not mean to go on any further with the adventure ; in fact, he proposed to go back to town forthwith. Momus scorned the idea. The late catastrophe had only served to excite him, and his blood was up.

" Do as you like ! " he said, with a certain impudence of tone, and a characteristic grimace and roll of the head, " I'm going on ! " And he sang again, turning Sinister's unfortunate hat over contemptuously on the table :

" With a laughing eye and a golden curl — Ah, Cinderella !"

When Tom arrived at the Castle Inn, a couple of hours later, conveyed thither, together with sundry relics of the hansom, in an old chaise which had been sent after him, behind which the hapless Peg painfully limped, it was to find Sinister alone. Momus had disappeared, incontinently gone on to Aber- duly, without a doubt. Sinister was still sulky ; for the idea of a Sunday alone with Tom in this uninspiring inn did not tend to restore his equanimity. As for the rest of the actors lately figuring on the highway — the circus proprietor and his two collaborateurs — they had gone off in an opposite direction, to appear no more in these pages.

Sunday broke dull and wet, to add to Sinister's disgust and ennui, and his bruised shoulder had grown painful. But there was no possible escape, and his only solace lay in an old punch-bowl, which Tom had discovered and filled. But even this proved unsatisfying, and both were in the depths of a profound boredom, listening to the melancholy drip of the rain, when as the clock struck ten, the sound of a horse's hoofs without announced a late arrival.

A few seconds more, and in walked Momus, streaming from the rain. His usual jaunty step was stiff, and his face, beneath its round comic lines, had an expression of utter weariness.

68 THE SAVOY

" You'd be tired if you were me ! " he said, as they exclaimed at his plight. " I've ridden fifty miles in the rain, on a beast bewitched, since breakfast ! "

Since his knowledge of the horse as a beast of burden had been confined hitherto to that gained inside a London hansom, this ride of Momus might, in fact, be considered a remarkable performance.

" Oh, poor Momus ! Give him some punch ! " cried Sinister.

Tom administered a rousing tumbler, and they set the exhausted hero to steam by the fire.

The ride was, in truth, only one of many singular incidents through which fate had been educating him since he left this room and Sinister yesterday. While he sat there, with the consciousness that his two companions were waiting to hear his story, these incidents revived themselves, and formed a fantastic jumble in his head. As he had gone out singing, with " Ah Cinderella ! " for refrain, unabashed by accident, still following fast on the heels of romance ; so he had kept his way to the end, though the fates declared against him at every turn. He had taken train, the train was blocked for an hour. That delay over, he had hired a pony for the next stage of his journey, although he did not know how to ride. The pony, in turn, proved an in- corrigible malingerer, and deceived its perplexed rider by pretending to go dead lame. Then, hating walking, Momus had walked ten miles, along moun- tain roads and through mountain solitudes, which, sublime as they really were, seemed to him only dreary. Thus that fate which, he had been used to say, had learnt something of humour at last from observing his antics, had played pranks with him all the way, without breaking for a moment his romantic spirit of adventure. He went through with his romance, it must be owned, in a more than comic heroism. It came to an end at last, however, when he reached on the previous evening the " Aberduly Arms," a huge and preposterous modern erection on the seashore at Aberduly, once one of the shyest watering-places on the Welsh coast. At the " Aberduly Arms," you may find, if you will, the famous, the lyrical and loquacious, Mr. John Jones, proprietor of the establishment, formerly, as everyone knows, the leading tenor in the " Imperial English Comic Opera Company," in which, as Momus could not fail to remember, Miss Marie Barrone had made her debut in the provinces some years before the time of our story.

The first thing that caught Momus's eye, in fact, in the entrance-hall of the hotel, was a great red-and-blue placard, announcing " A Grand Concert," in the Aberduly Assembly Rooms, on the following evening. On this poster, the name of the distinguished Mr. John Jones figured conspicuously in large

A ROMANCE OF THREE FOOLS 69

red capitals. In still larger blue letters, betokening an even greater musical fame, was blazoned forth a name that gave Momus a thrill, — the name of Miss Marie Barrone : The Celebrated London Soprano, from the Folly Theatre! !

It was a copy of this poster which Momus, recollecting himself as he sipped his punch, while Sinister and Tom Pavier looked on inquiringly, drew from his pocket. As he unfolded it, he smiled ruefully.

" I've got a little tale to tell you ! " he said ; " but first of all I want you to drink the health of "

" Mrs. Momus !" promptly interrupted Tom Pavier, rising and preparing to drink the toast with unselfish fervour.

But Momus shook his head, and smiled a significant smile.

" Lady Merthen ! " said Sinister, then, in his turn, with an accent of inevitable conviction, as he caught up his glass.

" No ! " said Momus with a grimace, " Mrs. John Jones ! "

Ernest Rhys.

IN SCITUATE

NDER a hill in Scituate, Where sleep four hundred men of Kent, My friend one bobolincolned June Set up his rooftree of content.

Content for not too long, of course Since painter's eye makes rover's heart, And the next turning of the road May cheapen the last touch of art.

Yet also, since the world is wide, And noon's face never twice the same, Why not sit down and let the sun, That artist careless of his fame,

Exhibit to our eyes, offhand,

As mood may dictate and time serve,

His precious perishable scraps

Of fleeting colour, melting curve ?

And while he shifts them all too soon, Make vivid note of this and that, Careful of nothing but to keep The beauties we most marvel at.

Selective merely, bent to save The sheer delirium of the eye, Which best may solace or rejoice Some fellow-rover by and by ;

IN SCITUATE 7i

That stumbling on it, he exclaim,

" What mounting sea-smoke ! What a blue ! "

And at the glory we beheld,

His smouldering joy may kindle too.

Merely selective ? Bring me back, Verbatim from the lecture hall, Your notes of So-and-so's discourse ; The gist and substance are not all.

The unconscious hand betrays to me What listener it was took heed, Eager or slovenly or prim ; A written character indeed !

Much more in painting ; every stroke That weaves the very sunset's ply, Luminous, palpitant, reveals How throbbed the heart behind the eye ;

How hand was but the cunning dwarf Of spirit, his triumphant lord Marching in Nature's pageantry, Elated in the vast accord.

Art is a rubric for the soul,

Man's comment on the book of earth,

The little human summary

Which gives that common volume worth.

And coming on some painter's work, — His marginal remarks, as 'twere, — You cry not only, " What a blue ! " But, " What a human heart beat here ! "

Here is the little sloping field, Where billow upon billow rolls The sea of daisies in the sun, When June brings back the orioles.

72 THE SAVOY

All summer here the crooning winds Are cradled in the rocking dunes, Till they, full height and burly grown. Go seaward and forget their croons.

And out of the Canadian north Comes winter like a huge gray gnome, To blanket the red dunes with snow And muffle the green sea with foam.

I could sit here all day and watch The seas at battle smoke and wade, And in the cold night wake to hear The booming of their cannonade.

Then smiling turn to sleep and say, " In vain dark's banners are unfurled ; That ceaseless roll is God's tattoo Upon the round drum of the world."

And waking find without surprise

The first sun in a week of storm.

The southward eaves begin to drip,

And the faint Marshfield hills look warm ;

The brushwood all a purple mist ; The blue sea creaming on the shore ; As if the year in his last days Had not a sorrow to deplore.

Then evening by the fire of logs,

With some old song or some new book ;

Our Lady Nicotine to share

Our single bliss ; while seaward, look, —

Orion mounting peaceful guard

Over our brother's new-made tent,

Beside a hill in Scituate

Where sleep so sound those men of Kent.

Bliss Carman.

AT THE ALHAMBRA

IMPRESSIONS AND SENSATIONS

I

T the Alhambra I can never sit anywhere but in the front row of the stalls. As a point of view, the point of view considered in the abstract, I admit that the position has its disadvantages. Certainly, the most magical glimpse I ever caught of an Alhambra ballet was from the road in front, from the other side of the road, one night when two doors were suddenly flung open just as I was passing. In the moment's interval before the doors closed again, I saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the heads of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the whole stage, its brilliant crowd drawn up in the last pose, just as the curtain was beginning to descend. It stamped itself in my brain, an impression caught just at the perfect moment, by some rare felicity of chance. But that is not an impres- sion that can be repeated. In the general way I prefer to see my illusions very clearly, recognizing them as illusions, and yet, to my own perverse and decadent way of thinking, losing none of their charm. I have been reproved, before now, for singing " the charm of rouge on fragile cheeks," but it is a charm that I fully appreciate. Maquillage, to be attractive, must of course be unnecessary. As a disguise for age or misfortune, it has no interest for me. But, of all places, on the stage, and of all people, on the cheeks of young people : there, it seems to me that make-up is intensely fascinating, and its recogni- tion is of the essence of my delight in a stage performance. I do not for a moment want really to believe in what I see before me ; to believe that those wigs are hair, that grease-paint a blush ; any more than I want really to believe that the actor whom I have just been shaking hands with has turned into a real live emperor since I left him. I know that a delightful imposition is being practised upon me ; that I am to see fairyland for a while ; and to me all that glitters shall be gold. But I would have no pretence of reality : I do not, for my part, find that the discovery of a stage-trick lessens my

76 THE SAVOY

appreciation of what that trick effects. There is this charming person, for instance, at the Alhambra : in the street she is handsome rather than pretty ; on the stage she is pretty rather than handsome. I know exactly how she will look in her different wigs, exactly what her make-up will bring out in her and conceal ; I can allow, when I see her on the stage, for every hair's- breadth of change : yet does my knowledge of all this interfere with my sensation of pleasure as I see her dancing on the other side of the footlights ? Quite the contrary ; and I will go further, and admit that there is a special charm to me in a yet nearer view of these beautiful illusions. That is why I like to alternate the point of view of the front row of the stalls with the point of view of behind the scenes.

There, one sees one's illusions in the making ; but how exquisite in their frank artificiality, are these painted faces, all these tawdry ornaments, decora- tions, which are as yet only "properties" ! I have never been disappointed, as so many are disappointed, by what there is to be seen in that debatable land " behind the scenes." For one thing, I never expected to find an Arabian Nights' Entertainment of delightful splendour and delightful wickedness, and so I was never chagrined at not finding it. The coulisses of the Alhambra are, in themselves, quite prosaic. They form, of course, the three sides of a square, the outer rim ; the fourth side being the footlights. On the prompt side is the stage-manager's chair, the row of brass handles which regulate the lights and ring down the curtain, and the little mirror, with a ledge running along below it, which (with the addition of a movable screen) constitute the dressing- room accommodation of the " turns " who have to make a change of costume. Layer after layer of scenery is piled up against the wall at the side, and nearly the whole time there is a bustling of scene-shifters shoving along some great tottering framework, of which one sees only the canvas back and the narrow rim of wood. Turn to the right, pass under that archway, and the stone stair- case going down leads to the canteen ; that going up leads to the dressing- rooms of the corps de ballet. Another staircase on the other side of the stage leads to the dressing-rooms of the principals, the extra ladies, and the children. Downstairs are some more dressing-rooms for the supers and the male " turns." The back of the stage is merely a passage : it is occasionally a refuge from the stampede of scenery in a quick change.

It is ten minutes before the ballet is to commence. Some clowning comic people are doing their show in front of a drop-scene ; behind, on the vacant space in the middle of the stage, the ladies of the ballet are beginning to assemble. They come down in twos and threes, tying a few final bows,

AT THE ALHAMBRA 77

buttoning a few overlooked buttons, drawing on their gloves, adjusting one another's coats and wigs. As I shake hands with one after another, my hands get quite white and rough with the chalk-powder they have been rubbing over their skin. Is not even this a charming sensation, a sensation in which one seems actually to partake of the beautiful artificiality of the place? All around me are the young faces that I know so well, both as they are and as the footlights show them. Now I see them in all the undisguise of make-up : the exact line of red paint along the lips, every shading of black under the eyes, the pink of the ears and cheeks, and just where it ends under the chin and along the rim of throat. In a plain girl make-up only seems to intensify her plainness ; for make-up does but give colour and piquancy to what is already in a face, it adds nothing new. But in a pretty girl how exquisitely becoming all this is, what a new kind of exciting savour it gives to her real charm ! It has, to the remnant of Puritan conscience or consciousness that is the heritage of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness, the delight of forbidden fruit. The very phrase, painted women, has come to have an association of sin ; and to have put paint on her checks, though for the innocent necessities of her pro- fession, gives to a woman a sort of symbolic corruption. At once she seems to typify the sorceries and entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex —

" Femina dulce malum, pariter favus atque venerium " —

with all that is most subtle, and least like nature, in her power to charm. Then there is the indiscretion of the costumes, meant to appeal to the senses, and now thronging one with the unconcern of long use ; these girls travestied as boys, so boyish sometimes, in their slim youth ; the feminine contours now escaping, now accentuated. All are jumbled together, in a brilliant confusion ; the hot faces, the shirt-sleeves of scene-shifters, striking rapidly through a group of princes, peasants, and fairies. In a corner some of the children are doing a dance ; now and again an older girl, in a sudden access of gaiety, will try a few whimsical steps ; there is a chatter of conversation, a coming and going ; some one is hunting everywhere for a missing " property " ; some one else has lost a shoe, or a glove, or is calling for a pin to repair the loss of a button. And now three girls, from opposite directions, will make a simultaneous rush at the stage-manager. " Mr. Forde, I can't get on my wig ! " " Please, Mr. Forde, may I have a sheet of notepaper?" "Oh, Mr. Forde,

may Miss stay off? she has such a bad headache she can hardly stand."

Meanwhile, the overture has commenced ; and now a warning clap is heard,

78 THE SAVOY

and all but those who appear in the first scene retreat hurriedly to the wings. The curtain is about to rise on the ballet.

To watch a ballet from the wings is to lose all sense of proportion, all knowledge of the piece as a whole ; but, in return, it is fruitful in happy accidents, in momentary points of view, in chance felicities of light and shade and movement. It is almost to be in the performance oneself, and yet passive, a spectator, with the leisure to look about one. You see the reverse of the picture : the girls at the back lounging against the set scenes, turning to talk with someone at the side ; you see how lazily the lazy girls are moving, and how mechanical and irregular are the motions that flow into rhythm when seen from the front. Now one is in the centre of a jostling crowd, hurrying past one on to the stage ; now the same crowd returns, charging at full speed between the scenery, everyone trying to reach the dressing-room stairs first. And there is the constant shifting of scenery, from which one has a series of escapes, as it bears down unexpectedly, in some new direction. The ballet, half seen in the centre of the stage, seen in sections, has, in the glimpses that can be caught of it, a contradictory appearance of mere nature and of absolute unreality. And beyond the footlights, on the other side of the orchestra, one can see the boxes near the stalls, the men standing by the bar, an angle cut sharply off from the stalls, with the light full on the faces, the intent eyes, the gray smoke curling up from the cigarettes. It is all a bewilderment ; but to me, certainly, a bewilderment that is always delightful.

II

To the amateur of what is more artificial in the art of illusion, there is nothing so interesting as a stage rehearsal, and there is no stage rehearsal so interesting as the rehearsal of a ballet. Coming suddenly out of the clear cold of a winter morning into the comparative warmth of the dimly-lighted Alhambra (it must have been three years ago, now, I think), I found that one of the rehearsals of a ballet named after " Aladdin " was about to begin ; and, standing at the far end of the hall, I saw the stage gradually filling with half-dressed figures, a few men in overcoats moving rapidly to and fro in their midst. Lit only by a T-light, these odd, disconcerting figures strolled about the stage, some arm in arm, some busily knitting ; they formed into groups of twos and threes and half dozens, from which came the sound of a pleasant chatter, a brisk feminine laughter. I found my way between the lonely-looking stalls, disturbing the housekeeper at her work, and mounted to

AT THE ALII AM BRA 79

the stage. The stalls were covered in their white sheeting ; white sheeting hung in long strips from boxes and balcony ; here and there a black coat and hat stood out from the dingy monotony of white, or a figure flitted rapidly, a sudden silhouette, against the light of a window high up in the gallery. The T-light flickered unsteadily ; a little chill light found its way through roof and windows, intensifying, by even so faint a suggestion of the outside world, all that curious unreality which is never so unreal as at the prosaic moments of a rehearsal.

I had the honour to know a good many ladies of the ballet, and there was no little news, of public and private interest, to be communicated and discussed. Thus I gathered that no one knew anything about the plot of the ballet which was being rehearsed, and that many were uncertain whether it was their fate to be a boy or a girl ; that this one was to be a juggler, though she knew not how to juggle ; and that one a fisher-boy, and that other a fisher-girl ; and that Miss A had been put in a new place, and was disgusted ; and Miss B, having also been put in a new place, was delighted ; together with much information in no way bearing on the subject of the ballet. All at once the stage-manager clapped his hands ; the ladies rushed to their places ; I retreated to a corner of the stage, behind the piano, at which sat a pianist and a violinist ; and the ballet-master came forward, staff in hand, and took up his position on a large square piece of board, which had been provided for the protection of " the boards " (technically speaking) against the incessant thump-thump of that formidable staff as it pounds away in time with the music. The rehearsal had begun.

Rehearsal costume, to the casual outside spectator, is rather curious. There is a bodice, which may be of any kind ; there is a short petticoat, generally of white, with discreet linen drawers to match ; the stockings are for the most part black. But a practising dress leaves room, in its many exceptions, for every variety of individual taste. A lively fancy sometimes expends itself on something wonderful in stockings, wonderful coloured things, clocked and patterned. Then there are petticoats plain and orna- mented, limp and starched, setting tightly and flapping loosely ; petticoats with frillings and edgings, petticoats of blue, of pink, of salmon colour, of bright red. But it is the bodice that gives most scope for the decorative instinct. Many have evidently been designed for the occasion ; they are elaborately elegant, showy even. There are prints and stuffs and fancy arrangements in the way of blouses and jerseys and zouaves and Swiss bodices ; with white shawls and outdoor jackets for the cold, and ribbons and

So THE SAVOY

bright ties for show. The walking-ladies are in their walking-dresses ; and it is with the oddest effect of contrast that they mingle, marching sedately, in their hats and cloaks, with these skipping figures in the undress of the dancing-school. Those who are not wanted cluster together at the sides, sitting on any available seats and benches, or squatting on the floor ; or they make a dash to the dressing-rooms upstairs or to the canteen downstairs. One industrious lady has brought her knitting. It is stowed away for safety in some unused nook of the piano, which is rattling away by my side ; presently it is hunted out, and I see her absorbed in the attempt to knit without looking at the stitches. Another has brought woolwork, which is getting almost too big to bring ; several have brought books : the works of Miss Braddon, penny novelettes, and, yes, some one has actually brought the " Story of an African Farm." Occasionally a stage-carpenter or scene-shifter or limelight-man passes in the background ; some of the new scenery is lying about, very Chinese in its brilliant red and blue lattice-work. And all the while the whole centre of the stage is in movement ; the lines and circles cross and curve, hands lifted, feet lifted ; and all the while, in time with the music, the ballet-master pounds away with his stout staff, already the worse for wear, and shouts, in every language but English, orders which it is a' little difficult to follow.

As the bright, trickling music is beaten out on the perfunctory piano and violin, the composer himself appears, a keen profile rising sharply out of a mountainous furred overcoat. It was just then that the ballet-master had left his place, and was tripping lightly round the stage, taking the place of the absent premiere danseuse. It was only for a moment ; then, after a rush at some misbehaving lady, a tempest of Italian, a growl of good-humoured fury, he was back on his board, and the staff pounded away once more. The coryphees, holding bent canes in their hands, turned and twirled in the middle of the stage ; the corps de ballet, the children, the extra ladies, formed around them, a semicircle first, then a racing circle ; they passed, re-passed, dissolved, re- formed, bewilderingly ; with disconcerting rushes and dashes ; turning upon themselves, turning round one another, advancing and retreating, in waves of movement, as the music scattered itself in waves of sound. Aimless, unintelligible it looked, this tripping, posturing crowd of oddly-dressed figures ; these bright outdoor faces looked strange in a place where I was so used to see rouged cheeks and lips, powdered chins, painted eye-lashes, yellow wigs. In this fantastic return to nature I found the last charm of the artificial.

AT THE A LH AM BR A 81

III

The front row of the stalls, on a first night, has a character of its own. It is entirely filled by men, and the men who fill it have not come simply from an abstract aesthetic interest in the ballet. They have friends on the other side of the footlights, and their friends on the other side of the footlights will look down, the moment they come on the stage, to see who are in the front row, and who are standing by the bar on either side. The standing- room by the bar is the resource of the first-nighter with friends who cannot get a seat in the front row. On such a night the air is electrical. A running fire of glances crosses and re-crosses, above the indifferent, accustomed heads of the gentlemen of the orchestra ; whom it amuses, none the less, to intercept an occasional smile, to trace it home. On the faces of the men in the front row, what difference in expression ! Here is the eager, undisguised enthusiasm of the novice, all eyes, and all eyes on one ; here is the wary, practised atten- tion of the man who has seen many first nights, and whose scarcely perceptible smile reveals nothing, compromises nobody, rests on all. And there is the shy, self-conscious air of embarrassed absorption, typical of that queer type, the friend who is not a friend of the ballet, and who shrinks somewhat pain- fully into his seat, as the dancers advance, retreat, turn, and turn again.

Let me recall a first night that I still, I suppose, remember : the first night of" Aladdin." I have had to miss the dress rehearsal, so I am in all the freshness of curiosity as to the dresses, the effects, the general aspect of things. I have been to so many undress rehearsals that I know already most of the music by heart. I know all the dances, I know all the movements of masses. But the ballet, how that will look ; but my friends, how they will look ; it is these things that are the serious, the important things. And now the baton rises, and the drip, drip of the trickling music dances among the fiddles before the curtain has gone up on the fisherman's hut, and those dancing feet for which I am waiting. Already I see how some of my friends are going to look ; and I remember now the musical phrase which I came to associate with that fisher dress, the passing of those slim figures. The Princess flashes upon us in a vision, twining mysteriously in what was then the fashion of the moment, the serpentine dance ; and this dance transforms, by what she adds and by what she omits, a series of decorative poses into a real dance, for it is the incomparable Legnani. Then the fisherman's hut, and all mortal things, vanish suddenly ; and Aladdin comes down into a vast cave of

82 THE SAVOY

livid green, set with stalactites, and peopled with brown demons, winged and crowned with fire ; reminding one of the scene where Orfeo, in the opera of Gluck, goes down into hell. Robed in white, the spirit of the Lamp leads on the coryphees, her genii ; and they are here, they run forward, they dance in lines and circles, creatures with bat-like wings of pale green, shading into a green so dark as to be almost black. The Princess enters : it is " a wave of the sea " that dances ! And then, the scenery turning suddenly over and round, the cave suddenly changes into a palace. There is a dancing march, led by the children, with their toppling helmets, and soon, with banners, fans, gilt staves, a dancing crowd moves and circles, in beautiful white and gold, in purple and yellow, in terra-cotta, in robes that flower into chrysanthemums, and with bent garlands of leaves. I search through this bewildering crowd, finding and losing, losing and finding, the faces for which I search. The Princess is borne on in a palanquin ; she de- scends, runs forward (Simeon Solomon's " Lady in a Chinese Dress "), and in the quaintest little costume, a costume of a willow-pattern plate, does the quaintest little trotting and tripping dance, in what might be the Chinese manner. There is another transformation : a demon forest, with wickedly tangled trees, horrible creatures of the woods, like human artichokes, shimmer- ing green human bats, delightful demons. The Princess, the Magician, Aladdin, meet : the Magician has the enchantment of his art, the Princess the enchantment of her beauty, Aladdin only the enchantment of his love. Spells are woven and broken, to bewitching motion : it is the triumph of love and beauty. There is another transformation : the diamond garden, with its flowers that are jewels, its living flowers. Colours race past, butterflies in pale blue, curious morbid blues, drowsy browns and pale greens, more white and gold, a strange note of abrupt black. The crystal curtain, a veil of diamonds, falls, dividing the stage, a dancing crowd before it and behind it, a rain of crystals around. An electric angel has an apotheosis ; and as the curtain falls upon the last grouping, I try, vainly, to see everyone at once, everyone whom I want to see. The whole front row applauds violently ; and, if one observed closely, it would be seen that every man, as he applauds, is looking in a different direction.

IV Why is it that one can see a ballet fifty times, always with the same sense of pleasure, while the most absorbing play becomes a little tedious after the third

AT THE ALU AMUR A 83

time of seeing ? For one thing, because the difference between seeing a play and seeing a ballet is just the difference between reading a book and looking at a picture. One returns to a picture as one returns to nature, for a delight which, being purely of the senses, never tires, never distresses, never varies. To read a book, even for the first time, requires a certain effort. The book must indeed be exceptional that can be read three or four times ; and no book ever was written that could be read three or four times in succession. A ballet is simply a picture in movement. It is a picture where the imitation of nature is given by nature itself; where the figures of the composition are real, and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have a delightful, deliberate air of unreality. It is a picture where the colours change, recombine, before one's eyes ; where the out- lines melt into one another, emerge, and are again lost, in the kaleidoscopic movement of the dance. Here we need tease ourselves with no philosophies, need endeavour to read none of the riddles of existence ; may indeed give thanks to be spared for one hour the imbecility of human speech. After the tedium of the theatre, where we are called on to interest ourselves in the improbable fortunes of uninteresting people, how welcome is the relief of a spectacle which professes to be no more than merely beautiful ; which gives us, in accomplished dancing, the most beautiful sight that we can see ; which provides, in short, the one escape into fairy-land which is permitted by that tyranny of the real which is the worst tyranny of modern life.

And then there is another reason why one can see a ballet fifty times, a reason which is not in the least an aesthetic one, but on the contrary very human. I once took a well-known writer, who is one of the most remarkable women of our time, to see a ballet. She had never seen one, and I was delighted with her intense absorption in what was passing before her eyes. At last I said something about the beauty of a certain line of dancers, some effect of colour and order. She turned on me a half-laughing face : " But it is the people I am looking at," she said, " not the artistic effect ! " Since then I have had the courage to admit that with me too it is the people, and not only the artistic effect, that I like to look at.

Arthur Symons.

EASTERN DANCERS

YES ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what pas- sionate spirits aflaming with fire Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens that

glimmer around them in fountains of light? O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music that cleaveth the stars like a wail of desire, And beautiful dancers with Houri-like faces bewitch the voluptuous watches of Night.

The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter and die in the maze of their

gem-tangled hair, And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies of lips that are

opiate-sweet, Their glittering garments of purple are burning like tremulous dawns in the

quivering air, And exquisite, subtle and slow are the tinkle and tread of their rhythmical

slumber-soft feet.

Now silent, now singing and swaying and swinging, like blossoms that bend

to the breezes or showers, Now wantonly winding, they flash, now they falter, and lingering languish in

radiant choir, Their jewel-bright arms and warm, wavering, lily-long fingers enchant thro'

the summer-swift hours, Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, their passionate spirits

aflaming with fire.

Sarojim Chattopadhyay.

A LITERARY CAUSERIE

ON EDMOND DE GONCOURT

Y first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May, 1892. I remember my immense curiosity about that " House Beau- tiful," at Autcuil, of which I had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual loosely-knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen ; for he had at once the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle ; a general air of dignified collectedness ; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of having said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum, I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little, unconscious murmurs : " Quel gout ; quel gout ! " These rose-coloured rooms, with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous " Plongeuses" !), always in perfect condition (" Je cherche le beau ") ; albums had been made for him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his eighteenth century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one (a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought ; he had been sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.

When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of Flaubert,

86 THE SAVOY

Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate ; and I remember his speak- ing (with a parenthetic disdain of the " brouillard scandinave," in which it seemed to him that France was trying to envelop herself ; at the best it would be but " un mauvais brouillard ") of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to represent the only thing worth representing, " la vie vecue, la vraie verite." As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing, " l'optique " : out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of expressing it. " There is a true thing I have said in my journal," he went on. " The thing is, to find a lorgnette " (and he put up his hands to his eyes, adjusting them care- fully), " through which to see things. My brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from us."

How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most essen- tial in the work of the Goncourts ! It is a new way of seeing, literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented ; and it is in the invention of this that they have invented that "new language" of which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly, complained. You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in " Charles Demailly " : "I am a man for whom the visible world exists." Well, that is true, also, of the Goncourts ; but in a different way. As I once wrote, and I cannot improve upon what I said then : " The Goncourts' vision of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of things ; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpen- ing the acuteness of every sensation ; or somewhat such a sense as one derives from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of time, the notion of space. Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of their work, with those of Theophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or, rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you the things that Gautier leaves out ; they find new, fantastic, points of view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute, distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see them ; seeing them, indeed, always very consciously, with a deliberate attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in

./ LITERARY CAUSERIE 87

which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from no excess ; slang, neologism, archaism, forced construction, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly ex- pressive, super-subtle in expression ; and they prefer indeed a certain per- versity in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct."

" The delicacies of fine literature," that phrase of Pater always comes into my mind when I think of the Goncourts ; and indeed Pater seems to me the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their books, to " Madame Gcrvaisais," to "L' Art du XVI IP Si tele," to "Cherie"; with a passing objection to what he called the " immodesty" of this last book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that "that was how it seemed to him a book should be written." I repeated this once to Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like ; and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he instinctively realized would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less feverish in his variations of cadence ; and naturally so, for he dealt with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth. Put with both there was that passionately intent pre-occupation with "the delicacies of fine literature " ; both achieved a style of the most personal sincerity : " tout grand ecrivain de tout les temps," said Goncourt, " ne se reconnait absolument qu'a cela, e'est qu'il a unc langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est signee, pour Ie lecteur lettrc, comme si son nom etait au bas de cette page, de cette ligne " : and this style, in both, was accused, by the " literary " criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial, andtherefore reprehensible.

I have no intention, now, of discussing the place of the Goncourts in literature, or of analyzing the various characteristics of their work. That I shall hope to do some other time, in a more elaborate study than I can write just at present. Let me state only my own conviction, that their work is more worthy of the attention of those who care, not merely for the " delicacies," but for all the subtler qualities, of fine literature, than that of any contemporary writer of French prose.

Arthur Symons.

88 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS

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THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS 89

Nocturnes and Pastorals. Poems by A. Bernard

MlALL.

Four Hundred copies on Large Post 8vo deckle-edged paper, bound in dark green cloth, at Five Shillings net per copy. Printed at the Chiswick Press.

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1

90 THE SAVOY— ADVERTISEMENTS

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THE SA VO Y—A D VER TI SEME NTS

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