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Title: Trivia

Author: Logan Pearsall Smith

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TRIVIA

By

Logan Pearsall Smith

1917

Bibliographical Note

Some of these pieces were privately printed at the Chiswick

Press in 1902. Others have appeared in the “New Statesman” and

“The New Republic,” and are here reprinted with the Editors’

permission.
Preface
“You must beware of thinking too much about Style,” said my

kindly adviser, “or you will become like those fastidious people

who polish and polish until there is nothing left.”

“Then there really are such people?” I asked, lost in the thought

of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed

lady could give me no precise information about them.

I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one

day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.

The Author

These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a

large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the

Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked

Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and

the long-eared Chimpanzee.

List of Contents
BOOK I

Preface

The Author

Happiness

To-day

The Afternoon Post

The Busy Bees

The Wheat

The Coming of Fate

My Speech

Stonehenge
The Stars

Silvia Doria

Bligh House

In Church

Parsons

The Sound of a Voice

What Happens

A Precaution

The Great Work

My Mission

The Birds
High Life

Empty Shells

Dissatisfaction

A Fancy

They

In the Pulpit

Human Ends

Lord Arden

The Starry Heaven

My Map
The Snob

Companions

Edification

The Rose

The Vicar of Lynch

Tu Quoque Fontium

The Spider
BOOK II
L’Oiseau Bleu

At the Bank

Mammon

I See the World

Social Success Apotheosis

The Spring in London

Fashion Plates

Mental Vice

The Organ of Life

Humiliation
Green Ivory

In the Park

The Correct

“Where Do I Come In?”

Microbes

The Quest

The Kaleidoscope

Oxford Street

Beauty

The Power of Words

Self-Analysis

The Voice of the World

And Anyhow

Drawbacks

Talk

The Church of England

Misgiving

Sanctuaries

Symptoms

Shadowed

The Incredible
Terror

Pathos

Inconstancy

The Poplar

On the Doorstep Old Clothes

Youth

Consolation

Sir Eustace Carr

The Lord Mayor

The Burden
 Under an Umbrella

TRIVIA
BOOK I
_How blest my lot, in these sweet fields assign’d Where Peace

and Leisure soothe the tuneful mind._

SCOTT, of Amwell, Moral Eclogues (1773)

Happiness

Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine,

small boats that sail before the wind—all these create in me

the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a

piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have

imagined), in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but

here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered

valley. Certain grassy lanes seem to lead between the meadows

thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.

To-Day

I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality,

into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom—in fact

into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet

unexplained Universe.

Then I, who came out of Eternity and seem to be on my way

thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read,

I pottered, I talked, and took exercise; and I sat punctually

down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at stated intervals.

The Afternoon Post

The village Post Office, with its clock and letter-box, its

postmistress lost in tales of love-lorn Dukes and coroneted woe,

and the sallow-faced grocer watching from his window opposite,

is the scene of a daily crisis in my life, when every afternoon

I walk there through the country lanes and ask that well-read

young lady for my letters. I always expect good news and

cheques; and then, of course, there is the magical Fortune which

is coming, and word of it may reach me any day. What it is, this

strange Felicity, or whence it shall come, I have no notion; but

I hurry down in the morning to find the news on the breakfast

table, open telegrams in delighted panic, and say to myself

“Here it is!” when at night I hear wheels approaching along the

road. So, happy in the hope of Happiness, and not greatly

concerned with any other interest or ambition, I live on in my

quiet, ordered house; and so I shall live perhaps until the end.

Is it, indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for

which I am waiting? I do not know.

The Busy Bees

Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near

the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those

honey-merchants—sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with

their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the

late sun to their night-long labours-I have sought instruction

from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old

industrious lesson.

And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and

who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian

insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of

Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless

factories, might they not learn at last—might I not finally

teach them—a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the

shining hour?

The Wheat

The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the

fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest

in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.

Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to

make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one

day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees,

I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I

bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky;

how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the

English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the

Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from

the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so

reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the

cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how

for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the

hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the

processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great

barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their

wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at

harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or

under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern

landscape, the antique, passionate, Biblical beauty of the

South!

The Coming of Fate

When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had

their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments

that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that

made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and

fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread

that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder;

more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me

with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I
did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the

threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not

held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim

as a into the waste realms of non-existence.

So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm

of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why,

to-day, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing

up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.

My Speech

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I began—The Vicar was in the chair;

Mrs. La Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the

little schoolroom, with its maps and large Scripture prints,

its blackboard with the day’s sums still visible on it, were

assembled the labourers of the village, the old family coachman

and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners and

boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few

phrases, I had composed a speech which I delivered with a

spirit and eloquence surprising even to myself, and which was

now enthusiastically received. The Vicar cried “Hear, Hear!”,

the Vicar’s wife pounded her umbrella with such emphasis, and

the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was warmed. I

began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the

audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well

to the Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express

my real ideas and hopes for the Commonwealth.

Brushing therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my

safe principles, I began to refashion and new-model the State.

Most existing institutions were soon abolished; and then, on

their ruins, I proceeded to build up the bright walls and

palaces of the City within me—the City I had read of in Plato.

With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with eloquence, I

described it all—the Warriors, that race of golden youth bred

from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those

philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest

and most extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual

greatness, possessed the truest fortitude, looking down indeed

with a kind of disregard on human life and death. And then,

declaring that the pattern of this City was laid up in Heaven, I

sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending little

audience.

And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on

walls and the doors of barns, among advertisements of sales, or

regulations about birds’ eggs or the movements of swine, little

weather-beaten, old-looking notices on which it was stated that

I would “address the meeting,” I remembered how the walls and

towers of the City I had built up in that little schoolroom had

shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar’s party.

Stonehenge

They sit there forever on the dim horizon of my mind, that

Stonehenge circle of elderly disapproving Faces—Faces of the

Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.

In the bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my

dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For

nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of

approval that ring of bleak and contemptuous Faces.

The Stars

Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and

rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back

into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open;

the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the

dispersing clouds.

I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the

night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by

them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy

tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of

the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own

footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one

of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was

something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.

Silvia Doria

Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a

country of parks and beeches, with views of the far-off sea. I

remember in one of my rides coming on the place which was the

scene of the pretty, old-fashioned story of Silvia Doria.

Through the gates, with fine gate-posts, on which heraldic

beasts, fierce and fastidious, were upholding coroneted shields,

I could see, at the end of the avenue, the fa�ade of the House,

with its stone pilasters, and its balustrade on the steep roof.

More than one hundred years ago, in that Park, with its

Italianized house, and level gardens adorned with statues and

garden temples, there lived, they say, an old Lord with his two

handsome sons. The old Lord had never ceased mourning for his

Lady, though she had died a good many years before; there were

no neighbours he visited, and few strangers came inside the

great Park walls. One day in Spring, however, just when the

apple trees had burst into blossom, the gilded gates were thrown

open, and a London chariot with prancing horses drove up the

Avenue. And in the chariot, smiling and gay, and indeed very

beautiful in her dress of yellow silk, and her great Spanish hat

with drooping feathers, sat Silvia Doria, come on a visit to her

cousin, the old Lord.

It was her father who had sent her—that he might be more free,

some said, to pursue his own wicked courses—while others

declared that he intended her to marry the old Lord’s eldest

son.

In any case, Silvia Doria came like the Spring, like the

sunlight, into the lonely place. Even the old Lord felt himself

curiously happy when he heard her voice singing about the house;

as for Henry and Francis, it was heaven for them just to walk by

her side down the garden alleys.

And Silvia Doria, though hitherto she had been but cold toward

the London gallants who had courted her, found, little by

little, that her heart was not untouched.

But, in spite of her father, and her own girlish love of gold

and rank, it was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old

Lord, but for Francis, the younger son. Did Francis know of

this? They were secretly lovers, the old scandal reported; and

the scandal, it may be, had reached her father’s ears.

For one day a coach with foaming horses, and the wicked face of

an old man at its window, galloped up the avenue; and soon

afterwards, when the coach drove away, Silvia Doria was sitting

by the old man’s side, sobbing bitterly.

And after she had gone, a long time, many of the old, last-century

years, went by without any change. And then Henry, the eldest son,

was killed in hunting; and the old Lord dying a few years later,

the titles and the great house and all the land and gold came to

Francis, the younger son. But after his father’s death he was but

seldom there; having, as it seemed, no love for the place, and

living for the most part abroad and alone, for he never married.

And again, many years went by. The trees grew taller and darker

about the house; the yew hedges unclipt now, hung their branches

over the moss-grown paths; ivy almost smothered the statues; and

the plaster fell away in great patches from the discoloured

garden temples.

But at last one day a chariot drove up to the gates; a footman

pulled at the crazy bell, telling the gate-keeper that his

mistress wished to visit the Park. So the gates creaked open,

the chariot glittered up the avenue to the deserted place; and a

lady stepped out, went into the garden, and walked among its

moss-grown paths and statues. As the chariot drove out again,

“Tell your Lord,” the lady said, smiling, to the lodge-keeper,

“that Silvia Doria came back.”

Bligh House

To the West, in riding past the walls of Bligh, I remembered an

incident in the well-known siege of that house, during the Civil

Wars: How, among Waller’s invading Roundhead troops, there

happened to be a young scholar, a poet and lover of the Muses,

fighting for the cause, as he thought, of ancient Freedom, who,

one day, when the siege was being more hotly urged, pressing

forward and climbing a wall, suddenly found himself in a quiet

old garden by the house. And here, for a time forgetting, as it

would seem, the battle, and heedless of the bullets that now and

then flew past him like peevish wasps, the young Officer stayed,

gathering roses—old-fashioned damask roses, streaked with red

and white—which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged

with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however,

struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own

party. A few of the young Officer’s verses, written in the

stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have

been preserved. The lady’s portrait hangs in the white drawing

room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and

drop-pearls, and a dress of amber-coloured silk.

In Church

“For the Pen,” said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that

followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert

or postpone the solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it

seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that “the Pen is

mightier than the Sword.”

Parsons

All the same I like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe,

and believe in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I

am told, believe in Angels—that there are Angels who guide our

footsteps, and flit to and fro unseen on errands in the air

about us.

The Sound of a Voice

As the thoughtful Baronet talked, as his voice went on sounding

in my ears, all the light of desire, and of the sun, faded from

the Earth; I saw the vast landscape of the world dim, as in an

eclipse; its populations eating their bread with tears, its rich

men sitting listless in their palaces, and aged Kings crying

“Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!” lugubriously from their

thrones.

What Happens

“Yes,” said Sir Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, “it

certainly does seem strange; but the novelist was right. Such

things do happen.”

“But my dear Sir,” I burst out, in the rudest manner, “think

what life is—just think what really happens! Why people

suddenly swell up and turn dark purple; they hang themselves on

meat-hooks; they are drowned in horse-ponds, are run over by

butchers’ carts, and are burnt alive and cooked like mutton

chops!”

A Precaution

The folio gave at length philosophic consolations for all

the ills and misfortunes said by the author to be inseparable

from human existence—Poverty, Shipwreck, Plague, Love-Deceptions,

and Inundations. Against these antique Disasters I armed my soul;

and I thought it as well to prepare myself against another

inevitable ancient calamity called “Cornutation,” or by other

less learned names. How Philosophy taught that after all it was

but a pain founded on conceit, a blow that hurt not; the reply

of the Cynic philosopher to one who reproached him, “Is it my

fault or hers?”; how Nevisanus advises the sufferer to ask

himself if he have not offended; Jerome declares it impossible

to prevent; how few or none are safe, and the inhabitants of

some countries, especially parts of Africa, consider it the

usual and natural thing; How Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Agamemnon,

Menelaus, Marcus Aurelius, and many other great Kings and Princes

had all worn Actaeon’s badge; and how Philip turned it to a jest,

Pertinax the Emperor made no reckoning of it; Erasmus declared it

was best winked at, there being no remedy but patience, _Dies

dolorem minuit_; Time, Age must mend it; and how according to

the best authorities, bars, bolts, oaken doors, and towers of

brass, are all in vain. “She is a woman,” as the old Pedant

wrote to a fellow Philosopher….

The Great Work

Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library,

with flies droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my

thoughts what should be the subject of my great Work. Should I

complain against the mutability of Fortune, and impugn Fate and

the Constellations; or should I reprehend the never-satisfied

heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts between the

unsullied snow of mountains, the serene shining of stars, and

our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I

confine myself to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying “Fie!”

on the Age with Hamlet, sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and

riddling through and through its comfortable Optimisms?

Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad

brains about Life—the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped

Planet?

My Mission

But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I

read about the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions. its

Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go

out and comfort it, to still its cries, and speak earnest words

of Consolation to it.

The Birds

But how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and

tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush,

and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate

cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the

Blackcap’s stave of mellow music. All these are familiar—but

what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out;

the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down

again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the

noonday heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy

meditations. Then suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest

recesses comes the Green Woodpecker, and mocks at me an impudent

voice full of liberty and laughter.

Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My

concern is with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous

Humanity, not with that inconsiderate, wandering, feather-headed

race.

High Life

Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and

I had got an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk

through the lordly gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring

the door-bell. And when I was ushered in, and the shutters were

removed to let the daylight into those vast apartments, I

sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity which had

brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was

treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a

possible purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence

imputed to me. From all the novels describing the mysterious and

glittering life of the Great which I had read (and I had read

many), there came to me the enchanting vision of my own

existence in this Palace. I filled the vast spaces with the

shine of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of ladies

sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.

But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry

limits, O no! Never could I box up and house and localize under

that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was

capable.

Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and

of course, as I told them, this would never do.

Empty Shells
They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old

worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation,

and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted

universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us,

who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense

modern Cosmos in which we live—the great Creation of granite,

planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so

pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own

creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think

to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.

But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal

spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy

vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in

those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a

prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to

surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and

cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow

for his insolent Mind.

Dissatisfaction
For one thing I hate Spiders—I dislike all kinds of Insects.

Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted

industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the

future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration

of the Earth, the Sun’s waning, and the ultimate, inevitable

collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings. And all

the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that my mind is

really nothing but a sieve—this, too, at times disheartens me.

A Fancy

More than once, though, I have pleased myself with the notion

that somewhere there is good Company which will like this little

Book—these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that

phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained

process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of soft gray

matter in the bowl of my skull.

They
Their taste is exquisite; They live in Georgian houses, in

a world of ivory and precious china, of old brickwork and

stone pilasters. In white drawing rooms I see Them, or on

blue, bird-haunted lawns. They talk pleasantly of me, and

their eyes watch me. From the diminished, ridiculous picture

of myself which the glass of the world gives me, I turn for

comfort, for happiness, to my image in the kindly mirror of

those eyes.

Who are They? Where, in what paradise or palace, shall I ever

find Them? I may walk all the streets, ring all the door-bells

of the World, but I shall never find them. Yet nothing has

value for me save In the crown of Their approval; for Their

coming—which will never be—I build and plant, and for Them

alone I secretly write this little Book, which They will never

read.

In the Pulpit

The Vicar had certain literary tastes; in his youth he had

written an Ode to the Moon; and he would speak of the

difficulty he found in composing his sermons, week after week.

Now I felt that if I composed and preached sermons, I should by

no means confine myself to the Vicar’s threadbare subjects—

should preach the Wrath of God, and sound the Last Trump in

the ears of my Hell-doomed congregation, cracking the heavens

and dissolving the earth with the eclipses and thunders and

earthquakes of the Day of Judgment. Then I might refresh them

with high and incomprehensible Doctrines, beyond the reach

of Reason—Predestination, Election, the Co-existences and

Co-eternities of the incomprehensible Triad. And with what a

holy vehemence would I exclaim and cry out against all forms

of doctrinal Error—all the execrable hypotheses of the great

Heresiarchs! Then there would be many ancient and learned and

out-of-the-way Iniquities to denounce, and splendid, neglected

Virtues to inculcate—Apostolic Poverty, and Virginity, that

precious jewel, that fair garland, so prized in Heaven, but so

rare on earth.

For in the range of creeds and morals it is the highest peaks

that shine for me with a certain splendour: it is toward those

radiant Alps that, if I were a Clergyman, I would lead my flock

to pasture.

Human Ends

I really was impressed, as we paced up and down the avenue, by

the Vicar’s words and weighty, weighed advice. He spoke of the

various professions; mentioned contemporaries of his own who had

achieved success: how one had a Seat in Parliament, would be

given a Seat in the Cabinet when his party next came in; another

was a Bishop with a Seat in the House of Lords; a third was a

Barrister who was soon, it was said, to be raised to the Bench.

But in spite of my good intentions, my real wish to find,

before it is too late, some career or other for myself (and

the question is getting serious), I am far too much at the

mercy of ludicrous images. Front Seats, Episcopal, Judicial,

Parliamentary Benches—were all the ends then, I asked my self,

of serious, middle-aged ambition only things to sit on?

Lord Arden
“If I were Lord Arden,” said the Vicar, “I should shut up that

great House; it’s too big—what can a young unmarried man…?”

“If I were Lord Arden,” said the Vicar’s wife (and Mrs. La

Mountain’s tone showed how much she disapproved of that young

Nobleman), “if I were Lord Arden, I should live there, and do my

duty to my tenants and neighbours.”

“If I were Lord Arden,” I said; but then it flashed vividly

into my mind, suppose I really were this opulent young Lord?

I quite forgot to whom I was talking; my memory was occupied

with the names of people who had been famous for their enormous

pleasures; who had filled their Palaces with guilty revels, and

built Pyramids, Obelisks, and half-acre Tombs, to soothe their

Pride. My mind kindled at the thought of these Audacities. “If

I were Lord Arden!” I cried….

The Starry Heaven

“But what are they really? What do they say they are?” the small
young lady asked me. We were looking up at the Stars, which were

quivering that night in splendid hosts above the lawns and

trees.

So I tried to explain some of the views that have been held

about them. How people first of all had thought them mere

candles set in the sky, to guide their own footsteps when the

Sun was gone; till wise men, sitting on the Chaldean plains, and

watching them with aged eyes, became impressed with the solemn

view that those still and shining lights were the executioners

of God’s decrees, and irresistible instruments of His Wrath; and

that they moved fatally among their celestial Houses to ordain

and set out the fortunes and misfortunes of each race of newborn

mortals. And so it was believed that every man or woman had,

from the cradle, fighting for or against him or her, some great

Star, Formalhaut, perhaps, Aldebaran, Alta�r: while great Heroes

and Princes were more splendidly attended, and marched out to

their forgotten battles with troops and armies of heavenly

Constellations.

But this noble old view was not believed in now; the Stars were
no longer regarded as malignant or beneficent Powers; and I

explained how most serious people thought that somewhere—though

just where they did not know—above the vault of Sky, was to be

found the final home of earnest men and women; where, as a

reward for their right views and conduct, they were to rejoice

forever, wearing those diamonds of the starry night arranged in

glorious crowns. This notion, however, had been disputed by

Poets and Lovers: it was Love, according to these young

astronomers, that moved the Sun and other Stars; the

Constellations being heavenly palaces, where people who had

adored each other were to meet and live always together after

Death.

Then I spoke of the modern and real immensity of the unfathomed

Skies. But suddenly the vast meaning of my words rushed into my

mind; I felt myself dwindling, falling through the blue. And

yet, in these silent seconds, there thrilled through me in the

cool sweet air and night no chill of death or nothingness; but

the taste and joy of this Earth, this orchard-plot of earth,

floating unknown, far away in unfathomed space, with its Moon

and meadows.
My Map

The “Known World” I called the map which I amused myself making

for the children’s schoolroom. It included France, England,

Italy, Greece, and all the old shores of the Mediterranean; but

the rest I marked “Unknown”; sketching into the East the

doubtful realms of Ninus and Semiramis; changing back Germany

into the Hyrcanian Forest; and drawing pictures of the supposed

inhabitants of these unexplored regions, Dog-Apes, Satyrs,

Cannibals, and Misanthropes, Cimmerians involved in darkness,

Amazons, and Headless Men. And all around the Map I coiled the

coils, and curled the curling waves of the great Sea Oceanum,

with the bursting cheeks of the four Winds, blowing from the

four imagined hinges of the Universe.

The Snob

As I paced in fine company on that Terrace, I felt chosen,

exempt, and curiously happy. There was a glamour in the air, a

something in the special flavour of that moment that was like

the consciousness of Salvation, or the smell of ripe peaches on

a sunny wall.

I know what you’re going to call me, Reader. But I am not to be

bullied and abashed by words. And after all, why not let oneself

be dazzled and enchanted? Are not Illusions pleasant, and is

this a world in which Romance hangs on every tree?

And how about your own life? Is that, then, so full of golden

visions?

Companions

Dearest, prettiest, and sweetest of my retinue, who gather

with delicate industry bits of silk and down from the bleak

world to make the soft nest of my fatuous repose; who ever

whisper honied words in my ear, or trip before me holding up

deceiving mirrors—is it Hope, or is it not rather Vanity,

that I love the best?

Edification
“I must really improve my Mind,” I tell myself, and once more

begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and

toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears

off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange

birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh

in the tumbling chimneys.

The Rose

The old lady had always been proud of the great rose-tree in her

garden, and was fond of telling how it had grown from a cutting

she had brought years before from Italy, when she was first

married. She and her husband had been travelling back in their

carriage from Rome (it was before the time of railways), and on

a bad piece of road south of Siena they had broken down, and had

been forced to pass the night in a little house by the roadside.

The accommodation was wretched of course; she had spent a

sleepless night, and rising early had stood, wrapped up, at her

window, with the cool air blowing on her face, to watch the

dawn. She could still, after all these years, remember the blue
mountains with the bright moon above them, and how a far-off

town on one of the peaks had gradually grown whiter and whiter,

till the moon faded, the mountains were touched with the pink

of the rising sun, and suddenly the town was lit as by an

illumination, one window after another catching and reflecting

the sun’s beams, till at last the whole little city twinkled and

sparkled up in the sky like a nest of stars.

That morning, finding they would have to wait while their

carriage was being repaired, they had driven in a local

conveyance up to the city on the mountain, where they had been

told they would find better quarters; and there they had stayed

two or three days. It was one of the miniature Italian cities

with a high church, a pretentious piazza, a few narrow streets

and little palaces, perched all compact and complete, on the top

of a mountain, within an enclosure of walls hardly larger than

an English kitchen garden. But it was full of life and noise,

echoing all day and all night with the sounds of feet and

voices.

The Caf� of the simple inn where they stayed was the meeting-place
of the notabilities of the little city; the Sindaco, the

avvocato, the doctor, and a few others; and among them they

noticed a beautiful, slim, talkative old man, with bright black

eyes and snow-white hair—tail and straight and still with

the figure of a youth, although the waiter told them with

pride that the Conte was molto vecchio—would in fact be

eighty in the following year. He was the last of his family, the

waiter added—they had once been great and rich people—but he

had no descendants; in fact the waiter mentioned with complacency,

as if it were a story on which the locality prided itself, that

the Conte had been unfortunate in love, and had never married.

The old gentleman, however, seemed cheerful enough; and it was

plain that he took an interest in the strangers, and wished to

make their acquaintance. This was soon effected by the friendly

waiter; and after a little talk the old man invited them to

visit his villa and garden which were just outside the walls of

the town. So the next afternoon, when the sun began to descend,

and they saw in glimpses through doorways and windows blue

shadows beginning to spread over the brown mountains, they went

to pay their visit. It was not much of a place, a small,

modernized stucco villa, with a hot pebbly garden, and in it a

stone basin with torpid gold fish, and a statue of Diana and her

hounds against the wall. But what gave a glory to it was a

gigantic rose-tree which clambered over the house, almost

smothering the windows, and filling the air with the perfume

of its sweetness. Yes, it was a fine rose, the Conte said

proudly when they praised it, and he would tell the Signora

about it. And as they sat there, drinking the wine he offered

them, he alluded with the cheerful indifference of old age to

his love-affair, as though he took for granted that they had

heard of it already.

“The lady lived across the valley there beyond that hill. I was

a young man then, for it was many years ago. I used to ride over

to see her; it was a long way, but I rode fast, for young men,

as no doubt the Signora knows, are impatient. But the lady was

not kind, she would keep me waiting, oh, for hours; and one day

when I had waited very long I grew very angry, and as I walked

up and down in the garden where she had told me she would see

me, I broke one of her roses, broke a branch from it; and when I

saw what I had done, I hid it inside my coat—so—and when I

came home I planted it, and the Signora sees how it has grown.

If the Signora admires it, I must give her a cutting to plant

also in her garden; I am told the English have beautiful gardens

that are green, and not burnt with the sun like ours.”

The next day, when their mended carriage had come up to fetch

them, and they were just starting to drive away from the inn,

the Conte’s old servant appeared with the rose-cutting neatly

wrapped up, and the compliments and wishes for a buon viaggio

from her master. The town collected to see them depart, and the

children ran after their carriage through the gate of the little

city. They heard a rush of feet behind them for a few moments,

but soon they were far down toward the valley; the little town

with all its noise and life was high above them on its mountain

peak.

She had planted the rose at home, where it had grown and

flourished in a wonderful manner, and every June the great mass

of leaves and shoots still broke out into a passionate splendour

of scent and scarlet colour, as if in its root and fibres there

still burnt the anger and thwarted desire of that Italian lover.
Of course the old Conte must have died many years ago; she had

forgotten his name, and had even forgotten the name of the

mountain city that she had stayed in, after first seeing it

twinkling at dawn in the sky, like a nest of stars.

The Vicar of Lynch

When I heard through country gossip of the strange happening at

Lynch which had caused so great a scandal, and led to the

disappearance of the deaf old Vicar of that remote village, I

collected all the reports I could about it, for I felt that at

the centre of this uncomprehending talk and wild anecdote there

was something with more meaning than a mere sudden outbreak of

blasphemy and madness.

It appeared that the old Vicar, after some years spent in the

quiet discharge of his parochial duties, had been noticed to

become more and more odd in his appearance and behaviour; and

it was also said that he had gradually introduced certain

alterations into the Church services. These had been vaguely

supposed at the time to be of a High Church character, but

afterwards they were put down to a growing mental derangement,

which had finally culminated at that notorious Harvest Festival,

when his career as a clergyman of the Church of England had

ended. On this painful occasion the old man had come into church

outlandishly dressed, and had gone through a service with

chanted gibberish and unaccustomed gestures, and prayers which

were unfamiliar to his congregation. There was also talk of a

woman’s figure on the altar, which the Vicar had unveiled at a

solemn moment in this performance; and I also heard echo of

other gossip—gossip that was, however, authoritatively

contradicted and suppressed as much as possible—about the use

of certain other symbols of a most unsuitable kind. Then a few

days after the old man had disappeared—some of the neighbours

believed that he was dead; some, that he was now shut up in an

asylum for the insane.

Such was the fantastic and almost incredible talk I listened to,

but in which, as I say, I found much more meaning than my

neighbours. For one thing, although they knew that the Vicar had

come from Oxford to this remote College living, they knew

nothing of his work and scholarly reputation in that University,

and none of them had probably ever heard of—much less read—an

important book which he had written, and which was the standard

work on his special subject. To them he was simply a deaf,

eccentric, and solitary clergyman; and I think I was the only

person in the neighbourhood who had conversed with him on the

subject concerning which he was the greatest living authority in

England.

For I had seen the old man once—curiously enough at the time of

a Harvest Festival, though it was some years before the one

which had led to his disappearance. Bicycling one day over the

hills, I had ridden down into a valley of cornfields, and then,

passing along an unfenced road that ran across a wide expanse of

stubble, I came, after getting off to open three or four gates,

upon a group of thatched cottages, with a little, unrestored

Norman church standing among great elms, I left my bicycle and

walked through the churchyard, and as I went into the church,

through its deeply-recessed Norman doorway, a surprisingly

pretty sight met my eyes. The dim, cool, little interior was

set out and richly adorned with an abundance of fruit and

vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and golden wheat

sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September

flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top

of a step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As

soon as he saw me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the

decorations, and raising my voice a little, for I noticed that

he was somewhat deaf. We talked of the Harvest Festival, and as

I soon perceived that I was talking with a man of books and

University education, I ventured to hint at what had vividly

impressed me in that old, gaudily-decorated church—its pagan

character, as if it were a rude archaic temple in some corner of

the antique world, which had been adorned, two thousand years

ago, by pious country folk for some local festival. The old

clergyman was not in the least shocked by my remark; it seemed

indeed rather to please him; there was, he agreed, something of

a pagan character in the modern Harvest Festival—it was no

doubt a bit of the old primitive Vegetation Ritual, the old

Religion of the soil; a Festival, which, like so many others,

had not been destroyed by Christianity, but absorbed into it,

and given a new meaning. “Indeed,” he added, talking on as if

the subject interested him, and expressing himself with a

certain donnish carefulness of speech that I found pleasant to

listen to, “the Harvest Festival is undoubtedly a survival of

the prehistoric worship of that Corn Goddess who, in classical

times, was called Demeter and Ioulo and Ceres, but whose cult as

an Earth-Mother and Corn-Spirit is of much greater antiquity.

For there is no doubt that this Vegetation Spirit has been

worshipped from the earliest times by agricultural peoples; the

wheat fields and ripe harvests being naturally suggestive of the

presence amid the corn of a kindly Being, who, in return for due

rites and offerings, will vouchsafe nourishing rains and golden

harvests.” He mentioned the references in Virgil, and the

description in Theocritus of a Sicilian Harvest Festival—these

were no doubt familiar to me; but if I was interested in the

subject, I should find, he said, much more information collected

in a book which he had written, but of which I had probably

never heard, about the Vegetation Deities in Greek Religion. As

it happened I knew the book, and felt now much interested in my

chance meeting with the distinguished author; and after

expressing this as best I could, I rode off, promising to visit

him again. This promise I was never able to fulfil; but when

afterwards, on my return to the neighbourhood, I heard of that

unhappy scandal, my memory of this meeting and our talk enabled

me to form a theory as to what had really happened.

It seemed plain to me that the change had been too violent for

this elderly scholar, taken from his books and college rooms and

set down in the solitude of this remote valley, amid the

richness and living sap of Nature. The gay spectacle, right

under his old eyes, of growing shoots and budding foliage, of

blossoming and flowering, and the ripening of fruits and crops,

had little by little (such was my theory) unhinged his brains.

More and more his thoughts had come to dwell, not on the

doctrines of the Church in which he had long ago taken orders,

but on the pagan rites which had formed his life-long study,

and which had been the expression of a life not unlike the

agricultural life amid which he now found himself living. So as

his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had gradually

transformed, with a maniac’s cunning, the Christian services,

and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back

toward their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he

had thrown away all disguise, and had appeared as a hierophant

of Demeter, dressed in a fawn skin, with a crown of poplar

leaves, and pedantically carrying the mystic basket and the

winnowing fan appropriate to these mysteries. The wheaten posset

he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also, and

the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy

Wheatsheaf, whose unveiling was the culminating point in that

famous ritual.

It is much to be regretted that I could not recover full and

more exact details of that celebration in which this great

scholar had probably embodied his mature knowledge concerning a

subject which has puzzled generations of students. But what

powers of careful observation could one expect from a group of

labourers and small farmers? Some of the things that reached my

ears I refused to believe—the mention of pig’s blood for

instance, and especially the talk of certain grosser symbols,

which the choir boys, it was whispered, had carried about the

church in ceremonious procession. Village people have strange

imaginations; and to this event, growing more and more monstrous

as they talked it over, they must themselves have added this

grotesque detail. However, I have written to consult an Oxford

authority on this interesting point, and he has been kind enough

to explain at length that although at the Haloa, or winter

festival of the Corn-Goddess, and also at the Chloeia, or

festival in early spring, some symbolization of the reproductive

powers of Nature would be proper and appropriate, it would have

been quite out of place at the Thalysia, or autumn festival of

thanksgiving. I feel certain that a solecism of this nature—the

introduction into a particular rite of features not sanctioned

by the texts—would have seemed a shocking thing, even to the

unhinged mind of one who had always been so careful a scholar.

Tu Quoque Fontium

Just to sit in the Sun, to bask like an animal in its heat—this

is one of my country recreations. And often I reflect what a

thing after all it is still to be alive and sitting here, above

all the buried people of the world, in the kind and famous

Sunshine.

Beyond the orchard there is a place where the stream, hurrying out

from under a bridge, makes for itself a quiet pool. A beech-tree

upholds its green light over the blue water; and there, when I

have grown weary of the sun, the great glaring indiscriminating

Sun, I can shade myself and read my book. And listening to this

water’s pretty voices I invent for it exquisite epithets, calling

it silver-clean or moss-margined or nymph-frequented, and

idly promise to place it among the learned fountains and pools

of the world, making of it a cool green thought for English exiles

in the dust and glare of Eastern deserts.

The Spider

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind?

To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to

a barrel full of floating froth and refuse?

No, what it is really most like is a spider’s web, insecurely hung

on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with

dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the

Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny

Soul.
BOOK II
_”Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets

conduct thy bard along.“_

Gay’s Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London.

L’oiseau Bleu

What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that

I am looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to

me as if I were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings

sweetly as it floats about from one place to another.

When I find myself however among persons of middle age and settled

principles, see them moving regularly to their offices—what keeps

them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.

There is though a Philosophic Doctrine—I studied it at College,

and I know that many serious people believe it—which maintains

that all men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live

alike for Pleasure. This theory certainly brings portly,

respected persons very near to me. Indeed with a sense of low

complicity I have sometimes followed and watched a Bishop. Was

he too on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his Bird?

At The Bank

Entering the Bank in a composed manner, I drew a cheque and

handed it to the cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him

narrowly. Would not that astute official see that I was only

posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly opened a little drawer,

took out some real sovereigns, counted them carefully, and

handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away feeling

I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold

of the actual world!

Yet now and then, at the sight of my name on a visiting card, or

of my face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I

see a letter addressed in my hand, or catch the sound of my own

voice, I grow shy in the presence of a mysterious Person who is

myself, is known by my name, and who apparently does exist. Can

it be possible that I am as real as any one else, and that all

of us—the cashier and banker at the Bank, the King on his

throne—all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in this

authentic world?

Mammon

Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil,

the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul’s

damnation. It has been called “trash,” “muck,” “dunghill

excrement,” by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all

Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and

in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their

faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern

times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the

leaders of the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all

the ages done anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig

for it ever deeper into the earth’s intestines, travel in search

of it farther and farther to arctic and unpleasant regions.

In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to

have some of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence

cheers and comforts me, diffuses a genial warmth through my

body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of it; its clinquant sound is

music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid service, and

reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the House

of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed

ecstasy.

How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies

and heavenly Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them,

while He has sat there, a great God, golden and adorned, and

secure on His unmoved throne?

I See the World

“But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world,” my cousins said.

Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now

and then invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really

much more pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of

my own of seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when motors

hurry through the late twilight, and the great houses take on
airs of inscrutable expectation, I go owling out through the

dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my way in unknown

streets—an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens and a

bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by

powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan,

or some half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit

candles and strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are

still splendid people on this flat earth; and at dances,

standing in the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music,

the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the Ladies as

beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes of light past our

rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords in novels;

and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by me,

they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on

hot nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner

Parties, as I peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at

the silver, the women’s shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels,

and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and listen,

I imagine extraordinary intrigues and unheard of wines and

passions.
Social Success

The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of self-satisfaction

I walked out into the night. “A delightful evening,” I reflected,

“the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French

philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a

pig squealing.”

But soon after, “God, it’s awful,” I muttered, “I wish I were dead.”

Apotheosis

But Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe

too small to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine

Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of

Truth, and my umbrella God’s umbrella!

The Spring in London

London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its

low sky were the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such
as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.

And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds

voyaged in the blue sky; the interminable multitudes of roofs

were washed with silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of

new-fallen snow. And the coming of Spring to London was to me

not unlike the descent of the maiden-goddess into Death’s

Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom,

and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for

meadows and the shepherd’s life. Nor was there anything more

virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young

foliage, which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the

smoke-blackened London trees.

Fashion Plates

I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of

printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses

and old-fashioned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes

in one period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as

butterflies, or float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer

streets. And yet in all shapes they have always (I tell myself)

created thrilling effects of beauty, and waked in the breasts of

modish young men ever the same charming Emotion.

But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely

the same? Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite

unchanged beneath all the changing fashions of frills and

ruffles? In this elegant and cruel Sentiment, I rather fancy

that colour and shape do make a difference. I have a notion that

about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the Golden Age of

the Passion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those

crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a

leisure, a refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other

dates.

Mental Vice

There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force themselves

on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and

buzzed about by moral Platitudes. “That shows—” I say to

myself, or, “How true it is—” or, “I really ought to have

known!” The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on

the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of

telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man’s

triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid

ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather

unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I

can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence

and accuracy of the Postal System.

Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom,

which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers

of Westminster Palace—that Mother of Parliaments—it is not

much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the

Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra’s Needle, and the Thought

that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has

that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as

Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.

I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for

everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key,

like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning

but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of

Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once

explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with

Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees,

and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I

have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun.

So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my

thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste

of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all

crashing blindly forever across the void of space.

The Organ of Life

Almost always In London—in the congregated uproar of streets,

or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows—you can

hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which

sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the

lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who

blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the busses.

“Speak to me kindly,” the hand-organ implores; “I’m all alone!”

it screams amid the throng; “thy Vows are all broken,” it

laments in dingy courtyards, “And light is thy Fame.” And of hot

summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness

to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt—faint

and sad—through open office windows.

Humiliation

“My own view is,” I began, but no one listened. At the next

pause, “I always say,” I remarked, but again the loud talk went

on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, “I often

think—”; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly

or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the

thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded

attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza

or Abraham Lincoln.

Green Ivory

What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same

person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,

bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep

Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.

I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a

hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with

impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.

I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world’s greatest

Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and

green ivory.

In The Park

“Yes,” I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather

contemptuously at the people of Fashion, moving slow and

well-dressed in the sunshine, “but how about the others, the

Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore

fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer

air. What has become of them?” I somewhat rhetorically asked.

They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold
in their graves.

And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from

the Park and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the

noisy World.

But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me,

all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.

The Correct

I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn’t

quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in

muffled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously

for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt

and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.

But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club

windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of

fashionable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live

by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and
questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is

Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot,

they pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures,

correctly across the roundness of the Earth.

“Where Do I Come In?”

When I read in the Times about India and all its problems and

populations; when I look at the letters in large type of

important personages, and find myself face to face with the

Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, “Where do

I come in?” I ask myself uneasily.

Then in the great Times-reflected world I find the corner

where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the

unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be

a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die,

in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post

just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are

enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own

convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw

themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London

bridges.

Microbes

But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that

worm-eat people’s brains—those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms

and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from

what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with

germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they

open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with

them—the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.

Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall

he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel

schemes of Salvation?

Can he ever be sure that he won’t be suddenly struck down by the

fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with

a new Sex Theory?

But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe

really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and

sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can

make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can

free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon

wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why

pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the

others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green

pastures?

The Quest

“We walk alone in the world,” the Moralist, at the end of his

essay on Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, “Friends such

as we desire are dreams and fables,” Yet we never quite give up

the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?

what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and

disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown

persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin

to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist

hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences,

or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among

the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly

caterpillars.

And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and

ring door-bells.

The Kaleidoscope

I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a

curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining

and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way

remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.

But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my

eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill

of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or

swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain

beating forever on the fields. Then Winter’s upward glare of

snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the

windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths

bathing in Summer’s golden heats.

And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises

above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the

sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of

lilacs and bees, and shut-in sunshine, with the Mediterranean

lounging and washing outside its walls; now in a little college

library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford

lawns—and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar

Oxford hours.

Oxford Street

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of

vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I

was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted

shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had

faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods

displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share

in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious

faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London

traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant

and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which

sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence,

blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore,

the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace

beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani

padme hum_—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the

pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.

Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked

that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was

enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the

Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that

turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.

Beauty

Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face

made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens

to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for

a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to

follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises

they promise.
Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to

think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine

revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a

mirror, the Absolute Beauty—; it is Reality, flashing on us in

the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we

should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will

lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,

keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to

their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so

sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their

stars to listen.

But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do

get us into!

The Power of Words

I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and

stepped out lightly into the vastness and freshness of the

Night. And as I walked along my eyes were dazzling with the

glare I had left; I still seemed to hear the sound of my speech,

and the applause and laughter.

And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore

me company, streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt

that I was the Lord of Life; the mystery and disquieting

meaninglessness of existence—the existence of other people,

and of my own, were solved for me now. As for the Earth,

hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how

shining the goal toward which it went swinging—you might

really say leaping—through the sky.

“I must tell the Human Race of this!” I heard my voice; saw my

prophetic gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of

existence to the white, rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the

words—that troubled me; were there then no words to describe

this Vision—divine—intoxicating?

And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I

stopped in the street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that

snarls at a jarring touch. I stood there awhile and meditated on

language, its perfidious meanness, the inadequacy, the ignominy

of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled our words by

distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all their

hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words

which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest

feelings! This music within me, large, like the song of the

stars—like a Glory of Angels singing—“No one has any right to

say I am drunk!” I shouted.

Self-Analysis

“Yes, aren’t they odd, the thoughts that float through one’s

mind for no reason? But why not be frank—I suppose the best of

us are shocked at times by the things we find ourselves

thinking. Don’t you agree,” I went on, not noticing (until it

was too late) that all other conversation had ceased, and the

whole dinner-party was listening, “don’t you agree that the

oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one’s

head—the unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?” When I

remember that remark, I hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler

considerations. I think of Space, and the unimportance in its

unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in

speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best

our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief

as a dream.

The Voice of the World

“And what are you doing now?” The question of these school

contemporaries of mine, and their greeting the other day in

Piccadilly (I remember how shabby I felt as I stood talking

to them)—for a day or two that question haunted me. And

behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear the voice of

Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and

indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I

doing, how did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were

numbered, and which were described in sermons and on tombstones

as so irrevocable, so melancholy-brief.

I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time

and age; my contemporaries should treat me as an important person.

I began thinking of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight

lamp, my risings at dawn for stolen hours of self-improvement.

But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It

somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the

young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I

loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and

brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking

faces—and I was always looking for faces—would keep me amused.

And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play in

fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to

find myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul’s, amid

the cheers of the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell,

“Take away that bauble,” as I sauntered past the Houses of

Parliament.

And Anyhow

And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or

thereabouts the Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold,

all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze

to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun.

Drawbacks

I should be all right…. If it weren’t for these sudden

visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven’s blue,

little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands,

or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should

be like everybody else, and as blameless a rate-payer as any in

our Row.

Talk

Once in a while, when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a

group of free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk

begins. ‘Tis a sudden illumination—the glow, it may be of

sanctified candles, or, more likely, the blaze around a cauldron

of gossip.

Is there an ecstasy or any intoxication like it? Oh? to talk, to

talk people into monsters, to talk one’s self out of one’s

clothes, to talk God from His heaven, and turn everything in the
world into a bright tissue of phrases!

These Pentecosts and outpourings of the spirit can only occur

very rarely, or the Universe itself would be soon talked out of

existence.

The Church of England

I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday

afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the London Church, and

listened to the unexpressive voices chanting the correct service,

I felt a comfortable assurance that we were in no danger of

being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious

fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance

to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark

Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles

and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly

respected Anglican First Cause—undemonstrative, gentlemanly

and conscientious—whom, without loss of self-respect, we

could sincerely and decorously praise.

Misgiving

We were talking of people, and a name familiar to us all was

mentioned. We paused and looked at each other; then soon, by

means of anecdotes and clever touches, that personality was

reconstructed, and seemed to appear before us, large, pink, and

life-like, and gave a comic sketch of itself with appropriate

poses.

“Of course,” I said to myself, “this sort of thing never happens

to me.” For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean

of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge,

to turn my discreet way of life into a cake-walk.

Sanctuaries

She said, “How small the world is after all!”

I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China,

full of legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It

is always enveloped in mountain mists; and in that white thick

air I heard the faint sound of bells, and the muffled footsteps

of innumerable pilgrims, and the reiterated mantra, _Nam-Mo,

O-mi-to-Fo_, which they murmur as they climb its slopes. High

up among its temples and monasteries marched processions of

monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and lighted

candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn

shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated

on his white elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of

Amitabha, the Lord of the Western Heavens.

She said “Life is so complicated!” Climbing inaccessible cliffs

of rock and ice, I shut myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond

the Himalayan ramparts. I join with choirs of monks, intoning

their deep sonorous dirges and unintelligible prayers; I beat

drums, I clash cymbals, and blow at dawn from the Lamasery roofs

conches, and loud discordant trumpets. And wandering through

those vast and shadowy halls, as I tend the butter-lamps of the

golden Buddhas, and watch the storms that blow across the barren

mountains, I taste an imaginary bliss, and then pass on to other

scenes and incarnations along the endless road that leads me to

Nirvana.
“But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?”

I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest.

There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with

the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous

Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God,

Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods are sometimes moved to

pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is unknown. He is

utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no

holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one

moment, propitiate Him.

Symptoms

“But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A

dreariness and sense of death come over me when I meet them—I

really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room,

as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn’t it

be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never

seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous

Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable

obtuseness of such people.”

I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked

on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in

the appearance of my charming neighbour, something—a slightly

glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her

breathing—which turned that occasion for me into a kind of

Nightmare.

Shadowed

I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of

mine—the Me of my daydreams—who leads a melodramatic life of

his own, quite unrelated to my real existence. So one day I

shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and

then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy

tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two

stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a

while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in

Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service

and costly wines. His amorous adventures in this region I pass

over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors,

dismissed his retinue of servants, and went—saving two young

ladies from being run over on the way—to live a life of heroic

self-sacrifice among the poor.

I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a

fishmonger’s, he pointed at a great salmon and said, “I caught

that fish.”

The Incredible

“Yes, but they were rather afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?”

“Yes, so one of them told me afterwards.”

I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or

respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it.

Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children

more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was

Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything half so silly?

Terror

A pause suddenly fell on our conversation—one of those

uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching

our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable

silence. It was only a moment—“But suppose,” I said to myself

with horrible curiosity, “suppose none of us had found a word to

say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?”

It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and

awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk

from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep

their fires ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the

darkness to leap upon them.

Pathos

When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense

of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of

drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves

them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing

morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.

Inconstancy

The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets,

the music that passes—out of the well-known transitoriness of

mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the

effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen

long for one voice, in a world that is after all, as I know,

full of enchanting voices.

But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with

which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love,

and the unchanged Northern Star.

The Poplar

There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage

floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and

blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a

shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green

cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit,

hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when all

the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those

cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among

its lightly hung leaves.

But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.

On the Doorstep

I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great

shining Door and waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the

wild heart, that delicious doorstep Terror—it was gone; and

with it dear, fantastic, panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell,

flitted round the corner and vanished for ever.

Old Clothes
Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to

cover? Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested

beneath you? Old shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the

Past did I wear out your sole-leather?

Youth

Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts

and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and

Roses…

Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and

laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of

God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who

sang “Auld Lang Syne” and howled with sentiment, and more than

once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic

tears?

Consolation

The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer

myself by thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there

wasn’t one of them for which I seemed to care a hang—not

Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the

Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in

a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?

Then I thought of reading—the nice and subtle happiness of

reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this

polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long

intoxication.

Sir Eustace Carr

When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning

paper, I was startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by

name this young man, whose wealth and good looks, whose

adventurous travels and whose brilliant and happy marriage, had

made of him an almost romantic figure.

Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this

kind. But they are acts so anomalous, in such startling

contradiction to all our usual ways and accepted notions of life

and its value, that most of us are willing enough to accept the

familiar explanation of insanity, or any other commonplace cause

which may be alleged—financial trouble, or some passionate

entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the

Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory

shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But

with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes

let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead

man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of

some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible

impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and certainly the

coroner’s jury, can have had no inkling.

I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr—the worlds we

lived in were very different—but I had read of his explorations

in the East, and of the curious tombs he had discovered—somewhere,

was it not?—in the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this

was the main cause of my interest) that at one time I had seen

him more than once, under circumstances that were rather unusual.

And now I began to think of this incident. In away it was nothing,

and yet the impression haunted me that it was somehow connected

with this final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of

sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did

not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted,

I believe, both by his friends and the general public—and with

the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,

amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced,

it was said, in his mother’s family.

I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the

memory of those cold and rainy November weeks that I had

happened to spend alone, some years ago, in Venice, and of the

churches which I had so frequently haunted. Especially I

remembered the great dreary church in the piazza near my

lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in

the twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are

draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at

dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior,

with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous

tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels

blowing trumpets—all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty

and frigid—I would find the fantastic darkness filled with

glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant

noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell

with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into

darkness, and the great bells, swinging against the low sky,

sent the melancholy sound of their voices far over the lagoons.

It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr;

would generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and

would sometimes watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing

of the candles, one by one, left us in shadowy night. It was a

handsome and thoughtful face, and I remember more than once

wondering what had brought him to Venice in that unseasonable

month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous service.

It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity

newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also

must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his

uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to

my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I

went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and

almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming

before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or

supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly

accept it.

For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that

time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous

incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its

decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really

seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and

metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at

dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal

candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose

(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this

spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to

someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely

over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the

clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr’s—not only his

interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,

but also his unexplained and mysterious end?

Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great

personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who

have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow

of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with

mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,

like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the

present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;

not on the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and

dwelling-places of the Dead beneath it.

Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has

exercised so enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not

impossible to imagine some modern favourite of fortune falling a

victim to this malady of the soul; until at last, growing weary

of other satisfactions, he might be drawn to open for himself

the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that dim region,

“Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold, who

filled their houses with silver.” This, as I say, was the notion

that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir

Eustace Carr’s presence in that dark Venetian church, and his

self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a

clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more

than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say.

The Lord Mayor

An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there.

The boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.

“But I should be ‘appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a

day,” he said.

I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this

crippled, half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make

him happy. Happiness! the fabled treasure of some far-away

heaven I thought it that afternoon; not to be bought with gold,

not of this earth!

I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was

enough for the boot-black.

“Why,” he said, “I should be as ‘appy as the Lord Mayor!”

The Burden

I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History

and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over

books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese

Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.

Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn’t

invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow

to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their

Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight

of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas,

this vast and erroneous Cosmos.

Under An Umbrella

From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement

lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with

dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid

mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And

through how many rains and years shall I still hurry down
wet streets—middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And

on what errands?

Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision,

Reader, into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.

THE END

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