Frank Harris

My life and loves Vol. 3

For thilke cause, if that ye red

I wolde go the middle wey

And write a boke between the twey

Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore.

"Moral" Cower (1325–1408)

FOREWORD

Give me the man that on Life's rough sea Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, Even till the sail-yards tremble, the masts crack, And the rapt ship runs on her side so low That she drinks water while her keel ploughs air.

There is no danger to a man who knows What life and death is; there's not any law Exceeds his knowledge, nor is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law.

Chapman

At length the oracle has spoken. Mr. Justice Levy of the Supreme Court in New York has looked into the second volume of My Life, and "found it necessary to read but a few passages to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that it is neither literature nor art."

Now who made Levy, with his "inevitable conclusion," a judge of literature and art? He may be a judge of what is legal or illegal; but what does he know of literature or art?

Levy proceeds to declare that my book "is not only obviously and unquestionably obscene, lewd, lascivious, and indecent, but it is filthy, disgusting and utterly revolting," and he adds, not seeing that he is contradicting himself, "I purposely refrain from naming it, as I am averse to enhancing its sale"; but if it is "disgusting and utterly revolting," then surely no sale need be feared. Levy, why play Dogberry and write yourself down an ass!

But this New York judge has given the police the power to raid private printing establishments without a search warrant and arrest the printers of a book about which nothing is known! "The police," he declares, "do not merit the criticism leveled at them" for exceeding their constitutional powers.

"Quite the contrary, they are to be commended," for the book turned out to be obscene. Justice Levy's law is as ridiculous as his view of literature. I can only hope the police may raid his house and arrest him for having in his possession a Bible, the obscene passages in which are known to every schoolboy!

Is there any way of arriving at an impartial and definitive judgment on what should be allowed and what should be forbidden in writing of sexual matters? It will scarcely be denied that there is far less freedom of speech in England and the United States than anywhere else in Christendom, and this Anglo-Saxon prudery is hardly more than a century old. It came with the increase of women readers, coincident with the vast growth in wealth and numbers of English-speaking people since the French Revolution. It is manifestly founded on Puritanism and is supported by the middle classes and has no deeper or more rational sanction. In France, and indeed in every country of Europe, the man of letters today can treat sexual facts as freely as the painter or sculptor treats the nude: it is only in England and the United States that he would be advised to speak of his "little Mary" instead of his stomach.

And since this prudery has come into power, English literature has lost its pride of place. French books and Russian books have taken the position once held by English books. If it were worth the trouble, it would be easy to trace the emasculating effect of this prudery throughout English and American literature; but the main facts are manifest and indisputable.

Let us see what the best Frenchmen have to say about their wider liberty, do they praise or condemn it?

Anatole France, who died recently, held for a dozen years the foremost place in French literature. He was, by almost universal consent, the foremost man of letters in the world. A book on him has been published lately by Jean Jacques Brousson, who was for many years his secretary. He calls it Anatole France in Slippers. Again and again Anatole France expresses himself on questions of sex with complete freedom.

"A sad prudery reigns over literature; a prudery more stupid, more cruel, more criminal than the Holy Inquisition." (La triste pudeur regne sur la litterature, la pudeur plus sotte, plus cruelle, que la Sainte Inquisition.) And he goes on:

"I want Venus from head to foot. Her face is good enough for relations and friends and children, and the husband, but her body must be ready for caresses. For I hope you are not one of those fools who would limit the lover to a kiss on the face, as if she were a holy relic. Lovers can claim all the unedited places and the first editions, if I may so speak… (Hark to that, Levy!) "People praise my learning; I only want to be learned now in the things of love. Love is now my sole and particular study. It is to love that I devote the remains of my continually diminishing power. Why can I not write everything that the little god inspires me with?

"For me now a woman is a book. There is no such thing as a bad book, as I have already told you. Going over its pages, one is sure to find some place that will repay you for your trouble. Page by page, my friends, I love to go over it slowly." And while saying this, "he wet his fingers and made the gesture of caressing some imaginary pages, his eyes sparkling with youth," Brousson adds.

Again and again he returns to this theme: here is his advice to his young secretary:

"Make love now, by night and by day, in winter as in summer… You are in the world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets."

It must be remembered that Anatole France, when he complains of the prudery and reticence in literature, is speaking of French literature, the frankest in the world. Again and again Anatole France has written and spoken as frankly as I have written in any page of My Life, and yet he complains of French prudery as "stupid, cruel, criminal," and no Judge Levy dares to assail him.

There is another example one should cite. In his last book, published since his death, Paul Verlaine, perhaps the greatest of French poets, certainly one of the immortals, sings the delights even of unnatural passion, and yet the Upton Sinclairs will read us Sunday school lectures of what we must say and what leave unsaid in describing normal human desire.

And if the authority of Anatole France and of Verlaine is not enough, I can comfort myself with the saying of Michelangelo: "The great indiscriminating masses always honor what they should despise and love what they should abhor"; or the saying of perhaps the wisest Frenchman: "The value of any work of art can be gauged by the Indignation it excites among ordinary folk."

When Rubens was criticized by the Archduke Ferdinand, the governor of the Low Countries, for his bold painting of The Three Graces, the great artist answered frankly, "It was in painting the nude that the power of the artist could best be seen" (c'etait au nu qui se voyait le merite de la peinture). And this was said at almost the end of his life.

I leave Sinclair to his Mammonart and communist tracts, for already the new time is upon us and the new paganism is making its claim felt. The old paganism was emphatic enough: Aristophanes wrote stage scenes that would have made Sinclair shudder, and Plato, "the divine one," as Barrett Browning called him, declared in the fifth book of his Republic that the man who condemned women exercising naked was like "unripe fruit" on the tree of life.

And the new paganism, with its creed of self-development, is just as emphatic: we see its first fruits in Anatole France and Verlaine, in La Garconne of Marguerite, in the Ulysses of James Joyce, and in this Life of mine.

There are other signs of the great awakening that the Sinclairs and Levys know nothing about. In the summer of 1921 in Berlin, I was invited by a society to come to one of their meetings in which men, women and children bathed naked and afterwards sat and talked and even lunched in the open air, clad only in their skins. Of course I went and found two hundred and fifty persons of all ages enjoying themselves naturally. The professor who invited me and his wife beside him and two daughters, one of fifteen and the other of eighteen; we bathed and lunched together, and round us were two hundred others, young and old of both sexes, naked and unashamed. There are, I was assured, over a hundred of these societies in Berlin alone, numbering over one hundred thousand adherents.

As I sat there I became curiously conscious of the fact that the first reformation in religion came from the Germans, and Luther in the sixteenth century was hardly so far in advance of his time as Goethe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Perhaps these Germans, I said to myself, are again leading the world to a new paganism. One thing is certain. Doctors not only in Germany but all over Europe are preaching sun baths and the immense benefit to be derived from sitting naked for some hours a day in hot sunshine.

Of course, England and America will stick to Puritanism and prudery long after they have abandoned all belief in Christ and his commandment.

My professor and his pretty daughters seemed in no doubt as to the future.

One and all declared that the sun bath not only abolished colds and coughs but all sorts of rheumatic aches and pains; the professor declared: "I have never been so well in my life as since I began toasting myself every day in the sun."

But American and English people would naturally ask another question: admitting all the doctors say about the benefit of sun baths, why not take them in private? It does not appear to affect it. The eldest daughter of my professor was engaged to a young chemist, and towards the end of luncheon he joined us and sat with his betrothed, as Adam might have sat with Eve.

Even Germans, well read as they are, do not appear sufficiently to appreciate that in all this they are going back to the old traditions of their race. The chastity of German women surprised the Romans: Tacitus speaks of the German children who ran about the houses naked as when they were born (nudo et sordido), and of the girls as well (eadem juventa); and a century and a half before Tacitus, Caesar in his Sixth Book describes the primitive custom still more startlingly. "They make no secret of the differences of sex"; he writes, "both sexes bathe together in the rivers, and under their fur wraps and little coverings of skin they are completely naked."

The mere fact ought to reassure the prudish majority who seem to think that nudity and shamelessness are intimately connected. Of course I shan't convince the Levys; they are beyond reason and beneath humanity; but I may give pause and thought to some who wish to see things as they are. For plainly we are at the parting of the ways. The World War has taught us many things-taught us, as the great American orator put it, to take new mental bearings and so ascertain when and how far we have gone astray.

I am afraid of repeating myself; but I must confess frankly that my use of complete freedom has not helped me in painting women: reticence in sexual matters has become second nature with them; till some woman breaks through the convention there is little to be done; but surely no unprejudiced person will deny that in painting men, freedom of speech is absolutely essential. Let any one try to paint a Maupassant in conventional terms and he must soon see that he can make nothing of him but a conventional lay figure with the soul of him unexpressed. And, as Anatole France says, "All great artists and writers are sensualists, and sensual in proportion to their genius."

Is it possible to say something new on this question, something that will strike people who wish to think fairly?

The other day in my reading I came across this verse of Heine:

Doch die Kastraten klagten

Als ich meine Stimm' erhob;

Sie klagten, und sie sagten:

Ich sange viel zu grob. (Ever the eunuchs whimpered When I sang out with force, They whimpered and they simpered:

My singing was much too coarse), and his wit inspired me to try once more to explain from a new angle why freedom of speech should be conceded to the literary artist as it is given to the painter or sculptor, whose revelations are surely more exciting than words can be.

There are two essential desires in man: the one is for food, the other for reproduction. While both are imperious, the one is absolutely necessary, the other, to some extent, adventitious. But while the desire for food is necessary and dominant, it has very little to do with the higher nature, with the mind or soul; whereas the sex-urge is connected with everything sweet and noble in the personality. It is in itself the source of all art; it is so intimately one with the love of the beautiful that it cannot be separated from it. It is the origin of all our affections. It redeems marriage, ennobles fatherhood and motherhood, and is in very truth the root of the soul itself and all its aspirations.

Now if religion had set itself to restrain eating and drinking, and to render immoral all descriptions of feasting or of every possible pleasure of the palate, it would have been, it seems to me, within its right. Doctors tell us that men commonly dig their graves with their teeth. The sad results of too much eating and drinking are seen on all sides: women and men at forty or forty516 five go about carrying twenty-five or even fifty or seventy pounds of disgusting fat with them that destroys their health and shortens their lives.

Moreover, no one gets anything from eating and drinking but the mere sensuous gratification; they are not connected with any of the higher instincts of our nature. Religion could have condemned indulgence here, it seems to me, in the most stringent way, and been more or less justified.

But instead of that, Christianity, mainly because of Paul and the fact that he was impotent, has attacked the sexual desire and has tried to condemn it root and branch. It doesn't preach moderation here as it should, but total abstinence; and condemns every sexual provocation and all sensuous desires as if they were contrary to human nature, instead of being the very flower of the soul.

If Paul had been a dispeptic or even of weak digestion, instead of being impotent, there is small doubt that he would have condemned any immoderation in eating and drinking, instead of sexual indulgence. And what a difference this would have made in all our lives, and how much more rational ordinary Christian teaching would have been.

Self-indulgence in eating and drinking is simply loathsome and disgusting to all higher natures, and yet it is persisted in by the majority of mankind without let or hindrance. What preacher ever dares to hold the fat members of his congregation up to ridicule, or dreams of telling them that they are not only disgusting, but stupidly immoral and bent on suicide? Indulgence in sex pleasure is much less dangerous to the individual. It is indeed only when indulgence is carried to excess that sexual pleasure can be harmful.

And what I want to know is, why shouldn't one speak just as openly and freely of the pleasures and pains of sexual indulgence as of the pleasures and pains of eating and drinking? Religion, it seems to me, or our duty to our neighbor, has little to do with either of these dominant desires of humanity. In each of them, religion should preach moderation and due regard for the welfare of our neighbor, and nothing more. For the temptation to excess in any sexual desire is only a sign of natural vigor and is therefore closely allied to virtue: as the Bible says, "Out of strength comes forth sweetness."

Our ordinary convention of speech is simply stupid. I am allowed to talk in any company of the pleasure of eating young partridge, or well-kept pheasant, or high grouse, but I am forbidden to talk in the same way of the pleasures of sexual intercourse. One cannot contrast the thrills of the novice with the delights of the experienced without incurring the condemnation of all and sundry. I can study indigestion and talk of its causes and consequences; I can push my investigations to apoplexy and death; but I must not talk of diseases brought on from sexual promiscuity, nor warn against them. For fifty years now the whole of the prohibitions of society and religion, in this respect, have seemed to me perfectly idiotic. I blame every father and mother for letting boys and girls go into life unschooled and unwarned.

And when in the story of My Life I began to treat sex matters freely and honestly, I was overwhelmed by the preposterous condemnation of the English-speaking peoples. Still, behind the storm of cowardly calumny and silly slander on the part of the self-styled critics, I have been encouraged by the testimony of hundreds of men and women who have written, thanking me for my outspokenness. They have all told me what I knew, that frank expression made my life story more interesting and more valuable; for without knowledge of the sexual life of man or woman, one can know little or nothing of the character. And so I begin this third volume of my autobiography, comprising the ten years between 1890 and 1900, with these words of Heinrich Heine, the first of all the moderns.

Ever the eunuchs whimpered

When I sang out with force,

They whimpered and they simpered:

My singing was much too coarse.

This decade of my life was memorable to me for the discovery of a side of life which I had hitherto almost ignored. I had found out early, at fifteen or sixteen, that if you worked as hard as you could, you came to success everywhere very quickly. So few people do their best that the one who does becomes a marked man almost at once; and thus success leads immediately to large influence. If you choose to save, you can become rich in a few years. But till this later period I had no idea of the speculative part of city life, where fortunes are made in a day by an idea. This knowledge in its complete form came to me through association with Terah Hooley — the great speculator of that mid-period in London. As Maupassant and Randolph Churchill were the heroes of my second volume, so Terah Hooley, Cecil Rhodes, Oscar Wilde, and a host of writers and artists were the dominant personalities of this period.

It was asserted by the official receiver in Hooley's bankruptcy that he had made over six million pounds in two years in London; that is why I call him one of the most successful speculators of that time. Rhodes's fortune was even larger and better based and led to all sorts of political influence which I wish to trace as fairly as I can, for I liked both these men and had good reason to like them.

In my first volume travel and study had the chief place and, in my second volume, love and politics; but in this third volume I propose to deal with literature and art and describe my own beginnings as a writer and artist; and when passing thus from things of the will to things of the intellect, I feel that I am rising into serener and purer air, and hope, therefore, to make this third volume more interesting than the earlier ones.

I have always wanted to build Romance in the heart of Reality, making the incidents of my life an Earthly Pilgrimage: of my youth a great adventure; of my manhood a lyric of love; of my maturity the successful quest of El Dorado; and finally, of my old age, a prophetic vision.

And here in this book I wish to admit the reader more closely than ever to the subtle intimacies of my spirit. I want him to realize my tremulous-vague hopes of immortal life; the evidences of my mortality, and the effect of sadeyed doublings; the fitful joys of life and love, and the growing spirit of things called inanimate. I want him to meet a thousand instincts and confused desires, and gradually come to know me better than he knows anyone else who has given a record of himself in any literature.

As one gets toward life's term, one is apt to dwell more and more on the supreme value of goodness and loving-kindness. It comes to me often, as if the only things of moment in my life were the kindly things I've done, and the consistent advocacy of forgiveness in my works was the prophylactic against decay-as if goodness were in a very real sense the goal of human life.

It is not altogether then by chance that this third volume should be devoted to some of the best and sweetest souls I have met in this strange crusade of life-Thomson, Meredith, and Burton; I must tell, too, what I owe to Heine, whom I love more even than any of these, though I never met him in the flesh, for Heine left this world in the same month I entered it. All through these years from thirty-five to forty-five the spirit of Jesus came to have ever more and greater influence, not only upon my mind, but also on all my actions.

CHAPTER I

Mental self-discipline

What can we call our own in this world, but our energy, strength and will power? If I could count up all I owe to my great predecessors and contemporaries, there would not be much over.

Goethe to Eckermann, 1825

Strictly speaking, one should tell only of one's life that which is symbolic and therefore of universal interest; but it is extremely difficult to draw the line with any precision, and now and then the seemingly trivial accidents of life have a certain deeper meaning of their own; for instance, adventures come to the adventurous, riches to the greedy. I am treating the happenings of my existence as freely as Rousseau treated his: taking memory, for the most part, as artist-but the first pages of his Confessions startle me with the extraordinary difference of character between us.

He is full of affection and sentiment even in childhood. As a boy, I certainly loved no one. I liked my eldest brother because when I was about thirteen he began to treat me as an equal and showed me kindness. But the first person I really cared for was Professor Smith of Lawrence, Kansas.

How he managed to discover that there was something more than the ordinary in me the very first time we met, I am at a loss to imagine; it may have been a certain fluency of speech, or an uncommon choice of words.

I remember, on my way up from Texas once, the malarial fever having left me, I was hungry and glad to get down from the stage-coach. Dinner had been laid in a little roadside inn for half a dozen people-but I was the only passenger, and I practically ate the half-dozen dinners!

The motherly woman of the place came in and held up her hands in astonishment. I said, "Of course I will pay you for the six dinners."

"Indeed you won't!" she cried. "You have a right to eat all you can; won't you have another pie?"

I could not help accepting, and took another apple pie. When I was pulling out six dollars to pay, "No, no," she exclaimed, "it is a dollar a head — I know'd at once you was a foreigner!"

"Why do you think I'm a foreigner?" I asked.

"You speak such broken United States!" she replied. I gasped, for already I prided myself on my English speech. Professor Smith was the first to praise me for it.

All my boyhood was informed with a consuming passion to win in life, and to enjoy as much as possible. By living for three years beside Professor Smith, there came to me a passionate desire for growth, a view of the possibility, not of perfection, but of trained and lofty intelligence. From that time on, I read and thought and lived with a purpose, to develop every faculty I had to the uttermost.

A gifted woman writes to me that my first love must have modified my character profoundly. It did nothing of the sort. I never felt what is called love, that is, sexual desire and admiration plus affection, until I was nearly thirty, though desire possessed me incessantly from fourteen on.

In some respects Rousseau was very like me and again very unlike. For instance, he tells us that the true meaning of a scene did not come to him at the time, but hours afterwards he recalled each intonation, each look, each gesture, and realized exactly what each person had thought and felt in his heart. This has been true to me all my life, and I attribute its magic to my excellent memory. How one with a bad memory can reproduce a scene, I am at a loss to imagine. But always, thanks to my exact remembrance, friends and enemies and the indifferent reveal themselves to me in their true colors when I recall their words and looks afterwards.

On another occasion, Rousseau tells us how girls appeal to him according to their fine dress and manners; chambermaids, he says, and shop-girls never attracted him at all: he wanted ladies-cared-for hands, exquisitely dressed hair, pretty shoes, ribbons and laces always won him more than beauty. He knew this preference to be ridiculous, but he could not help feeling it. In my case, the exact reverse was true: it was beauty and youth that attracted me and the dress had absolutely nothing to do with it; even the beauty of face did not affect me as much as a beautiful figure, and while still a youth, I was as conscious as a Frenchman of the charm of small wrists and ankles and the deeper significance thereof. I must confess here and now that beauty of line and perfection in form were the soul of my desire from youth to age.

Up to forty, my life was one long effort at self-development. Thanks to the competition in English schools, I wanted, as a boy and youth, to be an extraordinary athlete more than anything else and labored to develop my muscles in every possible way. I read everything I could find on athletics, and questioned my elders every chance I got, while developing myself systematically. With my eldest brother, in the Belfast gymnasium, I practiced assiduously. At fifteen I could pull myself up and chin the bar fifty tunes; and I shall never forget my joy when I found I could draw myself up with one hand. After prolonged practice with clubs and dumb-bells I could hold out fifty pounds at arms' length, and put up a hundred pounds above my head: I could also walk under a bar and then with a short run, jump it.

But again and again I met someone stronger than myself, or more agile, and at eighteen I put the gloves on with a second-rate professional and got a bad beating. He taught me the most important truth in boxing, that one can hit down very much harder than one can hit up; and that height and length of reach give an enormous advantage. From that day on I realized that I was too small to be a great athlete. My eyes, too, were astigmatic and I was shortsighted; in every physical respect I seemed "cribbed and coffined" to mediocrity. Nature had denied me the crown!

Thanks to this continual exercise, even now, though only five feet six in height, I am broad and strong; nearly forty inches round the chest with fourteen-inch biceps and twelve-inch forearms; stripped I look more like a prize fighter than anything else.

As soon as I learned as a boy of twelve wherein beauty really consisted, I saw that I could have no claim to it; my features were irregular, my eyes only ordinary in size and grey-blue in color, and even my father's sailors always called me "lug-sails" because of my over-large ears. The chief thing about my mug, as Rodin said, was that it had a certain life and energy.

Perhaps the one thing that might be praised in my appearance was my dress: my father, as a naval officer, always advised me to dress as well as possible at all cost. "It is of supreme importance in life," he said, "to be always well dressed; nobody cares where you live or what you eat, but everyone notices your dress." I took his advice to heart, and the public school life taught me the rest. The English of the best class are the best dressed men in the world-they have a supreme sense of the value of appearance.

Strangely enough, Pierre Loti told me that he had been plagued as a boy with the very same athletic ambition. I met him first in the Palace at Monaco; he was a great friend of the Princess Alice, who often talked of him. One day I was introduced to him there. He was very small and slight and certainly wore stays, if indeed, he didn't rouge as well; so his confession that he had wanted above all things to be big and an athlete astounded me. We went into the garden together; he was tiny and fully forty, yet to my amazement he insisted on throwing a somersault backwards, and he did it quite perfectly, like a clown, and then went on to show me that the muscles of his arms and legs were like bands of steel. He was of astonishing physical vigor.

"I always wished to be very strong," he said, "till I found out, at about seventeen, that I was too small. It was my admiration of size and strength in a man that made me take a big sailor about with me, even in Paris society, at first, and so gave occasion for much cheap sneering."

Disappointed in my ambition to shine physically, I turned with redoubled energy to the things of the mind; my memory I always knew was very good, indeed: I could read a page of a book slowly and then repeat it almost exactly. I had already learned at school the Paradise Lost of Milton in the leisure hours of a school week; later, at about twenty-four, I learned half a dozen Shakespeare plays by heart without any trouble; and mainly to show off, in Athens I learned Demosthenes' oration "On the Crown" in the original Greek from beginning to end.

I had no idea then that one should select with the greatest care everything that one learns by heart in youth; for whatever one learns then sticks in the memory and prevents one from recalling with ease words or passages learned later. Memory has its limitations. I hate to think now that I was fool enough to waste my time and pack some memory drawers with Demosthenes' rhetoric instead of Russian vocables.

My father did even worse for me. He used to give me chapters of the Bible to learn by heart and was delighted to make me spout them before visitors.

Often, now, trying to think of something more valuable, I recall some page of the Psalms or even of Chronicles that merely annoys me. One blunders in this world for want of knowledge, and often blunders irretrievably.

I soon found too that a good memory was a handicap to the thinker: to know the thoughts of others prevents one from thinking-to think is a special accomplishment, and has to be specially cultivated.

But no one has shown the way, or indicated, even, the first steps. I found out, however, that denying a thesis and trying to elaborate arguments against it was one way of exercising the mind; so at once I began, in Goethe's phrase, to be the spirit that always denied-der Geist der stets verneint.

This practice helped me a good deal, and one trick I discovered which was of even more avail. Before reading a chapter in some book that interested me, I'd write down all my thoughts on the subject, then read the chapter and see how much the author had added to my stock of ideas. This soon taught me many things and above all, made the personalities of the great thinkers plain to me. I found, for instance, that Kant and Schopenhauer were fine minds, as good even as my whilom favorite, Bacon.

Let me give one example of this way of reading. We take up Schopenhauer on The Art of Literature. If an intelligent, well read man reads it through, the odds are that he finds nothing wonderful ha it, nothing with which he does not agree, and that's the end of the business. But there's a better way to read. I take up a sheet of paper and ask myself what I could write on "Authorship."

Because I know Schopenhauer is a first-rate man, I take care to put down on the paper all that life and thought have taught me about the author's work. I revise and revise what I have written, all the while letting my thoughts play about this question, just as if Schopenhauer and I were two competitors and this was the theme given to us by the examiners, which was to determine our respective places in the crucial examination. When you have done this once and then read Schopenhauer's essay, you will appreciate his distinction between those who write for money and those who write because they have thought deeply on some subject and have something original to say. You will probably end where he begins, that writing for money is the mortal disease of literature. You may even share the great pessimist's opinion that "Vermin is the rule everywhere," which is a funny comment on our American belief in democracy.

This way of testing yourself by comparing your ideas with those of a master will not only make you think; but will impress upon you any new thought the author gives you in an extraordinary way. One hour's work of this sort each week will make an incredible difference in your thinking powers and in your knowledge in one short year.

For years I did everything I could think of to better my mind; but whereas the proper exercises for the body and its muscles are fairly well known and classified, there are no such handbooks dealing with the intellect, I just jot down, therefore, the practices I have found most helpful, and among them, this of setting forth what you know of a subject, and then comparing it with what a master has written on the same theme, is the most educative.

Very early in my development I found that travel and the learning of a new language did more for me than even books: each new language, I soon realized, was like a new window opening new views of the world, while enlarging one's conception of life.

But it is excessively dangerous for a writer to learn another language really well. Carlyle told me that he had always regretted that he did not know German as well as English, and advised me to make myself a master of it. So when I went to Germany I studied it assiduously, and not only learnt to speak it as well as I spoke English, but studied its development, learnt Gothic and Old High German and Middle High German, as well as modern German.

Besides, I really learnt Latin and Greek through German. The consequence was, when I returned to England my friend Verschoyle pointed out to me that my English style was spoilt by German idioms. I used to say afterwards that it took me three years to learn German and six more years to wash my mind free of it. For I was quite six years in England as a journalist, writing a good deal every day, before I got back to my sure boyish feeling of what was the true English idiom, or the best way to express a new thought in English; and all these years I was afraid to read a German book, nor would I speak a word of German if I could help it. For the characteristic of German is abstract thought, while our English speech is fundamentally poetic.

But a little knowledge of languages does one good. It's like travel: it excites the mind and provokes thought by showing you new views and new limitations of men. Even more than travel, I found that meeting and getting to know men of light and reading was exhilarating, and in the truest sense, inspiring. But I soon found that really great men were extraordinarily rare, and even famous names often covered commonplace natures.

The chief delights of life have come to me from books. I remember reading once of the death of a princess of the Visconti in the early Renaissance, 1420 or thereabouts. She left great possessions in lands, vineyards and jewelry: she did not even trouble to enumerate them, but willed them away in blocks.

When she came to her books, however, she bequeathed them one by one to her dearest, adding a word of description or affection to each volume, for they had been her "most treasured possessions"; she had four books in all and she had read every one of them hundreds of times.

That is how books ought to be regarded, but now they are so cheap that we have lost the sense of their inestimable value.

There is a subtle compensation in everything, and the cheapening of books, the vulgarization of knowledge, has a great deal to answer for. We have forgotten how to use books, and they revenge themselves on us.

First of all, reading usually prevents thinking. You want to know how light is transmitted from the sun, let us say. Instead of thinking over the matter, you pick up a book on physics to learn that light is transmitted by the ether at the rate of some fourteen million miles a second. The ordinary man is satisfied with this farrago of futilities. But the man who has taught himself to think pauses and asks: "What is this ether?" He then learns that the ether is but a name invented to conceal our ignorance. We know nothing about the ether; we take it for granted that light cannot be transmitted through a vacuum.

Consequently we have to assume some attenuated form of atmosphere gifted with the power of transmitting light and heat. The whole hypothesis is just as imaginary as that of a personal God and not nearly so uplifting and comforting.

The whole theory of light must be reconsidered. Newton's theory has been accepted on insufficient grounds. We all know that Goethe rejected it and spent fourteen years in evolving a theory of his own. Physicists and men of science rejected Goethe's explanation and most men thought of it as the aberration of a man of genius; but a generation later Schopenhauer, who was certainly an intellect of the first order, examined the whole question and declared that Goethe was right and Newton wrong. But even now our textbooks have hardly done more than fill us to contentment with our ignorance on this important subject.

And so it is with almost everything else; we read a dozen novels hastily, carelessly, for the story alone. We might as well drink quarts of a Tisane sweetened to please the palate. We get nothing out of our traveling in a foreign country but what we bring with us. It is certain that the more we bring to our reading, the more we get from it.

Schopenhauer saw that there is "no quality of style to be gained by reading writers who possess it. We must have the gifts before we can learn how to use them. And without the gifts, reading teaches us nothing but cold, dry mannerisms, and makes us shallow imitators." Another word of his is better still.

"Be careful," he advises, "to limit your time for reading and devote it exclusively to the works of those great men of all times and countries who overtop the rest of humanity. These alone educate and instruct."

There should be "a tragical history of literature," he adds, "which should tell of the martyrdom of almost all those who really enlightened humanity, of almost all the really great masters of every kind of art: it would show us how, with few exceptions, they were tormented to death without recognition, without followers; how they lived in poverty and misery, while fame, honor, and riches were the lot of the unworthy."

Yet, from intimacy with the greatest, one gets a certain strength and a certain courage, like Browning's here:

Careless and unperplexed

When I wage battle next What weapon to select, what armour to endue.

You should find thoughts, too, that Schopenhauer has not found, get outside his mind, so to speak. For example, he does not tell you the chief advantage of authorship. Bacon says that writing makes "an exact man", but neither Bacon nor Schopenhauer seems to see that writing should teach you how to think, and that no other business is so favorable to mental growth as authorship properly understood: teaching is the best way of learning. Even Schopenhauer is sometimes uninspired. It is not enough to have new things to say, as he believes; you should also say them in the best and most original way, and that is something the German in Schopenhauer prevented him from understanding.

I have praised Schopenhauer so freely that I feel compelled to state one or two of the important points in which I differ from him. For instance, he sneers at those who study personalities; he says, "It is as though the audience in a theatre were to admire a fine scene, and then rush upon the stage to look at the scaffolding that supports it." In this he is mistaken: we should study the development of a great man, if for nothing else, in order to see what helped him in his growth. What was it, for instance, about mid-way in his life, say from 1600 or so on, that set Shakespeare to the writing of his great tragedies?

He tells you the whole story in his sonnets and in his plays of this period, as I have shown in my book on him.

And this knowledge is of supreme importance for any complete realization of Shakespeare, but Schopenhauer did not understand the creative intellect.

Whenever he talks about novels he is not so sure a guide as when he is talking of philosophies. "Good novelists," he says, "take the general outline of a character from some real person of their acquaintance, and then idealize and complete it to suit their purpose." This is not true of the novelists or dramatists: the creative artist goes differently to work, I believe.

It is perfectly clear, for instance, that Cervantes painted himself in Don Quixote, idealized, if you like, a little, but rather by omission of faults than by heightening of idealistic touches. Nor do I imagine that Sancho Panza was taken from any real person of Cervantes' acquaintances; it is to me a generalized portrait of ordinary Spanish characteristics.

And if we go to an even greater imagination, to Shakespeare's, we shall find that he wrote in much the same way. His Hamlet is a portrait of himself, with the omission of his worst fault, which was an overpowering sensuality. His Falstaff, as I have shown elsewhere, is indeed a portrait taken from life, probably from Chettle, the fat man, half-poet, half-wit, a friend of his early days in London. I have proved this, I think, by showing that when the Queen ordered him to picture Falstaff over again and show "the fat Knight" in love, he was unable to find a single new characteristic of his hero; he had to copy his previous work almost word for word. If he had invented the new character, he would have been able to add some new traits at will.

But then I may be asked about the multitude of his other characters, and in order to answer it properly, I should have to take them seriatim. But the main truth can be put shortly. Nearly all of the fine lovable characters are partial portraits of himself, and his villains, such as Iago, are really his view of life, as it acts on inferior intelligences. "Put money in your purse… Drown cats and blind puppies"-all Iago's chief sayings might have been put in the mouth of Sancho Panza. They are from the heart of the common Englishman, who is very like the common Spaniard. Shakespeare's expressions are more pregnant, for he was a greater master of language than even Cervantes: but the wicked and hateful purpose of Iago was not sufficiently and so he does not live for us as effectively as Sancho.

It was my love of Shakespeare and my study of him that gave me most of what I know, for my study of him taught me to read all other great men, taught me how they grow and how their peculiarities often dwarf them. From this passionate study of Shakespeare I came to see how the high lights of noble feeling and high endeavor were continually shadowed by little snobbisms and pitiful shortcomings.

A better lesson, still, I learnt from Shakespeare. As I have told in my book on him, the greatest disappointment in his life came when his beloved Mary Fitton married and left London for good in 1608; and when, in the same year, he got the news of his mother's death. He went back to Stratford and there got to know his daughter Judith. The dramas he wrote afterwards show an astounding growth in beauty of character. He not only forgives his lost love, Mary Fitton, but acknowledges with perfect comprehension all she had taught him, and meant to him. The modesty of his daughter, Judith, too, adds a new tinge of Puritan morality to his judgments of life. It was Shakespeare's sovereign fairness of mind and nobility of soul first taught me that I ought to modify my native selfishness and pugnacity. Through studying him I came to see gradually that the greater natures and wiser minds owe a certain duty to themselves: we must forgive, he taught me, for little people cannot; and so I came to that modification of the prayer of Jesus, which has been condemned as blasphemous. "Give us this day our daily bread," he says, "and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us."

"Give and forgive," I said, "is the true gospel"; and from this time on, with many lapses, due for the most part to selfishness or temper, I tried, in my own life, to realize this striving.

This was my "conversion" to a better life, and it occurred about my fortieth year as a result partly of complete success in material strivings; but more, I am fain to believe, as a natural incident of growth. I came to see that if I would be with the great ones in the future, I too must lead a life of generosity and kindness. It was and is my most profound conviction that all progress in this life comes from gifted individuals, and if we desire the bettering of things or think of this earthly pilgrimage as a slow journeying upward to perfection, we must do our little best to help all the abler men of our time to selfrealization and achievement.

Like chooses like in this world, and the natural affinity of the noble is a stronger tie than can easily be imagined. Now, for the first time, I began to live the higher life, as I understood it. And soon new lessons from it began to drift in upon me. I found almost immediately, that certain persons, whom I felt to be among the best, now began to seek me out and show me affection. Lord Grimthorpe became a close friend, and charming people in every walk of life began to show me kindness.

"He came to His own, and His own received Him not," is one of the few sayings in the New Testament which must be construed in a narrow way: in this world, our own, in the large sense of those like us or on our level, always receive us and treat us with loving-kindness beyond our deserts. If "the way of the transgressor is hard," the way of the heavenly pilgrim becomes the primrose path to the divine life.

It must not be understood that I became a saint, or that ideal strivings dominated me; far from it, alas! Now and then I was hatefully selfish and once, at least, to a woman detestable: she is still living and I cannot confess my meanness without exposing her, but my treatment of her still brings a hot flush of shame to my cheeks. Even wounded vanity, though it may explain, cannot excuse my paltry, detestable conduct. I was as self-centered as ever, and as confirmed an epicurean: a Hellene always, as Heine would have said, and not a Jew, and still less a Saxon; for the Saxons love to accept promissory notes of ecstatic happiness in eternity, whereas the Hellenes are intent on making the best of this present life, and enjoying themselves here below as much as possible.

My worst fault, I think, has always been my impatience: it often gave the impression of bad temper, or cynicism, or worse, for it was backed by an excellent tongue that translated most feelings into words of some piquancy.

Consequently, this man spoke of me as truculent and the other as callous and the third as domineering, when in reality I wished to be kind, but was unable to suffer fools gladly. This impatience has grown on me with the years, and as soon as I gave up conducting journals, I limited my intercourse to friends who were always men of brains, and so managed to avoid a myriad occasions of giving offense unnecessarily.

This sharp-tongued impatience was allied to a genuine reverence for greatness of mind or character; but again this reverence brought with it an illimitable disdain for the second-rate or merely popular. I was more than amiable to Huxley or Wallace, to Davidson or Dowson, and correspondingly contemptuous of the numerous mediocrities who are the heroes of the popular press. So I got a reputation for extraordinary conceit and abrupt bad manners.

All the early part of this period I was in love and therefore did not run after new experiences in what the French call le pays du tendre. I had an excellent home and troops of friends: I had brought living to a science; I rode every morning in the park, ate and drank in moderation, watched my weight, and by hard exercise kept myself in good condition.

About 1895 I began, little by little, to alter my purpose in life, trying, as far as vanity would let me, to live to the best in me; and when I took control of the Saturday Review in that year, I modified the general method of criticism, as I shall tell; I found it better to praise than to condemn.

Even in this world, loving-kindness is a key to most of the great doors. And though it was in England that I learned this good lesson, strange to say, all the while I worked and thought, England grew smaller to me and more provincial, while America seemed to expand with undreamed of possibilities.

But now and again some law case or some presidential or public announcement shamed me to the soul by flaunting some outworn brainless prejudice.

Little by little I turned to France as the motherland of my spirit, though there were Germans, too, and Italians and Spaniards that quickened and inspired me with enthusiasm similar to my own; cosmopolitan, I called myself from this time on, or perhaps it would suit English and American prejudice better if I invented a new French word and called myself cosmopolisson.

CHAPTER II

Heine

In connection with Heine I must begin by relating one event that happened before 1890: I was lunching one day about 1889 with the Princess of Monaco at Claridge's when for some reason or other the talk fell upon Heinrich Heine, the Princess being a grand-niece of the famous poet. I had just been reading some things of his for the hundredth time with huge delight, and curiously enough, a morning or two before in a Vienna paper, I had come across the announcement that the poet's sister was still living and in full possession of all her faculties, though she was nearing ninety.

"Instead of editing a London review," I exclaimed, "I would give anything to go to Germany, get to know Heine's sister, and then write the best life possible of the great poet."

"How could she help you?" asked the Princess.

"It is the first manifestations of a great talent," I said, "that discover the secret, and show the heart. His sister would know his first successes and his first disappointments: all his beginnings; she could recall childish memories throwing light on his growth-unimaginable things-indicating how he came so early to maturity. What he tells of his visit to England as a young man is astounding, his condemnation of English pedantry, snobbishness, and cruelty is extraordinary. 'The figure of justice in England,' he said, 'had a naked sword on her knee, but was quite blind!' "

"Why don't you write his life," asked the Princess, "if you admire him so intensely?"

"It would cost me five thousand pounds to abandon my work here and go abroad for a year," I said, "and I haven't the money to spare."

"I'll give it you," she replied.

"In that case, Madame," I said, "I'll go and do the work without a moment's delay, for Heine's sister is certain to be able to throw new light on a myriad doubtful things, and assuredly she will be able to solve for us the inexplicable tragedy of his life: how did he come to suffer for years in his mattress-grave in Paris and die at six and fifty? Was it syphilis? Or merely sexual selfindulgence?

We know he was never very strong; but his sister must have heard the truth, and fancy being in a position to tell the true truth about Heine, the greatest German poet after Goethe; the first of the moderns, as I always call him, because he was a rebel at heart and soul-free of that respect for convention that maimed even Goethe."

The next weeks I spent reading Heine, his Reisebilder, his latest poetry and all the books I could get on his life and art; but I heard nothing from the Princess Alice. At length I thought of writing to her, but I couldn't do that.

"She may have spoken in haste," I said to myself, "and I should be forcing her perhaps to give me five thousand pounds which she could ill spare." I resolved to put the whole incident out of my mind.

Some time later I read in a German paper of the death of Heine's sister: she was ninety-odd. The very next day I was again lunching with the Princess at Claridge's and I told her of the death. "No one now," I said, "will ever be able to tell the true truth about Heine's long illness and death."

"I thought you were going to do it," said the Princess.

"I told you, Madame, it would cost five thousand pounds and I couldn't afford it."

"But I said that I would give you the money willingly," was her reply; "why didn't you ask me for it?"

"I was afraid it might embarrass you," I said. "However, it is now too late!"

I should have loved to write Heine's life, infinitely rather than the life of Oscar Wilde, because he was a far greater man and had new and true things to say on the vital problems of modern Europe.

What he has written on Italy and France and Germany constitutes the best criticism in literature, and his Fragments on England are almost as penetrating. I have here a personal confession to make. I knew that Heine had only been in England for a few weeks as a young man, and so, half- English as I was, I thought I could afford to neglect what he had written about it. When I went to New York in November, 1914, I was asked to lecture at the German Club, and I selected Heine as my theme; but the committee wanted me to speak on England as well, to say what I really thought of it, so I talked on England for some time. At the end of the evening, a man came over to me and said, "You never quoted the English Fragments of Heine, and yet you repeated almost word for word things he had said about the English people."

"How extraordinary," I exclaimed, "to tell you the truth, I never read the English Fragments, but I will read them at once."

I found that I had almost used Heine's very words; that my point of view on England and English faults was all but the same as his; but, though he saw all the weaknesses of the people with astonishing clearness and put them in a high light, some of the virtues of that strange folk seemed to have escaped him: for the true Englishman has a deep love for what is fair and large and kindly; he allows himself to maltreat Ireland for hundreds of years, but when his sin is brought home to him, he will give the Irish their freedom in a kindly and generous spirit. After the Civil War in America, eight or nine states contracted debts to England, but England has never called them in nor insisted on repayment; surely there is something nobly generous in such a people. Besides, their high poetry and astounding love of physical beauty should have endeared them to Heine. But Heine's view of English limitations and surface faults is astoundingly acute. It taught me that there was a strange likeness of view between us, and of judgment. Time and again I had been struck by some half-truth pungently expressed, only to find on wider reading that he had seen the other half just as clearly. Much of the piquancy of his writing comes from this peculiarity of his. I went on to read him completely; and the more I read, the more I grew to love and admire him.

The Germans always talk of Goethe and Schiller as their greatest, just as the English foolishly talk of Shakespeare and Milton, without realizing that in Hyperion Keats has written far better blank verse than anything ever reached by Milton. And in the same way Heine is a greater poet and a greater prose writer, too, than Schiller, who, like Milton, was rather a rhetorician than a master-singer. Both nations accept the Immortal reluctantly, but console themselves with what is related to them and commonplace.

I love Heine perhaps even more than Goethe, though I recognize that he is inferior to Goethe in philosophic range and deep-thoughted wisdom; he was almost as great a lyric poet as Goethe himself, though Goethe's best lyrics are the finest in all literature-and a far better prose writer. Besides, Goethe was in love with the conventional, whereas Heine was a born rebel, the first, indeed, to voice the revolt of the modern man against all the outworn and irrational forbiddings and prohibitions of our ordinary life.

And how lovable Heine was, and how human-charming, and what a friend of man! Can one ever forget the poem he wrote when Karl Heine, heir of old Solomon Heine, his banker-uncle, who had always allowed him five or six thousand francs a year, wrote to him that he heard he was writing his life and so wished to warn him that if he wrote anything derogatory of the Heines, he would immediately cut off his allowance.

Heine had already written three volumes of what would have been the most interesting autobiography in the world, but how could he continue it if it were to cost his beloved wife the little pension of five thousand francs a year, which would ensure his dear one comparative comfort after his death?

For sweet love's sake, Heine burnt his autobiography and wrote this poem on the incident:

Wer ein Herz hat und im Herzen

Liebe tragt, ist uberwunden

Schon zur Halfte und so lieg' ich

Jetzt geknebelt und gebunden.

Wenn ich sterbe wird die Zunge

Ausgerissen meiner Leiche

Denn sie furchten redend kam' ich

Wieder aus dem Schattenreiche.

Stumm verfaulen wird der Todte

In der Graft und nie verraten

Werd' ich die auf mir verobten

Lacherlichen Freveltaten.

Was there ever a greater poem written as comment on an actual occurrence?

With rare understanding Heine called himself the best of all the humorists; he is that, and something more, wittier even than Shakespeare, while Goethe, to judge by the scene in Auerbach's Keller in Faust, had hardly more humor than a pancake. It is Heine's humor that gilds all his books and makes them unforgettable-a possession of mankind forever. Who can ever forget the verses in the poem entitled Deutschland, which he calls "A Winter's Tale," in which he has set forth our modern creed better than anybody else:

Bin neues Lied, ein besseres Lied,

O Freunde, will ich euch dichten:

Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon

Das Himmelreich errichten.

Wir wollen auf Erden glucklich sein,

Und wollen nicht mehr darben;

Verschlemmen soil nicht der faule Bauch, Was fleissige Hande erwarben.

Es wachst hiernieden Brot genug

Fur alle Menschenkinder,

Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schonheit und Lust, Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.

Ja, Zuckererbsen fur jedermann,

Sobald die Schoten platzen!

Den Himtnel uberlassen wir

Den Engeln und den Spatzen.

Here for the first time is the modern gospel, complete in essentials and unforgettable in humor. It is indeed "a new song and a better song" that Heine sings to us: "the resolve to found the Kingdom of Heaven here in this world."

"We want to be happy on this earth," he says, "and no longer suffer want or allow the lazy belly to consume what industrious hands have created."

"There's enough bread for all the children of men," he cries, "and roses and myrtles and beauty and passion besides: ay, and sweet peas to boot-yes, sweet peas for all, and with full content we can leave Heaven to the angels and sparrows."

I would rather have written those four verses than all Schiller.

And in his history of religion, Heine has written our modern faith in prose even more perfectly than in his poetry:

The happier and more beautiful generations who are produced through free choice of love and who come to blossom in a religion of joy will smile sorrowfully over us, their poor ancestors who stupidly controlled ourselves instead of enjoying all the pleasures of this beautiful life, and by denying and killing our passions and desires made ourselves into pale ghosts of real men and women. Yes, I say it boldly, our descendants will be more beautiful and far happier than we are.

This, too, is the heart of my belief and of my hope for the future of mankind, and I have preached it even more boldly than Heine or Whitman and have been punished for it even more savagely.

How wise Heine was and far-sighted!

Think of what he wrote to a friend about Alsace-Lorraine thirty years before the war of 1870 and seventy-five years before the Great War:

I am the friend of the French, as I am the friend of all men who are good and reasonable. Rest quiet, I will never give up the Rhine to the French, and that for the very simple reason that the Rhine belongs to me. Yea, it belongs to me, through inalienable right of birth. I am of the free Rhine, the still freer son; my cradle stood on its banks, and I do not see why the Rhine should belong to any other than the children of the soil.

Alsace and Lorraine can I truly not so lightly incorporate with Germany as you are in the habit of doing, since the people in these countries are deeply attached to France, on account of the rights which they won at the great revolution, on account of those equal laws and free institutions which are very agreeable to the citizen spirit, but which yet leave much to be desired by the stomachs of the masses.

Meanwhile Alsace and Lorraine will again be attached to Germany when we accomplish that which the French have already begun; when we surpass them in action, as we have already done in thought; when we can exalt ourselves to the last consequence of such thought; when we rout out servility from its last corner of refuge-from heaven; when we free the God who dwells upon earth in humanity from Ms state of degradation; when we again restore to their dignity the people disinherited of its happiness, and genius and beauty brought to shame… Yea, not alone Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe, the whole world shall then fall to our share, the whole world shall become German! I often dream of this mission and universal dominion of Germany when I wander among the oak trees. Such is my patriotism!

Yet Heine poured deathless sarcasm on the worst faults of the German, the wooden, pedantical Prussians with their frozen conceit and on their behinds a coat of arms.

Heine saw life more deeply and fairly than any of his contemporaries:

What will be the end of this agitation to which, as ever, Paris gave the first signal? War, a most frightfully destructive war, which, alas! will call into the arena the two most noble nations of civilization-I mean Germany and France. England, the great sea serpent which can always creep back to its monstrous lair in the ocean; and Russia, which has most secure hiding places in monster pine forests, steppes, and ice-fields-these two would not be quite overthrown by the most decisive defeats; but Germany in such case is threatened with a far worse fate, and even France might have to part with its political existence.

Yet that would only be the first act of the great extravaganza — the prelude as it were. The second act is the European, the world revolution, the great duel of the destitute with the aristocracy of wealth, and in that there will be neither talk of nationality, nor of religion. There will then be only one nation, to wit, the world: and only one faith, to wit, prosperity upon earth…

And then the inevitable twinkle of the eye:

I advise our descendants to come into the world with a very thick skin to their backs.

Heine was just as wise and far-seeing about persons. The best portrait extant of Lassalle, the great socialist, is from Heine's pen, written when Lassalle was only a youth of nineteen.

My friend, Herr Lassalle, is a young man of the most distinguished intellectual gifts, of the most accurate erudition, with the widest range of knowledge, with the most decided quickness of perception which I have yet known; he combines an energy of will and an ability in conduct which excites my astonishment, and, if his sympathy for me does not deceive me, I expect from him the most effective assistance.

I can't help noticing here Heine's extraordinary prophecy of Lassalle's future.

"You will do great things in Germany," Heine said to him, "though I fear you will probably be shot by someone."

Heine was always generous in encouragement and lavish in praise of contemporary writers-a rare quality with successful writers; and in the "Romantic School" he has especially praised such young writers "for not having divorced life from literature, and for making politics go hand in hand with science, art, and religion," so that they were all at the same time artists, tribunes, and apostles.

Yea, I repeat the word "apostles," for I know no more distinguishing word. A new faith inspires them with a passion of which the writers of a previous period had no idea. This faith is faith in progress, a faith which springs from knowledge. We have measured the earth, weighed the powers of nature, calculated the resources of industry, and discovered that this earth is large enough for everyone to build therein the hut of his happiness.

It is his deeply moral and true view of life which places Heine forever with the highest, but it is his humor which puts the crown, so to speak, on that gracious smiling face: think of a few phrases taken from his school days:

You have no idea how complicated Latin is! The Romans would certainly never have had sufficient spare time for the conquest of the world if they had had first to learn Latin… And geography-I learnt so little of it that later I lost my way in the world (Shakespeare's phrase)…

I got on better in natural history. Some of the pictures of apes, asses, kangaroos, etc., remained fixed in my memory; and it happened subsequently very often that a good many people appeared to me at first sight like old acquaintances…

And then later flashes.

When Boerne, the democrat, observed that if a king had shaken him by the hand he would cut it off, Heine replied, "And I, when his majesty the mob takes my hand-shall wash it."

Speaking of Madame de Stael, Heine wrote:

"O Woman! we must forgive thee much, for thou lovest much-and many."

With one great magnate of the practical world in Paris, the Baron James de Rothschild, Heine was on terms of considerable intimacy; he was welcomed in the Rothschild family circle soon after his arrival in Paris, by means of a letter of introduction from his rich Frankfort uncle. The Baron's liking for Heine's society must have been founded on the latter's social qualities, for his intelligence extended only to financial matters, and his acquaintance with art and poetry was of the smallest. Rothschild treated him, he said, famillionairement; and one story illustrates their relations.

"You know everything, Heine," said Rothschild one day at dinner; "why is this wine called Lacryma Christi!"

"It is called Lacryma Christi," said Heine, "because Christ weeps when rich Jews drink it, while so many poor men are dying of hunger and thirst."

Heine was small in stature and even in youth anything but strong, though Gautier says that at thirty-five in Paris he appeared to be perfectly healthy and had color in his cheeks. Of his first days in Paris, Heine wrote in a continuous state of rapture. "One may regard Paris," he said, "as the capital of the world; a new form of art, a new religion, a new life coming into being here … mighty days are dawning and unknown gods reveal themselves; and at the same time there is everywhere laughing and dancing; everywhere the most cheerful tone of banter prevails and the lightest of jesting…"

He wrote a friend: "If any one asks how I find myself here, say 'Like a fish in water,' or, rather, say that when a fish in the sea asks another how he is, the reply is, 'Like Heine in Paris.' "

But the years of his joy and pleasure were few: from '48 till his death in '56, he suffered the long martyrdom of creeping paralysis. Whatever his shortcomings and his sins, Heine paid for them all in those dreadful years of his agony in Paris. Here is a description of him two years before the end by a lady:

He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child's under the sheet which covered him, the eyes closed, and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted Ecce Homo ever painted by some old German painter… When I kissed him, his beard felt like swan's down or a baby's hair, so weak had it grown, and his face seemed to have gained a certain beauty from pain and suffering… I never saw a man bear such horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected a manner. He complained of his sufferings and was pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once set to work to make me laugh heartily, which pleased him just as much. He neither paraded his anguish nor tried to conceal it, or to put on any stoical airs. He was also far less sarcastic, more hearty, more indulgent, and altogether pleasanter than ever.

All Heine's work appeals to me intensely. He never perhaps reached the highest height of art and created ever-living figures such as Falstaff and Don Quixote: he used mainly his lyrical gift; yet his extraordinary endowment as "the best of all the humorists" gives him rank with the greatest, and he has lent more lightness and grace to German prose than any one else.

Let no one think I am intent on putting Heine higher than he was. In my mind he always comes immediately after Goethe, completing him. Our modern belief, I repeat, has come from Heine, at least was first stated by him; in this respect it is characteristic that he was born with the French Revolution.

Heine understood Christianity on its pathetic side, and if all his sayings and poems on the subject were put together, they would form as illuminating a commentary as Kenan's Life of Jesus. A great passage comes to mind in which he speaks of socialism as the religion of the modern world, and "it, too, has its Judases and its Calvarys."

I love to remember that Heine held Jesus in the highest reverence. "Eternal fame," he says, "is due to that symbol of a suffering God, of the Holy One with his crown of thorns, the crucified Christ whose blood like a soothing balsam has healed the wounds of humanity."

Heine was far more of a pagan than a Christian: he disliked all stupid conventions so heartily that he leaned perhaps too far away from them; he didn't realize that the chiefest reforming force of our time is just the new commandment which Jesus was the first to formulate. But this is really hyper-criticism, for the synthesis of perfect paganism and pure Christianity is not yet even adumbrated, and it is nearly a century since Heine went silent.

Yet he speaks of Stratford-on-Avon as the "northern Bethlehem," which shows, I think, profound understanding of Shakespeare-the understanding of kinship and kingship.

He was indeed, as he said himself, a "brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity," but he was much more than that: I regard him as the best leader we moderns could have had; as a rebel he won to perfect sanity and was able to destroy with his happy humor all the bug-bears, superstitions, conventions, and pruderies that maim and deform our life. If I could only translate him adequately I would make my readers love him as I do. Think of the poem he calls Enfant Perdu (A Lost Child); the stanzas bring tears to my eyes:

Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege, Hielt ich seit dreissig Jahren treulich aus.

Ich kampf te ohne Hoffnung, dass ich siege, Ich wusste, nie komm' ich gesund nach Haus.

In jenen Nachten hat Langweil' ergriffen Mich oft, auch Furcht-(nur Narren furchten nichts)- Sie zu verscheuchen hab' ich dann gepfiffen Die frechen Reime eines Spottgedichts.

Ein Posten ist vakant!-

Die Wunden klaffen-

Der eine fallt, die andern rucken nach-

Doch fall' ich unbesiegt, und meine

Waffen Sind nicht gebrochen-

Nur mein Herze brach.

Such was the courage of the man who died "broken hearted!" And this his creed, which has always been mine. Like Heine, who boasts that all his life he had been a Knight of the Holy Spirit of Truth, I, too, have always loved Truth more than her sisters, Beauty and Goodness; her figure is slighter and less voluptuous; her face, too, less flower-like and round; but the eyes are magnificent, and she is of passion all compact; her kiss-a consecration of sincerity. With her is neither doubt nor fear, and the entire confidence her worship inspires is worth more to her lover than any gift her sisters can bring.

Her chosen one must be a fighter who scorns odds; his course is always straight, forward and upward, and on the arduous road he will lose all friends and fellows and the sweet companionship of life; his beloved ones even will desert him. All his days will be days of strife, there is no respite for him, no rest and no reward save in the proud consciousness that he will always be in the forefront of the great battle, and is sure sooner or later to pay the penalty of his devotion, and die on the field unknown and unpraised, bleeding from a hundred wounds.

I admire all the greatest: Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes, but I love Heine: it is under his standard we must all fight for many a year to come till peradventure science gives us a new and higher creed.

CHAPTER III

Marriage and politics

I ought to have begun this volume with my marriage, but it's painful to me to write about it and I must omit many things, for my first wife is still living, and the circumstances and motives of the alliance are not creditable to me. I had been in love with my American girl for six or seven years, as I have told in Volume II of My Life, and I had been on the point of marrying her a dozen times. But again and again she had excited my jealousy, once, at least almost to frenzy; and now at a crisis in my life, she went on the Continent with her mother without saying anything to me beforehand, and a friend told me he had seen them on the Channel steamer with a young man in close attendance. I was sick with rage and jealous imaginings. The crisis that I speak of came through my losing the editorship of the Evening News, as I shall tell in another chapter.

I had got to know my wife, Mrs. Clayton, a widow, some time before at Mackenzie of Seaforth's in Scotland: he was Lady Jeune's brother. My wife had a house in Park Lane next door to George Wyndham's and often asked me to lunch or dinner. She it was who introduced me to the Duke of Cambridge, who lunched with her at least once a week when he was in London, and to the Vyners, who were intimate friends of hers: Mrs. Vyner, in especial, being also a great friend of the Prince of Wales.

Mrs. Clayton had been married to a rich Yorkshireman of good position: she entertained charmingly and knew everyone. I was delighted to accept her invitations and grew to like her very quickly: she was an excellent companion, not well-read, but intelligent and sympathetic, and we soon became close friends.

Finding me down in the mouth one day, she pressed me for the reason and I told her of Laura. She smiled: "No one who cared for you would go off to the Continent in that way: you had better put Laura out of mind." A little while afterwards she wanted to know why I didn't marry some one and turn my back on all the worries.

"Who would marry me?" I asked. "I'm miserable."

At last I asked her to marry me: she consented, and I was content. Archbishop Plunkett came across to London and married us within a fortnight. We went to Paris, to the Hotel Meurice, and I fell asleep, quite satisfied that I had done very well for myself: my political ambitions, at any rate, would soon be realized.

Next morning I had a rude awakening.

Twenty or thirty people had written to me about my marriage, and among them a couple of girls. When I awoke in the morning I saw my wife crying at the table.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Matter!" she exclaimed; "you are a brute. These girls are in love with you and I thought you had no one."

"How dare you open my letters?" I cried, jumping up and going to the table.

But she was furious beyond all manners and I learned, then and there, how much more jealous women are than men. For a long time I could not believe it, but she gradually convinced me of it. If I looked at any woman in the street there was certain to be a row. Time and again she got up in a theatre and walked out, rather than see me stare at some pretty girl, as she said. All this annoyed me the more because I was short-sighted, and could not see anyone distinctly at half a dozen yards.

As soon as I came to realize that she really suffered, I began to school myself, and the schooling went on to the point that I remember when we went into Italy, I used to select a corner in the hotel restaurant and always looked at the bare walls: anything for a quiet life was my motto, and as I had married for selfish reasons, I felt I ought to give full play to my wife's egotism and peculiarities.

I had resolved to make a success of marriage. I was standing for Parliament, for a division of Hackney, and I believed that if I lived properly with my wife I would get into Parliament and soon reach office. I was brought to discount these hopes almost immediately. Two things convinced me. As we were passing through Bologna, on our way to Rome and Sicily, for I wanted to see Rome and Naples again and Palermo and Monreale, I pulled up the blind for some reason or other and looked out of the window, and there, passing in front of me, was Laura with her mother. I thought I should choke; pulses woke in my throat and temples: in one moment I realized that I had bartered happiness for comfort and a pleasant life, that I had blundered badly and would have to pay for the blunder, and pay heavily.

The next incident took place in Rome. Thanks to the English ambassador, I got a young Italian of real ability to read Dante with me. He used to come at ten o'clock each day and read until my wife wished to go for our morning walk, about half-past eleven. One day she came in while I was reading with Signer M. We had just got into a dispute about the meaning of a passage in Dante and I had persuaded him that my view was right. He was a little hurt, and seeing it, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "You know, I am much older than you, my dear fellow, so you must not mind."

He smiled at me and my wife immediately swept out of the room. I knew something was wrong and as soon as possible finished off the lesson and let my young friend go. When I went into my wife's bedroom I found her almost crazy with rage.

"You caress your friends before my eyes," she cried, "you beast," and she beat my chest with her fists.

I hardly realized what she meant at first, but when it dawned on me, I was furious.

"You are crazy," I said. "No one ever before accused me of that vice: I will never give you another chance. Here ends our marriage." And there it ended.

Her jealousy was almost incredible, and it continued in reference to every one, man or woman, whom I might see and show any liking for. An English friend, a man of good position, with a title and well-off, came to us at Palermo and asked me if I would take him to Monreale and show him the wonders of the church. I said, "Of course"; the row with my wife afterwards lasted for more than a week. Her jealousy was a disease and she suffered agonies through if, but it was also almost always ill-founded, and her mistakes supplied a comic element which often diverted me hugely, in spite of the constant annoyance. For instance, an Irish lady lunched with us one day who was both pretty and intelligent; she talked well and was evidently well-read in both French and English literature. This naturally interested me in her.

After lunch I took her to her carriage, and in the brougham sat one of the prettiest girls I have ever seen. "My daughter Katie," said the lady, introducing me; "we call her 'Kitten.'" The girl laughed charmingly. They told me they were driving downtown and so I begged them to give me a lift. I went into the house for my hat, made some excuse to my wife about going to the office, and ran out to join them. For days afterwards my wife went on about this, saying I had behaved shamefully, shown my admiration for the lady too plainly: her knowledge of French books was only a pretext to show off, and so forth. A month later by chance she met me walking in the park with the pretty daughter; of course, my wife turned and went with us to the mother's house; but my wife never seemed to suspect that Kate and I understood each other very well, and at the door, when I refused to go in, she was quite penitent.

"I thought you cared for Mrs…" she said as we walked back together to our home. "I think she is clever." She had never even noticed that Kate had been tongue-tied, probably out of nervousness; she suspected the clever woman, yet the girl was to the mother, in my opinion, as a divinity to an ordinary mortal.

We went round Sicily, and came back by Taormina, and my wife was charmed with the natural beauty of the place; she thought it the most entrancing scene in the world; but she cared nothing for the remains of the Greek theatre, which interested me intensely.

After six months of this sort of honeymoon we returned to London and as friends lived together in Park Lane. The six months had done this for me: they convinced me that there was something in the English character that I never could be in sympathy with. The snobbishness, not only of the titled but of gentle-folk of good breeding, began to exasperate me. Lunching in the house in Park Lane with the Duke of Cambridge and half a dozen people of good position taught me that I should always be an outsider, alien to them in imagination and in sympathy. When I went to the House of Commons and took my seat under the gallery I had a confirmation of the same feeling.

Everyone now was nicer to me than they had been. I was not only the editor of the Fortnightly Review, but I had a house in Park Lane and entertained royalty, and was altogether better worth knowing. I resented the whole thing!

It has happened several times in my life that apparent success has shown me inner failure. As long as I had not won, the struggle obsessed me; but as soon as I saw victory in sight and began to count the spoils, I became discontented, conscious that I was not on the right road. And so now, having won a secure position in the best English life, I found I was out of place. Many factors combined to disillusion me.

I have already told how the English mistake themselves: they believe that they are the most frank and honest race in the world, whereas in reality they are the most cunning, adroit, and unscrupulous diplomatists; their chief quality, as I am always saying, for it came to me with a shock of surprise, is a love of physical beauty in pigs and cattle and barn-yard fowl, as in men and women. They know without the teaching of Montaigne that the only beauty of man is height, and I was rather below the average stature. You may smile at this, gentle reader, but the full significance of it may escape you. In my experience, all the men who have succeeded in England have had height to help them: Kitchener and Duller were preferred before Roberts, who had more brains in his head than both of them put together, or multiplied by each other. Sir Richard Burton with his six feet was at once accepted as a personality, while little Stanley was treated with scant respect; Parnell, Randolph Churchill, Dilke, Chamberlain, and Hicks Beach were all far above middle height. Tennyson with his noble presence was accepted everywhere, while the far greater poet and man, James Thomson, being small, was altogether ignored. If Swinburne had been tall and strong he would have been Poet Laureate, but his magnificent forehead was spoiled to the English by his low stature. Oscar Wilde owed at least as much of his renown to his great height as to his wit.

I saw that the road to parliamentary success would be hard for me.

Englishmen distrust good talkers and have an absolute abhorrence of new ideas. When Cecil Rhodes (another tall man) was praised in The Times for his high ideals, my comment was: "True, he had ideals, but his ideals were all 'deals' with an T before them." Again, my socialistic leanings were anathema in England: I saw that they had degraded the best men of the common people, but they hated to have a doubt cast on their complacent optimism.

True, I had certain advantages: I had had an English education and knew how to dress, my table manners, too, were English of the best; but I was small and self-assured, and worst of all, obsessed by new ideas which ran counter to the interests of the English governing class. Sooner or later on my way to power I should be denounced and betrayed or boycotted. Strange to say, my sense of isolation grew with my success. It became more and more clear to me that I was not on the right road.

This conviction grew with the months. One incident occurs to me. I was doing all I could to make my election in Hackney sure. I was spending three or four thousand a year in the constituency, keeping up the club and speaking every week. The poverty in the district, or rather the destitution of the poor, appalled me; I was resolved to do what I could to better the dreadful conditions of their existence.

When the Parnell scandal came up and Gladstone took sides with his accusers as if he had known nothing before of Parnell's intrigue with Mrs.

O'Shea, I went down to Hackney and told the whole truth as I knew it. I said that Gladstone had known of the intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea for years and had smiled over it, and now to pretend to be outraged was a shameful concession to nonconformist prejudice. I made fun of the whole thing and declared that Kitty O'Shea's petticoats could hardly be turned into the oriflamme of English liberty. I was enthusiastically applauded, everyone left in the best of humor, and next day eighty out of the hundred of my committee resigned.

They sent me a letter, telling me that making fun of adultery had offended every one of them. There was a notice, too, in several of the daily papers of their resignations, and I saw at once that the matter was serious: my seat was imperiled and one or two of my friends told me I would have to take back what I had said.

Accordingly, I gave a dinner to my committee, sending special letters to the eighty, asking them to be present, and at the end of the dinner I admitted that I had treated the matter too lightly and was sorry; and my eighty critics retracted their resignations and all was pleasant as before. But I had had my lesson. I now knew that if I went into the House of Commons I should have to walk gingerly. I became conscious of the fact that I was walled in on all sides by English middle-class prejudice and mired in shallow Puritanism.

And the roof of snobbishness over me scarcely gave me air to breathe. I began to wonder what was the best way out. I felt as if I were in a prison and must escape. Moreover, Randolph Churchill, who was my chief backer, had already come to grief and would not be able to help me as he had promised.

My first wife was a great friend of Lord Abergavenny, who was known as the "wire-puller" of the Tory party. He had us down to Bridge Castle, his country seat in Kent, and got me to address a Conservative meeting on imperial federation.

I had been one of the first founders of the Imperial Federation League. From away back, I wanted to bring about a confederation of the English colonies, and I saw plainly that the holding by England of India and Egypt worked against this ideal; but when I spoke to influential people about giving up India and Egypt and founding an Imperial Senate to take the place of the House of Lords, and giving political power to the colonies through colonial senators, I found that ninety-nine people out of a hundred thought I was crazy. "Why should we give up Egypt and India," they said, "the twin stars in the English crown?"

"Machiavelli pointed out," I used to say in reply, "that every possession owned by the Romans, but not colonized by Romans, was found to be a weakness in time of war. If you are put to any severe war test, you may find that having to defend India and Egypt will lessen your chances of success.

Your heritage in colonies of your own race is surely large enough; why not content yourselves with that? You already possess more than half of the temperate zone."

Lord Abergavenny said to me frankly, "Leave out that talk of Egypt and India and I'll see that you are asked to speak at all the great meetings, and I'll get you a life seat in Parliament to boot."

I felt that it was no use my getting into the House of Commons. I should be like one crying in the wilderness. Besides, I had become conscious of a want of sympathy with all political aims in England: I was half a socialist and absolutely convinced that the awful social inequality in England was altogether wrong, and had already brought about the deterioration of the race. As I have explained in my second volume, I wanted not only the land of England to be nationalized, but also the main joint-stock industries of general utility or public service, such as the railways, gas and water companies, etc., to belong to the public; and I wished the wages given to these millions of State employees to be at least twice as large as the starvation rates of wage usually established. A great lower middle class should be established in England and no one who would work should be unemployed.

But these views, held, I believe, by all the best heads, such as Carlyle and Bismarck, found no support in the House of Commons, or, indeed, in any of the governing classes in England. Socialism to them, like atheism, was a word of ill omen. The unrestrained individualism which they praised as liberty seemed to them the only sane doctrine. And the more I lived with the governing caste, and the better I came to know them, the more hopeless I felt.

Their aims were not my aims, and my hopes did not appeal to them.

It was gradually borne in upon me that I should have no real career in the House of Commons, that I must be a writer and teacher, and not a framer of policies. But I doubted my own talent. Could I really be a writer? I meant a great one. I would never have given sixpence to have been with the herd, and I thought it utterly impossible for me ever to be with my heroes, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes. "Sit down and invent a new character like Mephisto or Don Quixote or Falstaff," I said to myself, "and then I would recommend you to take off your coat and write, but if you cannot invent such a character, what is the good of trying to write?" For some years I put off the decision through an acutely painful sense of my own deficiencies.

Modesty is not likely to be ascribed to me. Every idiot who has ever met me talks of my extraordinary conceit. Now, all men are egotists, and all women, too, and I have yet to meet the man or woman who has not an excellent opinion of himself or herself, as the case may be. Nor have I any quarrel with any other man's egotism. I expect it and reckon with it just as certainly as I reckon on the fact that his body casts a shadow. Nay, more, I must even confess that I find egotists peculiarly interesting when they talk about themselves; and this leads me to the truth, that nothing is so interesting as egotism when a man has an ego.

Your ordinary egotist is a bore because he will never talk about himself: he cannot; he has a self to talk about, but he does not know it; he is under the impression that everything that has happened to him in life is interesting and peculiar; whereas the truth is, nearly everything that has happened to him has happened to everybody else and to tell it bores everybody because everyone would prefer to hear himself telling the same thing.

But your egotist who possesses an ego, who is conscious of the divine spark in his nature, tells things that are true of himself and of no one else, unexpected, wonderful things; and thus he becomes enormously interesting, more interesting than Perry and his North Pole, because his vision discovers hitherto unknown vistas, and his outlook makes clear to us heights and depths in ourselves which we had never before realized. His unique and powerful personality is in direct and intimate relation with the center of gravity of the universe, and thus prefigures the future, and when he speaks of himself he is telling of spiritual experiences that will only become commonplace ten thousand years hence.

Perhaps since my revelation of Shakespeare was completed I may have taken myself too seriously, but for years and years of manhood I was too modest. One instance may prove this. I bought a great many of Rodin's sculptures when he wanted money terribly. When he came to England and found that I was known as a writer, he began asking me to let him do my bust.

"No, no," I said, "you mustn't waste your time on me. I've done nothing yet that would allow me to use your genius," and when he pressed me, I replied, "I had nothing to do with the making of my mug, so I am not proud of it." At about the same time Bernard Shaw gave him a very large sum to model his bead.

Shaw was wise in his generation.

Life in London, too, as seen from Park Lane, was infinitely pleasant. One met intelligent, well-bred people, who were more or less interesting, every day, and if I wanted more intelligence than could be found among my wife's friends, I could easily invite Oscar Wilde or Matthew Arnold or Browning, or Davidson or Dowson or Lionel Johnson, or Dilke or John Burns, and so have the intellectual stimulus I needed.

The climate of England, however, was dreadful to me. From November on, for six months it was unendurable, but one could go to Egypt or Constantinople or India or the French Riviera and meet the same people under the same delightful conditions of life. Why should one bother? Life was velvet-shod and sun-lit.

The determining cause of my break with my wife and Park Lane was something different. Without telling me anything about it, my wife sold my bachelor house in Kensington Gore. She said I should not have another establishment to take women to, and in this she was justified; so she accepted the first offer for my house which came to hand, and I thereby lost all sorts of papers, books, photographs and little personal mementos that were exceedingly precious to me. I lost even the photograph Professor Smith, my hero at Kansas University, had given me with the splendid encouragement of his dedication. I raged at losing it so foolishly.

I saw that I must make a decisive break. I mustn't go on living simply because the life was pleasant; I must have a higher purpose in it and devote myself to its realization. Could I become a writer? I had a talent for speaking, I told myself, but not for writing.

CHAPTER IV

Laura in the last phases

I HAD BEEN married a year or more and had returned to London and taken up my ordinary life when one day I got a letter from Laura, asking if she might call on me in my bachelor house in Kensington Gore. I never was so rejoiced in my whole life. My six months' honeymoon had wearied me and the life in Park Lane was simply tiresome, to a degree. I begged her to come at once, and a day or two later Laura came to me in the room where we had met so often. She was as lovely as ever, but at first withdrawn and strangely quiet.

"I wanted to see if you had forgotten me," she said.

"I could as soon forget my own soul," I answered; and our eyes met- hers were inscrutable but slowly turned into a question.

"Then why did you marry?" she exclaimed.

"Why did you lie and go abroad?" I countered.

"My mother's health," she replied.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I attacked.

"I hoped to be back before it would matter to you," she answered.

"Always your mother between us," I said.

"Nothing is altered, then," she went on, "you care for me as much as ever?"

"More, I am afraid," I replied, and it was indeed less than the truth. She was as beautiful to me as ever-more beautiful; in fact, infinitely attractive. Her very faults were dear to me. The worst of it was I could never quite believe in her affection, I don't know why: I never did, either earlier, or then, or later: that was the tragic background of our intimacy.

She assured me that no young man had gone abroad with them and that she cared for no one but me; and I told her how I had seen her with her mother at the station in Bologna, and how terribly it had affected me, making me realize my awful blunder. She put her arms round me at this, and our lips met, and at once hers grew hot.

"Will you come to our room, dear?" I asked.

She nodded her head: "Our room, indeed!" And we went upstairs together. In a few minutes she had undressed, and I lifted her into the bed, taking her chemise off as she lay: her superb form brought heat into my eyes. She was braver than she had been in the past; she made no resistance now, as she often used to make before, and as I began to kiss her, I couldn't but admire the exquisite beauty of her form and sex. Never surely was any one more perfect.

For some time I kissed her before she gave any sign of emotion. Then suddenly she called me, "Frank"; and when I lifted myself to answer, she drew me into her arms. "How could you, how could you? You dear, naughty boy! How could you leave me? When I love you more than all the world," and she broke into a flood of tears.

"Why didn't you say so?" I replied. "If you had, I should have been faithful."

"I never felt you cared," she answered, drying her tears, "I even feared you loved your wife till I saw her the other day, then I laughed and wrote to you; I was sure you couldn't love her as you had loved me. Oh, Frank, what hours we have had!"

"The Gods hate human happiness," I said, "that is why I have lost you. But now let us begin again. Come to me on our three holy days-Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; tell me what you want frankly and I shall try to meet all your desires."

"They have been pressing me to marry some one," she said; "father has lost money again, but I have refused. If you could help me, it would make it easier."

"I am glad to do it, so glad! I shall give you more than before. Life is going to change and we shall come together yet."

"I love you," she replied, "and only you. I ought to have made that clear, but when we give ourselves, we women, we are apt to think that the man must know we are his and belong to him absolutely, and we are a little ashamed of it."

"You dear," I answered. "I ought to have guessed it; but let us begin again and bring love to a higher perfection."

I had never felt such passionate admiration for any other woman: the beauty of her figure appealed to me intensely, and the mere touch of her firm flesh thrilled me as no one else had ever done. I cannot explain the magnetism, the intensity of the attraction and the passion she inspired in me. Life would have reached its highest through my connection with her if it hadn't been for one thing.

I don't know why, but I was never sure of Laura's love; and that caused in me a curious reflex action: I never tried to give her the greatest sum of pleasure that I possibly could. I often stopped embracing just when she was most passionate, out of a sort of revenge that sprang from hurt vanity. This passion of vanity is the most cruel master of mankind-a very God. Who that has read them can ever forget Blake's lines:

Nought loves another as itself

Nor venerates another so

Nor is it given unto thought

A greater than itself to know.

Why did I doubt Laura's love? I remember once an article appearing in a London paper, putting me among the first writers of the time and declaring that I was a better talker even than Oscar Wilde. It was by Francis Adams, I think. I paid no attention to it, but Laura brought it to me one day in huge excitement wanting to know: "Had I seen it? Who was the writer? Was it true? Had I written a story called Mantes the Matador- 'one of the great stories of the world,' this critic says?"

Her astonishment was so unfeigned that I realized she didn't know me at all. I recalled the fact that at the beginning of our acquaintance, when I told her I would make money within a year or so, she didn't believe me, but went off and grew to care for some one else because she thought I should always be hard up as I was when we first met.

I remember, too, her astonishment when she saw my first articles on Shakespeare. "But how can you be sure," she said, "that he grew as you have depicted him?"

She had not the remotest conception of my intelligence or what I could do in literature; and love is, above everything, I said to myself, divination. One loves because one feels the utmost power of mind, of character, of soul in the beloved. Always I was sure that Laura did not love me, had never loved me; and I punished her for it by my restraints. Yet now and then she reached greatness.

It was after this first reconciliation, just when she had dressed and was standing before the glass, that she found a great word. We had resolved to meet on the next Tuesday. I had given her the latch key to the front door: she suddenly turned and kissed me. "Ah, you bad boy, you have taught me everything, Frank; but not how to do without you."

What could I do but kiss her while tears burnt my eyes. This was the beginning of love's renewal. From that day on we met three times a week for the next three years till my wife sold my bachelor house without my consent and forced us to meet elsewhere.

Even before this, Laura had told me of a rich man who wanted to marry her: he was an invalid, she said, and only wished to secure her in possession of his fortune before he died. I found out later it was partly true: but a certain coolness between us had come again, chiefly through her jealousy. I had a servant who happened to be very pretty: I had never made up to her: devoted to Laura, I scarcely looked at any one else; but one day I was late and found Laura furious.

"Your maid was rude to me," she declared; "you must get rid of her or I won't come again!"

I bowed my head and assured her that next time she should not be bothered.

When she went away, I called the maid, and for the first time noticed that she was well made and pretty. "Why were you rude?" I asked. "I wasn't rude first," she answered; "but when she was rude, I answered back; do you mind very much?" she went on, coming towards me, with challenging eyes.

"I don't like rudeness," I answered.

What devil is it in a man to make him desire at all times the Unknown, the new? It has never been explained, and never can be explained rationally. It is the primary urge, the keenest desire of the male; and the individual is not responsible for it in the smallest degree. He was fashioned in the far past of time, a creature of unregulated, impassioned desires.

Desires now surged over me in a hot wave, and I took her into my arms and kissed her. Ten minutes later I had stripped her, reveling in the beauty of a slight girlish figure and extraordinary courage. In a quarter of an hour I realized that she was a seductive mistress, endowed with a passion that matched mine, and little cunning ways and turns of speech that pleased me by their cockney originality: she was really, as the French say, "some one!"

"Oh, oh," she cried the first time. "I won't ask you again for more kisses: my heart's in my mouth and flutters there-no, no more-I'm near hysterics! Kiss and part friends! I hope there's nothing to fear?"

"Nothing," I replied; "you can trust me!"

"Then," she cried cheekily as she began to dress, "Kensington Gore is quite a good place to live in."

I recall another scene later. For days she had been thoughtful and gone about heavy-eyed. Suddenly one morning she was her old gay self again; she came laughing into my bedroom with my tea, and when I asked her what had chased away the clouds, she struck an attitude. "You can't guess?" I shook my head.

"I always say," she went on, smiling cheekily, "all's well that end's unwell!"

I couldn't but laugh.

For some time she attended to all my wants and desires with great cleverness, leaving the older housemaid to take her place whenever Laura visited me.

She entertained me with frank stories of her early life. She had been naughty as a girl, she said, especially with one boy, and had given herself at fourteen to her first master, a married solicitor. She loved love, she confessed, and couldn't live without it; but she took everything lightly, and as soon as my passion was satisfied and I knew all her past, I lost interest in her: there was nothing extraordinary in her, either in face or figure or mind, and so I quickly grew to indifference.

At first I found myself putting Laura off more than once to enjoy Sadi- I could not call her "Sarah," though that was her name. But when she saw that I preferred Laura and was really devoted to her, Sadi suddenly left me with a letter, saying that she knew I preferred my "American, though she doesn't love you and will cheat you yet."

Strange creatures, women, to whom love lends a certain intuition!

Early in this year Laura spoke of the Passion Play as given by the peasants at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. I had seen it in 1880 and had greatly admired the way Plunger played the Christ and Lechner the Judas. It would be a great holiday, I thought, so I proposed to take her and her mother for the opening performance in May.

Early in the month we all three went to Munich and stayed at my old hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten. I was still remembered there and accordingly we were well received, and a couple of days later in the bright sunshine we took the train for Oberau. On the way I told them something about the Passion Play which we were going to see.

It has been played every ten years since 1634 with only two interruptions; an extra presentation in 1815 to celebrate the Great Peace, and another in 1871 to conclude the series interrupted by the Franco-German war. The history of it is almost an epitome of the changes in religious thought of these last centuries.

In the early drama, Lucifer had been one of the leading characters; and in 1740 9. monk named Rosner introduced comic incidents and gave Satan many attendant imps and demons, who strutted and gambolled about the stage, making the groundlings grin, until 1800. In consequence of these extravagances, the performance was almost forbidden in 1810; but the play was remodelled and limited to the simple Biblical narrative. In 1840 Pastor Daisenberger revised the text of the play and gave it much of its present reverence and charm.

The railway in 1890 ran as far as the Oberau station, within a short drive of the village: and the drive to the Ettal Monastery was by a new and infinitely more beautiful road than the one I remembered. Oberammergau itself had come to be a most flourishing village. At the dissolution of the Ettal Monastery the land was divided among the neighboring villagers and had made them extremely prosperous: every house showed comfort and well being.

As we drove into Oberammergau I told Laura an amusing experience. In 1880, going early to the first performance of the Passion Play, I suddenly noticed a curiously caparisoned figure standing in the wings, as if about to come on.

"Who is that?" I asked the village magnate who accompanied me.

"That," he said; "oh! that's Adam waiting to be created."

Laura laughed merrily.

The scenery was really splendid; high above us towered the Kopelberg, surmounted by a glittering cross. I had ordered tickets in advance and the proprietor of the Vier Jahreszeiten had secured for us the best accommodation in the inn. But alas, the village innkeeper, reading of a visit by mother, daughter, and one man, gave us one large bedroom with three beds: and when Laura's mother declared that she wouldn't have me in the room, the maid said it was quite easy to put up a Scheidewand, and brought in a little screen not three feet high, which shocked the American Puritanism of Laura's mother so that I thought she would have a fit. I went away and quickly got a couple of rooms at the forester's house.

Everyone knows that the performances at Oberammergau are given in an open-air theatre: that is, the stage and the lower part of the stalls next the stage are in the open air: fortunately there is a cover for the more highly placed spectators, chiefly Americans and English, which protects them both from the sun and rain. The stage is more than quaint: on the left a wide space; on the right a small stage, before which hangs a curtain; further to the right the horse of Annas, the High Priest; on the left, the house of Pilate-the whole outlook framed, so to speak, by green hills and blue sky.

The booming of a cannon tells us that the play is about to begin. You see half of the Old Testament pictures before any of the New; the slaying of Abel, the sacrifice of Isaac, the affliction of Job.

The music, however, was really good and redeemed the trivialities of the first scenes. The orchestra, of course, was in front of the stage. The music, I learned, was written by one Dedler at the beginning of the century, and excellent music it is. It must be admitted that when the curtain drops after each scene, the effect grows in intensity through the harmony of colors and the fine grouping of the figures. All the costumes are taken from old pictures, and the arrangements this year were in the hands of the stage manager of the Munich Court Theatre and Opera-House; and so were all super-excellent, from the children bearing palm branches to the crowd assembled at the entry of Christ into Jerusalem to the singing of hosannas.

I was dreadfully disappointed in the impersonator of Christ, Joseph Maier, but then I had the memory of Plunger, who was a real genius just as the new Judas, one Zwinc, was nothing like as good as Lechner had been ten years before. Maier hadn't the face of Christ; his expression was that of the fighter rather than of the saint; yet, in spite of his bad acting, the agony in Gethsemane set every one in the great audience weeping; and the crucifixion scene must always remain among the imperishable memories of those who saw blood streaming from his hands and feet; then a soldier pierces his side, the last words are uttered, and the great life seems to be finished.

After some discussion Joseph of Arimathea begs the body and the disciples, with Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, bear it away to burial.

Then comes the Resurrection and the Ascension, which made no deep impression on me.

The one player who really rose to the height of the drama was a newcomer, one Rosa Lang, who played Mary, the mother of Jesus. She showed superbly the mother's joy and pride in her son, her sorrow at parting, her sympathy with him in affliction, her agony at the foot of the cross.

The idea seemed to occur to no one that this is not at all the way that the mother of Jesus is pictured in the Bible. But of course the usual mother business had to be played at Oberammergau; and thanks to a good actress, the performance was wonderfully effective. Long before the close, Laura and her mother, as well as the five thousand spectators, were sobbing as if their hearts would break.

Strange to say, however, none of us wanted to go back and see the play again the next day. We all preferred to keep the memory of it alive and for some time we went for long drives through the Bavarian highlands. After three or four days, however, Laura's mother thought she would like to see it again, and with much difficulty I got one seat for her; and of course no more could be gotten for love or money, so Laura came and spent the afternoon with me in my room-four hours never to be forgotten.

Who can tell of love-encounters with the same person and intensify interest by bringing something new into each recital? It was love, I suppose, real affection, that made many of our meetings memorable. Here in this bedroom I was surprised by the intensity of her passion; her emotions always seemed to determine her sensations. "You have given me so much," she said, "made the long journey so delightful, and now the unforgettable memory of how the Jesus story was made living and vivid-a part of my being forever, I want to thank you and reward you if I can!"

"Oh, you can," I cried; "let yourself go once with all your heart and I shall be rewarded."

And she did as I asked: for the first time she threw reserve to the winds and met every movement of mine with appropriate response, and finally loved me in turn and showed herself as clever as any French woman in rousing passion to intensity.

And as I began later to kiss her again and excite her, she cried, "I am drained of feeling there, dear; but kiss my breasts, for they burn and throb, and my lips, for I love you."

As we went out two hours later we met the forester's daughter with a girl friend who took Laura in with sidelong appraising glance.

Whenever I think of Laura and the great days we spent together, the superb verses of Baudelaire come back to me:

The night grew deep between us like a pall, And in the dark I guessed your shining eyes, And drank your breath, O Sweet, O Honey-gall!

Your little feet slept on me sister-wise, The night grew deep between us like a pall.

I can call back the days desirable,

And live all bliss again between your knees, For where else can I find that magic spell Save in your heart and in your Mysteries, I can call back the days desirable.

CHAPTER V

Bismarck and Burton

The period that began in 1890 was memorable for many reasons: Sir Richard Burton, one of the greatest of Englishmen, whom I have elsewhere compared with Sir Walter Raleigh, died in October at Trieste, and left life poorer to some of us. Stanley, another explorer, was married to Miss Dorothy Tennant, and almost immediately hideous stories of cruelties perpetrated on the African natives during his last expedition shocked the conscience of England. When they said that Miss Tennant, who was a very charming girl, was going to marry the lion of the season, I said it seemed to me true: "She was about to marry the king of beasts," for Stanley was to me always a force without a conscience. Browning died in December, 1889, and Tennyson a couple of years later. Parnell, too, came to the crisis of his fate about this time, and in France, Renan's death left a sad gap.

But the event that marked the time and gave supreme significance to it was the dismissal of Bismarck. His fall in 1890 shook the world. For nearly thirty years, from 1862 on, Bismarck had dominated Europe. Few remember his beginnings, though he himself has told how.

When I first came into office, the king showed me his written abdication. I had first of all to re-establish the royal power, for it was shaken and shattered. I was successful. Yet I am not an absolutist. There is always danger in one-man government. Parliamentary opinion and a free press are necessary to a satisfactory monarchial system…

Universal suffrage was the spirit of the Frankfort Parliament. I adopted it in the Constitution of the North German Confederation and afterwards of the Empire, because it was necessary to counteract the Austrian influence, and it was my aim, therefore, to satisfy all classes.

Bismarck's judgments of his imperial masters are curiously characteristic: while in their service, he spoke well of them. On his tomb Bismarck directed that there should appear these words:

Here rests Prince Bismarck

Born 1st April, 1815

Died — A faithful German Servant of Emperor William the First

He wrote: "The old Emperor William was not a great statesman but a man of sound judgment and a perfect gentleman. He was true to those who worked with him. I was deeply attached to him. The Emperor Frederick, too, was a noble man-a sharp sword, so to speak, with a short blade." But after Bismarck died in 1898 and his Memoirs by Busch were published, we got the other side. As he said himself: "I lack altogether the bump of veneration for my fellow men." And so we find what Bismarck really thought of Emperor William the First: "When anything important was going on, he usually began by taking the wrong road, but in the end he always allowed himself to be put straight again… His knowledge of affairs was limited and he was slow in comprehending anything new."

Bismarck found it hard to conceal his contempt for the Crown Prince Frederick. It even comes out in spiteful little outbursts such as this: "The Crown Prince, like all mediocrities, likes copying, and other occupations of the same sort, such as sealing letters, etc."

And finally Bismarck's opinion of the Kaiser who dismissed him was written in vitriol even before the final break:

I cannot stand him (Wilhelm the Second) much longer. He wants even to know whom I see, and has spies set to watch those who come in and go out of my office… It comes of an overestimate of himself, and of his inexperience of affairs, that can lead to no good. He is much too conceited: he is simply longing with his whole heart to be rid of me. in order that he may govern alone (with his own genius), and be able to cover himself with glory. He does not want the old mentor any longer, but only docile tools. But I cannot make genuflections nor crouch under the table like a dog. He wants to break with Russia, and yet he has not the courage to demand the increase of the army from the Liberals in the Reichstag.

It is interesting to read that in a letter to the Chancellor, the Crown Prince Frederick at Portofino described his eldest son as "inexperienced, extremely boastful and self-conceited."

Bismarck's opinions of his masters are to my mind not only self-revealing but true, and his contemptuous condemnation of Wilhelm the Second has been justified by the result.

Like most of the leading men of the nineteenth century, like Tennyson and Hugo, Gladstone, Salisbury and Parnell, Bismarck was a convinced believer, not only in God and divine providence, but also in a life after death; he even believed in apparitions, ghosts, and supernatural signs.

In 1866, just before the war between Prussia and Austria, Bismarck, according to Busch, had been exceedingly cast down: when he was shot at five times and wasn't even grazed, he took it as a sign of divine approbation and was immediately lifted into the happiest humor.

One must think of what Bismarck accomplished even though handicapped by brainless masters! In 1866 he beat Austria and made Prussia the first military power in Europe. He welded many German states into one on the anvil of war, and after 1870 he developed the industries of his people in the most unexpected and successful ways. I have already related how he had profited by the socialist teachings of Lassalle, how in fifty ways he had fostered industry so that every one felt an added incentive to labor and a sure understanding that an extra effort would lead on to fortune. Considering that he was born and bred an outrageous individualist in an aristocratic tradition and yet created a new record as a social reformer, one can only wonder at the profound morality which led him always towards justice. He knew instinctively, as Lincoln knew, that "labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration."

His fall was treated excellently in the English press. Punch had a famous cartoon on it entitled, "Dropping the Pilot."

But Bismarck was not so great a man, in my opinion, as Sir Richard Burton: in force of character, in daring and in strength, they were not unlike; but Burton had a wider intelligence, a larger mind, and a richer generosity and kindliness of nature.

To me the difference between the fates of Bismarck and Burton gives rise to many reflections. For thirty years Bismarck had supreme power and made Germany the first state in Europe — I had almost said in the world; but England denied Burton almost everything. Although he had served the foreign office with extraordinary ability, they refused him even the usual retiring pension.

In my last visit to him in Trieste, I couldn't help asking him how it came about, why the English authorities were so down on him, and he said smiling, "You will laugh if I tell you. I think I blundered in my first talk with Lord Salisbury.

He called me 'Burton'; his familiarity encouraged me, and I spoke to him as 'Salisbury.' I saw him wince, and he went back immediately to 'Mr. Burton,' but out of cheek or perversity I kept up the 'Salisbury.' He was so ignorant; he didn't know where Mombassa was; and the idea that I had brought back treaties handing over the whole of Central Africa to Britain merely filled him with dismay. He kept repeating, 'dreadful responsibility — dreadful'; he was in reality, I believe, a very nice old lady." I could not help laughing.

Burton's judgment of Lord Salisbury was justified to me later in a peculiar way. One evening Teresa, Lady Shrewsbury, after meeting me somewhere at dinner, offered to take me home in her brougham. I thanked her warmly, for she was always interesting, knew everybody, and had a real salon in London.

Arthur Balfour had been one of the chief personages at the dinner. I asked her what she thought of him. "I know him very slightly," she replied, "but think him very distinguished-looking."

"I'm afraid," I said, "that his outward is the best part of him." "Strange," she said, "that reminds me that once, driving like this a few years ago with Lady Salisbury, I asked her what she thought of her husband's good-looking nephew. 'Oh, my dear," she replied, 'he's nothing for us women: I don't believe he has any more temperament than my poor old Bob!'"

So Lord Salisbury was judged by his wife very much as Sir Richard Burton had judged him.

When Burton showed me his translation of The Arabian Nights and I saw that he had described every sort of sensuality with the crudest words, I got frightened for him; still, I told him that I would help him so far as I could and put myself at his disposal. I would have liked him to modify some of the bestialities; however, as I have said elsewhere, it wasn't my business to condemn a great man but to help him; and I am proud of the fact that partly through my help he made ten thousand pounds out of the venture. No one could be with Burton for an hour without feeling his extraordinary force of character and the imperial keenness of his intelligence. If England had treated him as she should, he would have given her a glorious empire, the whole central plateau of Africa from the Cape to Cairo, without a war, and no one would be astonished now that I should compare him with Bismarck; but England couldn't use her greatest man of action!

I have never told how we came to know each other intimately. Captain Lovett Cameron, his lieutenant on several of his African journeys, had introduced me to him; but I was awkward and self-conscious and made some conventional foolish remark that caused Burton to turn from me contemptuously. I confessed my fault to Cameron afterwards, who insisted that the faux pas could easily be repaired. "You've no idea how generouskind Dick is; as soon as he gets to know you, he'll cotton to you," and he fixed a meeting for the morrow in Pall Mall at one of the clubs.

I thought over the meeting and arranged what I'd say. It had suddenly come into my head that Burton knew Lord Lytton and that they were friends. As soon as the three of us met next day, I shot off my bolt. "The other morning," I began, "I walked down Pall Mall just behind two men curiously differentiated in clothes and in person; the one was a little dandy, high heels, yellow kid gloves, tall hat, rouged cheeks-he evidently wore corsets too; the other, a very tall man, swung along with a sombrero on his head and a heavy stick in his hand. I was near enough to hear them talk. The dandy was intent on persuading his companion. "Ah, Dick," he began, "delicacies escape you men of huge appetite; you miss the deathless charm of the androgyne: the figure of the girl of thirteen with sex unexpressed as yet, slim as a boy with breasts scarcely outlined, and narrow hips; but unlike a boy, Dick; no lines or ugly muscles, the knees also are small; everything rounded to rhythmic loveliness-the most seductive creature in all God's world."

"You make me tired, Lytton," cried the big man in a deep tone, "you cotquean, you! Your over-sweet description only shows me that you have never tried the blue-bottomed monkey!"

"First-rate," cried Burton laughing to me, "you have hit off Lytton to the soul, which probably means that my portrait, too, is life-like."

From that hour on the ice was broken between us and we became friends, and I soon found Burton, as Cameron had said, determined unconditionally to forgive all injuries, one of the noblest spirits I have met in this earthly pilgrimage!

It was Burton who discovered the source of the Nile, for on that memorable journey of '58 Speke was merely his lieutenant; and when they reached Ujiji, on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, Burton was the first to proclaim the obvious fact; yet when Speke returned to England and claimed the honor of the discovery, Burton said nothing about the matter; there was in him at all times a real generosity.

Who can forget the verse in which he embodied his stalwart creed?

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,

From none but self expect applause:

He noblest lives and noblest dies

Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

When Burton died, Swinburne wrote for me a long elegy on him in the Saturday Review, which ends with this couplet that appealed to me intensely.

The royal heart we mourn, the faultless friend Burton-a name that lives till fame be dead.

Like Burton, Bismarck, too, had intimate little messages for me. On the occasion of his seventy-second birthday he said a thing that brought him close to me, for it has been my experience all through my life. "Out of the eight thousand letters of sympathy," he said, "that I have received, a quarter came from women-that pleased me greatly: I regard it as a good sign, for it is my experience that one doesn't reach the female sympathy as easily as the male; besides, women have never liked me: I don't know why; perhaps I couldn't speak nicely enough to them." Yet, if gossip is to be believed, he was more than nice to Pauline Lucca-the great Jewish singer — when she visited Berlin once.

Bismarck made an extraordinary impression on me. I always see him as I saw him first in the Reichstag: he would often sit for hours without speaking or suddenly get up in the middle of a debate and go out, and one felt at once that the Chamber had become common; vitality, distinction, any possibility of the extraordinary had gone out of the atmosphere.

One day, I shall never forget it, though it must be now nearly fifty years ago, he had been baited in the House, and at length, some socialist, I think it was little fiery Bebel, used the word wagt (dare) about his reticence. "The Imperial Chancellor does not tell us whether the edict has come from himself or from the Emperor, er wagt es nicht zu sagen," he added. (He dares not speak out.) Bismarck started up, his three hairs bristling on his bald head, and stalked out towards his persecutor. "Who says wagt to Bismarck?" he jerked out with intense passion. The whole House broke into applause, while the little socialist fairly cowered on his seat as the great man continued. "You can either take it that the project came from His Majesty, the Emperor, and was approved by his Chancellor, or that the project came from the Chancellor and was approved by His Majesty, the Emperor. And whichever you fancy the more probable, you can make it square with what you think is constitutional, exactly as it suits you: wie Sie wollen." The contempt of the corps-student for the little Jew raged in the disdain of voice and manner and words. He strode back to his place and went right on out of the House.

This scene taught me that Bismarck was the most impressive person I had seen up to that time-impressive, of course, chiefly for his courage, but also for his insight. Bit by bit I came to see that he was altogether unscrupulous, determined to make Germany the first country in Europe.

If Ms voice had been as impressive as his great frame and imperious manner, he would have been simply overwhelming! As it was, it was impossible to be in his presence and hear him speak without being impressed by his greatness of character.

The only time I met Bismarck to speak to was an event in my life. We had a literary society in Gottingen, his old university. The house he had lived in was shown on the edge of the ramparts; as a corps-student he had fought half a dozen duels, and all successful, thanks chiefly to his great height and length of reach. For some reason or other, the civic authorities in my time passed a law shutting up all drinking places, and all Kneipen even (the places where students drank) at one o'clock in the morning. The corps-students objected to this, defied the civic ordinance, and soldiers were ordered out to close the drinking places. At once the corps-students sent a deputation to the Chancellor to beg him to defend their liberties.

Hearing of this, I called on the literary society to do likewise, pointed out that we didn't drink or make night hideous for quiet citizens in the morning hours, and finally three of us were selected to go to Berlin and call upon Bismarck, and see if we could not win him to the cause of freedom. Next day, my friend, von H-, and a man whose name I've completely forgotten, and myself started for Berlin. Von H-, we agreed, was to be the spokesman, and he recited to us an excellent speech.

All went happily at first: I drafted a letter to Prince Bismarck, begging him to hear us for a few minutes as students of his old university. We got a letter from his secretary: the Chancellor would see us at eleven next morning in the Wilhelm Strasse. Needless to say, we were punctual, but when the door opened and Bismarck rose before us at his desk, the courage of my companions oozed away: they both stood bowing like automata with heels together, for all the world as if they had hinges in their backs.

"Begin!" I whispered to von H-, but he bowed again and again, and said nothing. I saw I'd have to speak or be shamed, so I stepped forward and simply said that we had come as members of a literary society; we were not idlers, but students, intent on improving ourselves: we didn't drink or annoy peaceable citizens by howling songs in the small hours, so we hoped he'd order the civic authorities in Gottingen to leave us alone. The closing time seems reasonable," Bismarck replied curtly.

"Why shouldn't we talk all night, so long as we don't annoy anyone?" I countered.

"You come into the category of student societies (Verbindungeri)," he said.

"It's difficult to differentiate."

"Good laws shouldn't oppress the well-behaved," I objected. "I'm sure there's a student behind the Chancellor!"

"Richtig!" he exclaimed, his face lighting up. "But," the thought came: "the well-behaved don't feel laws as oppressive. You can surely say all you have to say before one o'clock in the morning!"

"Why shouldn't we talk all night if we want to and don't annoy others? As a student Prince Bismarck would not like to have been coerced by soldiers, and we were told that we should be shot down like dogs if we resisted."

"Richtig!" he barked again. "The soldiers had their orders-scharf geladen!"

"It's mere despotism," I cried, "indefensible and intolerable tyranny; the Gessler hat sort of thing." He shrugged his shoulders, smiling, and I turned, bowing, and went to the door, for I feared that I had been too bold, while my companions went on bowing like wooden automata. At the door Bismarck called me back: "Are you a German?" he asked.

"An American," I replied.

"So…" he interjected, smiling as if at length he understood my boldness. "So!

The Declaration of Independence stops at the frontier," and he laughed genially.

When we got outside, my companions congratulated me; but I turned angrily on Von H-: "Had you told me you were going to say nothing, I'd have prepared something: as it was, I was beaten!"

"I would never have believed it," said Von H-, "but I could not have spoken to save my life; the discipline, the pigtail nature- zopfwesen-of us Germans since Frederick the Great has got into our blood! But you did splendidly."

"I did very badly," I said.

If I force memory and recount this unimportant little Incident, it is just to emphasize the fact that no one I have ever seen in this world had a greater magic of personality than Bismarck-an authentic great man.

No one in Europe at the time realized the disastrous consequences of Bismarck's fall. Every one knew that as far back as '79 he had formed an Austro-German alliance, directed practically against Russia. He was the inspirer too of the French occupation of Tunis in 1881. His object was to create ill feeling between France and Italy, and he succeeded.

In 1882 he won the adhesion of Italy to the alliance and so strengthened Germany against France, as well as against Russia. But even this Triple Alliance did not satisfy him. He knew how to play on imperial rulers. In 1884 he concluded with Russia a secret treaty behind the backs of both his Allies-a treaty by which it was arranged that if Germany or Russia were attacked, the other would come to her ally's assistance.

It was the failure of the Emperor William, and of his Chancellor, the Count von Caprivi, to renew this secret treaty in 1890 that first weakened Germany's position in Europe.

In 1891 the Russian Government invited a French squadron to Kronstadt — which should surely have warned even the Emperor William of his blunder.

And in 1893 the Russians sent Admiral Avellane to return the visit to Toulon.

Thus the Russian-French alliance was set on foot, if not at once concluded.

Bismarck's diplomacy was more cunning even than that imagined by Machiavelli. French colonial enterprise everywhere, and especially in Africa, was favored by German diplomacy, with the intention of separating France and England. And in this Bismarck's diplomacy continued to be effective after he himself had fallen from power; for the greater part, indeed, of the last decade of the nineteenth century! Fashoda in 1896 almost brought about war between the two countries.

Immediately after the fall of Bismarck, his policy that had made Germany the first of European powers was abandoned. The extraordinary commercial prosperity that had resulted from it continued and blinded the German people to the dangers of the new diplomacy that was, in truth, little more than the erratic impulses of William II. I can never think of William II without recalling the great phrase of Vauvenargues: Les pros-perites des mauvais rois sont fatales aux peuples.

As soon as I heard of Bismarck's dismissal by the Emperor, I felt sure that William II was a small fish.

"We Germans," said Bismarck later, "fear God and nothing else." He would have been much greater if he had feared God enough to play the game of life quite fairly. He did his best to embroil England with France. His want of moral scruple was his besetting sin.

But, if one can find fault with the inflexible selfish purpose of Bismarck, the policy that succeeded his was devoid of any virtue. William II not only brought France and Russia into a close alliance, but, with inconceivable stupidity, he estranged Italy and exasperated England without winning a single friend, unless, indeed, Turkey could be called a friend.

My private judgment of him, derived chiefly from the Prince of Wales and a casual meeting with the War-lord, as he loved to be called, I will give in due time: but for the moment I can only say that his famous speech, addressed to the Brandenburg Diet in this year, 1892, filled me with unutterable contempt. He talked about God as the "Supreme Lord" and "his unmistakable conviction that He, our former Ally at Rossbach and Dennewitz, will not leave me in the lurch. He has taken such infinite pains with our ancient Brandenburg and our House that we cannot suppose He has done this for no purpose. No; on the contrary, men of Brandenburg, we have a great future before us, and I am leading you towards days of glory."

There was one man in Germany, Maximilian Harden, who foresaw the ruin of Germany as soon as William II abandoned Bismarck and his successful international policy; perhaps I ought to say a word about him here.

Harden came to Berlin during the Bismarckian era, an ardent admirer of Bismarck and the great Chancellor's strictly national theories, a boy of nineteen who had just finished college.

His name then was Max Witkovski-a Jewish boy. A Jew had a hard time of it in Germany in those days. Public recognition seemed impossible. His journalistic career proved to him that a German name would be more advantageous. The English periodicals of the late eighties and early nineties, with their frankness and love of truth, became his ideal of journalism. In vain he tried to persuade publishers to follow the English lead, treating royalty and the aristocracy of birth as boldly as the British.

None could see what good it would do to quarrel openly with those in power.

Harden became the pioneer of the new journalism. He started a weekly paper, Die Zukunft (The Future). A storm of antagonism arose in all quarters.

Harden became the most discussed man in Germany. His paper was read everywhere. He attracted the youth of Germany. The modernists flocked to him; his paper became the mouthpiece of young, rebellious Germany. Never before had such free language been used in a German periodical.

He made enemies galore. Mercilessly he tore down superstitions and showed the inherent weakness of an absolute monarchy. Even his foes read his paper.

His circulation became extraordinary for a one-man magazine.

There was rarely a week in which some influential noble or some powerful organization did not start libel suits against the Zukunft. Harden hardly ever retracted a statement. He never published an article without proof of its veracity in hand. "Very well," was his eternal answer, "I shall prove and substantiate in court the truth of what I have written." Many of his opponents believed he would not dare to go to court. But he dared. A few sensational libel cases, which he won, left him free to do as he pleased.

He became the most feared publicist in Germany. This is what Harden wrote about William II in 1896:

Germany cannot, in view of the results of the six years since Bismarck's dismissal, refrain from asking their Emperor whether it was indeed necessary to remove, with ruthless hand, the man who raised the Hohenzollern House to a pinnacle, placed the military power of Prussia on a sure basis, founded the German Empire and prepared a future for German influence…

It would be criminal to ignore the dark clouds slowly and threateningly gathering on the German horizon. It would be criminal also to keep silence, seeing that the storm which piled up the clouds blew from the highest point of observation where the greatest serenity of mind ought to prevail.

He dared to publish his famous open letter addressed to William Hohenzollern. The Eulenburg scandal came as a result. A few suicides among the nobility followed the exposure about the Round Table of the "Most High."

Everybody predicted Harden's imprisonment, his trial for lese majeste.

Nothing happened. He was stronger even than His Imperial Majesty's Court, and everybody knew that he would show little reverence, and still less consideration, for the Kaiser's sacred person. The scandal of the Kaiser's friendship with the notorious Krupp some years later was Harden's complete justification.

565

CHAPTER VI

The Evening News

In the years from 1883 to 1887 I was working sixteen or seventeen hours a day on the Evening News, Bit by bit I found out the secret of journalistic success in London, and I may as well tell the story here. First of all, I discovered that the public did not care a row of pins for scholarly or even original leading articles. Arthur Walter praised this part of the Evening News very cordially, but I soon found that it had no effect whatever on the circulation. The first thing that gave me the clue to success was the divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell. I had met Lady Colin in Paris and admired, as every one else admired, her tall, superb figure and remarkable brunette beauty. I went to the court chiefly out of curiosity and heard her statement and cross-examination. I then begged the Evening News correspondent to give me a verbatim report, for I soon realized that no other paper would treat the case as it deserved. It was full of the most scabrous details. In successive editions that evening, I gave up the whole of the right-hand center page to it, and promised my readers, in the beginning, to give the fullest account possible of the trial. The question was how far I should report the lady's revelations.

I saw Arthur Walter in the evening, and I surprised him by telling him the details of the case; he agreed with me as to what should be published. In The Times account next morning, I found that they had drawn the line almost exactly where I had drawn it, though I had told the story at much greater length and made it much more interesting by adding detailed sketches of the chief personages. I pursued the same plan every day of the trial, making a most enthralling human story, as human as I dared in view of English convention.

The circulation of the paper almost doubled in the week, and the whole account attracted so much attention that Edmund Yates asked me to dinner, and while at dinner invited me to tell him how I had come to such extraordinary success. Everyone, he declared, was reading the Evening News for the report of the cause scandaleuse. One man, sitting almost opposite me at the table, sniffed again and again at my laughing outspokenness; it was, I learned afterwards, George Lewis-the famous solicitor.

The next day I received the proof of how envy and malevolence revenge themselves on success. George Lewis indicted the Evening News for obscene libel, and almost immediately the case came up before Mr. Justice Denman.

George Lewis read out some of the reports which I had printed and asked that I should be punished. Not wishing to put the paper to any expense, I defended the case in person, and my answer to the accusation was simply to show that I had followed with almost absolute exactness the example set by The Times, eliminating every scabrous detail just as The Times had eliminated them. "The standard of what is becoming," I said, "varies in every country and every age. I could do no better with a halfpenny paper than keep the limits established by The Times. This I have done," and I passed up my account with the account in The Times side by side, showing that we often stopped at the same word.

"What have you to say to that?" Mr. Justice Denman asked. My accuser, George Lewis, rose quickly. "I submit," said he, "that it's no answer whatever to the case. I contend that the Evening News is guilty of obscene libel, and I ask for a verdict on the strength of these reports."

"But," said Justice Denman, "if you are actuated by a respect for public morality, Mr. Lewis, why don't you select The Times rather than the less important Evening News?"

"Again, I submit," said Lewis, "that my accusation is unanswered."

Denman smiled and replied, "I give a verdict for the defendant, and wish to express my opinion that the case should never have been brought."

But I had learned my lesson. The fact that the Evening News published the longest and most detailed reports had doubled the circulation and brought the paper into the limelight. Now couldn't I go on to make the news pages more interesting? I at once set to work to get a couple of Paris papers, a couple of German papers, and used to glance through them every evening after my work of the day was supposed to have been finished.

As soon as I found either in Berlin, Rome, Madrid or Paris an interesting case, I rewrote it for the Evening News and soon saw that this was the road to success. The circulation of the paper rose rapidly, and people of some importance in journalism began to invite me out and show me favor; especially was this the case with Labouchere and Yates, whom I regarded as the two heads of the profession.

I made them both laugh heartily one evening after dinner by telling them of my progress downwards to success. I had edited the Evening News at first, I said, at the top of my thought as a scholar and a man of the world of twentyeight; nobody wanted my opinions, but as I went downwards and began to edit it as I felt at twenty, then at eighteen, then at sixteen, I was more successful; but when I got to my tastes at fourteen years of age, I found instantaneous response. "Kissing and fighting," I said, "were the only things I cared for at thirteen or fourteen, and those are the themes the English public desires and enjoys today."

It is to the present hour the true reading of successful popular journalism.

Why has the News of the World a circulation of over three millions? Simply because in it you can find most of the suggestive or sensational stories of the week. They have not found out the proper way of increasing their stock and so they are often short of good stories, but the good stories are there to be had always, as I very soon found out when my feet struck the right path.

It was, of course, extremely hard work for me to go through a dozen foreign papers every evening for perhaps a couple of stories, and besides at the best they were foreign stories-not as interesting to the English public as English stories would be. But how, how was I to get English stories?

One day, I was in the sub-editor's room and found that the reporters at all the police courts sent in flimsies with short accounts of what took place in the police courts during the day up to twelve o'clock. One of the stories told of a murder in Clerkenwell. There was no attempt at description: the common reporter had cut the incident down to some eight or ten lines, but beneath it I felt that there was a great human story. I at once jumped into a hansom, ran down to Clerkenwell, got hold of the reporter and made him take me to the scene of the tragedy. The story was appalling and intensely interesting.

A man and wife had lived together till middle age: had brought up a family of three children; comparative success had come through a little tobacco shop they kept, and with success came temptation. The father of forty-five had fallen in love with a girl of fifteen or sixteen who had come to the shop to buy tobacco. He made up to the girl and won her without the knowledge of his wife, who was wholly taken up with the household duties; but the eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen, had quick eyes and noticed that her father was going after the girl. When she saw him kissing her, she went to the mother to tell, feminine jealousy and curiosity blazing. At once the mother revenged herself on the girl. She beat her and called her names in the street until at length the father took his mistress' part and knocked his wife down. Strange to say, her head struck a cartwheel and she died the same night.

The whole story was told in court, but when I retold it in the Evening News with the chief details-a description of the jealous daughter and her account of how she had found her father out, and the father's confession — the story had an enormous vogue, and the circulation of the Evening News responded to it immediately.

I had found the way to success. Every day the London police courts are filled with love stories and sensational tragedies of all kinds. How to get them was the only question. I took six police courts as a nucleus and put an able man in charge of them with these instructions: "Whenever you get any story that promises, go immediately to the police court in question, see the reporter, get all the facts. If there is real interest in the incident, work it up, interview the principals, make a real story of it, and send it in to the paper." I advised my lieutenant to give a guinea to any police reporter who put him on to a good case. In a month I found the problem was solved. I could fill the six or seven columns of the Evening News with sensational stories of London life with the greatest ease.

After some three years' work the circulation of the paper had increased tenfold and it had begun to pay. As I had worked morning, noon and night on it without respite, I got the directors to give me a three months' holiday and went straight to Italy. In Rome I read a good deal of Italian and studied the old Roman remains, and became a friend of Prince Doria. There took place what I called the strangest occurrence in my life, which I may now tell at length.

The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns has always had a certain fascination for me, as I imagine it has for almost everyone. Long before the discovery of the X-rays had shown that one could see through houses and bodies, I was persuaded that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in any philosophy.

The strange attraction of human beings, one to another; the fact that chemical elements only unite according to certain ascertained weights, that gases would mingle, but not become one until an electric spark was passed through them; the myriad analogies in nature suggesting likeness in the eternal disparity; unity in the infinite differences, tormented my curiosity from the time I was twenty. But every time I sought for further knowledge I was met by a blank wall.

I studied spiritualism for six or eight months and was so eloquent about it that the medium admitted me into the secret and showed me all the tricks of his foul trade. I was amused later to find that Browning had had an equally strange experience with "Sludge," the medium whom his wife had begun to believe in.

Later still I was surprised to find that Alfred Russel Wallace, a great scientist and the forerunner of Darwin, a transparently honest man, believed absolutely in all sorts of communications with what he called "the spirit world." But my unbelief persisted and persists to this day. Where is the great light?

Still, I had one experience that enormously strengthened Wallace's influence over me in this respect. Desiring complete change and recreation, I took out some Irish horses and hunted regularly on the campagna. It seemed delightful to me to hunt foxes where Paul and Peter had walked, where Caesar and Pompey had marched at the head of their legions, to take high wooden fences on a countryside peopled with the ghosts of forgotten worthies. I used to spend some hours every afternoon studying the antiquities and all the morning galloping across the campagna.

It was the double life that seduced me and gave me absolute health of both mind and body. Naturally, in the hunting field I got to know nearly all the Romans of position, and I knew most of the scholars and poets through my afternoons.

As sometimes happens, there was a blank day in our hunting. The sun was hot and strong and the dogs could take up no scent at all. The whole hunt moved from place to place, drawing every spinney blank. Once I rested beside a sprig of acacia.

I had promised to go to the Dorias to lunch and to talk afterwards to their guests about the famous picture that was in the Doria galleries, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love by Titian. Every one interested in art knows the picture. At the left, in a charming Italian landscape, is a beautiful woman dressed in the utmost splendor of those great Venetian days; and seated on a round marble well-head, close to, is another woman, quite nude, wonderfully drawn and painted, realistically realized. Some idiot had christened it Sacred and Profane Love. I read it in a different way. It seemed to me plain that it was a characteristic Renaissance story: a Venetian aristocrat proud of the beauty of his wife, asked Titian to paint her in all her splendor of raiment, and at the same time to paint her as he saw her in her nude loveliness. It was plainly one and the same woman-figure, eyes and hair unmistakably alike.

Looking forward to the luncheon and the talk, and tired with futile efforts to find a fox, I broke away from the crowd before noon and rode towards the city, towards the Porta Pia, along the wonderful road made sacred by the sufferings of Paul. As I rode into the city, I think by way of the south gate, I had to slow up and go carefully because of a crowd of three or four hundred people. When I got through the gate I saw from my horse that the center of attraction was a veiled woman seated at a plain table drawn up against the wall. The table was covered with some simple brown cloth. I said to one on the outskirts of the crowd: "What is it all about?"

"A famous sorceress and soothsayer," he said, "who tells you the future," and he crossed himself as he spoke.

Just then a girl went up to the woman, put down some silver, and showed her hands. I laughed. It seemed strange to me that there in Rome, the city of a thousand miracles, the heart of a dozen civilizations, this poor cheat should have won through all the centuries of skepticism.

"A good way of getting rid of small change," I remarked, smiling, and some Italians echoed me, laughing. Suddenly the sorceress spoke:

"If that foreigner on the horse would come down and dare the test he would find that I could tell him new truths. I can unfold the future to him."

"It is the past I would like to know about," I answered. "If you can tell me about the past I'll believe your predictions."

"Come down," she said, "I'll tell you about the past as well as the future."

I looked at my watch and saw that I had half an hour to spare. There was an Italian boy already at my horse's head, promising to hold the cable-tow, so I

dismounted and went through the crowd to the sorceress. I offered her a gold coin but she waved it aside. "Do not pay until you are convinced."

I said, "Please understand that I want to know about the past."

"What about the past?" she asked.

"Oh, the most important thing to me in it."

"That's easy," she replied. "Give me both your hands, please. The left one shows what your natural proclivities are, the right how they have been modified by the experiences of your life."

I held out both my hands and stood feeling rather a fool to be wasting my time on such nonsense.

"The most peculiar thing in your life," she said, "up to date, is the love and admiration you had for a man, an American."

"Perhaps you can tell me the man's name," I suggested.

"I will spell it for you," she said, "you begin."

"Begin you-" said I, and she answered, "S-m-i-t-h-Smith."

For a moment I was dumbfounded. How could she know anything about my life in Kansas University?

"What was he like?" I asked.

To my amazement she described him.

"He had a great influence on you," she went on, "made you a student and writer. Am I right?"

"Perfectly right," I said, "but how you got the information I do not know.

Whatever you tell me about the future I shall think of and consider ripely."

"The movement of your life," she said, "goes steadily upward, and you will realize all your ambitions. You will win money and fame, and have a very happy and full life. But the curve in later life begins to go down, and I cannot see the end; there is a sea of blood."

"What do you mean," I cried, "blood cause by me?"

"Oh, no, blood over half the world-a sea of blood."

"Am I in it?" I asked. "I will say no more," she replied. "I oughtn't to tell you anything more."

I laughed. "It is a very dramatic ending. Of course if you think you ought not to tell me, you won't."

"Still you have no belief in it?" she asked, looking at me with sad eyes. None,"

I said, "not a vestige of belief, not in my success nor in the sea of blood."

She nodded her head several times as if in thought and then with a sigh, she said: "I can make you believe it all."

"There I defy you," I laughed. "I do not think I would believe you if it occurred; if in the years to come all you have said turned out to be true, I still should not believe."

"You will leave Rome this evening and go across the seas to England," she cried suddenly.

"Oh, that's a shockingly bad guess," I replied. "I have my rooms in Rome for months: I have horses here and do not intend to leave until spring is changing into summer. Three months at least I shall stay here."

"You will leave Rome this evening," she repeated, "for London. And in the train you will know that the soothsayer spoke truth."

To cut the matter short, I asked her what I owed her.

"What you please," she answered. "Nothing if you do not believe."

I took out a couple of gold coins.

"I believe the first part of what you said," I told her. "It was extraordinary. But nothing like you say is ever going to happen to me."

"Tonight you will know more," she replied.

I bowed and walked through the crowd to my horse and went off to the lunch.

I gave my little talk to perhaps a hundred people in the Doria gallery. I had just finished and was being congratulated by the British ambassador and Doria, when a servant came up and said to Doria, "A telegram for Mr. Harris."

With their permission I opened it and found that I was summoned back to London immediately-"Important!" The signature was that of a friend, Lord Folkestone, who would not have sent me such a telegram without absolute need. I showed the telegram to Doria, and, absorbed in the question of what could have happened, I hurried off to my hotel, sent a messenger to get my ticket, packed my clothes, settled my bill and caught the night express to London, getting a sleeping compartment all to myself. An hour later I went into the diner. In glancing out of the window into the gloom I saw that we were just leaving the campagna.

The whole scene of noon came back to me in a flash. Here I was against all probability going to London, as the soothsayer had predicted.

How could she have known? How much truth was there in it all? What did she mean by the "sea of blood" at the end? "A sea of blood," her words were,

"a sea of blood over half the world."

A couple of months later I was free again. I returned to Rome and did everything I could think of to find my soothsayer, but in vain. When I inquired of the police, they told me that the soothsayers and similar folk in Rome were legion. Could I give any description?

I never heard of her again. I leave the story now to my readers as a problem. It is the one fact in my life which I am unable to explain in any way.

I must now relate how I lost the editorship of the Evening News. All the while I was in Rome I received weekly statements from the Evening News and knew that it was going on all right, but without improving under the assistant whom I had picked, an Irishman named Ruble.

When I reached England, Lord Folkstone told me that Mr. Kennard. the banker and director who supplied most of the money, had come to have a great opinion of Rubie, my assistant; thought he could do the work quite as well as I could, and, in fact, intended to make a row about my having prolonged my holiday in order to put Rubie in my place as managing editor. I was astonished and amused. I knew that Rubie could not do the paper at all, and I had really worked with all my heart and soul at it, and hadn't taken breathing time or a holiday in the three years.

I meant to take up the whole problem of journalism in a big way when I came back. I wanted to group all the police courts in London in sixes under able heads, and so fill up the whole paper from one end to the other with astonishing stories of London life. I dreamed of a morning paper as well and a million circulation for each; and I would have done it all, but when I came back, I found that success had turned Kennard's head. He would have to pay me a share of the profits; he would always have me as a master in his paper; and as I had prolonged my holiday without leave, I had given him the opportunity he needed. I was to be discharged-decently because of Lord Folkestone-still, to be got rid of.

We had a board meeting at the Evening News and Kennard said he wanted to act quite fairly: he thought that I had made the paper successful, and he was quite willing to give me a thousand pounds as a solatium.

One incident is perhaps worth relating here: I brought some friends together who offered Coleridge Kennard some forty thousand pounds for the paper- more than all the money spent on it during my editorship; he refused the offer. I thereupon accepted his offer of a thousand pounds and got up to leave the board room. At this Lord Folkestone rose also, reminded Coleridge Kennard that he had put a good many thousands of pounds in the paper, that he had selected me as editor, and declared now that he was perfectly satisfied with my work. He preferred, he said, to leave the paper with me and lose whatever money he had put into it. In the most charming way, he added,

"Come on, Frank, they do not want us," and took me out to his mail-phaeton.

Three months after I left the Evening News Kennard met me at the corner of Grosvenor Street and begged me to come back to my old position on the News. He told me that the circulation of the paper had fallen off in the most extraordinary way. I smiled at him. "I warned you, Kennard," I said, "that things quickly built up would fall down nearly as quickly, but I am quite happy in the editorship of the Fortnightly Review and I will not go back."

Two months later Kennard confessed to me that he had sold the Evening News for a paltry two thousand five hundred pounds to Harms-worth: he had lost some thirty-eight thousand by discharging me.

CHAPTER VII

My pleasures: driving, food and drink, music and science

All this while in London I had one passion: the desire to know and measure all the men of ability in art and literature I could meet. I had, however, a myriad pleasures, among which I must put first the love of horses, of riding and driving, I mean. I still kept up another dozen of athletic amusements; I ran and walked regularly and boxed for at least half an hour each morning, just to keep myself perfectly fit, as I shall explain later.

A London newspaper once published the fact that I was the only editor who drove fine horses tandem down Fleet Street. From 1885 to 1895 or so I had, I think, some of the best driving horses in London. I should like to give the photo of one of them at the end of this chapter; the mare in question won first prize at the Richmond Horse Show, and was a very beautiful creature-wellformed with high spirit, and in her light American buggy an extraordinary mover; but alas! no picture could do her justice.

All these ten or twelve years in London I had from three to six horses for riding and driving; and I had the carriages built in America simply for lightness and perfection of spring. English carriages are usually very heavy and strong because of the bad old roads of the past, but the good modern road allows one to have lighter carriages, and is therefore better for the horses. I had a mail-phaeton built in New York and sent across which weighed less than four hundred pounds, so that two horses could draw it without feeling its weight, and were therefore free to show perfect paces. I was often stopped by Englishmen in Hyde Park wishing to know where I got the horses and the featherweight phaeton.

In a little portrait I wrote of Cunninghame Graham, I told of a race we had in Hyde Park one morning, in which I beat his Argentine pony rather easily with an English horse. Graham has written since that he has no recollection of such a race; perhaps if he had won he would have remembered it.

Whenever I think of horses I cannot but recall Blue Devil, the mare I have told about when I was a cowboy in Texas. She was a wonderful companion! I could throw my hat down and send her back for it: after five miles or more she would go straight to the spot and bring it to me in her mouth. When I was at the University of Lawrence, Kansas, which lies outside the town on a hill, I used to ride her up without bridle or saddle, then dismount and turn her loose, and she would wander about, eating a little grass from time to time, and as soon as I whistled she would come racing to me.

In her honor I must tell that I once made a bet in Lawrence that I could ride one hundred miles on this one horse and walk fifty in twenty-four hours.

When it came to the trial, it was a hot July day and I was dreadfully afraid that I had over-rated what Blue Devil could do, so I picked the cool night for her and rode her without a saddle; but about the fiftieth mile she fairly ran away with me just to teach me that she could do what was required of her; and at the hundredth mile, which was completed under eleven hours, she bit me on the shoulder playfully and began to eat her oats as if she had just left the stable; her heart was nearly as big as her body. I almost came to grief walking the fifty miles because one of my boots gave out about the twentyfifth mile and I had to walk the rest of the distance in my stockings. However, the ride is on record; not a bad achievement for a boy of seventeen!

The English know far more about horses than any other European people, but even in this cult they have been surpassed by the Americans, who first taught them that jockeys should sit as far forward on the withers as possible, and not in the small of the back. Even Fred Archer, great jockey though he was, was not nearly as good as some American jockeys who came after him and showed their skill on English race courses.

Just in the same way, prize-fighting was further developed in America in ten years' time than in England in a hundred.

I wish the English would understand how their love of tradition limits them in almost everything.

I can't leave this talk about horses without mentioning the advent of the motor-car. It was in the winter of 1895-96 that I went from London as usual to the Riviera, and there saw a motor-car for the first time. A man had brought it to Monte Carlo, and having lost his money, offered it for sale: it was a Georges Richard, seven horse-power, driven by belts. At once I tried it and fell in love with the speed and smoothness of its motion; finally I bought it, giving, I think, fifteen thousand francs for it, or about six hundred pounds.

I used it for almost a month to visit all the beauty spots of the Riviera, and they are numberless and wonderful. When I had drunk my fill of natural beauty, I started over Grasse and Digne to go to Paris. I remember dining late at Grasse and going on by night: we lost first one belt and then another on the road and had to hunt about in the dark for them before we could go on. Still it was evident to me that the motor-car would soon do away with horses: it was the most wonderful mode of traveling that man at that time had discovered.

It took me over a week to reach Paris, and three days to go from Paris to Calais; and when I started out from Dover to go to London, my difficulties began: the very first policeman stopped me and took me to the station; it was there decided that I must have a man to walk in front of the motor with a red flag. I acquiesced apparently, but declared to the police inspector that I would not go beyond four miles an hour and would use all care; and so at last I was allowed to start out for London. On the way I met a gentleman with a pair of horses who turned back at once and began following my motor-car.

He asked me numerous questions about it; and the end of it was that he paid me to bring it into his park and let him try it; which I did, and at the finish I sold him the car and went on to London endowed with my new experiences, the chief being the divine beauty of the Riviera, and the new power given to one by the motor-car.

The motor-car enriched life like the discovery of two or three new poets. I always give one instance of its almost magical power. I think I was the first person who ever saw the four great cathedrals of France in one day. I was staying in Amiens, and after a last look at the west door of the cathedral, about seven o'clock in the morning I drove the car to Beauvais and spent some hours with its beauties; thence I drove to Paris. At Paris I just looked at Sainte-Chapelle and went on to Chartres, where I had a late lunch; after lunch and feasting my eyes again on the beauties of the cathedral, I drove on to Rheims and had another great impression.

I suppose the day will come when one will see the four in a morning and fly to Monreale, near Palermo, for lunch, and then from Palermo to the Parthenon of Athens, and so on to the church of San Sofia at Constantinople, the inside of which is one of the wonders of the world.

One other experience I had in the last years of the century which I want to put on record, for it taught me that a machine heavier than air might fly. It was, of course, an American who gave me the experience; I have forgotten his name, although I knew him very well. He talked to me about a flying machine: "The motor-car engine," he said, "was still very heavy," but he felt certain that if speed enough could be got up, it would be possible to fly in an airplane heavier than air. He took me down one day to his place in the country. He had rigged up there a sort of airplane with a motorcar engine and a long set of rails down a fairly steep hill. He told me that the rails were there in order to get sufficient speed in the descent for the airplane to fly; he asked me would I risk a flight with him. I said I should be delighted. We got in; he started the engine; we ran down the slope and to my wonder lifted into the air and went about three hundred yards, crossing a fence in our flight before descending in a grass field. 'Twasn't anything very brilliant, but it taught me, certainly, that man had conquered the air and would yet have a machine to wing the ether like a bird.

Less than twenty years later I went up in an airplane at Nice, but I shall talk about that in another volume.

Now that I am telling about the pleasures of life and living, I want to tell about eating and drinking. I have already noted, I think, in a previous volume, that the English ideal of cooking is the best in the world; it is the aristocratic ideal and consists in the desire to give to each article of food its own especial flavor, whereas French cooking is apt to obliterate all distinctions with a democratic sauce.

The drawback of English cooking is that England has scarcely any cooks, and so it is seldom you find their ideals carried out. In one particular, however, I was always quarreling with English food: you can get the best game in the world in England, but alas, the English always keep it until it is "high," or if you prefer the truth, till it is almost rotten. I remember one Englishman of great position telling me that he always hung grouse till the bird fell of its own weight, drawing out its legs. Professor Mahaffy in Dublin once told me with huge gusto that he never cared for woodcock till it was represented by a green sauce on his plate. And all this is done, I have been told, in order to make game more tender; but I found out in Scotland once that if you cook game on the day it is shot, before the rigor mortis has set in, it is just as tender as if you kept it for a month. I used to take special pains to get my grouse cooked before the rigor mortis, and sent down to me from Yorkshire.

I think it was the ladies in England who first told me that my lunches were the best in London because the game was so delightful — not "smelly," they said.

It is possible in London to get the best beef and mutton in the world, and any one who tries Simpson's restaurant in the Strand will soon convince himself of the truth of this assertion. The veal, however, is not nearly so good as it is in France; and of course the average of French cooking is immeasurably higher than the average of English cooking; but I repeat, I have had the best dinners of my life in England.

Ordinarily here in France, at the seaside, one gets fish at the best restaurants that isn't fresh, and when you protest, the maitre d'hotel assures you that it is quite fresh; was alive that morning. Now high game is not injurious to the health. Beef and mutton, too, can be kept a long time without being harmful, but stale fish is often deadly; and I therefore want to tell my readers how to distinguish between fresh and stale fish at one glance. When the fish is put before you, you naturally open it; lift the flesh from the backbone; if the backbone has marked the flesh in the slightest way, it is two or three days old; and if the marks are dark brown, it is probably two weeks old. Yet at the best hotel I had fish of the Mediterranean, and the arete, or back bone, had marked the flesh black. No assurance of the maitre d'hotel would induce me to touch such fish. French bread, too, that used to be the best in the world, is now tenth-rate, but it is always possible to get sticks of gluten that look and taste like the best bread and are very easy to digest.

Most tinned and canned foods are better done in England than elsewhere, but one especially-petits pois de Rodel-prepared in two or three different ways in France, are the best sweet peas I have ever eaten.

Long ago I proposed to make a restaurant that should have rooms given to different schools of cookery: the English room, of course, and the French room, and the Russian room, at least; for these are the three great schools of modern cookery; and the best of them, in my opinion, is the English, so far as the ideal of cooking goes; but New York is beginning to run London very close. You can get nearly as good beefsteak and mutton in New York as in London, and better veal; fish, too, you can get in New York as good, except they have no salmon-trout, and the sole are not quite as good as Dover sole; but you can get better lobsters in New York than anywhere in the world, and deep-sea oysters, too-better than Carlingfords, in spite of British opinion. And as for vegetables and fruits, there is no comparison: the American vegetables and fruits are the best to be found anywhere.

But there is one thing which the French have to perfection, and that is many sorts of wine-the best, I think, in the world. I can get vin du pays almost anywhere in France that is light and of excellent flavor, sometimes indeed with a real bouqet, and it is as cheap as mineral water: a franc and a half a bottle, let us say, or two-pence or three-pence in English money, or five cents a bottle. Of course, the best wines, Bordeaux and Burgundy, are much dearer: half a dollar, or a dollar and a half a bottle, according to quality and age; but such luxuries can be omitted when the ordinary wine of the country is absolutely palatable and good. In my time in London champagne was the chief drink, and the English best class knew more about good champagne than the French: they were the first to modify the French habit of adding sugar and brandy to champagne-they have always wanted their wine nature or brut; and the taste for the best dry champagne in London is far higher than it is in Paris; but Burgundy and Bordeaux, and all the varieties of white and red wines are better understood in France than anywhere else.

My reputation for giving good lunches in London was based on the fact that I knew more about the best qualities and the best years of French wines than most people. I have always had a passionate admiration for Rhine wines, too, and the wines of the Moselle. A long time ago now I once earned my living in London by tasting wines: we used to have an excellent lunch, three or four of us, and the six or eight bottles of wine that we had to taste were brought in after we had enjoyed an excellent beefsteak and had cleaned our palates with bread and salt and olives: then each of us had to give his opinion of the various wines and tell especially which would improve with keeping and so be the better purchase. Most of us could give the year of any special vintage.

One man in London knew more about white wine even than I did, but I was a good second, and so I may be allowed to speak on French wines at least with some authority.

I remember making every one at table laugh one day by a comparison between wine and women as the two best things in the world. "Red Bordeaux," I said, "is like the lawful wife: an excellent beverage that goes with every dish and enables one to enjoy one's food, and helps one to live.

"But now and then a man wants a change, and champagne is the most complete and exhilarating change from Bordeaux; it is like the woman of the streets: everybody that can afford it tries it sooner or later, but it has no real attraction. It must be taken in moderation: too much of it is apt to give a bad headache, or worse. Like the woman of the streets, it is always within reach and its price is out of all proportion to its worth.

"Moselle is the girl of fourteen to eighteen: light, quick on the tongue with an exquisite, evanescent perfume, but little body; it may be used constantly and in quantities, but must be taken young.

"If you prefer real fragrance or bouquet, you must go to a wine with more body in it, such as Burgundy, Chambertin or Musigny. Burgundy I always think of as the woman of thirty: it has more body than claret, is richer, more generous, with a finer perfume; but it is very intoxicating and should be used with self-restraint.

"Port is the woman of forty: stronger, richer, sweeter even than Burgundy; much more body in it but less bouquet; it keeps excellently and ripens with age and can only be drunk freely by youth; in maturity, more than a sip of it is apt to be heavy, and if taken every day it is almost certain to give gout. But if you are vigorous and don't fear the consequences, the best wine in the world is crusted Port, half a century old; it is strong with a divine fragrance, heady, intoxicating, but constant use of it is not to be recommended: it affects the health of even its strongest and most passionate admirers and brings them to premature death.

I prefer the little common wine of France that is light gold in color or 'see with perfect taste, a slight fragrance and no intoxication in half a dozen bottles.

Oh, me! Which is a great sigh of regret for the dear dead days and loves desirable!

Strange," I went on, "the diseases of wine, too, corroborate my comparison.

Claret, or the lawful wife, suffers from what the French call tourne; if you turn away from her, the wife loses her subtle attraction very easily, and if she turns away from you, look out for storms.

Burgundy, on the other hand, is apt to become bitter; amer, the French call it: the body in it, if kept too warm or not treated properly turns bitter; and champagne is ruined by graisse, a sort of viscous ropiness.

"At their best and worst, wines have curious affinities with women. Young men prefer Burgundy because of its sweetness and fire, while old men always choose Moselle because it is harmless, light, has a delicious perfume and no bad effect."

There were many other pleasures in my daily life in Park Lane in those golden years from 1890 to 1900.

I have said nothing of the music in London in the eighties and nineties, but the chief part of it was really all contained in the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan given at the Savoy Theatre. Their popularity was extraordinary: from Pinafore, Patience, and The Pirates to Iolanthe, The Mikado, and The Yeomen of the Guard. I think it was in '81 that D'Oyly Carte opened the Savoy for these operas, and their success was sensational.

I don't know when Gilbert wrote Bab Ballads, but he had made the name of "Bab" famous in the comic weekly Fun before my tune. He had really an extraordinary ironic wit.

I was introduced to him by Beerbohm Tree. He was twenty years older than I was; and, of course, like every one in London, I had already heard a dozen examples of his mordant humor. I remember on one occasion when Tree had been playing Falstaff in the Merry Wives for the first time. Gilbert was in the theatre and came round behind the scenes afterwards to assist at Tree's triumph. Again and again Tree tried to get some praise out of Gilbert, but Gilbert put him off with phrases such as: "Your make-up, Tree, is astonishing," as, indeed, it was, Tree being an artist in make-up- a real artist. I still have the great mirror from his dressing-room, in which he painted himself as Svengali and as Bardolph in grease paint on the glass-a marvel of artistic similitude.

Annoyed at length by Gilbert's reiterated praise of his make-up, Tree said:

"But, my dear Gilbert, what do you think of my acting?" — wiping his brow at the same time because he had to be enormously padded to mimic the rotundity of Falstaff.

Gilbert could not resist the opportunity for a witty thrust. "I think your skin acts superbly, Tree," was the scathing reply.

On another occasion, when we were all condemning Tree's Hamlet, which was really absurd, Gilbert said, "I don't think his Hamlet is so bad: it's funny but not vulgar."

He was said to have been a kind and a good friend, and he certainly wrote wonderfully humorous libretti for Sullivan.

For the first time I found that the honors conferred upon the pair were justified. Sullivan was made a baronet in '83, whereas Gilbert was not knighted until 1907. These honors represented very faintly the true values of both men. Sullivan was a charming little fellow: he was never very strong, and he died, I think, with the century. The Savoy Operas were supposed to represent his contribution to popular music, but I was one of the few who thought that his great popularity had really harmed his genius. The Mikado was the best and the most popular of the whole series; it is still given frequently in America and England; but Patience and Pinafore were good, too, and had in them distinct echoes of the Bab Ballads; of course, in Patience, Gilbert ridiculed the "greenery, yellowy, Grosvenor Gallery, je ne sais quoi, young man," which was said to have been an attack upon Oscar Wilde. It may or may not be true, but Gilbert's wit didn't go very deep, whereas the music of Sullivan was of the very first order. One forgets today the splendid Golden Legend to remember that the music of Onward, Christian Soldiers is his; but he also wrote The Martyr of Antioch and The Light of the World, and is certainly the first of all English musicians-greater even than Purcell.

He was, too, extraordinarily lovable and kindly. I remember meeting him and asking him to dinner once, I think in '84 or '85, at Monte Carlo; I know it was shortly after he had been made a baronet. He came to dine with me at the Hotel de Paris, and when he came in and saw the table laid for seven or eight people, he said to me: "Do me a favor, Harris; introduce me as Sir Edward Sullivan; of course afterwards you will call me 'Sullivan' without the title, but I want these new people whom I am to meet to know that I am a Baronet." Of course I did as he asked.

I have no way of conveying to my readers the extraordinary boyish sweetness and kindness of the man, but he has remained with me always as a charming memory of a very great musician who kept his child's heart to the last.

The comic-operas at the Savoy Theatre were the most extraordinary theatrical performances that I have ever seen, except those of Wagner in Bayreuth. Everyone connected with the theatre seemed to be first-rate:

Barrington was as amusing as Grossmith; he was tall and big, while Grossmith was very small, tiny indeed. Barrington was a giant in girth and formed a perfect foil to Grossmith, who looked like a gnat. It was in the beginning of the nineties that he started touring with humorous and musical recitals.

Grossmith was a sort of elf who could sing with extraordinary speed-the very quality needed to give the patter of Gilbert its full value. The girls, too, were well served in these operas, and they sang wonderfully. Who that heard it could ever forget, Three Little Maids from School are We?

It was Dolmetsch, the Belgian musician, who first taught me what a great musician Sullivan really was; till then I knew nothing of him except is the writer of the comic operas; but Dolmetsch taught me the splendor of The Golden Legend and the beauty of some of his songs, such as Oh Mistress Mine and Orpheus with His Lute.

Dolmetsch explained many musical problems to me. Of course, everyone knows that he was the first to make the harpsichord and clavichord as in the earlier days, but to hear him play Bach on the instrument that Bach had written his music for was an unforgettable experience: it was like hearing a great sonnet of Shakespeare perfectly recited for the first time.

One cannot speak of music later in London without thinking of Sir Henry Wood and his conducting of operas: he was as great a conductor, in my opinion, as Toscanini!

I wonder if any one could divine the best experience I had in my life of a quarter of a century in England, the highest spiritual height reached in those colorful years of maturity.

I had run down to Oxford once to see Jowett, and a friend asked me, had I ever heard the boys sing in Magdalen College Chapel; he told me that some one had left a large sum to get the boys perfectly trained, and I know that boys' voices were the most beautiful in the world, so we made an appointment and in due course took our seats.

From the first moment I sat entranced; the boys not only sang divinely, but the music itself was extraordinarily beautiful, and I found out afterwards that it was the best music produced in England in three centuries; a cantata, I think by Purcell, brought tears to my eyes-I had a divine, unforgettable hour with those minstrels of God.

It was then given to me for the first time to catch a glimpse of the highest soul-beauty in the English character, and there is no higher on earth. How the same people who can train those boys to sing such heavenly music should be able to fight the miners and condemn their working-poor to destitution and misery is one of the most hideous puzzles of life to me. They have still in this twentieth century prisons and hospitals side by side; after a Casement has served them loyally for twenty-five years and been ennobled by and for his services to them, they can murder him in cold blood for his obedience to the highest instincts in him: the poor, purblind creatures could not see that "pardon's the word for all" and forgiveness is nobler than punishment. Yet I still hear those boy voices choiring like young-eyed cherubim!

Curiously enough, I always think of science when music is much in my mind; they are two of my greatest joys, though I don't pretend to know a great deal about them. Still, Wagner to me had a rival in Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the best and wisest of men; and I can't talk of Sullivan as a musician without thinking of William Thomson, f another great and lovable and simply sincere soul who stands with Newton himself and is curiously related to him in his prodigious mastery of mathematics.

Perhaps the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth has not yet produced his equal, was William Thomson, afterwards Lord Kelvin. His only rival, Helmholtz, put Kelvin on a pedestal by himself. Every one knows how he made the first Atlantic cable a success; it was an instrument which he had discovered that sent the first telegram between England and America in '58. He was the first, too, to light his own house with electricity.

In the last days of the century I was introduced to him by Alfred Russel Wallace, and was very much surprised to find that he was lame, the result of a skating accident in youth; but in spite of his lameness he had a wonderful presence-no one could forget the domed head and the kindly, frank eyes and grey beard. Two things I remember him by peculiarly: he talked of Joule as his master because he was the first to prove that heat was a mode of motion; Kelvin then went on to say that in every transformation of energy from one form to another, a certain proportion changes into heat, and the heat thus produced becomes diffused by radiation. This gradual transformation of energy into heat is perpetually going on and must sooner or later put an end to all life.

Almost before his death his whole theory was thrown overboard. His gloomy predictions of a degeneration of energy, ending in stagnation, are no longer justified. His conception of atoms and atomic energies has been entirely superseded by the electronic view of matter, and we now look forward to an endless and boundless unfolding, not of energy and power alone, but of life itself.

Kelvin was the first, I suppose, to point out that the amount of time now required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory, and upholders of the process of evolution, couldn't be conceded without assuming the existence of a different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted. I understood him to speak of Darwinism somewhat contemptuously. He seemed to say: "We know nothing of creation. They talk of life beginning in seething marshes and say this earth has gradually cooled, and is cooling."

Kelvin declared positively that if at any time the earth was hotter on the surface by even fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, all life would have been impossible.

I have never known so strenuous a worker. If he had five minutes to wait at any time, he pulled out a little notebook and began to make notes or solve some problem. The only time I seem to have moved him was when I spoke of the "weary weight of this unintelligible world."

"Oh, how true," he said, "I want to take that down"; and out came the notebook. "We know nothing," he went on, "and I am much afraid we never shall know anything but appearances; the meaning of it all, the purpose, if purpose there be, is hidden from us; of essentials, we know nothing."

Kelvin always struck me as perfectly simple and unaffected. He made a great fortune; everything he touched seemed to succeed. He lived till over eighty and went through life with perfect simplicity, not a trace of pose or snobbishness-probably in the twenty years from 1890 to 1910, the wisest man in the world.

We are gradually moving away from the attitude of mind engendered by religion to the attitude born of science. Then we accepted statements and believed; now we question all things and doubt.

Will the scientific habit of mind produce as great masterpieces in art and literature as the religious habit? There are no messiahs of science; a Kelvin is superseded almost in his own lifetime; yet the masterpieces of art will surely be built on our emotions and sexual desires, which grow in strength as we grow in health and knowledge of living.

Kelvin knew nothing, I think, of the marvelous discoveries of J. C. Bose in Calcutta. Bose has proved that plants live and feel as we do, are exhilarated by caffeine and killed by chloroform; he has shown, too, that metals respond to stimuli, are prone to fatigue and react to poisons; in fact, he has extended the realm of life and feeling to infinity.

One result is that we fear and tremble less; but hope and marvel and enjoy more.

CHAPTER VIII

Tennyson and Thomson

In 1892 two men died-Tennyson, the poet, in England, and Renan, the great prose writer, in France. The sensation caused by the death of Tennyson in England was unparalleled: he was treated like a demi-god: on all sides one heard that he was the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century. The Quarterly Review affirmed that "no English poet has possessed a more complete command of his genius in its highest form. No crudities of image like those of Byron, nor cloudy word-phantasms such as those of Shelley, nor fanciful affectations like those of Keats, nor versified prose, such as that of Wordsworth, mar his equality of treatment." A well known writer declared that "the marvellous island held nothing more glorious than this man, nothing more holy, wonderful and dear." Swinburne published a threnody on him of lyrical adoration, and in the press many compared him with Shakespeare. Renan, too, was overpraised by the French, but to nothing like the same extent: they recognized that he was a master of prose, a really great writer, but no Frenchman would have thought of putting him with Montaigne.

Or let us take Victor Hugo, whose life has more points of resemblance with that of Tennyson: he was a greater singer and his genius was far more widely recognized; he was as peculiarly French as Tennyson was English; he, too, lived to a great age and was accorded a public state funeral which was turned into a great ceremony. But there were no such dithyrambs of praise in the French press over Hugo: there was far more measure, more reason; the best heads did not hesitate to qualify their admiration for a great poet and master of musical French.

Tennyson's last day was described by a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette with a fervor of admiration that made him a sacred memory to thousands who had never seen him or read a line of his finer work. I quote the account because it was peculiarly characteristic of English sentiment.

The morning yesterday rose in almost unearthly splendour over the hills and valleys on which the windows of Aldworth House look out, where Lord Tennyson lay dying. From the mullioned window of the room where the poet lay, he could look down upon the peaceful fields, the silent hills beyond them, and the sky above, which was a blue so deep and pure as is rarely seen in this country.

Lord Tennyson woke ever and again out of the painless, dreamy state into which he had fallen, and looked out into the silence and the sunlight.

In the afternoon, in one of his waking moments, during which he was always perfectly conscious, he asked for his Shakespeare, and with his own hands turned the leaves till he found Cymbeline. His eyes were fixed on the pages, but whether and how much he read no one will ever know, for again he lay in dream or slumber, or let his eyes rest on the scene outside.

As the day advanced a change came over the scene, a change almost awful to those who watched the death-bed. Slowly the sun went down, the blue died out of the sky, and upon the valley below there fell a perfectly white mist. The hills, as our representative was told, put on their purple garments to watch this strange, white stillness; there was not a sound in the air, and, high above, the clear, cloudless sky shone like a pale glittering dome. All nature seemed to be watching, waiting.

Then the stars came out and looked in at the big mullioned window, and those within saw them grow brighter and brighter, until at last a moon-a harvest moon for splendour, though it was an October moon-sailed slowly up and flooded the room with golden light. The bed on which Lord Tennyson lay, now very near to the gate of death, and with his left hand still resting on his Shakespeare, was in deep darkness; the rest of the room lit up with the glory of the night, which poured in through the uncurtained windows. And thus, without pain, without a struggle, the greatest of England's poets passed away.

The idea of the stars growing brighter as the moon rose, and the hills putting on purple while the Lord was dying is pure English, or, perhaps I should say, English journalism. Yet everyone praised the description, and there was no criticism of it.

In every paper, too, one found Carlyle's pen portrait of the poet, which is excellent, though not unduly flattering:

Tennyson is one of the finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusty hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion; almost Indianlooking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic-fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe! We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic-his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.

Carlyle does not even notice that Tennyson was tall and well-made, but he saw distinctly the want of brains in him or he would hardly have emphasized that "chaotic" or shown contempt for his speculative activities. A great part of Tennyson's popularity was undoubtedly due to his Victorian religious belief, for he was an aristocrat by nature and would never even issue a cheap edition of his works. To mention him with Shakespeare, the supremest intellect England has produced, seems to me a crime of lese majeste: he wasn't even a thinker, but a sentimentalist.

I saw Tennyson twice: first in a house in London where he sat enthroned like a god and surrounded by worshipers, male and female. In spite of the incense of unmeasured praise, he said nothing of any value, but I caught a phrase or two that may be worth recording. Speaking of morality, he said, "Moral good is the crown of life. But what value is it," he added, "without immortality? If I knew my life was coming to an end in an hour, should I give anything to a starving beggar? Not a penny, if I didn't believe myself immortal… At the same time, I can't believe in Hell; endless punishment seems stupid to me."

The whole talk appeared to me simply brainless, but he was remarkably handsome, and at the request of his hostess he chanted several stanzas of Maude in a fine deep voice that brought out all the music of the verse. But I really formed no definite opinion of him till John Addington Symonds took me with him to Haslemere in this year, 1892. Tennyson then talked of Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, which he had been reading with his son Hallam, and the two had a long discussion about Bruno, in the course of which Tennyson declared that Huxley's belief that we were descended from apes had nothing in it to shock him. "It may be God's way of creation," he said.

But soon he got upon Gladstone, whom he recognized as an evil influence. I could not understand why, till he came upon Irish Home Rule, when he asserted that the Irish were more incapable of self-government than any other people in the world. "Really," I interjected, "perhaps better than niggers!" He turned sharply on me: "Niggers are hardly higher in the scale than animals, indeed I prefer dogs-very much."

There was nothing more to be said; all the while I felt I was listening to mere temper, not to intellect, much less genius, which is the intelligence of the heart. Half a dozen men in this last decade of the nineteenth century were his superiors in mind: Matthew Arnold, Browning, Russel Wallace, and Huxley in England, and of course Lord Kelvin; and in France, Hugo, Renan, Flaubert and Taine were altogether on a higher level. Yet he was apotheosized even in his life and before he reached maturity. His semi-religious sentimentality and his narrow jingoism were the sources of his astounding popularity in England.

"It is understood," wrote one well-informed critic about him, "that he believed he wrote many of the best and truest things he ever published under the direct influence of higher intelligences, of whose presence he was directly conscious." Writing on March 7th, 1874, to a gentleman who had communicated to him some strange experience which he had had under anaesthetics, Tennyson said, "I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating of my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life."

As if conscious of the significance of the statement thus detailed, he adds:

"I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"

The poet repeating his own name in order to pass from the consciousness of individuality into "boundless being, the only true life" is surely calculated to make one smile. Yet this letter is a prose explanation by the poet of one of the mysterious passages of In Memorlam.

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touch'd me from the past,

And all at once it seem'd at last

The living soul was flashed on mine.

And mine in this was wound and whirl'd

About empyreal heights of thought,

And came on that which is and caught

The deep pulsations of the world.

Aeolian music measuring out

The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance-

The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.

Vague words! but ah! how hard to frame

Or ev'n for intellect to reach

In matter-moulded forms of speech

Thro' memory that which I became.

There are many allusions in the Idylls of the King and elsewhere in his work to these same visions of the night or of the day, but all confirming the belief in his own immortality, which he sets forth finally in superb verse: … And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who lov'd, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?

Curiously enough, Hugo, as we learn from his Journal de l'Exile, was even more superstitious than Tennyson: he believed in table-turning and rappings, and in a spirit he called "The White Lady," who made her presence known in the most trivial ways. This superstition seems to belong to the time. In mature manhood, Hugo declares that he never lies down "without a certain terror," and "When I awake in the night, I awake with a shudder! I hear rapping spirits in my room"; and the "White Lady" he calls "an accursed horror." Yet he writes of all this much more reasonably than Tennyson: he says, "The world is still in its infancy: we require ruts and religions; it is doubtful if the average human being has arrived at even a moderate degree of reason: man still has need of written revelation"; and then we get the true reason of his superstition. "All great men have had revelations-all superior minds.

Socrates had his familiar genius. Zoroaster, too, and Shakespeare saw phantoms"; and, as if to atone for this nonsense, he adds finely: "In this century I am the first who has spoken not only of the souls of animals, but also of the soul of things. All my life I have constantly said when I saw a tree branch broken or a leaf torn off-'Leave that branch or leaf. Do not disturb the harmony of nature!' "

Another interesting fact about Hugo is that he always refused to publish as his own the poetry he believed was dictated to him by some table-rapping spirit. Here are two verses which Moliere is supposed to have dictated to him, though I think them curiously characteristic of Hugo himself:

Quand Moliere te dit: Femme, prends tes aiguilles, Fiere pensee, apprends que je te fais honneur, Toute main qui recoud, dans l'ombre, des guenilles Erode le manteau du Seigneur.

Ton autre fonction, pensee, est la science, Pour elle, rien n'est vil et rien n'est importun, L'homme materiel est le vase; elle est 1'anse, La poesie est le parfum.

The great social movement in favor of the poor and disinherited, which is the glory of the nineteenth century, never touched Tennyson; in this, as indeed in every domain of thought, he was far inferior to Victor Hugo, though in the Frenchman, too, the gift of musical speech could not mask the poverty of new ideas and lack of creative power.

When we think of Victor Hugo's constant appeals to reason and justice in all international disputes, and contrast them with Tennyson's wild ravings against Russia or France or Ireland, we are almost compelled to admit that the French habit of mind is higher than the English.

Anecdotes of Victor Hugo are legion, and some of them are very interesting.

During the worst days of the siege of Paris, the poet gave away a great deal of money, making use of Madame Paul Meurice-who did not long survive that terrible time-as his almoner. She told him one day of a poor woman without clothes, food or fuel, whom she thought very deserving. Victor Hugo gave her a hundred francs, which were gratefully accepted. Two days afterwards, Madame Meurice found the woman in the same state of destitution and asked where the hundred francs had gone. She said she had distributed them among famishing mothers and children of her acquaintance; and, as inquiry proved that this was perfectly true, Victor Hugo sent her another hundred francs, on condition that she spend it on her own necessities. This she absolutely refused to do, saying that she would rather not have it at all, so Madame Meurice gave her carte blanche to do as she pleased with it. This obstinate woman was no other than Louise Michel, the Communist, who had already suffered imprisonment and expatriation for her unselfish creed.

I have said nothing about the sex life of either Hugo or Tennyson. That of Hugo is fairly well known, whereas Tennyson's is unknown, even his intimate friends asserting that they knew nothing certainly. I should not think he had ever gone deeply into life anywhere. He was put upon a pedestal too early; he was too fortunate in every way, too highly rewarded. The sacred guides are never so well received; they get prison and hemlock, or the cross, as their reward.

Whenever I recall Tennyson's death and the unmeasured glorification of him in the English press, I am compelled to think of poor James Thomson and his end.

The poet of The City of Dreadful Night died ten years before Tennyson, died in miserable poverty and almost unappreciated; yet, in my opinion, he was as gifted a poet as Tennyson, and far wiser; intellectually, indeed, one of the greatest, a master of prose as well as verse. His life and fate throw a sinister light on English conditions.

In every respect he comes nearer to ideal wisdom than any other modern English poet.

While Tennyson lauds the Crimean War, Thomson condemns it as "a mere selfish haggle, badly begun and meanly finished." He refers to the more recent exploits of English jingoism as "purely iniquitous, battue-wars against tribes of ill-armed savages." He showed sympathy for all the struggling nationalism of his time, for Italy and Poland and even for the Basques, who had supported the Carlist cause in '73. Here are his words:

"Such was the loyalty of these people, far more noble than ours; for they were giving freely of their substance and their lives, whereas we give chiefly snobbish cringing and insincere adulation, and our rich give the money of the nation in large part wrung from the poor."

Unlike Tennyson, he was devoted to the cause of the people, and fought against every form of privilege and capitalism.

Every Englishman should read his satirical essay on Bumbledom. He points out that though there is more liberty in England than on the continent in matters affecting political discussion, "the reverse is true as regards questions of morals and sociology, for here the power of Bumble's purse rules our socalled free press and free institutions with a hand heavier than that of any Continental despot."

Thomson knew that there were worse faults of democracy than "political inequalities." "Bumble," he says, "imposes death by starvation."

He tells us in a letter that he used to read and "hugely admired Byron when about fifteen, but when I was sixteen I fell under the domination of Shelley, to whom I have been loyal ever since"-from Byron to Shelley in a year!

Thomson is really the only Englishman who stands with Heine and Leopardi as a great modern master, and his translations of their poems are the best in English. And Thomson was kindlier and sweeter in all his personal relations than either of them. Even Heine at times distresses one by the contempt he shows for the greatest, such as Goethe. We have no such apology to make for Thomson. He was the most gifted of all his English contemporaries, and he praises the wisest of them enthusiastically. He almost reached perfection, but alas, he sometimes drank too much, is the accusation brought against him, and by Englishmen.

There is the famous reply to a similar accusation brought against General Grant in the Civil War by his detractors. "Tell me what drink he uses," said Lincoln, "and I will send it to the rest of our generals, and then perhaps they, too, will win victories like Grant."

No wonder Thomson let himself drink too much; he could find no market for his work in England, nothing but poverty and neglect. He told me, with that rare power of laughing at himself, which only high genius possesses, that he failed in spite of good resolutions. "You see," he said, "the resolutions were made when I was sober, but after the first glass one is not quite the same who made the resolution, and after the second glass one is still more unlike. If you have been badly nourished, it needs a drink or two, or three, to bring you to your full vigor, and then one glass more for good fellowship and you're lost!"

One man who knew Thomson even at the end and saw this side of him, that I only caught a glimpse of, wrote:

"I am far from saying that Thomson did not find any happiness in life. His wit and broad fun vied with his varied information and gift of a happy talk in making him a prince of good fellows; and he least of all would be suspected of harboring the worm in his jovial heart.

"But these were the glints of sunshine that made life tolerable; the eversmouldering fire of unassuageable grief and inextinguishable despair burned the core out of that great heart when the curtain of night hid the play-acting scenes of the day."

After getting to know him fairly well, I met Thomson once by chance coming out of a public house, and I soon found that he was beyond intelligent speech.

I turned away too hastily. Yet I cherish more than almost any other memory the memory of my casual meetings with him.

Thomson's essays, especially on the poets, are far and away the best in English. His view of Tennyson shows the sureness of his judgment, the width of his impartiality:

"Scarcely any other artist in verse of the same rank has ever lived on such scanty revenues of thought (both pure and applied or mixed) as Tennyson…

He is continually petty… A great school of the poets is dying out: it will die decently, elegantly, in the full odor of respectability, with our Laureate."

Thomson wrote better of Meredith than even Meredith could write of him:

"His name and various passages in his works reveal Welsh blood, more swift and fiery and imaginative than the English… So with his conversation. The speeches do not follow one another mechanically, adjusted like a smooth pavement for easy walking; they leap and break, resilient and resurgent, like running foam-crested sea-waves, impelled and repelled and crossed by under-currents and great tides and broad breezes; in their restless agitations you must divine the immense life abounding beneath and around and above them."

Here is what he says of Browning:

"Robert Browning, a really great thinker, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and restless talents often overpower and run away with his genius so that some of his creations are left but half-redeemed from chaos."

And then he selects for highest praise his Lazarus in the Epistle of Karshish, an Arab Physician.

Thomson's portrait of Heine gives a better picture of Thomson himself than any one else has given:

In all moods, tender, imaginative, fantastic, humorous, ironical, cynical; in anguish and horror, in weariness and revulsion, longing back to enjoyment, and longing forward to painless rest; through the doleful days, and the dreadful immeasurable sleepless nights, this intense and luminous spirit was enchained and constrained to look down into the vast black void, which undermines our seemingly solid existence… and the power of the spell on him, as the power of his spell on us, is increased by the fact that he, thus in Deathin- Life brooding on Death and Life, was no ascetic spiritualist, no selftorturing eremite or hypochondriac monk, but by nature a joyous heathen of richest blood, a Greek, a Persian, as he often proudly proclaimed, a lusty lover of this world and life, an enthusiastic apostle of the rehabilitation of the flesh.

I want finally to put Thomson with the great masters of the nineteenth century. I always think of Blake first as the earliest prophet-seer, then of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats; but Thomson and Browning stand with these. His friend and biographer, Bertram Dobell, the poet, says nobly of Thomson that he "was one of the finest and rarest spirits that has ever worn the vestments of mortality." Think of Thomson's final word, which I would put in the forefront of every English Bible, if I could: "England and France are so proudly in the van of civilization that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them."

I am not sure that this is true of France; I am quite certain it is profoundly true of England.

Tennyson and Thomson-between these poles you can find England: the one man, supremely endowed with genius for words but the mind of a sentimental schoolboy, was ruined by too great adulation and too many rewards; the other, of far higher mental endowment, bred as a charity orphan, was gradually disheartened by neglect and finally broken by the universal indifference that kept him a pauper.

I know that this judgment will not be accepted readily in England; the English would much rather blame a great man than take any shame to themselves for maltreating him. But one proof occurs to me: in the nineties, more than fifteen years after Thomson's death, H. D. Traill, one of the first journalists and men of letters of the time, wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century on English poets of the Victorian era. He gave a list of sixty-six who were able to speak "the veritable and authentic language of the poet"; he puts Tennyson as the first, mentions even a Mrs. Graham Thomson; but omits James Thomson altogether. Yet, of the two, Tennyson and Thomson-the lord and the outcast-it was the outcast orphan alone that reached the heights.

There is no such handicap to genius as praise and money.

O wretched Earth! God sends thee age by age, In pity of thy wild perpetual moan, The saint, the bard, the hero, and the sage:

But still the lofty life is led alone,

The singer sings as in a tongue unknown, The sage's wisdom lamps his single urn;

Thou wilt not heed or imitate or learn.

CHAPTER IX

Friends

London in the nineties! How far away and long ago it all seems, and how shall I describe it? London, to me, is like a woman with wet, draggled dirty skirts (it's always raining in London), and at first you turn from her in disgust, but soon you discover that she has glorious eyes lighting up her pale, wet face. The historic houses, such as Marlborough House, Landsdowne House, Devonshire House and Cadogan House, and a hundred others, are her eyes; and they are simply wonderful treasure-houses of past centuries, with records of each age in gorgeous pictures and books, in tapestries and table silver-all the accessories of good taste and comfortable living. And if you admire her eyes and tell her so passionately one mid-summer evening, when the sunshine is a golden mist, she will give you her lips and take you to her heart; and you will find in her spirit depths undreamed of, passionate devotions, smiling self-sacrifice and loving, gentle attendance till your eyes dim at the sweet memory of her. And ever afterwards you, the alien and outcast and pariah of this all-hating world, will have a soft heart for London.

You will find magic and mystery in her fogs, as Whistler did; and in her gardens some June morning you will wake and find her temperate warmth of desire more enchanting than any tropic heat. London draws me more than any capital, and I have been in most of them, but the sameness of her squares, the destitution of her docks, and, above all, her wretched climate, appall me; and as I grow older I prefer Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where life's contrasts are not so hideous.

Marriage did not mean as much to me as other happenings in my life, and my wife was not, by any means, so important to me or to my mental growth as some of my friends, notably John Addington Symonds, Francis Adams, Grant Allen, and Harold Frederic. In the first ten years of my London life, friends meant more to me than any other influence, and notably such companions as these, who excited me intellectually.

I never could understand why these men did not do some great and evermemorable work. Symonds was a classic of the best, and master of an excellent prose; knew Italian and French, too, rarely well, and was a student born. He had no hindering English prejudices, regarded sex as lightly as Anatole France himself, and yet he did not write a single masterpiece. Why?

He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.

Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?

Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.

This fact made it gradually plain to me that intelligence and all round genial culture do not count for fame as much as some extraordinary endowment. It is, as Goethe said, "the extraordinary alone that lives." Swinburne was not comparable with Symonds in wisdom or understanding, or sweetness of character; and yet, because he had written ten pages of wonderful new verse music, he stands higher and is universally admired. The realization of this fact diminished for the first time in me that desire of fame which, so far, had been my driving power.

With these friends I was in constant touch for some important years without a shadow of misunderstanding or disagreement. Francis Adams was really my first good English friend: I met him in Hyde Park. I had been speaking there on socialism and the necessity of introducing some socialistic measures into English life when he came up and spoke to me, and we soon became friends.

Shortly afterwards, however, he went to Australia, and I did not see him again for some five years. When he came back our friendship was quickly renewed and I got him to write for me on the Fortnightly. He meant a great deal to me, though I was considerably his senior, for he was both frank and sympathetic.

When he came back from Australia he brought with him a wife, not particularly interesting, I thought, but he also brought back a certain weakness of lungs. I managed to help him to go to Egypt. I told him he should live in the desert above Assouan, or in some high place such as Davos Platz, but he did not take my advice and gradually grew worse. He came up the river with me one summer and in the winter stayed with me in London. I found that he was getting more and more hopeless. He spoke of suicide: I begged him not to let his thoughts wander in that direction, assured him that life would be greyer to me without him, and reminded him of his wife. He confessed to me he had tried to kill himself, but his courage had failed him. I told him that courage, like every other virtue, needed practice to become effective; and after he had left me that evening I wrote the little story, Eatin'

Crow, to show him what I meant. In the morning he read it in manuscript and said: "You may do bigger things, Frank, but you'll never do anything more perfect." He went back to his rooms at Margate, and suddenly I heard he had shot himself, after leaving me a message. His wife, too, wrote me that she had been arrested, so I went immediately to Margate and she told me the whole story.

He was going out for a drive with her when a hemorrhage came on. As he stepped into the carriage, he turned and came back to his room and told her that the blood was from his lungs and that he was dying. He gave her a message for me and then asked for his revolver. As the blood was pouring from his mouth she thought he was dying and bravely gave him the weapon.

He put it into his mouth and shot himself; the bullet went through his head into the ceiling. I saw the hole it had made.

In court Mrs. Adams told the whole truth, so the authorities thought she ought to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. But I pleaded with the magistrate, assured him that I knew of her great affection for her husband, and she was set free. I cannot tell here what I lost in Francis Adams-a sort of intellectual conscience and stimulus: the truest and wisest of friends.

Symonds came next in those early days. He had gone to Davos Platz with one lung destroyed and suffering from tuberculosis, but in the vivifying mountain air he quickly gained comparative health; and twice or thrice in summertime he came to London, and once stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore for some memorable days. We were together every evening and talked the stars down the sky. In sex matters he viewed pederasty with the same tolerance as normal indulgence, and told me how surprised he had been by Whitman's passionate repudiation of abnormal desire.

He showed a certain sympathy with the vice which astonished me, and explained, if it did not justify, Swinburne's later gibe at him on account of his supposed liking for "blue-breeched gondoliers." But Symonds' sympathy was purely intellectual, and I always thought him one of the best of men- full of the milk of human kindness and far nearer ideal manhood than Swinburne or Tennyson.

Grant Allen I have already told about: his influence with me only began when I began to write stories, and lived with me for some time longer.

This is even truer of Harold Frederic, who was, if I remember rightly, the correspondent of the New York Times. I met Harold Frederic first at Sir Charles Dilke's and we soon became close friends. I met Sir Edward Grey about the same time in the same house. Frederic had already written several volumes but none yet which corresponded to his ability, none which allowed one to take his measure.

I shall never forget one curious incident that occurred early in our friendship.

It took place at a dinner at Dilke's when Harold Frederic sat beside Cecil Rhodes, at that time little known in England.

When most of the guests had departed, Dilke, Frederic and myself came together in our usual way to talk over things.

"Well, Dilke," Frederic began, "that was the first dull dinner I've ever been at in your house. Who was the bloody fool you put me next to? I talked to him on a dozen subjects but could get absolutely nothing out of him."

Both Dilke and I laughed, and on our way home I told Frederic enough about Rhodes to make him modify his condemnation; but he always refused to believe in Rhodes's brains, and in time I came to think that Frederic was probably nearer right in his contemptuous estimate than Dilke or I in our appreciation.

All these years in the nineties Frederic was growing rapidly, but it was primarily the American in him which appealed to me from the first-a power of judging events and persons on their merits, heedless of position or apparent importance.

This was clearly shown to me by his attitude towards the Venezuelan question. Frederic had taught me to respect President Grover Cleveland who, he thought, was the ablest of American presidents in nearly a hundred years.

But Richard Olney was Secretary of State for foreign affairs and stood with him over the question of the boundaries of Venezuela. I am quite willing to admit that the English government was right in the attitude it took up. Lord Salisbury was about to impose demands on Venezuela by force of arms and Mr. Richard Olney plainly informed him that any such action would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Lord Salisbury had no difficulty in pointing out that this was giving an extension to the Monroe Doctrine that Monroe had never imagined. Mr. Olney retorted that the United States considered itself the best judge of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, and almost like a thunder clap on this came a statement from Grover Cleveland, backing up Mr. Olney and plainly stating that armed intervention by England would be regarded as "an unfriendly act" by the United States of America.

I was at that time owner and editor of the Saturday Review. I called on Harold Frederic and we both agreed that war was imminent. I wrote an article declaring that in case of war England would cease to exist as a power among the nations, and to run such a risk for a paltry boundary in Venezuela was so absurd as to be criminal stupidity. Lord Salisbury sent for me. He asked me to come and see him in Arlington Street, as he wanted to discuss the article with me. Of course I went next day, and found that he had protected himself by installing Lord Henry Manners, his secretary, almost between himself and me. He asked me how I had come to my belief in the enormous power of the United States in case of war.

"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Americans except as fighters," he said, "but you surely have an extravagant estimate of their fighting strength.

Our naval authorities think they could take Washington as they took it before and bombard New York into the bargain."

"Goodness!" I cried. "You frighten me for England when you talk like that."

"Explain yourself," he said. "Why do you feel so convinced of the power of America?"

"First of all," I said, "consider one thing. In the Civil War there were only about sixteen millions of people on the side of the South. Yet, in less than two years, the Southern Navy was wiped out of existence and the Northern Navy was stronger than all the navies of the world put together. In less than two years the Federals had invented every improvement in naval warfare which exists up to this moment. They used rams, big guns, heavy armor plating, and vessels cut down to the water edge so as to show no target and even torpedoes."

"Torpedoes!" exclaimed Lord Salisbury. "Surely you are mistaken."

"In '62 or '63," I replied, "a Southern battleship was blown up in Mobile harbor with a torpedo by Lieutenant Gushing. The Americans are crazy with the sense of the greatness of their country and the rapidity of its growth. In my opinion they would beat the world in arms today. They are the best organizers of labor in the world, and that is equivalent to being able to produce the best armies and navies."

"You talk persuasively," said Lord Salisbury. "Your view is quite original, but I see your reasons."

The talk went on for a little while, and he asked me when I could come down to Hatfield and have a longer conversation. The end of it was that I went to Hatfield and spoke with great frankness. I told him what I hoped for England was a close Union with her colonies, in order to pave the way for a confederation of all the English-speaking peoples, which might in the future, with the immense power of the United States, put an end to war. It seemed to me as easy to end war as to end dueling.

"A quarrel between England and America," I added, "is to me the worst thing that could be imagined, altogether horrible."

Suddenly I remembered that I had heard Lord Salisbury described as an earnest Christian, so I went on:

"How any Christian could think of the possibility of war between these two peoples is beyond my comprehension. It would be a sin against humanity, for which there would be no forgiveness."

Lord Salisbury suddenly turned away from me, put his hand under his desk, and drew out a sort of shelf, on which there was a glass, I think, of whiskey and soda, and took a drink. "Please forgive me!" he then exclaimed. "Would you like anything to drink?"

I laughed. "No, thank you!"

He looked at me and answered gravely:

"I think in the main you are right: it would be a crime against humanity, against our hopes for man. It is a little difficult," he added, after a pause, "to let Mr. Olney have it all his own way; he is somewhat peremptory and unreasonable."

"As the bigger man," I said, "I hope you will find reason enough in yourself far both." He smiled at me, nodding his head the while.

The whole talk made me realize, as nothing had made me realize before, that my sympathies were with America, even against reason. Lord Salisbury's argument was reasonable; Dick Olney was in the wrong, and yet I was on the side of Dick Olney. I could not make out why till I got Harold Frederic down to stay with me and confided to him one evening, under pledge of secrecy, all that had taken place with Lord Salisbury, and found that we agreed on every point.

From thirty to forty or so Frederic grew as I grew, but owed even less than I did to extraneous influences, for at first I had been greatly influenced by reading foreign languages and so-called scholarship. It was Frederic, indeed, who first showed me how little books and book-learning can add to one's stature, and though George Moore was always there to enforce the lesson, I couldn't honestly say I would willingly divest myself of any fragment of knowledge: Moore's familiarity with modern French literature helped him to a saner view of literary art than he would otherwise have possessed. Moore was always a pleasant acquaintance and interesting companion, rather than friend: I hardly know why.

Early in the nineties, too, I came to know Lionel Johnson and young Crackanthorpe. I was drawn to them both from the outset: to Crackanthorpe for his gift of story-writing, and especially to Johnson, whose scholarship was worthy of his poetic endowment. Very early in our acquaintance Lionel won my heart by showing that he knew James Thomson and his poetry and was able to appreciate that rare genius. He said to me one day that Thomson's poem on Shelley was the purest piece of Shelleyism in the language.

Thomson's prose work had escaped him, but he knew every line of his poetry and treasured it in his heart of hearts. Poor, dear Lionel Johnson, whose whole literary life was even shorter than Thomson's, for he had not long passed thirty when the end came. As in the case of Thomson, they talked of drink; but I have an idea that whenever a ship is highly powered, it should have a strong hull to boot or it cannot last long. Like Thomson, poor Lionel Johnson had a big heart, as well as a first-rate brain, and the little body was not strong enough to house such forces for many years.

Lonely unto the Lone I go

Divine to the Divinity.

Whenever I think of Lionel Johnson and Crackanthorpe, I am constrained to think of all the poets and men of genius I knew in my London life and the miserable fate of many of them. I have told of Burton, Thomson, Dowson, Davidson, and Middleton; but there were many others like Henry Harland, some deservedly famous, some inheritors of unfulfilled renown.

But the most startling appearance in these early nineties was certainly Aubrey Beardsley. I know no one in the whole history of art who made such an impression, took up such an independent and peculiar place so early in life.

I came to know him in the late eighties through his sister Mabel, a very charming and pretty girl. She told me that he had been a sort of childprodigy and had played Bach and Beethoven in public on the piano at ten or twelve.

Beardsley was of pleasant manners and intercourse: his appearance, too, was interesting; a little above average height, but very slight; perfectly selfpossessed, though strangely youthful; quite unaffected, but curiously derisive of affectation in others. While still in his teens he used to sneer at Oscar Wilde's poses to his face, though believing to a certain extent in his genius.

Of course Oscar was fifteen years his senior and was better read and had already won a high place.

After his success Oscar tried to patronize him, but Beardsley wouldn't have it.

"At noontide," he said contemptuously, "Oscar will know that the sun has risen!" Had Oscar's appreciation taken place a year or two earlier it would have made all the difference in their relation, for in a year or less Beardsley passed from pupildom to rare mastery. Today he was imitating Mantegna; six months later he was Beardsley-one of the great modern masters of design.

I introduced him to Whistler. At first Whistler seemed bored and turned over Beardsley's drawings carelessly. Suddenly he stopped and began to study them. A few moments later he looked up. "Wonderful," he said. "You are already a master."

Beardsley burst into tears: poor boy, even then he had hardly reached manhood.

But what is the word of his mystery, the "open sesame" to his heart? More than anyone I have ever known, Beardsley desired immediate fame, recognition of his genius, now, as if pricked on with the instinct that he had not long to live. And that demoniac, dominant desire made him sacrifice to sensation, force the note, so to speak, confident always that when he wished he could do great work as it ought to be done-soberly and with reverence.

Beardsley was a little lacking in reverence, that "angel of the world," as Shakespeare calls it in Cymbeline; but the explanation of his faults to me is always the intense desire of immediate recognition, of fame in the day and hour. I have told elsewhere how he came to mastery in writing in a month or so: it really seemed as if every mode of self-expression was easy to him. His sister Mabel always contended that he was more gifted as a musician than as a draughtsman, and it may well have been true. It was Beardsley's mastery of all forms of art that explained to me the extraordinary achievement of the Keatses and Rimbauds.

There are certain pictures of his that remain as part of my intellectual consciousness. Who can ever forget his Hamlet-the slight, boyish figure with the peering, eager, frightened eyes, trying to grope his way through the depths of a pathless wood; yet this was done in 1892. I can never think of Rejane save as she appeared to Beardsley, and his Tannhauser hastening eagerly, breathlessly back to the Venusberg-and these were the conceptions of an unlettered boy of twenty or so, resolved to read all life for himself. Only four years later, he gave us the Fruit Bearers, the ponderous satyr leading with his appalling female companion. And finally the Volpone series of his ripe maturity-unforgettable. Never was there a more astonishing growth or individuality of talent.

And Beardsley, wonderful as he was, was only one of a dozen. Think of Charles Conder as a colorist, or of Augustus John, that master draughtsman, or Walter Sickert, the painter, or Phil May as a caricaturist; to say nothing of Davidson and William Watson-both master-singers, and a dozen other writers. All these men of genius seemed to group themselves naturally round Oscar Wilde as a sort of standard-bearer: he stood for years as the representative of art in life which has now become to the intellectuals more important than religion: for no one can deny that the artist and man of letters in the new time has taken the place of the preacher and prophet.

I must confess that the chief influence in my life, in the first years of the nineties, was Oscar Wilde, and in the second rank, Whistler.

Whistler had come to grief before this. Ruskin had talked of one of his paintings as an impudent attempt to throw his paint-box in the face of the English public, and Whistler had brought an action against him, claiming heavy damages. He got one farthing, and the costs practically ruined him.

Bravely, cheerfully, he went abroad to Venice, paint-box in hand, to redeem his fallen fortunes, and did it after middle age with consummate brio.

Personally, I always rank Whistler with Rodin and Degas among the greatest artists of my time. I always coupled Degas in my mind with Whistler. Though no two talents could be more different, yet the likeness in some ways between them was most extraordinary. Both were witty and bitter-tongued, sparing neither friend nor foe; both made more money than they needed when money could no longer bring them happiness.

I have given in my sketch of him twenty instances of Whistler's poisonous tongue. Oscar spoke of him as a wasp with a sting in his tail, and Swinburne's verse lays emphasis on the same quality:

Fly away, butterfly, back to Japan,

Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man,

And strive not to sting ere you die away.

So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty, To brush the bright down from your wings were a pity- Fly away, butterfly, fly away!

Let me recall one or two stories of Degas. I was praising Puvis de Chavannest one day. I had just seen three or four of his great cartoons for some public building and was struck by the suave, idyllic beauty of the landscapes and the Arcadian innocence of the men and women, clothed only in grace.

"He's really another Rafael," I said, "born out of due time."

"There's some truth in that," replied Degas, with curling lip, "un Rafael du village" (a village Rafael). I could not help smiling, for the scalpel had touched the weakest spot. There is something provincial in Arcady-it is too far from the center of our struggle today, and our struggle is of intense interest. Degas with his racehorses and jockeys, ballet girls and opera singers, came nearer to us, being of our tune and hour.

I recall another story of Degas. He had gone to an exhibition of paintings and suddenly picked out one. "A poor Rembrandt!" he cried, and went over to examine it more nearly because of shortsightedness. "I'm mistaken," he said on getting nearer; "it's a first-rate Forain." Yet Forain the caricaturist had always been an admirer and even a disciple of his.

Toward the end of his life Degas was nearly blind and hardly worked at all.

He was a solitary and when he accepted an invitation it was always hedged about with conditions, one of which was that there must be no scent, for he hated odors of all kinds. He often said that "love was not a question of skin," as the French proverb has it, "but of smell."

Degas was a relentless skeptic. "I believe in that," he said one day, pointing to a painting on his easel, "and in nothing else"-a weird, unhappy temperament. He carried his bitterness into his work, whereas Whistler's work is always dedicated to pure beauty. Degas was a realist and supreme draughtsman; Whistler hated reality and was a master colorist. Oddly enough, one would have guessed that Degas, with his sense of line, would have been the great etcher; but it was Whistler who reigned here beyond comparison, save with Rembrandt.

From 1885 on to the catastrophe in 1895, I met Oscar Wilde pretty constantly. He used to lunch with me a couple of tunes every month, and whenever he brought out a new book, or when some article in the Fortnightly attracted him, we would dine together as well and talk half the night. He was, as I have said already, far and away the best talker I have ever met, with the most astounding gift of humor that irradiated all his other qualities. First of all, he was a born story-teller, a better story-teller, by word of mouth, even than Kipling, and with far higher themes, more suggestive, more poetic and symbolical. Often, after telling an exquisite little story, he would drift into portraiture of this or that man he had met: while giving a kindly picture of his subject, he would suddenly illumine it with some humorous, unforgettable word.

The defeat of Oscar Wilde came as a sort of result of the height to which he had climbed. He tasted real success for the first time when his first play was performed, Lady Windermere's Fan. It was admirably constructed, and it was just this quality that excited my curiosity. I asked him how he had won to such stagecraft, and he confessed to me quite frankly that he had gone away by himself for a fortnight and studied the construction of half a dozen of the best French and English plays, and from that study had gained the craft. But the parts of his play that won the public were the admirable aphorisms and witty sayings which he strewed about in every scene. I had heard them all before; they had come to him from time to time in conversation, but the effect on the stage to those who had never heard them was really overpowering.

I have pictured him so often, and with such particularity, that I could leave him now to the readers of my Life of him, but one is tempted again and again to recall the laughing eyes, the eloquent tenor voice, and the charming phrases.

Speaking of young Raffalovich, I said that he had come to London apparently to found a salon.

"And he very nearly succeeded," replied Oscar smiling, "he established a saloon."

On another occasion, apropos of some notice in a paper, I remarked, "It is curious to see how thinkers like Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer love to call on titled people, princesses and duchesses; how inappropriate it all is!"

"Inappropriate, Frank?" cried Oscar. "Surely it is to be expected: doctors must visit the dying."

No afterthought, no art can give any idea of the astounding richness of his verbal humor. One day, walking down by the Houses of Parliament, we came on a meeting of the unemployed who were reinforced by some bands of suffragettes. "Characteristic," I said, in my usual serious way, "one of these days the unemployed will make themselves heard here in Westminster. We are witnessing the beginnings of a social revolution."

"You call it 'characteristic'," said Oscar. "I think it characteristic, too, my dear Frank, to find the unenjoyed united in protest with the unemployed."

No one else ever possessed such humor, both of words and of thoughts. His magnificent gift had conquered even English dullness and he was becoming a social favorite when Nemesis overtook him. One day I heard that the Marquis of Queensbury had insulted him, and then Oscar called on me, as I have narrated in my Life of him, and the tragedy began.

CHAPTER X

Grace

Since maturity I have always thought of women in three categories: those who love with the head, those who love with the heart, and those who are ruled in love, as in life, by the senses. Fortunately for us men, most women love with all three: head, heart and body, but still an acute student can usually see which of the three powers is in the ascendant.

Those who love with the head are the most dangerous and least attractive: as soon as they find out that their lover or husband has failings or infidelities, they cast about how best to avenge themselves and so punish him. Usually their invention is not long at fault, and woe betide the poor wretch who has to suffer their vindictiveness. The worst tragedies in life come from their malevolence.

The women who love with the heart, on the other hand, are like pearls of great price, and happily they are the most numerous class. Nearly every woman has something of the mother in her, and pity for weakness and lovingkindness beyond reason are always innate in her.

Lastly come those who love by the senses; but men can estimate this category perfectly: the senses are always selfish and seek selfish gratification, and so the sensuous sometimes when piqued or disappointed come to be as harsh and unamiable as those women who have brains and no heart. But, as I have said, most women have all three powers, and we can develop in them the affections we most need by judicious flattery.

My experience has been that girls as a rule never yield willingly to sensual desire, unless it is accompanied with some appeal to the heart or emotion; even some who turn out to be very passionate later do not give themselves readily to the sex-urge.

I want to tell here some experiences at this time which show how all sorts of motive enter into the matter with the girl, whereas the one motive is strong enough as a rule in the man. All through the years from 1890 to 1895,1 thought chiefly of Laura and of arranging meetings with her almost exclusively, but in the sex-way I was always inconstant.

I don't know why it was, but from my first months in Paris I had always the feeling that French girls gave themselves more easily to passion than any others. They seemed to know more about it and to give more place to it in their lives than girls of other races; and above all, they were as outspoken about it as English boys, and as a Welsh-Celt I felt a peculiar kinship with the French on that account. When American or English girls are brought up in France, they, too show more understanding of sensuality than those brought up in England or America; the contagion is catching.

All these years I went over to France irregularly every winter: my health was better in Nice than it was anywhere else: I never suffered from my bronchitis there; and of course I stayed in Paris on the way to the Riviera. One day when I was crossing the Channel, it was very rough, indeed, and there was an American lady and a girl on deck together who were very ill- at least the older lady was. I brought the stewardess and tipped her well to take care of the patient; in a few moments the lady said that she would like to go downstairs to the cabin, but the girl preferred to remain on deck. The stewardess and I took Mrs. Sterling down to the ladies' cabin, and I came back to the girl. She seemed about fifteen or sixteen years of age. She had run to the side and been ill once and was still very white. I got her a glass of port wine which brought the color to her cheeks, and with the color all her native courage. "Would you like to walk," I asked, "or would you prefer to lie in the chair?"

"As soon as I stand up," she replied, "I get giddy. I think I had better lie back."

So I got her another chair and lifted up her legs onto it before covering them over with the rug.

"What pretty legs you have," I began.

She pulled a face at me and said, "They are like everybody else's, I suppose."

Her gesture amused me.

"Indeed they are not" I said; those were not the days of short dresses, but her dress was short and her legs were beautifully molded. "I believe you wear your dress short," I said, "just to show your lovely legs."

She drew up in the chair at once and said quite angrily, "It isn't true; I hate short dresses. Aunt keeps me in them, but I know when I go back to my mother in New York I shall have long dresses. I am a woman, not a child."

"A very young woman," I remarked to pique her.

"That's all you know about it," she said. "What age do you think I am?"

"About thirteen," I said.

"Oh, you pig," she cried, "I am nearly fifteen."

I had only said thirteen to get her contradiction and so I confessed to her, and then said, "But how long do you want your dresses to be?"

"Down to my ankles."

"Why don't you get long dresses?" I asked.

"My aunt won't let me," she said. "I make her look old already; she says everybody takes her for my mother; she's my mother's younger sister. She loves me and is kind to me, but she wants to keep me in school dresses as long as possible because long dresses would make her look old. But now take your hand away."

"My hand isn't doing any harm, is it?"

"It is, too," she said, "It keeps me nervous, and it has gotten up above my knee.

Now, please."

I followed her imperative wish and took my hand away, saying, "You might let me see whether you are a woman or a child."

"You must take my word for it," she said, laughing at me.

"I needn't," I said, and I put my hand on her breast. It was more mature than I had thought, rounded and firm, though still small.

"If you are rude," she said, "I shall go away."

"You won't either," I replied, "because you and I are going to conspire to get you into long dresses."

"Oh," she cried, sitting upright, "how will you do that?"

"Nothing easier," I said, "if you will give me your address in Paris. I am going to the Hotel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli, and either you will come to me or I will go to you; probably it would be better for you to come to me some morning, as the Rue de la Paix is quite close to my hotel and I can take you to Worth or one of the famous dressmakers and get very pretty dresses made for you. Then we will try them on and if they are all right, you must appear in them before your aunt one day and give her no chance of refusing you. She can't put you back in short dresses afterwards."

"Oh," cried Grace, again sitting up in her excitement, "that would be splendid; wouldn't it cost a great deal? Would you really do it?"

"Of course I would," I said. "We will get you the prettiest dresses and hats and everything to match."

"And a mantle," she said, "that makes one look so old. You know I am taller already than my aunt."

"Sure," I said, "and far prettier. Do you know where you will be staying in Paris?"

"Aunt wants me to go to school for one more term," she said, pouting, "but I don't want to go. I learn more French in one night at the theatre than in a week at school, and already I know it a great deal better than she does; in fact, they say I speak it rather well."

"All right," I said, breaking into French, "then we will talk French and you must be like a French girl and not say 'don't' at every moment," and my hand again went under the rug.

She wrinkled up her pretty little nose at me but didn't stop me; evidently the temptation of the dress was working, but as soon as my hand got near the danger point, she said, "Please, be kind; I want to like you, so be good."

I said, "Just one touch and I will."

"Oh, no, please don't," she said.

"Just one touch to make sure you are not cheating."

She smiled, and the next minute I had made sure. But as her face clouded and she drew back looking really hurt, I took my hand away at once and kissed my fingers and thanked her, which brought the smiles back again to her charming face.

If I have not managed to convey the impression of her courage and charm, it is because these qualities at their finest are indescribable: they depend on the eyes and mouth as much as on the varied intonations of the voice, and even on the myriad changes of attitude.

Needless to say, all the way to Paris I took care of the aunt and niece; I brought food and wine into the carriage at Calais and insisted that they should eat, and we all had a very pleasant meal together. The lady told me that she was going to an apartment in the Rue Copernic which I found out was near the Bois, and I arranged to call for them, a few days later, to take them to the theatre.

I said I would find out the best play and call for them on Friday, this being Monday. We became great friends, and accordingly, when we got to Paris, I sent my baggage by a special messenger to the Hotel Meurice, while I drove the aunt and niece in a carriage to the Rue Copernic. When the aunt went in I got the opportunity of telling Grace to come to me on Tuesday or Wednesday, and she said that she would certainly come at eleven o'clock in the morning on one day or the other.

Next morning I got a little note saying she would come on Wednesday, and on the Wednesday at eleven o'clock she came to the hotel. I had everything ready and took her at once to Worth. She had, I believe, one of the pleasantest hours of her life: the woman who fitted her complimented her on her figure, called her "Madame" to her intense delight, and told her it was ridiculous to wear short dresses with her lovely form, and measured her with the utmost particularity, showing off her hips at the same time, with a side glance at me of complete understanding. She did the same thing when she was measuring her bust and recommending a new corset-maker.

"When should the evening dress be tried on?" I asked, for I had ordered a morning dress besides and one for the afternoon.

"They will all be ready this week; if Madame comes on Thursday morning," she said, "I can deliver them by Friday evening; but Madame will have to get the new corsets at once."

Needless to say, I took her round to the corset-maker, but alas! she was not nearly so complacent. She took Grace into a private room to undress her and I was not allowed in until the corset was fitted, fortunately for Grace, unfortunately for me; but the model of the corset was becoming and Grace was enraptured at the idea of going to the theatre in full dress as a woman and not as a child. When I got into the cab to take her home, she kissed me of her own accord very willingly, and when my hand got naughty again she didn't say anything and left her lips on mine.

"You have closed drawers," I said, "you cheat."

She burst out laughing: "I wouldn't have let you put your hand up if I hadn't known that."

Well," I said, "at any rate, when the new dress comes home, you must wear the other sort of drawers. You never heard my joke about them?"

"A joke?" she repeated. "No!"

"The English," I said, "talk a great deal about free trade and the freedom of trade with every country in the world, whereas the Americans believe in protection and protective tariffs to favor their own manufacturers."

"I have heard that," she said, "but I don't understand very well what it means.

I hate politics!"

"There was once a young fellow in London," I went on, "who made money by selling photographs which showed a good deal of the girls' figures, and so I proposed to him to make two photographs in one and sell them together as Tree Trade' and 'Protection,' the Free Trade girl with drawers on that were open; the girl labeled Protection had closed drawers such as you wear. The jest caught on and he made a fortune out of it and gave me a thousand pounds for the idea. He sold over a million postcards in a month. Tree Trade' and 'Protection,' you see."

Grace laughed with all her heart and kissed me.

We parted having arranged that I should come early to take them to the theatre, because we intended to dine before the theatre; Grace assured me she would be ready when I called.

I went to the Rue Copernic about six o'clock, and when I went up to the second floor, Grace admitted me herself in full rig, looking ravishingly pretty.

When we went into the sitting-room, the moment the door was closed my right hand went up her clothes to convince myself, and I found that she had adopted Free Trade and was indeed a woman, passionate as well as very pretty. In a minute or two she asked me to stop, but when she kissed me with hot lips I felt able to ask her to come again to the Hotel Meurice next morning; my sitting-room was on the ground floor just by the door on the left and she could come in without being noticed and I would meet her. She promised to come.

We had a great night at the theatre; I took them to see Rejane and they both fell in love with her. The aunt told me when I asked them to supper that I had done quite enough. "I am sure the long dress was your idea," she said. I took all the blame of it and said that they looked like sisters now, which won the aunt's heart.

Next morning Grace came to my hotel.

How am I to describe it, those first hours spent with Grace? When she came into my room, I began to take off her cloak while she laid her hat aside, but when I wanted to undo her dress she resisted. In vain I begged and begged: evidently she had made up her mind before coming in, so at length I gave in and kissed her, saying, "I wanted to see your breasts: I know they are lovely and you won't let me."

"It wouldn't do you any good to see them," she said smiling. "What nice rooms you have here."

"I always have the same," I said, "but never before such a lovely visitor." Then I opened the door into the bedroom and drew her in. As she looked around curiously, I put my arms round her legs and, lifting her up, carried her to the bed. The next moment I had thrown up her clothes and buried my face between her thighs.

"What are you doing?" she cried, but as I began kissing love's sweet home and the little red button, involuntarily she opened her thighs and gave herself to the new sensations. As I felt her responding, I drew her nearer to me a little roughly and opened her thighs fully. There never was a more lovely sex, and already the smaller inside lips were all flushed with feeling, while soon pearling love-drops oozed down on my lips.

I kept on, knowing that such a first experience is unforgettable and soon she abandoned herself recklessly, and her hand came down on my head and directed me now higher, now lower, according to her desire.

When the love-play had gone on four or five times and I stood up to rest, she said gravely: "You are a dear and gave me great pleasure, but do you like it?"

"Of course," I said. "Even old Montaigne knew that the pleasure we give the loved one is more than that we get,"

"Oh, that's my feeling," she said, "but how am I to give you pleasure?" In answer, I took out my sex. She touched it curiously, drawing back the skin and pushing it forward: "Does that give you pleasure?"

I nodded. "But this," and I put my hand on her sex, "could give me much more; but I don't want to hurt you."

"Why not?" she asked. "I'm not afraid and I'd love to give you pleasure."

"It's only the first time that hurts," I said, "after that we both have the pleasure without pain."

"Is there no danger of a child?" she asked. "I'm ashamed to say that it would not stop me, but I'd like to know."

"No danger," I said, "if I take care."

"I trust you," she said, "my darling," and she gave me her lips.

"Undress," I said, "dear heart; I want to see all your loveliness unveiled, and I'll undress too."

Grace rose without a word and was undressed to her chemise and stockings by the time I had thrown off my clothes. "This naughty chemise," I cried, lifting it up and feasting my eyes on one of the loveliest figures I had ever seen-with small child breasts and great swell of hips and thighs and bottom set off by the smallest waist and perfect small sex-half-fledged-a creature made for love!

I put her on the side of the bed and tried to enter; she was tiny: I could only put in my first finger with difficulty, and even that brought some blood; but by this time my desire was rampant, and she met me by putting up her legs and giving me every opportunity. Soon the head of my sex was in her.

"Does it hurt?" I asked, and Grace's answer was to put arms about my body and legs about my hips and strain me nearer to her.

"One body," she said, "and one soul." The next moment we were coming together and thrilling.

A little pause and I lifted her up and taught her the use of the syringe with warm water, which almost avoids all danger. When I had explained it, she laughed delightedly. After two or three more embraces, she cried that it was getting late and she must get back. As she put on her new corset and the long dress, she exclaimed roguishly: "I deserve the long dress now, don't you think?"

"A dozen of them, you darling," was all I could find to answer. We were in each other's arms all the way to the Rue Copernic. As we entered the house, she turned to me gravely. "An unforgettable afternoon: you are a dear lover and I am proud of having won you."

"And I," I exclaimed, "am humble for the first time in my life-humble with the sense of a greater sweetness than I have deserved. Goodbye, darling, till tomorrow."

"You don't want to see my aunt?"

"No, no!" I said. "I want to keep the memory of you alone and relive every golden moment." Her eyes dwelt on me and she was gone, leaving with me deathless memories and pictures of exquisite loveliness that can never fade.

Why am I able to picture her now after thirty years? I forget nine out of every ten girls I have had in my life: why do I remember the tenth? For something extraordinary either in body or spirit, and Grace is memorable for both-the exquisite girlish figure, the bold self-abandonment, and the divine words of passionate affection! She taught me never to generalize Tennyson's statement in Locksley Hall: … All her passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.

I don't need to tell in detail how I came to know Grace's aunt, Mrs. Sterling, more intimately. It began with her asking me to come to dinner with them and go afterwards to the Theatre Francais. We dined at the Grand Hotel and went on to the theatre, and they were both amazed that I was able to go behind the scenes and visit the green room.

I held forth about Nice and its beauties till Mrs. Sterling said she would like to spend a month there, if I would play guide to them. I declared honestly enough that nothing would give me greater pleasure, and so a couple of days later we were all quartered in the Hotel d'Angleterre, which has since become the Hotel Ruhl, at Nice.

I managed that all our rooms should be communicating and I took the middle room, as I said, to protect them. About one o'clock the first night I entered the side-room where Grace was sleeping. I turned up the light, pulled down the bed-clothes and lifted up her chemise: she was ideally beautiful, and the little silky triangle in front deserved all my attention. Scarcely had I begun to kiss her when she awoke:

"Frank," she whispered, "I was dreaming of you." In five minutes I had brought her to spasms of pleasure and as her lips were all creaming I threw off my pyjamas and went into her arms. I don't know why, but I never had more poignant sensations; already Grace was an incomparable mistress, taking delight in every movement that could increase the pleasure, and not afraid to take the initiative.

I studied her sex afterwards to find out if possible how she managed to give the ultimate pang of pleasure. Her sex was very small and well-made; the inner lips especially were tiny and used to glow very red with the excitement, but the magic lay in the passionate nature of the girl and her intense desire to do whatever I wished.

Next day I took them to Monte Carlo and showed them the casino and the gambling, but they both disliked the vice for very different reasons. "Greedy old women and nasty old men," said Grace, whereas the aunt noticed the favoritism of the croupiers and the chefs de partie. We drove home by La Turbie and the Upper Corniche, the famous road made by Augustus Caesar.

At dinner that night Mrs. Sterling let her foot rest against mine. Of course, I had already seen that she was pretty and well-made and still fresh; but forty never appealed to me like fourteen, and I had no wish to change Grace for her aunt. But what was I to do? That night, as I was getting into bed, Mrs.

Sterling knocked lightly on my door. I put out the light and crept into bed and pretended to be sleeping. Again the tap, tap! I jumped out of bed. "Who's there?" I cried, while bolting the door into Grace's room, and then went over and half-opened the door into Mrs. Sterling's. She was standing with a dressing-gown about her, halfway between the door and her bed.

"Is there anything the matter?" I said.

"There are such strange noises in this hotel," she said. "Some one knocked at my door and I was scared and knocked at yours."

"First-rate!" I cried, putting my arms round her and kissing her. "You want me?" and I drew her to the bed. She shed her cloak and in a trice I had lifted up her nightie and put her on the bed. She had taken care of herself and had not let herself get too fat, but her figure was nothing like so lovely as that of Grace. Still I had to win her, so I stooped at once to conquer and began kissing her sex. In two minutes she had come three or four times with a hundred "ohs" and "ahs" and sobbing exclamations. "Did your husband ever kiss you there?" I asked.

"Never, never," she said. "He used to have me, but he had always finished before I really began to feel: now you excite me dreadfully and give me intense pleasure besides. Was he right, I wonder-my husband, I mean. He used to say that tall women were so much better than short ones because they were smaller there; do you think it true?"

"I don't really know," I said. "I'm afraid that I don't believe in any general rule."

"But do you like me a little?" she asked. "I know you like Grace; but she's too young, don't you think? Love is only understood in maturity."

What could I say? For answer I began kissing her again and again and when she was fully wound up, I put my sex in and found that she was quite a good performer at the game. But she wearied me as well with her passion as with her praise. She told me she hoped I would stay with her always, and when I said that I'd soon have to be getting back to London to go on with my journalistic work, she begged me to leave it; she was rich, why need I work?

She hoped for a child by me: she had always wanted a child-and a deluge of similar hopes and desires.

A length I returned to my room thoroughly disillusioned, and scarcely had I bolted her door and got into bed when I heard a timid "tap" from Grace's side.

I hurried over and opened her door. "You were not coming?" she pouted.

"I thought you were tired and sleepy," I said, "but I am glad you tapped." and I carried her to the bed.

Grace was already a wonderful lover. From the beginning she set herself to give one all the pleasure possible and was bold in asking whether this maneuver or that response had been most successful. Accordingly her progress in the art was astoundingly rapid. Already she was such a perfect bedfellow as one only finds twice or thrice in a lifetime. I know that whoever she married later would esteem himself fortunate, and the more experienced he was, the higher he would prize her. The women who complain of their husbands are, I have always found, those who do not know how to heighten delight to ecstasy.

A month later I had a telegram calling me back to London, but I met Grace again later, as I shall tell perhaps in due course. All I can say now is that no one ever had a more perfect mistress than Grace!

CHAPTER XI

Parnell and Gladstone

In April, 1886, Mr. Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill. The House was so thronged that members sat about on the steps leading up from the floor, and even on the arms of the benches and on each other's knees, while I had to give up my usual seat in the small compartment on the floor of the chamber and be content with a place in the first row of the Distinguished Strangers'

Gallery. Herbert Bismarck sat on my left and the Marquis of Breteuil on my right, yet the visitors that night were so world famous that these men were not even mentioned in next day's papers. Not a seat was vacant in any of the galleries; even that of peers was crammed; every diplomat in London seemed to be present; and cheek by jowl with the black uniform of bishops, Indian princes by the dozen blazing with diamonds, lent a rich Oriental color to the scene.

I had heard Mr. Gladstone often before, and especially on the war in the Sudan a few years earlier, when he had risen, I thought, to great heights, but this performance of the Old Man was none the less remarkable. His head was like that of an old eagle-luminous eyes, rapacious beak and bony jaws; his high white collar seemed to cut off his head of a bird of prey from the thin, small figure in conventional, black evening dress. His voice was a high, clear tenor; his gestures rare, but well chosen; his utterance as fluid as water; but now and then he became strangely impressive through some dramatic pause and slower enunciation, which emphasized, so to say, the choice and music of the rhythmic words.

Though I did not believe in him at all and was, indeed, repelled by the conventional Christian sentimentality he poured out on us when deeply moved, I could not but admit that the old man was singularly eloquent and the best specimen of the Greek rhetor of modern times. Everyone knew that his proposals were a mere resultant of a dozen opposing forces, yet he seemed so passionately sincere and earnest that time and again you might have thought that he was expounding God's law, conveyed to him on Sinai.

He was a great actor, and as Mr. Foster once said, could persuade himself of anything and the House of Commons of tragic absurdities.

Herbert Bismarck, a giant of thirty perhaps, with a long Viking-fair moustache and blue eyes, declared at the end that he had never heard so great a speech. And the effect was prodigious; for five minutes the whole House cheered and the people in the galleries sat spell-bound.

A few nights later, Parnell spoke; the House was nothing like full; the galleries more than half empty; the Indian dignitaries conspicuous by their absence; not a bishop nor archbishop to be seen; yet to me the scene was more impressive. There he stood, a tall, thin, erect figure; no reporter had ever said that he was handsome; yet, to my astonishment, he was by far the handsomest man I ever saw in the House of Commons-magnificently good-looking. Just forty years of age, his beard was beginning to grey, but what drew one was the noble profile, the great height, and the strange, blazing eyes in the thin, white face. I could not account for the effect of heat and light in his eyes, till later I noticed that the dark hazel of them was dotted, so to speak, with golden pin heads that in excitement seemed to blaze; the finest eyes that I have ever seen in a human head, except the eyes of Richard Burton.

He began amid Irish cheers, but very quietly in his ordinary voice. I soon noticed that the hands holding his coat were so tense that the knuckles went white; he hadn't a single oratorical trick; he spoke quite naturally, but slowly, as if seeking his words, and soon I began to feel that words to this man stood for deeds. When he spoke of the crimes and coercion of the previous five years, his words seemed to me those of some recording angel; the absence of inflection or passion gave the impression of immutable truth. I remember his very words: they were prophetic; they could be used for the events of thirty years later:

You have had during these five years-I don't say this to inflame passion- you have had during these five years the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; you have had a thousand of your Irish fellow-subjects held in prison without specific charge, many of them for long periods of time, some of them for twenty months, without trial and without any intention of placing them upon trial (I think of all these thousand persons arrested under the Coercion Act of the late Mr. Foster scarcely a dozen were put on their trial); you have had the Arms Act; you have had the suspension of trial by jury-all during the last five years.

You have authorized your police to enter the domicile of any citizen of your fellow subject in Ireland, at any hour of the day or night, and search any part of his domicile, even the beds of the women, without warrant. You have fined the innocent for offenses committed by the guilty; you have taken power to expel aliens from the country; you have revived the curfew law and the blood money of your Norman conquerors; you have manufactured new crimes and offenses, and applied fresh penalties unknown to your law for these crimes and offenses. All this you have done for five years, and all this and much more you will have to do again.

The chill atmosphere of hatred in which he had begun his speech had changed: a good many English members were listening now with all their ears. I felt very much as I had felt when drinking in Bismarck's great speech in the Reichstag five years before, that a great man was talking and the words were prophetic and the place sacred.

Then he spoke of Trevelyan and himself and I thrilled.

Mr. Trevelyan has said that there is no half-way house between separation and the maintenance of law and order in Ireland by Imperial authority. I say, with just as much sincerity of belief and just as much experience as the right honorable gentleman, that in my judgment there is no half-way house between the concession of legislative autonomy to Ireland and the disenfranchisement of the country and her government as a Crown colony.

That was the whole problem in a couple of phrases, and I was in no doubts as to who was in the right.

Yet when he sat down the cheering was purely Irish, and the Chief didn't even notice the enthusiasm of his followers.

One day, shortly before I got the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, I received a letter, from a man in Dublin, full of curious statements that greatly excited me. I answered him, and in the course of our correspondence I came to see that he was a mine of information about the Irish Party and their doings in Ireland. He stated quite boldly that the Irish Party was responsible for the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park and for most of the subsequent deeds of violence in Ireland. He did not hesitate to implicate Parnell in this knowledge; and so I wrote to him, asking him to come over to London and spend a week with me. He had already told me that he was poor, so I sent him money and asked him to be my guest; and in due time Richard Pigott came and stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore.

The very first evening he told me how the knives which had been used in the Phoenix Park murder had been taken from the offices of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster and brought across and distributed to the murderers in Dublin. I was quite willing to believe it all, and my manifest interest seemed to excite him, for he went on expanding the story in every direction. After two or three days I began to doubt him; and at the end of a week I knew that he was drawing on his imagination for his facts and was wholly untrustworthy. At the end I said that I would take the matter into consideration and would let him know. I did let him know in a day or two that I would have nothing to do with publishing his stories.

A little later The Times began publishing its exposure of Parnell, and at length printed a letter purporting to be from Parnell, which plainly implicated him in the Phoenix Park murder. I got a facsimile made of it and reproduced the letter in the Evening News. Next day I was out riding to Richmond with Arthur Walter, the son of the owner of The Times. He told me, without circumlocution, how glad he was that I had published the letter.

"Why?" I asked. "I published it merely as a piece of news." "Surely you wouldn't have published it," he said, "if you hadn't believed it."

"I don't believe a word of it," I cried. "I published it as news, on the authority of The Times."

"But it is plainly Parnell's handwriting," said Walter. "In these days," I replied, "handwriting can be photographed and reproduced precisely; it is absurd to trust to similarity in handwriting to prove the authenticity of a letter."

I can't remember whether I told him then or a little later how I had come to know Pigott, but about this time he admitted to me that Pigott was the chief source of The Times information, and I warned him against the man. All the world knows how Parnell brought his action against The Times and how Pigott broke down in the witness box and shortly afterwards shot himself in Madrid. But the hatred of Parnell was so pronounced in England that in due time his enemies induced O'Shea to begin his action for divorce and make Parnell the co-respondent. Parnell believed, and said openly, that the result of the case would be to show that he was not guilty of the grave accusation of having brought disunion between husband and wife: it was perfectly well known that the O'Sheas were practically separated before Parnell came upon the scene, but any weapon is good enough to beat a dog with, and so the dispute was given an exaggerated importance by the English press.

Gladstone threw up his hands in holy horror and pretended to be shocked at Parnell's sin; I called Gladstone an "old hypocrite" and stated that on more than one occasion he had sent to Mrs. O'Shea for intimate information about Parnell and his views. In her book on Parnell and their mutual love, Mrs.

O'Shea tells the plain truth.

For ten years Gladstone had known of the relations between Parnell and myself, and had taken full advantage of the facility this intimacy offered him in keeping in touch with the Irish leader. For ten years! But this was private knowledge. Now it was public knowledge, and an English statesman must always appear on the side of the angels.

So Mr. Gladstone found his religion could at last be useful to his country.

Parnell felt no resentment towards Gladstone. He merely said to me, with his grave smile: "That old Spider has nearly all my flies in his web," and, to my indignation against Gladstone, he replied: "You don't make allowances for statecraft. He has the Nonconformist conscience to consider, and you know as well as I do he always loathed me. But these fools who throw me over at his bidding, make me a little sad."

On the next page she tells of the traitorism of certain members of the Irish Party, when those who owed most to the great Chief turned most currishly against him. Mrs. O'Shea adds, "How long the Irish Party had known of the relations between Parnell and myself need not be here discussed. Some years before certain members of the party opened one of my letters to Parnell."

As I wrote at the time, this traitorism signed the death warrant of Irish Home Rule for a generation at least.

In December, 1890, a vacancy occurred in Kilkenny, and Parnell went over to support his nominee. Miss Katherine Tynan gives a great picture of the scene before his speech in the rotunda at Dublin.

It was nearly eight-thirty when we heard the bands coming. Then the windows were lit up by the lurid glare of thousands of torches in the street outside. There was a distant roaring like the ocean. The great gathering within waited silently with expectation. Then the cheering began, and we craned our necks and looked on eagerly, and there was the tall, slender, distinguished figure of the Irish leader making its way across the platform. I don't think any words could do justice to his reception. The house rose at him; everywhere around there was a sea of passionate faces, loving, admiring, almost worshipping that silent, pale man. The cheering broke out again and again; there was no quelling it. Mr. Parnell bowed from side to side, sweeping the assemblage with his eagle glance. The people were fairly mad with excitement. I don't think anyone outside Ireland can understand what a charm Mr. Parnell has for the Irish heart; that wonderful personality of his, his proud bearing, his handsome strong face, the distinction of look which marks him more than anyone I have ever seen. All these are irresistible to the artistic Irish…

I said to Dr. Kenny, who was standing by me, "He is the only quiet man here."

"Outwardly," said the keen medical man, emphatically. Looking again, one saw the dilated nostrils, the flashing eyes, the passionate face.

When Mr. Parnell came to speak, the passion within him found vent. It was a wonderful speech; not one word of it for oratorical effect, but every word charged with a pregnant message to the people who were listening to him, and the millions who should read him. It was a long speech, lasting nearly an hour, but listened to with intense interest, punctuated by fierce cries against men whom this crisis has made odious, now and then marked in a pause by a deep-drawn moan of delight. It was a great speech-simple, direct, suave- with no device and no artificiality. Mr. Parnell said long ago, in a furious moment in the House of Commons, that he cared nothing for the opinion of the English people. One remembered it now, noting his passionate assurances to his own people, who loved him too well to ask him questions.

I went across to Ireland for the Kilkenny election. Parnell was stopping in the hotel. In public he wore a bandage over his right eye, saying that some one had thrown quicklime in it and injured it. But when he received Harold Frederic and myself in the inn he had laid aside the bandage and his eye seemed altogether uninjured.

One incident took place then which I shall never forget. Frederic, the American journalist, was a great friend and loyal supporter of Parnell, and the chief therefore talked with us naturally and without pose. But I was shocked by the deep shadows under Parnell's eyes and a look of strain- I had almost said, of wild fear in his eyes. He had been through deep waters!

Suddenly, while we were chatting, there came some noise from outside, and before we could interfere Parnell had whipped outside the window and was standing on the balcony. A funeral was passing down the street in solemn silence. Everyone knows how seriously death is regarded in Ireland.

Suddenly Parnell cried at the top of his voice: "There goes the corpse of Pope Hennessy," his opponent in the electoral struggle. In a minute some friends came and helped Frederic to drag him into the room, reminding him that he had forgotten his bandage, which he wore even a week later. The loss of selfcontrol, so marked in so proud and masterful a man, made a deep impression on me. I told Frederic that night that Parnell had serious nerve trouble and would go mad soon if be didn't take care.

Fate was more merciful to him. He returned to his adoring wife at Brighton, but in spite of all her care and devotion, died in her arms in October, 1891, aged just 45. They had been lovers eleven years.

Parnell was a great character, if not a great intellect. But it was natural that England, which couldn't use the far greater man, Burton, couldn't use Charles Parnell. And the whole misery and disunion in Ireland today conies from this fact. Parnell ought to have been an English hero. His love for Mrs. O'Shea was the love of his whole life, and he gave himself to her with the same singlehearted devotion he had vowed in political life to the cause of Ireland.

Almost everyone took for granted that Gladstone was the greatest Englishman of his century, but in my heart I have always regarded him as negligible. His political achievements were merely parochial.

The insane misjudgment of Gladstone reminds me of a dinner I was asked to in London where Mr. Chauncey Depew was to appear for the first time. Every one was agog to hear the man who came to London with the reputation of being the best after-dinner speaker in America.

After dinner Mr. Depew got up, heralded with fantastic praise and applause, and began a long series of platitudes punctuated with age-worn anecdotes, chestnuts familiar to me in boyhood. He went on interminably while the applause grew fainter and fainter. At length, I said to my vis-d-vis, a wellknown judge, "Haven't you had enough of this?" He replied, "Enough for a life tune," and we both got up and left the room.

Years later I told this to a young friend from New York, one Allan Bowling. "I once heard Depew," he said, "in New York, say the most stupid thing conceivable. 'The greatest American I ever met,' he said, 'was undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln; the greatest man was William Gladstone!'" For monumental stupidity, the remark would be hard to beat.

When I told Lord Wolverton, a great friend of mine, how Chamberlain had cast me off, and the Fortnightly Review, because of my views against Free Trade, he immediately proposed that I should see Gladstone and put him in Chamberlain's place. "Then," the banker said, "you can have whatever money you want, and I think you will have a much greater success with Gladstone behind you than you have had with Chamberlain." That I admitted at once. So it was arranged that I should go out to Combe and meet Gladstone and have a talk.

I went out in due course, but I was not impressed much with Gladstone's talk at the dinner. He held forth on every subject that came up, and talked well, but his eagle face and luminous eyes were finer than anything he said. He had read widely, I saw, but it seemed to me that he had thought very little for himself.

At the end of the dinner he went off with an Eton boy and played "Beggar My Neighbor." About ten o'clock the Eton boy went up to bed, and Gladstone came over to half a dozen of us standing in front of the fireplace.

"Did you get much out of the game?" asked his host, Lord Wolverton.

"A great deal," said Gladstone. "The boy taught me that four knaves can beat the whole pack."

I could not resist the temptation. "Good God," I interjected, "I should have thought that your experience, Sir, would have shown that one knave was able to do that." He glowered at me and said nothing; he evidently took my jesting remark personally, though I had not so meant it.

Lord Wolverton told me, afterwards, that I had spoiled my chances with Gladstone. I said I thought I should survive, though I did not excuse myself for my foolish repartee.

A little while ago (I am writing in 1926), a Captain Peter Wright got into great trouble for stating that Gladstone was always running after women in the loosest way. The story of course was contradicted by his son, Herbert Gladstone, who is now Lord Gladstone; but Herbert Gladstone's denial should not be taken seriously.

It was common talk in the House of Commons that Gladstone was perpetually after women. It was said, too, that girls used to write him love letters, and that all such letters were brought to Mrs. Gladstone who, after reading them, tore them up, taking care that they shouldn't reach the Grand Old Man.

I distinctly remember Sir Charles Dilke telling me that Gladstone couldn't oppose him because he was known to be still looser himself. But my belief in Gladstone's libertinism was better founded.

But why should I prove it now? An English jury has declared its belief in Mr.

Gladstone's goodness: what more is wanted? An Irish M. P., too, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, has asserted that in his judgment Mr. Gladstone knew nothing about Parnell's intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea till the libel suit revealed it, though Mrs. O'Shea, in her book, has stated positively that Gladstone knew all about it years before the scandal. For good reasons I agree with Mrs. O'Shea, and can only regret that Mr. T. P. O'Connor's memory was so strangely subservient to English prejudice.

But, after all, what do the O'Connors matter when the Avorys sit as judges?

The height of the joke was reached when Mr. Justice Avory asserted, from his knowledge of English and Italian, that Lord Milner's allusion to "Gladstone, as governed by his Seraglio," was quite innocent and conveyed "no hint that such a man was a gross sensualist." Pity that Mr. Justice Avory didn't strengthen his knowledge by a glance at Dr. Johnson's dictionary! Thanks to this judicial freak, Gladstone has received, in correct English fashion, plenary absolution, and thus hypocrisy is justified of its professors, and the sepulchre of English life has enjoyed a new coat of cheap whitewash.

I don't pretend that my opinion has any objective validity; yet, I give it in corroboration of Captain Wright's boldness. But I should never have quarreled with Gladstone without mentioning his judgments, which reveal the essential mediocrity of the man. His heroes were Washington and Burke; the most interesting modern statesmen to him were Lord Randolph Churchill and Parnell. His favorite country after Britain was naturally the United States. Even in his chosen field of words and literary art, all his judgings were mediocre. The modern author he placed highest was Sir Walter Scott; the greatest modern masters of English prose in his opinion were Ruskin and Cardinal Newman; the best biography was Lockhart's Life of Scott, He thought Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe the four greatest writers, but he omitted Cervantes altogether, and never seems to have heard of Turgenev. Fancy putting Newman as a writer of prose above Swift or Pater, and fancy a Prime Minister who could write a review article on the genius of Marie Bashkirtseff.

My quarrel with Gladstone was not so bad as another blunder which I must now relate. In due time I found that my knowledge of Pigott had had a great effect upon Arthur Walter. His father and Mr. MacDonald, the manager of The Times had been utterly misled by Pigott, whereas I had got to know him and had soon judged him rightly. The first consequence of The Times fiasco was that John Walter practically withdrew from the management of the paper and asked his son Arthur to take his place. Arthur, it seems, after my talk, had told his father that he thought Pigott absolutely untrustworthy. As soon as Arthur Walter got power on The Times he sent for me. He had gone down, I remember, to stay with Mrs. Walter at the Hotel Metropole in Brighton. I went down, took a room, put my belongings straight and then went up to him. I found him washing his hands before lunch.

"I sent for you," he said, "because I think now I can offer you the editorship of The Times. I believe you would do it greatly, but I wanted to know first of all what you think of Buckle, the present editor, and what you would do with him!"

"I would keep him on as political editor," I replied; "he seems to suit the conservative opinion that is the backbone of The Times, and I have so many new things to do that I don't want to make any break with the past that isn't absolutely necessary."

"That's fine of you!" said Arthur Walter, "I suppose you know that Buckle wouldn't give you any place?"

"No one, Walter," I replied, "can see above his own head, and so we must forgive Buckle, but I see little Mr. Buckle perfectly plainly, though he is about six feet high. My idea is to make a general headquarters staff to run The Times; to get picked editors on every great subject, a dozen at least, and then fifty contributing editors, the ablest men from every country in Europe."

"Good God," said Walter. "You frighten me; what would it cost?"

"I should give the foreign contributing editors," I said, "about two hundred pounds a year each on their promise immediately to answer by return any questions addressed to them; of course, we would pay for their contributions as well, and I would give the dozen editors in England one thousand pounds a year, plus the honor."

"Even that," he said, "would be an added expense of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year: how would you cover the loss?"

"I would undertake for that single editorial page," I said, laughing, "to get three columns of advertisements in America and South Africa which would pay the twenty-five thousand pounds a year of new expenses three times over. I would make the leader page in The Times the greatest page that has ever been seen in journalism. Every line in it should be on the topmost level of thought! And I would add a financial column which would bring in more cash."

We went in to lunch and I told him more of my ideas, and he was greatly impressed, till I came to the declaration that I would make it a penny paper so as to get over a million circulation. "My father and MacDonald have gone into that," he said, "and they both declare it is absolutely impossible."

"That word shouldn't be in the vocabulary of The Times," I said.

But he went on seriously, "You have no idea how carefully they have gone into the whole matter, and it would turn all my father's grey hairs white if he thought that anybody was going to do such a thing."

"You can't afford," I said, "to leave the Daily Telegraph with a tenfold greater circulation than that of The Times. I assure you the penny paper is necessary, but I won't press it till the success of the other innovations has shown you that I am justified."

He shook his head and begged me to put the idea out of my head. Strange to say, I found that Mrs. Walter was with me in opinion. "If Mr. Harris could get a million circulation for The Times," she said, "surely all the advertisements would be immensely more valuable; and by making your own paper, as he says, you might get, if not such good paper as you have now, yet nearly as good at a cheaper rate."

Then for the first time I learned that the paper supply of The Times was in the hands of another branch of the family, and they wouldn't consent easily to any great change.

But I committed my great mistake when Walter began to talk of Oscar Wilde. "I hope," he said, "that you wouldn't employ him in any way on The Times." I replied that I didn't think he needed any journalistic employment: everything he did was eagerly bought up by the reviews and large publishers.

"I wonder that you go about with him," said Walter. "You are getting a bad name through it."

"Really," I said, "I never heard that his disease was catching. Genius is not infectious."

"In the last six months," Walter went on, "I have received hundreds of letters, signed and anonymous, talking about your connection with him and your perpetual defense of him."

This struck me as extraordinary. I had, then, no idea of the number of anonymous correspondents in London; I learned the vile effects of envy very slowly, for I never felt envious of any one in my life.

"I defend every able man I meet," I said carelessly; "they all have a hard time of it in life and it is a sort of duty to stick up for them."

"As long as you don't employ him," said Walter, "I don't mind, but I thought I ought to tell you that you could do nothing more unpopular than to defend him."

"I always defend my friends," I said.

Walter seemed a little shocked, a little pettish, too, I thought, not to say petty.

About a fortnight later, Walter told me that he had asked Moberly Bell, their correspondent in Egypt, to come to London to help him. "I couldn't face your innovations, Harris, especially in regard to the price of the paper."

I suppose I was too cocksure, and so frightened him.

I record my failures here as openly as my successes. If I had been a little more of a diplomatist I could have won Arthur Walter easily, for he had good brains and a good heart and only wanted the best. I have always blamed myself for my failure.

CHAPTER XII

The Fortnightly review

When I lost the Evening News in 1887, I saw Arthur Walter on the matter, and soon afterwards had a talk with Frederic Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, publishers of the Fortnightly Review. Chapman had told me that Escott, the acting editor of the Fortnightly Review, had made trouble with The Times by giving them an article which he said was by Gladstone; and when they asked him for the proof, because Gladstone denied it, Escott pretended that he had never made the statement. In consequence, for some months, The Times refused to mention the Fortnightly Review. Chapman wanted to know if I were appointed editor, would this be made right; Arthur Walter assured him that it would.

I have already told how I came to know Arthur Walter of The Times; all through the years from 1885 to 1895 or '96, our intimacy continued. I used to stay with him at his country place near Finchampstead three or four times each summer, and during the winter we met at lunch or dinner once or twice every week. We often spent the evening playing chess: I used to let him win a fair proportion of the games, for success pleased him intensely. I often thought that in the same spirit Gattie, the amateur champion, used now and then to let me win, but not often, for his supremacy forbade it.

Arthur Walter was older than I was and was greatly surprised when he found I was a good Grecian: he himself had won first honors in Mods at Oxford. He tested my scholarship, I remember, in all sorts of queer ways: for example, he once cited a phrase of Thucydides, which set forth that the whole world was the grave of famous men, and he liked my simple rendering. At another time he showed me the end of a chapter of Tacitus, in which the Roman historian says, At this time, news came to Rome that fifty thousand Jews, men, women and children, had been put to death in the streets o] Syracuse. "His comment is Vili damnum. How do you translate it?" Arthur Walter wanted to know.

"A cheap loss?"

"A good riddance," I proposed, and he was delighted. "The exact value," he declared.

When Arthur Walter said that he thought me fit for any editorship, even for that of The Times, Chapman asked me to call upon him the next day and told me that I could take over the editorship of the Fortnightly Review whenever I pleased. Escort was ill at the time; he had broken down in health. I said I would take over the Review on condition that the first year's salary went to Escott, as I knew that he was not well off. This was arranged, and I was formally installed as editor of the Fortnightly Review.

Shortly afterwards Chapman told me that John Morley wished to see me, and in a minute or two brought him in. Morley had been editor of the Review for some fifteen years, was a link with the founders, Lewes and George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. In popular opinion his editorship was summed up in the fact that he had always spelled God with a small "g." We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, when he said, "You know, I feel very guilty. I have been, lately, too much of a politician and too little of an editor. In those two boxes over there," and he pointed to two large boxes in the corner of the room, "are the proof of my laziness. In this one," he pointed to one of them, "I put the articles which I didn't feel at all inclined to accept; in that other one, the articles which I could use at any time if I wished to."

At this time Morley must have been forty-five years of age; of spare figure, some five feet ten in height; clean-shaven, with large rudder-nose, firm drawn-in lips of habitual prudent self-restraint; thoughtful, cold grey eyes, large forehead-"A bleak face," I said to myself, seeking for some expressive word. Manifestly, I was not much to his taste. I was as frank and outspoken as he was reserved, and while he had already climbed a good way up the ladder, I thought nothing of the ladder and despised the climbing. Moreover, his gods were not my gods, and he was as unfeignedly proud of his Oxford training as I was contemptuous of all erudition.

It is very difficult, indeed, for men to measure the juniors who are taking their places. We can all see youthful shortcomings and promise is infinitely harder to estimate than performance. Perhaps we could judge them best through then: admirations that are not learned or academic and, therefore, in so far original. Morley did not give himself the trouble to see me fairly. But, then, why should he? There were long odds against my being worth knowing, and he was courteous.

I remember he showed me an article with a Greek quotation in it. "I haven't corrected it, Mr. Harris," he said, "nor looked at the accents; I suppose you will do that," courteously giving me credit for sufficient knowledge.

I said something about accents being easy to me after having learned modern Greek in Athens.

"Really," he exclaimed, seemingly surprised, "that must have been an interesting experience. Hasn't the pronunciation changed with the changes in language?"

"The scholars all try to pronounce in the old way," I replied. "Lots of professors and students today in the University of Athens plume themselves on speaking classic Greek."

"Astonishing," he exclaimed. "You must tell me about it some day. Very interesting." But the day never came, for if politics soon absorbed him, life and literature absorbed me.

I had been curious about Morley's editorship, and so I went through both boxes, returning nearly all the manuscripts to their owners and excusing myself as hardly responsible for the delay; but in the rejected box I came upon two papers which interested me. The one was by Mrs. Lynn Linton on "The Modern Girl," which was charmingly written. Of course I wrote to Mrs.

Lynn Linton about it, regretting the delay in dealing with it. She came to see me and we became friends at once. I ought to have known her previous work, but as a matter of fact, I didn't. She had married Linton, an engraver of real talent, and he had left her; and she developed a faculty of writing that put her in the front rank of the women of the day. She was kindly, and we remained friends for years, till I took up the habit of going abroad every winter and we gradually lost sight of each other.

The other manuscript which struck me as excellent had a curious title, "The Rediscovery of the Unique," signed by some one totally unknown to me-H.

G. Wells! I have already told about it in a portrait of Wells, and have told, too, of our later connection, when I got him to review stories for me on the Saturday Review.

Morley, by his rise to place and power as a politician, enables us to judge how much higher the standard of intellect is in literature than in politics. For Morley was in the first flight of politicians: Secretary for Ireland and afterwards for India, always a considerable figure, though he entered the arena late in life and without the wealth needed for supreme success. In literature, on the other hand, Morley never played a distinguished part. He could not even shine with reflected lustre. In vain he wrote the lives of Cobden and of Gladstone with all the advantages of intimate first-hand knowledge and all the assistance gladly proffered by the family and by distinguished contemporaries. His work remains fruitless, academic, jejune, divorced from life, unillumined by genius, unconsecrated by art. A bleak face and a bleak mind!

The truth is, the politician, like the banker or barrister, has only to surpass his living competitors, the best in the day and hour, in order to win supremacy.

We cannot compare the Gladstones closely with the Cannings, any more than we can compare the Washingtons with the Lincolns. Men of letters and artists, however, fall into a far higher and more severe competition. Shaw writes a play, Kipling a short story: they easily outstrip most of their contemporaries; but Shaw's best play is at once compared with the best of Moliere or Shakespeare or Ibsen, and Kipling has to stand comparison with the best of Turgenev or Maupassant, the greatest, not of a generation, but of all time.

Exposed to this higher test as man of letters, Morley failed utterly, in spite of his success as a politician.

Yet it is understood that his life had noble elements in it. His character was much finer than his mind, and he was trusted and esteemed by his political associates in singular measure, in spite of a certain doctrinaire strain of pedantry and outspokenness. Had it not been for his learning, of which they stood in awe, his fellow ministers would probably have called him "Honest John."

When I took over the Fortnightly Review, Chapman and Hall were to pay me five hundred pounds a year for editing it and ten per cent of the net profits. If I doubled the circulation, I was to get fifteen per cent of the net profits. I told Chapman I should double the circulation in the first year, and practically did it, but I took nothing out of the Fortnightly Review. I used to spend all my salary in paying the contributors more highly, especially the contributors of poetry. It had been customary to pay not more than two pounds a page for any poem, but I gave Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne, too, twenty-five pounds a page, which came out of my salary.

As editor of the Fortnightly, I found it very easy at first to get on with Frederic Chapman, but his directors were for the most part stupid, brainless business men. I remember when I wrote my first stories, Mantes the Matador and The Modern Idyll; I brought them to Chapman and asked him to read them. He read them and said they were all right, but when I published The Modern Idyll in the Review, there was a huge to-do in the press. The Spectator condemned the story, passionately. I thought it was Hutton, the chief owner, with his high church prejudices, that had condemned it, but when I went and called upon him, I found it was his partner, Townsend, an utter atheist, who had played critic. He told me he thought the story terrible.

A nonconformist dignitary, the Reverend Newman Hall, I think, wrote, condemning the story root and branch and making a great fuss about it. The end of it was that the directors of the Fortnightly Review met together and asked me not to insert any more of my stories in the Review. At once I tore up my agreement with them and told them to find another editor as soon as they could.

At the same time Frederic Chapman told Meredith, who was then the reader of novels for Chapman and Hall, of the way the directors had condemned me, and Meredith came up to London to protest. I met him for the first time in Chapman's office-to me a most memorable experience. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, a little above middle height, spare and nervous; a splendid head, all framed in silver hair; but perhaps because he was very deaf himself, he used to speak very loudly. "We mustn't allow these directors to stand in our light," he cried. "I will talk to them and tell them they have never had as good a story in the Fortnightly Review as Mantes." And he did talk to them to some purpose, for they withdrew their condemnation of my stories and begged me to reconsider my resignation, which I did.

A few months after I had taken over the Review I had a dispute with Henry James, which may be worth recording here. Between 1890 and 1905 I used to meet him in London from time to time. I think it was Lady Brooke of Sarawak who first introduced me to him at a garden party. The Ranee was one of his most devoted admirers; she had a peculiar sense of certain literary values, or perhaps I should say, of certain men of letters. To me James was only a name; I had read none of his works, except some essays or travel-sketches in France, which were mildly interesting to me by virtue of the subject, though commonplace enough in treatment. The book reminded me of a couple of Tauchnitz volumes of sketches in Italy by W. Dean Howells, and ever afterwards I coupled the two men in my mind as absolutely negligible.

I do not attempt to put forth this summary judgment as fair criticism or even as a considered opinion; I give it merely as an instance of my off-hand rejection of any values in literature that did not strike me as of the highest.

Henry James almost immediately confirmed my somewhat contemptuous opinion of his intelligence by praising my predecessor on the Fortnightly Review excessively.

"It must have been a privilege," he said, "to follow such an editor. I regard Mr.

Morley and Leslie Stephen as about the first men of letters in England. You agree with me, don't you?"

"Indeed I don't," I cried. "What! With Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson and Arnold living, to say nothing of Meredith?"

"Of course," he broke in, "these poets come first; but I meant to speak of prose writers; men whom the French would call 'men of letters.' "

"It's ridiculous," I persisted, "even to mention such men as Morley and Stephen in the front rank; they are nothing but academic mediocrities; neither of them has ever written a word that can live."

"I'm afraid I cannot agree with you," he rejoined, with courteous distaste.

"Only creative artists are in the front class," I insisted; "Morley and Stephen are only hodmen and incapable of conception."

After this James appeared to avoid me and I had no desire to push the acquaintance. Neither his appearance nor personality attracted me: he was above middle height and inclined to stoutness; a heavy face, the outlines obscured by fat; the eyes medium-sized windows, rather observant, perhaps, than reflective; the voice colorless, conventional; manners also conventional.

James was always well-dressed, too, in a conventional way. I remember thinking afterwards with some insolence that his well-formed, prominent, rather Jewish-looking nose was the true index of his character. The rudder of the face, I always call the nose; and in James's make-up there was manifestly more steering-power of control than motive power of passion or enthusiasm; not a man to interest me in any degree.

James's so-called obscurity was never an offence to me; indeed, this charge against an author is invariably a spur. After forcing myself once to read and understand Kant, I profess to be able to find a meaning in any book where there is a meaning to be found, and so I set myself to unravel several of James's obscurities. The knots were soon loosed, but alas! I had nothing for my pains. "Much ado about nothing," I said to myself, and tossed the book aside, never again to be re-opened.

The admirers of James, too, I soon discovered, were all people of no importance as judges of literature; would-be geniuses, for the most part, or society women. Consequently, he was soon definitely classed in my estimation-another Howells without a trace of talent, devoted to the painting of commonplace Americans with painstaking industry. But I was fated to be disturbed in this comfortable belief.

One day Max Beerbohm lunched with us and afterwards we went for a walk in Richmond Park. Of a sudden he mentioned a book of Henry James and asked me had I read it.

"Thank God," I replied, "I have always something better to do than waste my time on James."

"You're mistaken, I think," said Max. "He's interesting to me, gets effects through those elaborate sentences that you could hardly get otherwise."

"You don't mean there is any real worth in him," I exclaimed. "I can't believe it; but if you say so, I'll have another look at him. What books of his do you like especially?"

Max mentioned two; I've forgotten what they were; even his praise could not overcome my settled distaste and repugnance. Nevertheless, his opinion remained with me and I record it willingly, though it could never alter my feeling that the man who admires the hodmen cannot be among the masters.

One day someone sent me a thin book of James's, begging me to read it and to give some account of what he thought a master-work. Mindful of Max's appreciation, I sat down and swallowed the draught. It was a story of two children, a little boy and girl, who had been corrupted, if I remember aright, by some teacher or governess. They were a foul pair, carefully presented: lifelike, but not alive, a study in child viciousness-worse than worthless, because not even natural. I never read another line of Henry James.

But one evening I met him, sat opposite to him, indeed, at some big public dinner. After the first greeting I paid no attention to him and talked chiefly to a man at my side, who showed some liking for letters. I don't know how it came about, but the talk fell on Sainte-Beuve. My acquaintance took him for granted as a great critic.

"Not a critic of any value," I declared, "a more over-rated man it would be difficult to find."

"How do you account for it," asked Henry James across the table, "that Arnold and others speak of his judgments with such respect. Who would you put above him as a critic?"

"All the creators," I replied, "but of course Goethe and Balzac, the only critics I take any interest in."

"I never heard Sainte-Beuve run down before," retorted James; "the French writers all admire him."

"I beg your pardon," I replied. "Balzac called him 'Sainte-Beuve le petit,' and as the 'petty Sainte-Beuve' he's destined to be known. The honor of a critic is to pick out the great men among his contemporaries and help them to recognition and to fame. What did Sainte-Beuve do? He denied genius to Victor Hugo and told Balzac that the flood of impurities in his books turned them into sewers; of La Cousine Bette, he said, 'Those infamous Marneffes infect the whole work with mephitic odors.' Flaubert he compared with Eugene Sue and declared that it was a pity he could not write as well as George Sand! The Goncourts, too, and Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire he always disfavored and depreciated. All the great ones of his day came under his ban. The truth is, he was a small man and could only judge fairly those smaller than himself; no one can see above his own head."

"That's your judgment," exclaimed James rather rudely.

"Mine today," I shot back, "but everyone's tomorrow. Truth makes converts."

In this year, 1926, Sainte-Beuve's posthumous work, Mes Poisons, has appeared, fifty years after his death, and even his French admirers have been shocked by his venomous misjudgings.

After Meredith had come to my aid on the Review, everything went on merrily for a long time. I thought more of Meredith than a dozen Jameses.

Five or six years later London, and Paris, too, were shocked by bombs thrown in Paris by Henri and Ravachol. I published in the Fortnightly Review a personal article on both men, from a friend, praising Henri as one of the sweetest and noblest of human beings. Chapman told me that he was shocked, and I became aware about the same time that Oswald Crawfurd, who had been in the English Embassy at Lisbon, and had now returned and become a great man, was intriguing against me. But I had doubled the circulation of the Review, and Walter and others admitted that I was editing it very ably; consequently, I had no fear of my position.

Chapman had become a little difficult to work with. He was naturally a conservative businessman of the old-fashioned English type. He hated poetry and thought it should be paid for at the ordinary rates. When he found that I was giving my salary in payment to his contributors, I fell in his esteem. To give Swinburne fifty pounds for a poem seemed to him monstrous; and when I bought certain articles dearly, he wouldn't have them at any price. And if he disliked art and literature, he hated the social movement of the time with a hatred peculiarly English; he looked upon a socialist as a sort of low thief, and pictured a communist as one who had his hand always in his neighbor's pocket. My defense of Henri and Ravachol shocked him to the soul. And without Chapman's sympathy, I couldn't make of the Review what I wanted to make of it. Chapman wouldn't have Davidson's Ballad of a Nun; he cut it out of the number when he saw it in proof, though it was paid for; and Bernard Shaw was anathema to him. Gradually, as I grew, my position as editor of the Fortnightly became less pleasant to me. I was like a boy whose growth was being hindered by too narrow garments.

One day Chapman wanted to know why I had never asked for the ten per cent arrears of profits that had accumulated for five or six years or more. I told him I did not care anything about the money; he told me the directors thought there should be a settlement and asked me what I would take? I said,

"If it is to get rid of me, you must pay me in full. If you are satisfied with me, give me anything you like, I do not care. I am not doing the Fortnightly Review for the money." Accordingly, he offered me, I think, about one-third of what I was entitled to, some five hundred pounds, telling me that he had no intention of getting rid of me. I accepted his offer, gave him a full quittance, and two months later the directors gave me notice: at the end of six months they would get another editor. I was shocked! I soon found out that Crawfurd expected to be made editor. I met him one day in the office and told him point blank that if he were appointed editor, I would expose the whole intrigue, and would show how I had been cheated of a thousand pounds. "I do not care who succeeds me in the editorship," I said, "but you shall not profit by the traitorism," and I told Chapman the same thing.

I had never had such a blow in my life. I had never lost a position before that I cared to keep, and at first I was overwhelmed at the idea of being supplanted on the Fortnightly. I went up the river to Maidenhead for a sort of holiday that summer but could not take my thoughts off my humiliation. I had sleepless nights and days of misery and regret. I was really making myself ill and had come to the brink of a nervous breakdown when Willie Grenfell, now Lord Desborough, without knowing of my trouble, took pity on me and began giving me lessons in punting. His companionship and kindness lifted me out of the slough of despond and postponed the evil day.

This was the occasion of my first meeting with Stead, the famous editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. He had recently founded the Review of Reviews. He asked me to call on him and wanted to know the reason of my leaving the Fortnightly. I told him the facts on his promising to say nothing special about Oswald Crawfurd, who had practically dispossessed me. He promised, and two or three days afterwards sent me an article detailing everything I had said and more. I refused to allow it to appear, and he finally inserted a colorless statement.

Stead was an extraordinary specimen of the lower middle-class type of Englishman-without classical education, without any understanding of any other language or people, save his own. He had a great energy, however, and a very complete realization of all the forces in England, particularly the forces of religious prudishness and nonconformity. In the Pall Mall Gazette he got up a crusade against the lust of what he called "The Modern Babylon," and by silly exaggeration managed to get himself into prison for six or eight weeks. He fell foul, too, of Sir Charles Dilke; declared that any one who was unfaithful to his wife was not fit to be in the House of Commons. Of course, I took up arms against him on this point and asserted that Dilke was one of the ablest of our politicians. I wanted to know why Stead would deprive England of his undoubted public services in order to drive him into private life, where he had failed quite lamentably. But Stead stuck to his cursing and got all the powers of nonconformity on his side in order to hound Dilke out of public life.

One incident is so illustrative of English public life and of the effect of ignorant democratic opinion upon even the most eminent statesman, that I must tell it here. Dilke came to see me one day and told me that in the beginning of the row over the divorce suit, he had written to Gladstone, putting himself absolutely in his hands: "If you think it would be good for the Party," he wrote, "I'll give up Parliament and political life altogether; tell me your real wishes and I assure you now, I will honor them."

"Gladstone," he said, "wrote me in reply a most charming letter, saying that he would be very sorry to lose my great ability and that he didn't think, as a leader of the Party, he had any right to play censor of morals. 'At all times,' he added, I am proud of your support.' "

A little later Stead got a crowd of women to go to Gladstone and petition him to get rid of Dilke. Thereupon the Great Old Man wrote to Dilke, asking him to return his letter, and Dilke told me that he was going to return it.

"If you do," I said, "you will be slung overboard; please say that you value it so much that you couldn't possibly return it, but send him a copy of it."

Gladstone's next reply to the wild women was astonishingly characteristic.

I have lost my notes of it, but I remember high platitudes and his significant refusal to take any action against a colleague; but if Gladstone had had his letter back, I think the G. O. M. would have thrown Dilke to the wolves.

In my mind, I have always compared Stead in England with Bryan in America, and I was rather relieved when he went down in some shipwreck and we were rid of him-just as I was glad that Bryan died during the Dayton trial, a disgrace to American civilization.

There is one bright spot in my memory of Stead: I was talking once to Mrs. Frankau about him, who was one of the wittiest women in London, and one of the most charming. She told me, laughingly, how she had made up to Stead and encouraged him, till one day he fell on his knees before her and put his arms round her, and she said to herself: "At last!" — when he suddenly told her that he was going to pray that she might always be faithful to her husband. I laughed till I cried at the unexpected foolish appeal.

Stead was regarded in English journalism as a great power for good, though in reality he was an influence from the dark, backward of time and shortsighted in his jingoism, as will appear when I come to the Jameson raid and his persistent defence of Rhodes.

But now I was all at a loose end and suffering for the first time in my life with nerves. I often sat in the corner and cried. I was unable to control myself, could not get better, and was very near an absolute breakdown. And the fatal day when I should be out of work was coming nearer and nearer. Sometimes I began to feel that I should go out of my mind. Neither the exercise in the open air with Willie Grenfell, nor the regular quiet life did me any good. At last, almost in despair, I left Maidenhead and returned to London.

A trifling incident here may be of some value to neuropaths. I had been working hard all the time and late one night had to go home by train. I drove to Waterloo; the porter opened the door to me and I got into the usual carriage. I hadn't asked him whether it was my train or not, but I wanted to ask him, and suddenly found that I couldn't remember my station-blank fear came upon me and the dreadful apprehension washed out all memory. I couldn't even recall my own name: for one moment I was falling into the abyss of despair-without memory life would be impossible!

I resolved to sleep and settled down in my corner. Just as the train started a man jumped in. "Is this the Richmond train?" he asked. "I was told it was; but I am uncertain."

"Ask the porter," I barked, "and leave me alone."

"Good God!" he cried, and at the next station left the train, evidently thinking he was in the carriage with a madman. This amusement gave me sleep, I think, for I woke up three stations beyond mine; at Richmond I got out and found a cab and told the driver to drive me back to Putney and ring the bell and deposit me at my door, and I would pay him double. I curled up in the corner of the cab and fell asleep again, and when I reached my home I was in my right senses with my memory back again; but the fear has always been with me since. Sleep is the best nerve sedative.

For some time nothing seemed to do me any good, but soon an unexpected change came in my fortunes, which had the most salutary influence on my health. I shall tell all about it in another chapter.

It was just when I lost the Fortnightly, in the middle of 1895, that the tragedy of Oscar Wilde came to a head.

I have already told the story in my Life of Wilde as carefully as I could and in full possession of the facts and notes taken at the tune. Bernard Shaw has said that at a lunch with Oscar, at which he was present at the Cafe Royal, I told Oscar the results of his trials beforehand with such astonishing accuracy that Shaw marveled at it later. I really think my years of journalism and the Dilke trial and my personal acquaintance with judges and politicians had taught me to know England and the dominant English opinion very intimately.

Oscar, though bred and brought up in it, had no understanding of it at all. He always felt sure he would get off with a minimum sentence. I knew he would get the maximum penalty, and insult and contumely to boot, from the judge and the press. The whole of the English judicial system is loathsome to me in its barbarous harshness; but what I never understood until this trial was that the ordinary English gentleman would behave just as vilely as the judge. For some time before his trial, even Englishmen of a good class who had known him cut Wilde in public, and even before he was condemned, George Alexander erased his name from the advertisements of his play, while still profiting by keeping the play on the stage. The hatred shown to Oscar Wilde taught me for the first time what Shakespeare meant when he spoke of this "all-hating world." Ladies and gentlemen are ashamed of showing reverence and affection in public, but none of them are ashamed of showing disdain, contempt, and hatred- the little human animal is always proud of exhibiting his worst side out of vanity.

I had no power on the Fortnightly Review when Oscar was condemned, and his trial took place just before I got the Saturday Review, so I had no organ at my command. I tried to write something suggesting a moderate sentence, but I couldn't get the article taken anywhere. Here was a brilliant man, one of the best talkers in the world, who had given hundreds of people hours of delightful amusement, and yet everyone seemed glad to show contempt for him; and the judge who went out of his way to insult him was applauded on all hands.

I found out from Ruggles-Brise, the head of the Prison Commission, that if I could get half a dozen literary men of position to pray the Home Secretary to make Oscar's imprisonment a little easier for him by allowing him to read and to have a light in his cell at night, the petition would be granted. I made the petition as colorless as possible and asked Meredith to sign it, but he would not. I could never understand why. Shaw, too, begged to be excused; but Meredith's refusal really shocked me because I had come to believe him one of the Immortals. But in truth everyone was down on Oscar in the most astonishing way.

A couple of incidents that occurred after he came out of prison, after he had purged his guilt by terrible sufferings, will illustrate just what I mean.

I was dining with Oscar Wilde as my guest at the Cafe Durand one night in Paris, when a certain English lord whom I knew came over to me with a smiling face; as soon as he saw my companion he stopped and exclaimed,

"Good God!" and turned abruptly to the door and went out. I happened to be going up in the lift at the Ritz Hotel a day or two later when he came into the lift at the second floor; at once he greeted me saying: "I am so sorry for the other day, Harris, but when I saw whom you were with, I couldn't possibly speak to you: fancy going about with that man in public."

"I know," I said, "there are not many Immortals; I don't wonder you don't want to know them; but why not forget me, too; it would be better, don't you think?" and I turned away and began talking to the lift-man.

Worse still happened to us in Nice. I had taken Oscar to the old Cafe de La Regence and we were dining there when an Englishman came in with a lady.

He stopped near the table and stared at Oscar, then took a seat at the next table behind us, saying in a loud voice to his companion:

"Do you know who that is, that infamous Oscar Wilde; fancy his showing himself in public."

Oscar's face blanched; I had already seen that a heavy glass pitcher of water was within the reach of my hand. If the man had said one word more, I would have smashed his face with the pitcher. I turned to him and said: "Your rudeness can be heard; any more of it and you'll be sorry. Now you had better go to another room." Fortunately, at that moment the manager came in, and I appealed to him; he knew me well and told the man he would not be served and asked him to leave the place. The pair had to go. Oscar was trembling from head to foot.

"Good God, Frank," he cried, "how dreadful; why do they hate me so; what harm have I ever done them?"

"Think of a London fog," I replied; "it prevents them seeing clearly; don't bother about them: didn't Shakespeare call it this 'all-hating world'?"

Many years later I was to find out what the "all-hating world" could do to show its dislike of me!

CHAPTER XIII

Prize-fighting

In my second volume I published a long account of the gluttony at the Lord Mayors' banquets in London, and especially of the bestial conduct of the most celebrated mayor that the city of London ever had-Sir Robert Fowler.

In the last chapter of this volume I shall tell how the English objected to this and tried to get my books stopped in France through the police.

I have no wish to denigrate the English. When I returned to London in '80-'81, they were kinder to me than the Americans were when I went to New York with an established reputation in 1914. Many individual Englishmen, in the thirty-odd years I spent in London, became dear friends of mine: and one in especial-Ernest Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe-I shall have much to tell about later. He was the best friend, except Professor Smith of Lawrence, that I have met on this earthly pilgrimage, but some Englishmen and English women, too, are friends of mine to this hour. Still, I am resolved, as one of God's spies, to tell the exact truth about them as I see it.

I don't know how I became a member of the National Sporting Club, but I was always greatly interested in athletics. I may here say a word about perfect physical condition to convince the athlete that I know what I am talking about. From thirty to forty in London I had a professional to box with me for half an hour every morning. When I was perfectly fit, my hand used to strike before I consciously saw the opening: as soon as I saw the opening before I struck I knew I was out of condition. The unconscious action should be quicker than the conscious.

In the late eighties and early nineties, I went to the Sporting Club a couple of times a week. Just as I found that my idea of a good dinner was not shared by those who partook of the Lord Mayors' banquets, so I found that my idea of fair play was not that of the majority of the Sporting Club in London.

I remember well one evening in which two lightweights, boys apparently of twenty or twenty-three, were boxing. In the third or fourth round, one of them caught a heavy blow on the chin and staggered about the ring, grasping at the ropes, and missing them, fell down. The referee began the solemn:

"One-two-three-," but before the fatal ten had been announced, the boy had staggered to his feet, only immediately to be knocked down again. I happened to be sitting just below the judge. I got up in my excitement and said, "Oh, please, won't you stop the fight! He has no chance: he may be severely injured by the next blow; please stop it!"

"I have no right to," replied the judge; and a moment later the cry went up,

"Knock him out, knock him out!" The victor struck the boy a heavy blow and laid him out on the floor for much more than the count of ten. I couldn't help crying out, "Disgraceful, shameless cruelty." A certain lord near me jumped up and cried, "I don't know you, Sir, and don't want to, but keep your opinions to yourself. We want to see a fight to a finish here and not to be interrupted in the middle by your childish opinions."

I could not help laughing: his indignation was so intense and so sincere. "Vae victis," I said; "'woe to the beaten, woe to the unsuccessful' should be the motto of Englishmen."

"And a damned good motto, too," exclaimed another man.

Evidently I was at variance with the feeling of the whole club. I spoke to the secretary and got him to take me outside and introduce me to the beaten boy.

He was pretty badly hurt but full of courage.

"How did you come to get in the way of that blow on the chin?" I asked.

"I haven't had any work for some time," he said to me, "and I have to keep a mother and sister. I hadn't much to eat this last week so I looked upon this fight as a blessing: it would give me ten shillings even if I were beaten; and if I won I might get ten pounds out of it. If you haven't eaten anything for a couple of days," he went on, "you get light and swimmy-like in the head, and so I got it on the chin-a rare jolt; after that I didn't know much what happened till they helped me out here and gave me a whisky and soda. But now I am going off with ten bob and one of them will get me a beefsteak and then I shall feel better."

I was charmed by the boy's high-spirited pluck, so I said, "Take a ten pound note, too, and make up your mind that you will win the next fight by keeping your chin tucked into your chest: it isn't well to shove it out too much in the open."

"Thank you, Sir," he said laughing, "I'll do my best."

I give this incident simply to expose the dreadful cruelty of the average wellbred Englishman. There is a curious want of chivalry in them, and no compassion for the under-dog. I remember two remarkable incidents exemplifying this that may find a place here.

I was one of those who went down the Seine to see a battle on an island in the river between Sullivan and Charlie Mitchell. While they were putting up the ropes, both the combatants stripped off, and it seemed to me a thousand to one on Sullivan. He must have been five feet eleven in height and was superbly made: the very model of a prize-fighter, though he had become far too fat and had put on a veritable paunch; still the power of him took the breath. For years he had toured America, offering any one five hundred dollars who would stay in the ring with him four rounds; but now he was grown fat and scant of breath, like Hamlet.

Charlie Mitchell, whom I knew very well, was an excellent prize-fighter in what we would call today the light heavyweight division. He was about five feet six. in height and very well made; was trained to the hour; and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds or one hundred and sixty-five against the two hundred that Sullivan weighed.

There had been a great deal of rain, and when the men had been in the ring for ten minutes, it was like a mud-puddle and as slippery as a butter-slide.

All through the first rounds, Charlie Mitchell, assured of his superior condition, kept away, forcing Sullivan to run after him again and again round the ring. About the fourth round, Sullivan stopped; he was puffing and blowing like a grampus. "Say, Charlie," he bellowed in his deep voice, "is this a prize-fight or a foot-race?"

Everyone burst out laughing. Sullivan had spoken needlessly. In the next round before he got his wind, Charlie met him and had a set-to in the middle of the ring: he ended it by slipping Sullivan's right and hitting him viciously in the stomach with the left, and then, crossing to the chin with his right, knocked the big champion down. "It seems to me it is a prizefight," said Mitchell coolly; but the heavy blow had taught Sullivan his lesson, and he fought more cautiously for the next half hour or so, till the referee said the fight was over as a draw.

It was curious to note how at once the English spectators changed their attitude and began to pay court to Mitchell.

On the way back to Paris everyone except myself seemed disgusted: the fight should have been fought to a finish, they said. What rot it was to spoil the day with a draw. We had seen some brilliant boxing, and I didn't think the day spoilt at all. It had taught me that Sullivan's day was over.

A little later when the news came through that he had been beaten by Jim Corbett at New Orleans in September, '92, I was not surprised. From all accounts, it was almost a replica of the fight which I had seen with Charlie Mitchell. The first rounds Corbett kept well out of reach, and the crowd jeered at him, while Sullivan kept calling out in his deep bass voice: "Come in and fight." About the third round Corbett went in to fight, and by the end of the fourth round it was seen that the great John Sullivan was beaten. How he ever lasted twenty-five rounds was a wonder! At the beginning of the twenty-first round, Sullivan made a last attempt to turn the tide and rushed at Corbett, but Corbett was too fast and managed to dodge nearly all his blows. This exertion of Sullivan was the last spurt: from that time on, Corbett kept hitting him as he pleased, and finally sent in a terrific right to the chin and Sullivan fell for the full count. On getting to his feet again, he staggered to the ropes, and said, "It is the old story: I am like the pitcher that went to the well once too often," and with the tears running down his face he added, "I have been beaten by a younger and better man, but I thank God he is an American."

John L. Sullivan was a remarkable character, for when he went home beaten and broken and met the treatment usually accorded in this world to the defeated, he gave up drinking and became a temperance lecturer. He made good, too, in this new role, and died fairly well off. In my poor opinion, with the solitary exception of Fitzsimmons, he was the best prizefighter I have ever seen, and surely at his best, the best prize-fighter in the history of the ring.

Some time later I went to see Slavin fight Jim Smith at Bruges. At first I was in Smith's camp and welcomed his supporters in the hotel at Bruges. Squire Baird, as he was called, was the principal backer of Smith. He was a millionaire, the result of three generations of Scotch ironmasters. I thought him one of the worst specimens of mankind I had ever seen: foul-mouthed, illiterate; he bragged continuously, but the whole gang did him honor for his wealth.

Next day after some difficulties the ring was pitched and the fight began. The two men seemed fairly well matched: Slavin, a little taller and lighter, but trained to the hour; Smith, strongly made and a good boxer, but clearly suffering from years of good London living. In the first round or two, Slavin took all care, though not afraid to mix it; but after the third round, the fight went all one way; it ended by Slavin knocking Smith down, which surprised the whole crowd of Smith's backers, and most of all, Baird, who kept shouting insults at Slavin from Smith's corner.

Soon afterwards, the crowd of Smith's supporters, drawing the ropes loose, made the way to Smith's corner a sort of lane. Smith stood by his own chair awaiting Slavin's onslaught, and Slavin with rare courage went over to him.

As he entered the lane, blows were showered upon him from Smith's supporters, but he nevertheless went through to Smith and knocked him down in his own corner.

The fight was over and ought to have been given to Slavin then and there, but Baird and his gang were not finished with. They raised a cry of "Police" and dragged Smith out of the ring and began sponging him and attending to him, thus giving him time to recover, if recovery were possible. Slavin sat in his corner quietly waiting. When Smith came in again to the ring, Slavin again had to go over to his corner to fight him, and now one of Baird's gang used a knuckle duster, and as Slavin passed, struck him heavily on the ear, cutting him so that the blood poured down his neck and shoulders; but he went on to Smith's corner in spite of a hail of blows from the spectators, and again knocked Smith down. At this the referee, to the surprise of every one, gave the fight as a draw.

Turning to the referee, Slavin exclaimed: "I have come thirteen thousand miles to have a fair fight, and you give it as a draw when the man for three rounds hasn't dared to leave his corner. Look how his supporters hit me and treated me; why in the very first round he wrestled me and shoved his boot nails into my legs"-and he pulled up his short drawers and showed his bleeding thigh. "I didn't even protest," he went on, "I could beat the fellow with one hand. How dare you give it as a draw? There is only one man in the ring!"

The referee replied, "I did it to save you from the brutes on the other side."

"Nonsense," cried Slavin, "turn them all in; I'll take on the whole damned crew." Never was there more splendid Irish courage.

At a word from Baird, his crew ran round to Slavin's corner as if to attack him, but Slavin walked to his chair, paying no more attention to them than if they had been a pack of Sunday school children, and not one dared now to lay a hand on him.

Baird's money had queered the whole fight!

But even before Slavin had spoken, I had left Smith's side and gone across to Slavin's corner, and when Baird came to me afterwards, I took no notice of him and wouldn't speak to him.

I returned to the Sporting Club and told the story and insisted that Squire Baird should be turned out of the club as a disgrace, not only to English sport, but to humanity. And I believe he was turned out. A word of mine about him stuck, I believe: remembering he was a product of Scotch ironmasters and Puritans, I said that the iron had entered into his soul.

A little later a story went about London of his conduct to his mistress, a woman of good breeding, which did him no good. He had bought her, it appeared, and one night he came home with his usual set of drunken prizefighters and cab-drivers; and when they were all drunk, he rang the bell and sent the maid up for Mrs. L… The maid came down and said her mistress was in bed. Baird said, "If she doesn't come down, I will go up and fetch her down in her shift." Whereupon the lady had to come down and witness some of the drunken orgy. Next morning she packed up and told Baird she was going to leave him. He went out and in half an hour came back and tried in his rough way to get her to stay. When she wouldn't stay, he took a ball of paper out of his pocket and threw it at her face. She told him what a cur he was to strike a woman; he cried, "Look at it, you fool, before you talk." When she picked it up, she found the ball of paper was made of fifty notes for a thousand pounds each.

The story was told to me by one who had heard Baird tell it. A little later, I believe, Baird died, still a young man, but a dreadful specimen of the evil great wealth can work on a common nature!

A little later I was to meet a much better specimen of the prize-fighter than Slavin, certainly the best character I ever saw in the ring. One day news came to the Sporting Club that Peter Jackson, the colored man, was coming over to London and was spoiling for a fight. I heard from the secretary that Slavin was very eager to meet Mm, and accordingly they soon met.

I soon got to know Peter Jackson personally and liked his quiet and modest ways. I asked him one day who would win.

"It is a tricky game," he said, "but I don't intend to let Slavin beat me, if I can help it. He is rather a brute. You know I taught him boxing in Australia: one day something or other I said offended him, and he struck me in the face, and we had a set-to. They parted us pretty quickly. But I am not afraid of Slavin and I don't like him, and frankly I don't think he has any chance of beating me."

Charlie Mitchell sized up the fight clearly beforehand. "Slavin," he said, "is a real fighter, and if he starts in at once to mix it, he may get the better of Jackson; but if he boxes with him for the first rounds, he is sure to be beaten;

Jackson is about the best boxer I have ever seen-a really fine performer, both in defense and in attack."

The fight bore out Mitchell's prediction to the letter. Slavin boxed the first three or four rounds, and Jackson outboxed him from beginning to end.

About the fourth round, Slavin rushed in and struck Jackson heavily about the heart. The round was clearly Slavin's, but the bell saved Jackson.

When they came out again, Slavin tried the same rushing tactics, but Jackson avoided him and kept hitting him in the face and on the chin; and in this round Slavin palpably weakened. From that time on Jackson hit him almost as he wished, and the fight ended pretty quickly with Slavin's complete defeat.

Peter Jackson told me afterwards that the punch which he had got from Slavin over the heart was the heaviest he had ever had in his life.

The colored man, Peter Jackson, like Corbett, was very much of a gentleman: he told me he always hated to knock anyone out, and thought the referee should stop the fight when the complete superiority of one fighter was established. I have said nothing in these memoirs of mine about Corbett, but he was a splendid specimen, and I always believed that his defeat by Fitzsimmons, good as Fitzsimmons was, was due rather to a chance blow, which caught him on the spleen, than to any superiority. Still Fitzsimmons was a marvelous fighter; considering that he never weighed more than one hundred and sixty pounds, the most extraordinary fighter ever seen. It mustn't be forgotten, however, that he had a longer reach than most of the big ones, and blacksmith's fists at the end of enormous arms; he seemed to be built for the ring.

I should perhaps say one word here to explain certain defeats in the prizering that are not sufficiently understood. A young man-and prizefighters should be very young-after training hard for some time and getting into perfect condition, is very apt to discontinue all exercise when the fight is over, and so put on a great deal of fat very quickly. He has been keeping himself fit by the most strenuous exercise, which has developed his appetite as well as his muscles. When he stops training, his appetite continues and immediately fat accumulates, and it accumulates not only round the intestines and abdomen, but round all the muscles, and especially round the main muscle of all, the heart.

It is comparatively easy to take off abdominal fat, but it is extremely difficult and extremely painful to take off fat that has accumulated round the heart.

In fact, the moment a man begins seriously to train for this purpose, any prolonged exercise exhausts him and he feels very ill. The heart, lacking its accustomed support, sags, labors, and the man feels faint and sick. For a couple of months, at any rate, the athlete must go on exercising under a constant cloud of sickness and weakness that is apt to bring him to despair.

But if be continues, the fat will come off and in a certain tune, say six months, he will begin to feel fit and well and strong again, and increasingly fit and strong as time goes on; though in my opinion he will never be quite as good again as he was before the fat accumulated round the heart.

The case of Paget Tomlinson, the famous hurdler, occurs to me. A great natural runner, he had stopped exercising for a year or so, but was called out when Oxford and Cambridge had to meet Harvard and Yale; and though he was still, as he thought, very fit, the clock told him at the beginning of his training that he was nothing like so good as he had been a year or two before.

But he trained as a man of brain does train, with perfect method and desperate resolution. He brought himself down to pounds less than he had ever been at the varsity, and persevered through the feeling of disease and sickness, but still the clock would not be conciliated. He got to within half a second of his best tune, but could not improve it, and was beaten in the race some three yards by a younger man who had never been out of training.

Now, prize-fighting is a far severer test than a one-hundred-and-twenty yards' sprint over hurdles. How severe it is can be told in almost one sentence.

Sharkey and Jeffries had a memorable fight of one hour. In that hour it was found that Sharkey had lost thirteen pounds and Jeffries eleven pounds and a half. These men were both trained to the hour before they went into the ring, and the loss of weight alone shows how tremendous the exertion and strain must have been.

The best way for the fighter, of course, is never to go out of training, strictly to limit what he drinks with his meals, and prevent himself ever going up more than a pound or two; but if he has put on weight, the best way of taking it off is not to go into physical training at once, but to begin by cutting out all drinking with his meals. Half an hour before a meal and two hours afterwards, he should drink nothing. In a month he will be lighter than he ever was, probably even than he was in his first training, and then he can begin by careful exercise and very careful feeding to increase his strength once more and get himself perfectly fit.

Perhaps I should say here too that unfortunately boxing has won such vogue in the last two or three decades that the influence of money has corrupted and degraded the prize-ring. No one can be a champion and be honest; it is almost unthinkable. Big money wants to bet on a certainty: a man cannot be as sure of winning as of losing; hence he will be a better instrument for making money on if he consents to lose than if he wanted to win. The fact is patent, obvious, corroborated by experience everywhere.

Is baseball honest? Is horse-racing honest? Ask a real prize-fighter: "Is prizefighting honest?" and he'll laugh in your face.

I have only written these recollections of prize-fighters to justify my opinion that the prize-fight is an evil, and boxing one of the lowest forms of athletics. I am very sorry that the French and Germans have taken it up as they have, but fortunately, in the last thirty years, the French have taken up every form of athletics with passionate enthusiasm. I remember thirty years ago seeing some regiments drilling near Toulon; someone had put up a rail about two feet six in height for the men to run and jump over. It was perfectly comic to see how most of the soldiers jumped with both feet together. At the request of the colonel, I went over and showed them how they should jump the rail, taking it in their stride. Thirty years later the ordinary French boy has learned how to jump and how to run, too, while at cycling he is probably as good as any.

The worst evil of boxing came through its increased popularity. As soon as it was taken up in America, the quick Irish-Americans found out that two blows were likely to be decisive; the first blow is an upward stroke catching the chin, which produces a shock on the vertebrae and often results in partial paralysis; the other is the blow on the spleen, which is spoken of as the blow in the pit of the stomach; but when the spleen is really hit, it turns the man sick and he has very little strength for the next ten or fifteen minutes, in spite of perfect training.

I remember one boy in London who had learned the chin blow perfectly; he used always to mix it, at half-arm's length, at about the third round and take whatever punishment he got smiling; but would suddenly flash out either left or right with an upper cut to the chin, which, even if it didn't catch the spot perfectly, was usually sufficient to decide the fight.

It is this knowledge of the weak parts of our frame that has made prizefighting so intolerably brutal. In my time at the National Sporting Club in London there were two or three old boxers who were still hangers-on at the club, whose heads were all knocked on one side, and faces distorted with partial paralysis, the dreadful debris of human savagery. Wrestling is a far better exercise than prize-fighting and far less likely to injure any of the contestants permanently.

I must not be taken to mean that brutality is chiefly or solely English and German; it is to be found also, though in a less degree, in France and the Latin countries, as well as in northern Europe. I remember once being horrified by seeing Salammbo on the films in France. I recalled that Flaubert represented the poor fellow being beaten almost to death by the crowd, including women.

The whole brutal exhibition was put on before one with an intense realism, and the crowd delighted in the appalling exhibition. I left the theatre thinking it would take a thousand years to civilize a French crowd; and an Italian crowd is no better, and a Spanish crowd is just as bad.

I am full of tolerance, I think, for all mortal weaknesses; I can easily forgive all the frailties of the flesh and all the sins of the spirit, with the sole exception of cruelty. Cruelty to man or beast, to rat or snake, seems to me the unforgivable sin, the one utterly loathsome and damnable crime that shows utter degradation, the devil in man.

Of course there are degrees even in this villainy; cruelty to animals adds cowardice to the diabolic.

In Rome once I stopped a peasant who was beating a horse unmercifully: and when I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself, he declared that he would beat the creature as he pleased because it had no soul; and this excuse was urged not once, but twenty times, in favor of sadic cruelties practiced on dogs and cats. Was it thoughtlessness or want of imagination or something brutal in man's nature? I often asked myself, but never found an answer.

During a winter spent in Spain I got to know and like the Premier, Canovas Del Castillo. I made him a proposal which I thought interesting; that he should send twenty or thirty of the masterpieces of the Prado Gallery in Madrid to London for the season, especially a dozen paintings of Velasquez, who was then very little known in England. He said at once that if the British government would reciprocate he would do it willingly: the pictures could easily be sent by special train, or on a special warship, or in two or three parcels, so as to diminish the risk of loss. He agreed with me that the international effect of such an exchange could only be inspiring.

When I returned to England I saw Lord Salisbury on the matter, but to my astonishment he held up his hands and wouldn't hear of it, "I am glad I have no power," he said, "it isn't within the range of my duties. You would have to go to the trustees of the National Gallery in order to get the permission, and I don't think they would consent." I sounded one or two of them, but found they all wanted to shelter themselves behind the impossible.

I only mention the matter here because it was one of the many pleasant talks that made me appreciate the Spanish Premier's mind and character. Talking to him once about bull-fighting, to my astonishment he agreed with me that the killing of the horses was shamefully brutal and mere torture.

"Why not stop it?" I asked. "The play of the chulos at first and putting in the banderillas is extremely fine and interesting with just sufficient danger to make it enthralling; and the killing of the bull with a sword thrust is such an extraordinary feat that every one would wish to have seen it; but the lancers, who on horseback torture the bull to attack the poor old horses and tear them to pieces, constitute a dreadful exhibition."

Canovas finally declared that he would try to stop that part of bullfighting; and he kept his word. Everyone remembers the result: the mob left the bullring hissing and shouting and went after the Premier, who had to take refuge in the Royal Palace and then flee out of the back door and get away from Madrid. The thing the Spanish populace most loved was the horrible cruelty and torturing of the poor, broken-down horses.

Before leaving this chapter on prize-fighting and cruelty, I wish to record the most tragic story I have ever heard or read of. When one thinks of tragedy, one recalls unconsciously the tragedy of Socrates, or the still more terrible tragedy of Jesus on the Cross; but once many years ago, while spending a holiday in Venice, an old Venetian told me a story which seemed to me more terrible than these. I have often wanted to use it and have been afraid to, and with the passing of the years the memory became a little vague. But the other day I came across the tale again, told at full length and in its proper historical setting.

It belongs to the time of the five months' siege of Venice by the Austrians, half a century ago now. The story is already passing into oblivion, even among Venetians, but it surely deserves to be revived today. Here it is, word for word:

"The Venetian commanders determined to sever the single link with the mainland, and to blow up the two-and-a-half miles of uniform roading-the work of the oppressors-which bridged the lagoon.

"For some reason the mine did not explode; whereupon a certain Agostino Stefani volunteered to row out in his sandolo and set the matter right.

"General Cosenza accepted the bold offer, and in the face of a double fire from the forts of Malghera and San Giuliano, Agostino set out in his light craft.

"He accomplished his task unscathed, but on the return passage over the wide unsheltered stretch of water, the sandolo was hit and sunk.

"Agostino was a strong swimmer, but the current was against him, and when a patrol boat at length picked him up, he was exhausted beyond power of articulation.

"Excited crowds on the bank watched his rescue, and suddenly, 'A spy! A spy!

A traitor!' was shouted. The reported capture of an Austrian was spread from mouth to mouth. Stones and execrations were hurled at the patrol boat, and suspicion seemed to fly with them and infect the crew, who threw the speechless man back into the water and struck at him with oars and stones.

He sank just before General Cosenza's aide-de-camp proclaimed his identity and told of his heroic courage."

What he must have thought before he sank, poor Agostino, with shouts of "Spione; spione; traditore!" sounding in his ears!

The benefactor of his fellows-a brave soldier if ever there was one- murdered by those he had fought for, and murdered as a spy and a traitor- "Spione! traditore!" ringing as a curse in his death-agony.

CHAPTER XIV

Queen Victoria and Prince edward

It is impossible to paint a complete picture of my time without saying something about Queen Victoria and Prince Edward, afterwards King Edward VII. In the preceding volume I have given some personal anecdotes about him and described how his introduction of cigarette smoking after lunch and dinner, immediately the last course was finished, put an end to the custom of heavy drinking which had been usual till his advent. As soon as the upper classes stopped guzzling, the middle classes followed suit, and ever since the revenue from drink has diminished in Britain in curious proportion to the increase of population.

Prince Edward reaped only a small part of the benefit of this change. He had a reputation for loose living and no one wished to think of him as a reformer.

Some few knew that he had all the social duties of a sovereign to perform and state to keep up on a small income and with no real power.

It was Edward who changed the traditional policy of Great Britain, which was one of friendly alliance with Germany, into a policy of antagonism to Germany and alliance with France. He was the founder of the Entente Cordiale between England and France, and accordingly the first cause, so to speak, of the World War. But in order to exhibit this change of policy in its true light as a complete right-about-face, I must first speak of his mother, Queen Victoria, and describe her influence.

It is difficult to paint a pen portrait of Queen Victoria. First of all, it must be done chiefly from the outside, and secondly, she changed with the years in an astonishing degree. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister of her early life, the guide and mentor of her first decisions as a monarch-in fact, the man who trained her-always spoke of her as eminently teachable and docile.

After she married Albert of Saxe-Gotha, she took her husband as mentor.

Her early English education was swallowed up in a German education. She had learnt German as a girl; but now, out of passionate love for her husband, she spoke nothing but German in her home; read chiefly German; took her ideas from her husband; saw life and men through his eyes. She did not love him merely; she grew to idolize him.

A story is told of her early married life which illustrates her devotion. I cannot say how it originated or who was the authority for it; but it became a tradition, one of those stories which are truer than truth, symbol as well as fact.

The husband and wife did not agree about a certain policy. Victoria, still English, was backed up by the Minister whom she was accustomed to trust: at length she said gently to her husband:

"Don't let's argue, dear. I am Queen; I mean the responsibility is mine. You see, don't you?"

"Yes, I see," said Albert, and left the room quietly.

In half an hour she wanted him and was chilled to hear that he had gone out.

In an hour she sent again; he was still out.

He did not appear at dinner, and the Queen could not even pretend to eat.

Late in the evening she was told he had returned and she waited expectantly; but he kept to his apartment.

At length the Queen could stand it no longer. She went to his room; but the door was locked. She knocked and knocked.

"Albert, Albert!"

"What is it?"

"Oh, let me in; I want to come in."

"I'm sorry, but I've letters to write."

"Let me in, I say; you can do your letters later."

"I want to do them now; please leave me alone."

After begging and begging in vain, the Queen burst into tears.

"Oh, forgive me, I'm so unhappy. I can't bear to quarrel with you. I can't bear it."

That was the literal truth; she could not bear a momentary coldness in the man she worshiped. When two love, the one who loves the least is master; so the Queen became her husband's slave and echo.

Prince Albert's death widowed Victoria-maimed her. For years she found it impossible to take up life without him. Even her duty to her children and the Crown could not draw her from the absorbing anguish of grief; her very reason tottered, for her love was rooted in reverence. Albert was her divinity.

To the very end of her life she bowed to his authority.

And when, after many years, she took up life again without him, she seemed changed to everyone. She met her English ministers and advisers from a different standpoint. She felt herself their superior. She not only knew the English view of matters, but also the German view, and this gave her a singular authority. Her confidence in herself, her dignity, her sense of her own importance grew with the years, till she became authoritative. In every difficulty she was accustomed to ask: "How would he have acted?" It is on record that on more than one occasion she left her minister and went over to a bust of her husband and asked the stone effigy what she was to do.

Such devotion did not seem ridiculous to her, for love is never contemptible.

Besides, there was a great deal of common human nature in her, and it may be well to bring her ordinary qualities first into prominence.

Two stories that can both be vouched for throw, it seems to me, a high light on Queen Victoria's character.

She was a great friend of old Lady Hardwicke's, and used often to go and have tea with her. Lord Hardwicke told me once that as a boy he was very curious to know what the two old ladies talked about, and once listened at the door when the Queen was paying an unusually long visit.

It seems that they had sent for fresh tea for the second time, and the two old ladies had consumed an enormous quantity of muffins. They had been talking about their dead husbands, and when the Queen described how her beloved Albert had looked in his court dress when decked out with the Garter for the first time, she burst into tears. "He was so beautiful," she cried,

"and had such an elegant shape," and Lady Hardwicke sobbed in sympathy.

"They cried in each other's arms," said he, "and went on crying and drinking tea while swapping stories of their dead husbands."

When the Queen got up she wiped her eyes. "My dear," she sobbed, "I have never enjoyed myself more in my lie; a really delightful time-" and Lady Hardwicke mopped her eyes in unison.

"A really delightful time, dear."

When old age came upon her, bringing with it a certain measure of ill health through stoutness, she became irascible and impatient. As a girl even, she was far too broad for her height, and particularly short-necked. In her old age she was very stout, so stout that for ten years before she died, she had to be watched in her sleep continually by one of her women, for fear her head should roll on one side and she should choke, her neck was so short.

There was perpetual scandal in her late middle life about her relations with her Scotch gillie and body servant, John Brown. Even among the officers of her court, there were some who believed in her intimacy with the servant; while there were others equally well informed who would not harbor even a doubt of her virtue.

I remember asking Lord Radnor about it once, who had been in her household for twenty years, and whose daughter had been brought up with

the daughters of Prince Edward, but he would not admit the suspicion, though he told me a curious story of the privileges which John Brown arrogated and the Queen permitted.

On the occasion of a visit from the German Emperor, Lord Radnor had to arrange the reception. He formed up the lords and ladies of the court in two long lines, a sort of lane, in fact, through which the Queen and the German Emperor would pass to the dining-room. Just when he had got everyone in place, John Brown came in and began pushing the lines further back. Lord Radnor told him courteously that he had already arranged the court and that it was all right. John Brown told him he didn't know what he was talking about and pushed him, too, back into the line.

At the moment there was nothing for Lord Radnor to do but submit.

That evening Lord Radnor told the Queen that he had to complain of her servant. The Queen listened impatiently and replied that "It was only John's way; he did not mean any rudeness."

When Lord Radnor insisted that he had been rude, she replied, "You must forgive John. It is his way," adding, with curious naivete, "he is often short with me."

Brown's apartments were always near those of the Queen.

She sometimes sent for him two or three times in the evening. He would always come down, but he often made her wait, and even neglected to address her as "Madame"; he would just put his head in at the door and say,

"Well!" The Queen would say, "I just sent to see if everything was all right."

Brown would not even deign to give a word in reply, but went back to his rooms in silence.

Towards the end of his life she gave him a house and piece of ground in her own park at Balmoral, and when he died she set up his statue in the grounds.

One of the first things the Prince of Wales did when he came to the throne was to ask the relatives of Mr. Brown to take the statue away. It is, I believe, still regarded as a precious heirloom in the Brown clan.

In her later life, Victoria left all the ceremonies of royalty to Prince Edward.

He had to receive for her and fulfill all the social duties of the monarch, but there his power ended; he was a figure-head and nothing more. She hardly ever attended a court and gave scarcely any dinners, except occasional dinners to royal personages, particularly to her nephew the German Emperor, and now and then to some German prince; but to the end she kept in her own hands the reins of government. She did not even consult her son about anything or allow him to have any first-hand knowledge of state affairs.

She judged him almost as severely as the German Emperor judged him later.

She heard of scandals-stories of his relations with women; she regarded him as leicht-lebend-loose, if not dissolute, and there was no weakness she condemned so bitterly. She would never have a divorced woman at her court, and if she received anyone and they afterwards got mixed up in any scandal, she cut out their name relentlessly, even though she had liked them.

Looseness of morals was to her the sin that could never be forgiven.

Queen Victoria had all the intolerance of perfect virtue. People she knew and liked and esteemed tried to get her to forgive Colonel Valentine Baker; pointed out to her how nobly he had acted in not defending himself against the woman who accused him; how he had redeemed his fault, too, by years of high endeavor; how he had shed his blood for the English in Egypt. Nothing could move her. A man should be as pure as a woman, was her creed, and she would tolerate no infringement of it. Her eldest son's lax moral code was a perpetual offense to her.

Up to the very last Queen Victoria was Queen and would brook no interference or advice. Her relations with her ministers for the last thirty years of her life were always on a peculiar footing. She had not only grown more imperious with the years, but wiser. Again and again she had matched her brains with her ministers, and a woman learns rapidly through intercourse with able men; but it was her German husband who had taught her broad-mindedness and given her faith in herself.

This self-confidence grew in the nineties to absurd heights. She wrote several messages to her people which were plain translations from the German.

At a big reception one evening I followed Arthur Balfour up the Starrs and a lady, I think the then Duchess of Sutherland, was chaffing him about the latest Royal message. "Your English," said the lady, "is not so pure as it used to be, my dear Arthur."

"I had nothing to do with it," replied the Prime Minister. "The dear old lady never even showed me the message! I wish she would, but it is difficult now even to hint criticism to her. So I keep quiet; after all it doesn't matter much-"

"Would you like the practice to cease?" I asked him a little later.

"Indeed I should," he answered. "It might lead to an awkward position at almost any time: her ministers are supposed to do these things."

The next week I wrote an article in the Saturday Review, entitled "The Queen's English," in which I set forth how this expression came into vogue as expressing how careful her various ministers had been to put only good English into any document which the Queen was supposed to sign. I went on to say that the good custom was being neglected, and I took certain phrases from the latest messages and showed that the bad English of them was due to the fact that they were literal translations from the German.

Yet Arthur Balfour knew no German and was besides a master of good English: it was evident that the Queen herself had written these messages, a custom which, if persisted in, would soon ruin her reputation as a writer of English. "In fact," I summed up, "the Queen's English is now plainly made in Germany."

The exposure put an end to the practice: always afterwards the Queen used to call her ministers to counsel.

Queen Victoria grew to dislike radicalism through her dislike for Gladstone.

"He speaks at me," she said, "as if I were a public meeting."

She loved Disraeli's deference and courtesy, and when he made her Empress of India he won her heart of hearts.

In the South African War she took the English official point of view very strongly while deploring the necessity, as she regarded it, of war; and when her nephew, the German Emperor, sent his famous telegram to Krueger, she wrote to him with her own hand, declaring that he had acted unjustifiably; rated him, indeed, as if he had been a peccant schoolboy. And when he pleaded that he thought her Majesty's ministers had directed the Jameson raid, the old lady replied by declaring that none of her ministers knew anything about it and scolded him sharply for the assumption.

"You have weakened the principle of royalty," she wrote.

It says a good deal for the Kaiser that he apologized humbly and promised never to offend again in the same way.

From this it will be seen that towards the end of her life Queen Victoria's personal influence in the courts of Europe was extraordinary. She was the oldest reigning sovereign, save the Emperor of Austria, and the most secure.

Everyone outside of England saw that she had immense power, and yet she was supposed to be a constitutional ruler.

Men of the first capacity as English politicians were astonished at her ability.

No two men could have been more unlike than Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Charles Dilke; yet both spoke of Victoria as the ablest woman they had ever known. Still, her influence was injurious. She strengthened English conservatism and it was already far too strong; she did more than any other person to block the wheels of progress. All her influence during the last twenty years of her life was thrown against reform; she loved the established order and the traditional rule of conduct.

Her foreign policy was bounded by the idea of working in perfect harmony with Germany. She distrusted and disliked France and despised the French.

After Fashoda she still passed a couple of months on the French Riviera in the winter, but her relations with the French had been so slight and formal that the difference of feeling between the two races made hardly any impression on her. It was the South African war which got the English thoroughly disliked in France. And the high-handed, not to say, rude way the English acted about Fashoda humiliated French pride and brought the two peoples to the verge of war. I have already told how Rochefort, the greatest of French journalists, wrote in the Intransigeant the bitterest attack on Queen Victoria; he even called her "Cette vieille caleche qui s'obstine a s'appeler Victoria," (That old stage coach which persists in calling itself Victoria.) Prince Edward used to say that he never knew his position till his mother died, and at her death-bed Lord Salisbury spoke to him.

"He had always been cold to me," he said, complainingly, "but when the doctors said, 'The Queen is dead,' Lord Salisbury suddenly altered his tone, his manner, everything. He came to me respectfully; stooped to kiss my hand and hoped that I would believe he would serve me as faithfully as he had tried to serve my mother. I was really touched. Then, for the first time, I realized through his deference what it was to be King of England."

When Edward came to the throne, he brought a new policy into power: so long as Victoria lived, England favored Germany and cold-shouldered France, and the outward visible sign of England's good will was the cession of Heligoland to Germany.

Of course, Lord Salisbury knew nothing of the value of that island; never dreamed that it could be an outpost of attack on England by airships and a fortress to protect the German navy. He was blissfully ignorant of geography and gasped with astonishment when told once that Zanzibar was an island.

But he had served Victoria loyally, and up to the very end of her reign it looked as if the understanding between the two Teutonic peoples was certain to endure for at least another century.

In 1889, when I first knew him, Prince Edward was a typical German in appearance, about five feet eight in height, very heavily built, with dark brown hair and full whiskers, beard and moustache. He was already very stout; but instead of trying to get rid of his fat, or to keep it within bounds, he was much more concerned to conceal it. The trait is characteristic. He dressed with extreme care, and always with the idea that he had a figure.

Consequently, his clothes were always a little too tight, and thus drew attention to his rotundity. As is usually the case, his vanity did him harm.

His love of good living and childish self-esteem were his most obvious qualities; they went hand in hand with good humor and a certain bonhomie which everyone noticed in him. When threatened by old age, he tried from time to time to diminish his drinking, believing that too much liquid was the cause of his obesity: but he could never be persuaded to cut down his eating.

Foolish proverbs, enshrining the stupidity of the past, governed him, or were used by him as justification: "Bread is the staff of life… good food never hurt any one," commonplaces appealing to him irresistibly.

The Prince had had every advantage of both German and English training.

He spoke English however, with a strong German accent, and continually used bad English through translating literally from the German. In the same way, his French was fairly fluent so long as he kept to the commonplaces of conversation; but as soon as he had to express some unfamiliar thought he was hopelessly at sea, and then his baragouinage was that of a South German. Curiously enough, his accent in French and in English was rather like a Bavarian, with an indefinable tang of the Jew. I don't put forward the usual scandalous explanation; I merely note the fact.

The Prince's sensualism was as round as his figure, as full-blooded as his body.

He gambled whenever he could because of the pleasure it gave him; he smoked incessantly, though the cigarettes plagued him with smoker's cough; but till Nemesis came with the years-ill health and indigestion from want of exercise or from over-eating, which you will-he was generally good humored and kindly disposed: un ban vivant, as the French say.

Like the average man, he delighted in popularity. He could not help believing that all desired and sought it, and if they failed, it was because of some shortcoming in them. He could not imagine that anyone would hold himself above the arts which lead to popular applause. When he drove through London, bowing and smiling to cheering crowds, he took it all as a triumph of personal achievement, a final and complete apotheosis.

Edward had all the aristocrat's tastes. He loved horse-racing, was gregarious, hated to be alone, preferred a game of cards to any conversation; in fact, he only talked freely when he went to the opera, where, perhaps, he ought to have been silent. He was a gambler, too, as English aristocrats are gamblers, and his love for cards often got him into difficulties. It has been said by a bitter but keen sighted observer: "King Edward was loved by the English because he had all the aristocratic vices, whereas King George is disliked by them because he has all the middle class virtues."

Early in the nineties I was struck by the story of Father Damien. There was an echo of the heroic self-sacrifice of St. Paul and the early Christian martyrs in his self-abnegation.

A simple Belgian monk, he had begged to be sent to the South Sea lepers. He made the choice in the spring of lusty manhood, knowing that he would never see his home and his loved ones again, in the full conviction that he, too, must catch the loathsome malady and die piecemeal, rotting for years, and praying in the end for death as a release.

At luncheon one day I happened to have the Vyners: Mrs. Vyner, an intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, was an extraordinary woman; Bob Vyner, her husband, was simply a very rich Yorkshire squire. Mrs. Vyner, without being good-looking, had an extraordinary charm of manner. I remember once saying to her daughter, Lady Alwynne Compton: "You know, Lady Alwynne, after talking to your mother for some time, one feels a sort of ultimate sympathy with her, almost as though it were love."

"The curious part of it is," said Lady Alwynne, "that she is in love with you for the time being; she's extraordinarily sympathetic."

At this luncheon I declared that modern science should turn the sacrifice of Father Damien into a triumph by forming a fund to study leprosy and discover a cure.

"The only worthy memorial to him," I said, "would be to make his selfsacrifice final by eliminating the foul disease from the world."

Mrs. Vyner questioned me closely after lunch and then persuaded me that I should call on Prince Edward and ask him to take the initiative. "I'll speak to the Prince," she said, "and you'll see that he'll take fire at your idea; he's really a good man and eager to help every noble cause."

A day or two afterwards I got a letter from Prince Edward, asking me to come to Marlborough House and explain my scheme about Damien. I went and found Sir Francis Knollys, the Prince's secretary. I told him I wanted to get up a committee and form a fund, to be called the Damien Fund, to make an end of leprosy in memory of the great hearted man who had given his life for the lepers. "Modern doctors," I said, "will be able to find the microbe of leprosy in six months and so cure the disease." Knollys finally agreed with me and made an appointment with the Prince for the afternoon. When Edward saw me he burst out: "I could hardly believe it was you, Harris! Your naughty stories are wonderful; but what have you to do with leprosy and a fund to cure it?"

"It could be done so easily, Sir," I began. "I'm sure if you'll lend your great influence to the cause, it can be made successful in a year, and one of the vilest diseases that afflict humanity can be done away with."

"All right," cried the Prince. "I'll back you up in every way: see Knollys here and arrange the plan of campaign. I'm with you heartily. We'll have the meetings here." I thanked him cordially for his support.

The chief persons in the kingdom were put on the committee: the preliminaries were settled by Sir Francis Knollys and myself, and a large fund raised. But alas! In spite of all my efforts to keep at least one lay member on the working committee, the whole executive power fell into the hands of the doctors, who each had his own fad to air and his own personality to advertise.

Our first meeting at Marlborough House was a huge success. All the first men in England came to the meeting and some twenty thousand pounds were subscribed in the first half hour. "What should I give?" asked the Duke of Norfolk.

"You must remember," I said, "that as the first Catholic in the realm, your gift will certainly not be surpassed; the more you give, the more others will give."

He gave two thousand pounds, I believe.

While the doctors were disputing in private, strange rumors came to London from the leper settlement in Hawaii. It was said that Father Damien's leprosy had been contracted through his carnal love for some of the female lepers.

The wretched story was contradicted, but the slander was too tasty a morsel to be rejected. The Prince sent for me hot-foot. I found him in a state of great excitement in Marlborough House.

"Here's a pretty kettle of fish!" he cried. "Of course it's not your fault, but this Father Damien must have been a nice person. Fancy choosing lepers-eh? It gives one a shiver. I suppose it's human nature; propinquity, eh?" and he laughed. "We must change the name of our fund, though; what shall we call it?"

"Why change, Sir?" I asked. "That would be to condemn Damien without a trial. I don't believe a word of the vile story."

"Whether you believe it or not," cried the Prince impatiently, "everyone else believes it, and that's the thing I have to consider. Such stories are always believed, and I can't afford to be laughed at like they laugh at Damien. I don't want to be taken for a fool; surely you see that. We may believe what we please, but I have to consider public opinion."

"As you please, Sir," I said, realizing for the first time that in these democratic days Princes, even, are under the hoof of the ignorant despot called opinion.

"The name can be changed. "The Leprosy Fund' is as distinctive a title as 'The Father Damien Fund,' but I regret your decision."

"Oh, come," he exclaimed, restored to complete good humor by my submission. "The Leprosy Fund' is excellent. Tell Knollys, will you, that we have changed the title, and take all steps to make it widely known! We must be worldmen, men of the world, I mean, and accept opinion and not be peculiar. It's always foolish to be peculiar; you get laughed at," and so he ran on, expounding his cheap philosophy, the philosophy of the average man and of the street. Fancy a Prince afraid to be peculiar. No wonder Edward was popular; he was always eager to pay the price popularity demands.

The doctors chosen to investigate were appointed by the head of the College of Surgeons, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, and the head of the College of Physicians, whose name I forget. But Sir Jonathan Hutchinson took the chief part in the appointments and he was notorious for his belief that leprosy came from the eating of stale fish. This was the theory when he was a youth and studied medicine. It had been completely disproved by the experiments of the Norwegians, who had established the best school and hospital for leprosy in modern Europe, but Sir Jonathan knew nothing of modern research on the subject and insisted on appointing someone who believed or pretended to believe in the stale fish theory. Consequently, the commissioners went to India and returned without achieving anything. They would have been infinitely better advised if they had gone to Norway and profited by the experiments of the Norwegian investigators.

I wanted to use the fund to send two young men to Norway and two to the leper settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and two more to Calcutta, to study leprosy in all its phases and try to find a cure for it; whereas each of the great doctors had a new theory and a new method to propose. One declared that it was purely contagious; another believed that like syphilis, it could only be propagated through an abrasion of the outer cuticle: not one of them knew anything about the modern researches; they were all full of the conclusions they had formed on the subject after an hour's reading when they were students-one could tell the textbook each of them had used.

I had already noticed that Sir Andrew Clarke and the other notable medical authorities were opposed to me and my ideas. But they didn't trouble me greatly, as no two of them agreed on any policy. On one point however, they were all at one: as I was not a properly qualified doctor I could know nothing of leprosy, though I had really spent more time on it than all of them put together, and had studied the latest works on it in three or four languages. I found it hopeless to dispute with the doctors, and as soon as the name of the fund was changed I resigned my position as secretary and washed my hands of the whole business, though the Prince and Knollys requested me very kindly to reconsider my decision.

The single experience had taught me several good lessons. For one thing, I began to see the weakness of patronage in England. The Prince could only act in any case through the nominal heads of the profession concerned, and the great London doctors knew nothing about leprosy and cared less. I was convinced that no good would come of the inquiry as directed by them.

Progress in science is only made by disinterested, able investigators: one thing was certain; if the money had been subscribed in Germany or in France, a far better use would have been made of it.

In spite of the comparative failure of the scheme, it made the Prince of Wales like me better, and certainly turned Sir Francis Knollys, who was nominally the head of the Prince's household and his most trusted adviser, into a really close friend. When I got to know him I found that he was a lineal descendant of the Sir Francis Knollys, who was the Chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth's Court and made himself a little ridiculous when well advanced in years by falling in love with Mistress Mary Fitton, Shakespeare's love, "the dark lady of the Sonnets," and the mistress of young Lord Pembroke, Shakespeare's patron and friend.

I felt sure this old Sir Francis Knollys was the prototype of Shakespeare's Polonius, and I could give a dozen reasons for my belief.

One day I detailed them to Sir Francis Knollys, who was delighted with the identification, a little to my surprise, for Polonius does not cut a heroic figure in Hamlet. I learned to like Knollys with heart and head: he was not only kindly and fair-minded, but absolutely loyal to his friends, and more than anything else I appreciated that loyalty in London, where everybody seems inclined to run his friend down and depreciate even good ideas and unselfish endeavor.

Snobbery is the religion of England. I had always regarded Edmund Yates, owner and editor of the weekly paper, The World, as a friend of mine, and I had taken care to have him asked to the meetings of the Damien Committee, but now he came out with a long article in The World, declaring that I had jumped from Father Damien's shoulders through the window of Marlborough House-the whole article a mere sweat of envy. I never laid any stress on the fact that Prince Edward was kind to me. But to Edmund Yates, who pretended to be my friend, my little social success was much more important than my writing or my friendship. The incident only confirmed my growing belief that most men give themselves much more readily to hatred than to love.

The reasons why the Prince disliked Germany, in spite of his German upbringing, have never yet been told in print. Nevertheless, they are interesting and show how petty slights and foolish misunderstandings may help to cause the greatest wars and deluge Europe with blood.

For many years Prince Edward had been an ardent admirer of Germany and most German institutions.

After the German Emperor began to take up yacht-racing there was a dinner at Cowes, in the early nineties, at which Prince Edward declared that there was no such enviable position in all the world as that of the German Emperor.

"He is the greatest influence in the world," he declared, "for good or evil.

Whatever he does is accepted and copied. All his subjects now are taking up yacht-racing because he wishes it and he'll do great things yet, you'll see: to be German Emperor is to be a god on earth."

But when the Kaiser visited England frequently the glamor disappeared and the real difference in the nature of the two men became apparent.

The uncle was prepared to look up to the nephew who wore the crown, but he was not content to be treated with contempt. On the other hand it was perfectly plain that the German Emperor regarded Prince Edward as a fat elderly person who sacrificed the dignity and serious purposes of manhood to the vices and amusements of youth.

I was once at a dinner at Osborne toward the end of Victoria's life which tells the whole story.

By the wish of Victoria the German Emperor was treated with special reverence. The famous gold dinner service even was brought from Windsor to Osborne to do him honor. The Queen would have had even the weather regulated to suit the convenience of her beloved grandson.

The kinship and likeness between grandmother and grandson were extraordinary. They both had the same serious view of life and the same conventional view of morals. All through the dinner the Queen spoke to no one except the German Emperor, who was on her right. There was scarcely any conversation among the other diners.

Occasionally Prince Edward, who sat opposite the Kaiser, ventured a remark, but neither of the sovereigns paid much attention to him.

Grandmother and grandson talked together in excellent German in a low tone at the head of the table, and it took a very bold spirit among the rank and file of the guests even to whisper to his neighbor. The Prince, who sat opposite the German Emperor, was evidently ill at ease; his usual bonhomie was blighted. As the meal drew to an end he fidgeted about, looking the picture of discomfort.

Suddenly the Queen got up to go. Everybody stood up and the German Emperor and the Prince accompanied her to the door. When the Queen disappeared there was a sigh of relief. The ice was broken. The air of constraint vanished; every one began to talk. Prince Edward was all smiles.

The German Emperor walked back to the table and took his seat again still in profound thought. As Prince Edward seated himself, he asked the Emperor, with a smile, to take the head of the table. The Kaiser did not appear even to hear him, but with clouded brow appeared to be in deep thought: suddenly he pushed back his chair, got up and went hastily out of the room after the Queen, without a word to the Prince, leaving the whole assembly gasping.

Prince Edward flushed; the slight was manifest. He so far forgot himself for the moment as to exclaim: "German manners, I suppose," then went on talking as usual; but the table remained in expectancy; there was a certain embarrassment in the air; the dinner was a failure.

From that time on Prince Edward stood, not with the German Emperor, but opposed to him, and in private did not hesitate to criticize his manners and his want of consideration for others. In fine, he began to look for his nephew's faults and not for his qualities.

A wit at the time summed the whole matter up in the phrase that has more truth than humor in it: "Morals and manners are always at daggers drawn." It was certainly the brainless rudeness of the German Emperor that first made the breach.

When Edward succeeded to the throne, the ever-widening breach became apparent to every one. The German Emperor was not run after nor his visits solicited. When he came to England, he would stay with Lord Lonsdale or some other friend, but there was no public reception; he came and went unheralded and unwelcomed so far as the court was concerned.

Edward's early experiences as king almost forced him to take a new attitude towards affairs. The Queen had died in the early part of the South African war. King Edward hated the war-was liberal-minded enough to feel that war in one of her colonies was not likely to do England any good; he shared, too, the common feeling that the German Emperor was giving the Boers at least moral support. Every setback in the field made the King more determined to put an end to the war, and as soon as Pretoria was taken and President Krueger had fled the country, he used all his influence to bring about peace, peace at almost any price.

It will be remembered that peace was made possible at length by the promise of England to give three million pounds to the Boers to rebuild the farm houses that Lord Kitchener had burnt down. That this proposal of Botha's was accepted was due to King Edward's personal intervention. With the common sense of a man of the world, he saw that fifteen million dollars was a flea bite, not worth talking about. More, as he said, would be spent in a week's war. It was absurd to haggle over such a sum.

As soon as peace was established, everyone felt grateful to the King for having divined the unconscious wishes of his people. He was put on a pedestal; many persons remembered that he had broken the habit of drink in England, and now he had brought about peace in South Africa; almost everyone began to hope that the kindly, good-natured man of the world might be a better ruler than his all too severe and moral mother.

If there was one thing King Edward appreciated and knew all about, it was popular opinion. He soon saw that he had won the confidence of earnest and serious people and at once began to take himself seriously. Everything he did had turned out to be right; why should he not assume the initiative in politics? Not only did he leave the Kaiser uninvited, but he paid a visit to Paris-a state visit-and so pleased the great body of English Liberal opinion, which naturally preferred democratic France to imperial Germany.

Then in 1905 he invited the French fleet to Cowes and gave the French admiral and his officers a great banquet at the Royal Yacht Squadron Club when the Entente Cordiale was confirmed.

The great banquet that followed in the Guildhall only ratified the agreement, and when Admiral Caillard, driving through London, took off his hat to the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square, amid a cheering crowd, everyone felt that at length the two peoples were united in heart and in purpose.

In 1906 French officers from the General Staff came across to London and in consultation with the British military authorities fixed on the place in the north of France where the British army was to assemble if the Germans invaded France. From that time on there was a complete military understanding between the two peoples.

One little incident, as yet unrecorded, did a good deal to change King Edward's dislike of the Kaiser into contempt. It was rumored in London that the Kaiser had fallen in love with a lovely Italian: soon the report became clear and detailed; the lady was a fair, if not a super-subtle, Venetian, the Countess M… Whenever the Kaiser went to Italy he met her and spent some time with her. The scandal delighted King Edward. Eagerly he asked anyone who might know:

"Is it true? Do you know her? Is she really lovely? Are they devoted to each other?"

Question on question.

"Well, Sir," came the reply, "it is true at least that the Kaiser visits her whenever he can, spends every moment of free time with her: it is true that countless photographs of him all autographed are all over her rooms; and… "

"Tell me," cried King Edward, "is he taken in uniform or in mufti?"

"In both, Sir," was the reply.

"Then he loves her," was the King's comment. "It is true. Oh, those moralists; they are always the worst…" and he laughed delightedly.

This discovery increased his self-assurance in the most extraordinary degree; he began to speak of himself as a diplomat, and French nobles, like the Marquis de Breteuil, and French politicians of all kinds flattered and praised him to the top of his bent.

Many streams added volume to the great current: the King's personal preference for the French over the Germans was the most obvious force; then came the influence of liberal England; but the main river was the individual rivalry of Germany, now challenging England in the most vital way.

Early in King Edward's reign people began to notice that the production of German steel was exceeding that of English steel; that German industries were competing on an even footing in neutral markets with English industries-beginning, indeed, to oust the English products from one market after another.

Experts went to visit Germany and came back praising German methods and German education; bodies of workingmen returned to eulogize German state socialism. Statesmanship, as understood in England, could not follow the rising tide of rivalry with approval. The Entente Cordiale with France was confirmed in form, and hardly had British politicians arrived at an understanding with Delcasse when the possibility of war with Germany was mooted.

Each year saw the bonds uniting England to France strengthened. The German Kaiser's visit to Morocco fanned the embers of suspicion, dislike and trade-jealousy to a flame. What had the Germans to do in Morocco? Why did the French stand it? The English press began asking: "Isn't it about time that we taught the Germans their place?"

The storm clouds blew over, but a year or two later came the visit of the German cruiser Panther to Agadir, and everyone saw that events were ripening to a catastrophe. The Prune Minister of France, Monsieur Caillaux, told Sir Edward Grey that he would break off negotiations with Germany without ceremony if Sir Edward Grey would assure him of British support in case of war. Sir Edward Grey recommended him to wait, declared that England would support France in case France was attacked, but begged him to let the occasion be a German aggression. "We must carry the opinion of neutral nations with us," he said again and again, and finally, "Wait; the time is not yet ripe."

When Monsieur Caillaux consulted his Russian allies, they answered still more plainly that Russia was not ready-had not yet recovered from the war with Japan. But all the while the storm clouds grew heavier-the ill feeling between the peoples more pronounced.

King Edward never saw the storm break that he had done so much to conjure up, but after his death forces he had set in motion went on acting, and when Russia was ready the storm burst.

CHAPTER XV

Prince Edward

I have omitted one or two incidents in the chapter on Prince Edward which I think I must relate now. When I was giving up my position on the Damien Fund Committee, which had become the Leprosy Fund, the Prince said, "I find you too serious, Harris. What I really want are some more of your naughty stories; why not come up and dine tomorrow night and tell me some?"

Of course I went and told him a round dozen of humorous stories which he had never heard before and which amused him infinitely, whether they were old or new: I only remember one or two in particular. I told him the old chestnut about the first time the Prince de Joinville met the famous actress Rachel: he passed her his card after writing on it: "Quand? Ou? Combien?" (When? Where? How much?) Rachel replied: "Ce soir; Chez moi; Rien." (This evening; my house; nothing.) To my astonishment, Prince Edward liked it so much that he tried to memorize it.

The second was better. There is a story told in New York of the friendship between an Englishman and an American who were out together one day on Long Island: they came upon a pretty girl fishing in a very, very shallow little brook.

"What are you fishing for there?" exclaimed the Englishman, "There are no fish in that shallow brook; what can you hope to catch?"

She swung round on the rock she was sitting on and said cheekily: "Perhaps a man."

"In that case," laughed the American, "you shouldn't sit on the bait."

The girl tossed her head, evidently not appreciating the freedom; and the pair went away. Half an hour later the Englishman burst out laughing. "I didn't see your joke at first," he said.

"Joke?" said the American; "it was pretty plain."

"I didn't think so," said the Englishman. "How could you know she had worms?"

I remember telling the Prince of the gormandizing habits of the English city folk and of the smells made at the Lord Mayor's banquet, corrupting the whole atmosphere of the great hall. He laughed but said it was a pity to tell anything against one's own country; he would rather forget it. And the story of Fowler, the famous Lord Mayor who made it impossible for Lady Marriott, at her own table, to sit out the dinner, seemed to him appalling. He hoped I would never mention it. "We should forget what's unpleasant in life," was his guiding rule.

"But sir," I said, "there are similar instances in France, though they are treated more lightly."

"Really?" he asked in some excitement. "Tell me one."

"There is a story told," I said, "of Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, who was supposed to be one of the wittiest men of his time. He was at dinner once with a lady who made a peculiar little noise and then proceeded to shuffle with her feet on the parquet so as to cover the indiscretion with similar sounds.

"'Oh, Madame,' said the witty Bishop, 'please don't trouble to find a rhyme; it is not important.' "

The Prince laughed but did not prize the witty word at its real worth.

There are two stories about the Prince himself which are really funnier and which should find a place here.

For several years in London he was really in love with a lady who had a title and who was extremely pretty and on his own level in love of life and humor.

He asked her to meet him after the theatre one night and had borrowed the house of his aide-de-camp, a Mr. T. W. The aide-de-camp, in giving him the key, told him that supper would be laid out and that all the servants would be sent away so that he might feel completely at ease. The lady had said she could only make herself free after the opera; and after the opera she drove to Mr. T. W.'s house and found the Prince fishing in the gutter: he had dropped the key and couldn't find it again.

The lady had driven up in a hansom, and she finally persuaded the Prince to get in with her and drive about for an hour or so; at the end of the drive, he took her to the corner of the square in which she lived; they both got down, and the Prince handed the cabby a shilling. Immediately the cabby hopped off his box in wild wrath crying, "What's this? What's the bloomin' bob for?"

The Prince said, "Your fare, my man!"

"Fare," cried the cabby, "for two hours driving and ten miles!"

The lady, having seized the situation, took out her purse hastily and gave the cabby two sovereigns.

When he saw that the pieces were gold, his manner changed. "Thank you, mum," said he, "thank you kindly. I know'd you was a lady as soon as I seed you. But where did you pick 'im up?"

No one was so delighted with this story as the Prince, who told it with huge gusto. I give the story as an exemplification of the extraordinary ignorance of common things shown by some of the privileged. The Prince told me that he had always heard that a shilling was the price paid to cabmen, and he thought that was the cabman's fare, for two hours' work.

The other story is perhaps a little more risky. A later flame of the Prince, when he became King, had a very pretty daughter about thirteen. The Prince, calling one day, happened to see the pretty girl and spoke enthusiastically about her to the mother. The mother said she would go and bring her in; and she went out and told her daughter that she was going to present her to the King and she must be very careful not to offend him in any way. "If he wants to kiss you, let him kiss you," she said. "What does it matter?"

In a few moments she brought the beschooled child in and presented her to the King and he began talking to the girl; the mother made some excuse and went out of the room. A quarter of an hour later she came back and found the girl alone: the King had left. "Well, what happened?" she asked.

"Nothing," said the girl. "I don't like him much, he paws one about so."

"Did he kiss you?" said the mother.

"Oh yes," replied the girl, "he kissed me; he put his hands on me; pulled me down and made me sit on his knee; he said I was beautiful and charming; I tried to smile, but I don't care much for him-fat old man-he looked at me so funnily."

"But why did he go away?" the mother asked.

"I don't know," said the girl. "He suddenly put me down and got up saying, 'Oh, I'm coming,' and hurried out of the room; but, mother he hasn't come yet!"

"That's all right," said the lady, "you have been a very good girl."

This incident was supposed to be the reason why the lady received over a hundred thousand pounds from the King.

I must tell another story to show him in a better light. A certain banker's wife who had been a great friend of the Prince's got into difficulties. Her husband's bank was on the point of failing, and the husband told his wife that she would have to ask the Prince for the five hundred thousand pounds which had been advanced to him; so she wrote to the Prince, begging him to come and see her.

He came, and she told him all that had happened and her dreadful difficulty.

"Don't you distress yourself," he said. "Of course I will get the money at once.

If my friend Baron Hirsch calls, please see him: I think he will make it right."

The next day Baron Hirsch called and saw the lady and said he wanted to give her a cheque for five hundred thousand pounds, plus interest. When she thanked him, he said, "If you would receive me sometimes and regard me as a friend, I would write this cheque for a million just to make the figures round, you know, as you say in England."

Every woman is inclined to prefer round figures and so the lady smiled and was delighted, and the cheque was made out for a million.

When the lady told me the story, she added: "The Prince, you know, is really good and kind: he called two or three days afterwards to ask me to tell my husband how much he had been helped by the loan and to assure me that if he could do anything for me at any tune, he would be eager to do it. He is a great gentleman."

There was a Mr. X of good position in London in the nineties, who made himself conspicuous by his devotion to the Prince's wife. People said all sorts of things and hinted at worse, but the association was strictly platonic: everyone knew that the Princess was impeccable, a heroine after Tennyson's model:

Faultily faultless, perfectly regular, icily fair.

Those who knew asserted that as a signal favor he was now and then permitted to hold the Princess' hand while extolling the loveliness of nature.

But for some reason or other, perhaps from the uneasy sense of dignity which everyone ascribed to him, the Prince rather resented the way his wife's name was coupled with that of Mr. X.

At Wadhurst once the Prince and Mr. X were both present at a garden party.

The day was perfect, the park lovely. In the great tent, equipped with small tables, a most perfect luncheon was served. Afterwards a Spanish girl danced, as only a Spaniard can dance, with satanic vigor and impudence, spiced with provocative glance and bold gesture. She was applauded and encored again and again and was followed by an Indian nautch girl, whose challenge was not of spirit and defiant gesture, but of yielding and languor and deliberate revealing of round limb and lithe grace of form.

Everything that day seemed perfect. It would have been hard to imagine a better luncheon or more lovely surroundings, and the hostess had brought just the people together who suited each other. The Spanish dancer broke up the English restraint and set pulses beating; the nautch girl deepened the note. As usual in England, the loosening of bonds led to innocent fun: a pretty girl took a scarf and gave an astonishing imitation of Alma; another, I think a daughter of the house, forthwith beat the gitana, dancing with infinite spirit and go; everyone was standing in groups, talking, chattering, laughing. The footmen had cleared away the tables almost as silently as spirits; the Prince was the center of a gay circle.

Suddenly someone threw an orange at a friend; it was caught and returned like lightning, thrown and returned again, but this time badly aimed, it struck the Prince on the shoulder. He turned around, his smile gone, picked up the orange and then dashed it at Mr. X, who was standing opposite to him and could not possibly have been the guilty one.

The insult was so plainly intentional that Mr. X started forward as if to avenge it when one of the men standing by caught him, whirled him round and led him immediately out of the tent.

But the Prince had marked the gesture and was so infuriated that he exclaimed:

"That man must leave the house or I shall," and he went in search of his hostess.

The Marchesa sought to pacify him; but he held to his resolve and the hostess had nothing to do but tell Mr. X of the Prince's decision. He behaved perfectly.

"I'm so sorry, Marchesa," he exclaimed, "but really if I offended, it was quite involuntarily. I hope you know I would do nothing consciously in your house that you would object to. I've already packed and will get up to London by the evening train.

"Now, please don't fash yourself. It'll all blow over and I am, as always, infinitely indebted to you for having allowed me to come."

He was so handsome and so submissive that he quite won his hostess, who always afterwards took his part.

I do not give this as a proof that the Prince was jealous. He had no reason to be and he knew it, though like most loose livers he was inclined to be suspicious and did not believe much in any virtue. Still of his wife he felt perfectly sure.

He often used to say that she was perfect save for one fault, and that annoyed him beyond measure.

The Princess was always late-incurably unpunctual, and the Prince, believing that "punctuality is the politeness of princes," loved to be exact to the minute; used to boast that he was never late in his life.

When they were going to any function he was always ready ahead of time and ten minutes before the start would send up to the Princess to warn her.

The reply would come back, "I shall be ready dear." But she never was ready.

The hour would strike. The gentlemen-in-waiting would all be on the qui vive. The Prince would grow impatient and send up again. Reassuring answers would be returned, but no Princess. The Prince would fume and fret and threaten to go on alone and finally, twenty minutes late, the Princess would sail in with her stereotyped smile and amiable manners, as if unconscious of anything wrong. But the Prince could never forgive the perpetual waiting. He often said it was like a pea in one's boot-intolerable.

And when annoyed by waiting he sometimes criticized her bitterly; one day he was told she was dressing her hair and would be down soon. As the maid disappeared he cried: "Hair indeed; she has no more hair than her brother and he's as bald as an oyster." Another time I praised her smile. "Yes," replied the Prince, "her smile's the best part of her fortune; it has made her popular and it is easy for her to smile for she can hear nothing: she's as deaf as a post."

Some English aristocrats could never forgive Edward's loose morals. There was a certain Duke who would not meet the Prince, even when he had invited himself to dine with the Duchess. "Is the Duke really ill?" I asked his wife on one such occasion. "Dear no!" she replied. "He's locked in the w.c. on the third floor, with a novel, and will not appear till the Prince has gone. We all say he's ill."

When he was on the Riviera, Edward usually lived at Cannes. Mrs. Vyner, who was the queen of the English colony there, had always been one of his special favorites. And no one wondered at it, for Mrs. Vyner had the genius of charming, sympathetic manners. He disliked the Prince of Monaco, who was serious and a friend of the German Emperor, whom he loathed. Yet he frequently ran over to Monte Carlo to have a fling at the tables, and at one visit there he met Lady Brougham in one of the gambling rooms. As every one knows, she had a lovely villa at Cannes, and in fact her husband's father was the person who really brought Cannes into notice and made it the favorite winter resort of the best English set.

Lady Brougham was a delightfully pretty and vivacious woman, always beautifully gowned and up-to-date in the sense that she would be furious if the date were not tomorrow rather than yesterday. Her husband was a large, heavy, pompous person with unfeigned reverence for what he regarded as principles, which were usually mere conventions: he took himself seriously; I always thought of him as a sort of English Chadband. When Prince Edward met Lady Brougham that evening in the rooms of Monte Carlo, he said to her after a few moments' talk, "Dear Lady Brougham, I should like to dine with you next Sunday evening. May I?"

"How kind of you," exclaimed the lady. "We should be only too proud."

"All right," he said, "I will write you," meaning he would send her a list of people he would wish to meet him, "and we'll have a little game of 'bac' afterwards, eh?"

Lady Brougham professed herself delighted and they parted. As soon as she could find him, she told Lord Brougham the Prince was going to dine with them on the next Sunday, but when she mentioned the little "bac" afterwards, Lord Brougham put down his large flat foot decisively.

"I cannot have any gambling in my house on Sunday; it is against my principles."

"Nonsense," cried his wife, "don't be disagreeable; your principles are only bearishness."

"No, no," he said, and his long upper lip came down and his jaws set in the way she had learned thoroughly to dislike. "I draw the line at gambling on Sunday nights. I cannot allow it."

He stuck to his guns till at last his wife, unnerved and disgusted, cried, "Then you must tell the Prince so yourself, for I won't, and then we shall never be on his 'list.' I think it is beastly of you."

The pompous person went off nevertheless to beard the Prince. When the Prince saw him, he cried in his German accent, "Oh, Lord Brougham, I have just met your charming wife and she was good enough to say I might dine with you next Sunday."

"Surely, Sir," replied Lord Brougham, bowing, "we would be delighted, but my wife tells me that you want to play baccarat afterwards. It will be Sunday, Sir."

"Does that make any difference?" asked the Prince.

"Yes," said Lord Brougham, blurting out the unpleasant truth, "it is against my principles to have gambling in my house on Sunday."

The Prince looked at him quietly. "I am very sorry, Lord Brougham; in that case there will not be any 'bac.' I shall write to Lady Brougham. I would not hurt your principles for anything."

"I hope, Sir," began Lord Brougham, again pompously, but the Prince bowed slightly and turned away. He had had enough of the large gentleman's principles.

Next morning Lady Brougham received a little note from him which ran thus:

Dear Lady Brougham:

I am sorry but I shall not be able to dine with you on Sunday next as I must really go to Mentone to pay a duty visit.

I hope I have caused you no inconvenience. I should hate to do that for you are always charming to me.

Yours sincerely,

Edward.

"There," said the lady, flouncing into her husband's room about twelve o'clock next day, "that is what comes of your silly principles. I wish all your principles were at the bottom of the sea. They make life not worth living."

But Lord Brougham was full of self-content till he found that a good many people who gave zest to life did not care to meet him after they had heard the story; in fact, he began to wish that his principles had not been so rigid when it was too late, for one peculiarity of Edward was that he never forgot or forgave a slight to his dignity. His vanity was at least as imperious as Lord Brougham's principles. From that time to the day of his death he never dined in the Villa Eleonore.

Edward was most generous and kindly so long as things went in accord with his wishes. At a reception by the Vyners one night, the Prince walked up and down the room with his arm on my shoulder while I told him one or two new stories. Suddenly I said to him, "You know, Sir, I mustn't accept any more of your kind invitations as commands because I must get to work; I must withdraw from all this London life and try to make myself a writer."

"A little gaiety will do you good from time to time," he replied.

"No, Sir," I said. "Please believe what I say; I must get to work."

He seemed huffed, greatly put out. "You are the first," he said, "who ever spoke to me like that."

"It's my necessity, Sir," I said, "that drives me to work. I shall always be proud of your kindness to me."

"A strange way of showing it," he said, and turned away.

Once later at Monte Carlo I was talking to Madame Tosti, the wife of the well know London musician, when the Prince came directly across the room to speak to us. I don't know why, but I felt sure he meant to be rude to me, so I took the bull by the horns and copied Beau Brummel's famous word to King George. "Now I leave you," I said to the lady, "to your stout friend." And I turned away, but I could see that the Prince was furious.

I must end these stories of the Prince with the wittiest thing I had ever said.

One night he went to the house of the Duchess of Buccleuch, whose husband didn't like him because he thought him a loose liver. The Prince was in extraordinarily good form and won everyone-really found a kindly and appropriate word for twenty or thirty people, one after the other. I told him his success had been as astonishing as Caesar's at the battle of Zela, when he afterwards wrote to his friend Amantius, "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered). "Of course," I went on, "that's not what Caesar really said; what he really said was, 'I saw, I conquered, and-I came!'" The Prince laughed heartily. "You are incorrigible," he said. So I was encouraged to tell him the famous witticism of Degas. Some one spoke condemning Minette or Muni, as it is often called in French, meaning the kissing of the woman's sex. Degas replied with the old saying: "Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous preparez!" (What a dreary old age you are making for yourself!) The Prince pretended not to understand what I meant, and when it was explained, thought the practice unmanly.

To atone, I told him another story which pleased him a little more. A married woman took her young sister of twelve for the first time to the theatre. The child sat entranced, though the play was a poor melodrama to the third act, when the hero asks the heroine to marry him: she will not; again he asks her and she refuses. "If you refuse again," he cried, "I'll make you my paramour!"

At once the little cockney girl exclaimed, "'Ark at the swine!"

Then I told him another story which pleased him better. "At the end of one of my lectures in New York," I began, "a man in the audience rose and evidently as a joke said:

"'The lecturer spoke of "virgin" once or twice; would he be kind enough to tell us just what he means by "virgin"?' "'Certainly,' I replied, 'the meaning is plain; "vir," as everyone knows, is Latin for a man, while "gin" is good old English for a trap; virgin is therefore a mantrap.' "Everyone laughed and a lady in the hall rose and kept up the game.

"'I believed,' she said, 'that all traps were usually open and afterwards closed, while the reverse seems to be the case with the mantrap.' "The laughter grew and finally a man got up: 'I have another objection,' he said. 'Traps are always easy to enter and hard to get out of, whereas this trap is hard to enter and easy to get out of.' "

The Prince, laughing, said, "You made those two answers up, Harris, I'm sure."

"I give you my word," I replied, "that the definition was all I invented."

Content

Frank Harris
My life and loves Vol. 3

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

565 CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV