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Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar

Wilde, Edited by Robert Ross

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Title: Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde

with a Preface by Robert Ross

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release Date: March 22, 2005 [eBook #1338]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED PROSE OF OSCAR

WILDE***

Transcribed from the 1914 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email

ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

SELECTED PROSE OF OSCAR WILDE

Contents:

Preface by Robert Ross

How They Struck a Contemporary

The Quality of George Meredith

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Life in the Fallacious Model

Life the Disciple

Life the Plagiarist

The Indispensable East

The Influence of the Impressionists on Climate

An Exposure to Naturalism

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright

Wainewright at Hobart Town

Cardinal Newman and the Autobiographers

Robert Browning

The Two Supreme and Highest Arts

The Secrets of Immortality

The Critic and his Material

Dante the Living Guide

The Limitations of Genius

Wanted A New Background

Without Frontiers

The Poetry of Archaeology

The Art of Archaeology

Herod Suppliant

The Tetrarch's Remorse

The Tetrarch's Treasure

Salome anticipates Dr. Strauss

The Young King

A Coronation

The King of Spain

A Bull Fight

The Throne Room

A Protected Country

The Blackmailing of the Emperor

Covent Garden

A Letter from Miss Jane Percy to her Aunt

The Triumph of American 'Humor'

The Garden of Death

An Eton Kit-cat

Mrs. Erlynne Exercises the Prerogative of a Grandmother

Motherhood more than Marriage

The Damnable Ideal

From a Rejected Prize-essay

The Possibilities of the Useful

The Artist

The Doer of Good

The Disciple

The Master

The House of Judgment

The Teacher of Wisdom

Wilde gives directions about 'De Profundis'

Carey Street

Sorrow wears no mask

Vita Nuova

The Grand Romantic

Clapham Junction

The Broken Resolution

Domesticity at Berneval

A visit to the Pope

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DEDICATION

This anthology is dedicated to Michael Lykiardopulos as a little token of

his services to English Literature in the great Russian Empire.

PREFACE

With the possible exceptions of the Greek Anthology, the "Golden

Treasury" and those which bear the name of E. V. Lucas, no selections of

poetry or prose have ever given complete satisfaction to anyone except

the compiler. But critics derive great satisfaction from pointing out

errors of omission and inclusion on the part of the anthologist, and all

of us have putatively re-arranged and re-edited even the "Golden

Treasury" in our leisure moments. In an age when "Art for Art's sake" is

an exploded doctrine, anthologies, like everything else, must have a

purpose. The purpose or object of the present volume is to afford

admirers of Wilde's work the same innocent pleasure obtainable from

similar compilations, namely that of reconstructing a selection of their

own in their mind's eye--for copyright considerations would interfere

with the materialisation of their dream.

A stray observation in an esteemed weekly periodical determined the plan

of this anthology and the choice of particular passages. The writer,

whose name has escaped me, opined that the reason the works of Pater and

Wilde were no longer read was owing to both authors having treated

English as a dead language. By a singular coincidence I had purchased

simultaneously with the newspaper a shilling copy of Pater's

"Renaissance," published by Messrs. Macmillan; and a few days afterwards

Messrs. Methuen issued at a shilling the twenty-eighth edition of "De

Profundis." Obviously either Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Methuen or

the authority on dead languages must have been suffering from

hallucinations. It occurred to me that a selection of Wilde's prose

might at least rehabilitate the notorious reputation for common sense

enjoyed by all publishers, who rarely issue shilling editions of deceased

authors for mere aesthetic considerations. And I confess to a hope that

this volume may reach the eye or ear of those who have not read Wilde's

books, or of those, such as Mr. Sydney Grundy, who are irritated by the

revival of his plays and the praise accorded to his works throughout the

Continent.

Wilde's prose is distinguished by its extraordinary ease and clarity, and

by the absence--very singular in his case--of the preciosity which he

admired too much in other writers, and advocated with over-emphasis.

Perhaps that is why many of his stories and essays and plays are used as

English text-books in Russian and Scandinavian and Hungarian schools.

Artifice and affectation, often assumed to be recurrent defects in his

writings by those unacquainted with them, are comparatively rare. Wilde

once boasted in an interview that only Flaubert, Pater, Keats, and

Maeterlinck had influenced him, and then added in a characteristic way:

"But I had already gone more than half-way to meet them." Anyone curious

as to the origin of Wilde's style and development should consult the

learned treatise {1} of Dr. Ernst Bendz, whose comprehensive treatment of

the subject renders any elucidation of mine superfluous; while nothing

can be added to Mr. Holbrook Jackson's masterly criticism {2} of Wilde

and his position in literature.

In making this selection, with the valuable assistance of Mr. Stuart

Mason, I have endeavoured to illustrate and to justify the critical

appreciations of both Dr. Bendz and Mr. Holbrook Jackson, as well as to

afford the general reader a fair idea of Wilde's variety as a prose

writer. He is more various than almost any author of the last century,

though the act of writing was always a burden to him. Some critic

acutely pointed out that poetry and prose were almost side-issues for

him. The resulting faults and weakness of what he left are obvious.

Except in the plays he has no sustained scheme of thought. Even "De

Profundis" is too desultory.

For the purpose of convenient reference I have exercised the prerogative

of a literary executor and editor by endowing with special titles some of

the pieces quoted in these pages. Though unlike one of Wilde's other

friends I cannot claim to have collaborated with him or to have assisted

him in any of his plays, I was sometimes permitted, as Wilde acknowledges

in different letters, to act in the capacity of godfather by suggesting

the actual titles by which some of his books are known to the world. I

mention the circumstance only as a precedent for my present temerity. To

compensate those who disapprove of my choice, I have included two

unpublished letters. The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, published

since his death, have been generally associated with disagreeable

subjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast.

ROBERT ROSS

HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make

it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so inartistic as not to contain a

single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll

reads dangerously like an experiment out of the _Lancet_. As for Mr.

Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly

magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that

when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a

personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of

cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon

mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style,

his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it

is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his

voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn

is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts

down the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. As

one turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almost

unbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar

towards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent

chromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants take

refuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-

tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. Marion

Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He is

like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel

d'Italie." Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral

platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, and

that to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. _Robert

Elsmere_ is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genre

ennuyeux," the one form of literature that the English people seems

thoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that

it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in

the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it.

Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. England

is the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing school

of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the only

thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leave

it raw.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH

Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by

flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except

language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an

artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in

Shakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is always

breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might

serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he

is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of

realism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberate

choice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the knee

to Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt

against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite

sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means

he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with

wonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of

the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he

bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The

difference between such a book as M. Zola's _L'Assommoir_ and Balzac's

_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism and

imaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'are

gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his

fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded

to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.' A steady

course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our

acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of

fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism.

One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de

Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to

rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when

I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created

life, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high a

value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of

his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbo_ or

_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte de

Bragelonne_.--_The Decay of Lying_.

LIFE THE FALLACIOUS MODEL

Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and

pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is

the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and

asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of

her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is

absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps

between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style,

of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the

upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true

decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.

Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks

Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she

enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms,

she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more

terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than

lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods,

who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.

To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language

full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence,

or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and

enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment

and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its

marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and

with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river

to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.

History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the

dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple

truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself

is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit

of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare

we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual

breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominance

given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation.

The passages in Shakespeare--and they are many--where the language is

uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due

to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the

intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be

suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless

artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's

natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative

medium she surrenders everything.--_The Decay of Lying_.

LIFE THE DISCIPLE

We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and

fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative

painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view

or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's

dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened

shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of

'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the

'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and

lithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.' And it has always been

so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to

reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither

Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They

brought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty

set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their

quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamber

the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely

as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They

knew that Life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought

and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on

the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of

Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection

to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that

it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try

to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free

sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better

housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health,

they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true

disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who

become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or

pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only

pupil.--_The Decay of Lying_.

LIFE THE PLAGIARIST

I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had

any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, but

that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess

who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the

companion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what became

of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after

the appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of the lady

with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in

society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely by Mrs.

Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to

the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other

gambling places. The noble gentleman from whom the same great

sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _The

Newcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word 'Adsum' on his

lips. Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychological

story of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the

north of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took what

he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in a

network of mean, evil-looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he began

to walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right

between his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, and

trampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and a little

hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was full

of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants. They

surrounded him, and asked him his name. He was just about to give it

when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson's

story. He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person

that terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally,

though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate

intent, that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was, however, very

closely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door of

which happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, who

happened to be there, exactly what had occurred. The humanitarian crowd

were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and as

soon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out, the name on the

brass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was 'Jekyll.' At

least it should have been.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THE INDISPENSABLE EAST

What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those

arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts

in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its

frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its

dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own

imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in

Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe

by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative

work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic

conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned

for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our

work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern

tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad

expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty

whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We

are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we

have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets

of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane

worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have

become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured

Mahomedan once remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in

misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of

making an artistic application of the second." He was perfectly right,

and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art

in is not Life but Art.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON CLIMATE

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown

fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and

changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and

their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our

river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying

barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of

London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school

of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a

metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what

is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our

creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are

because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the

Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from

seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see

fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have

taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have

been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one

saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist

till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried

to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the

exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where

the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so, let us

be humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has

done so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now

in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet

shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces it

quite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she

gives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros. Indeed there are

moments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time,

when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be

relied upon. The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Art

creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on

to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation

can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect

until we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any real

culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset.

Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was

the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism

of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.--_The Decay of Lying_.

AN EXPOSURE OF NATURALISM

After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various

styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists. Surely

you don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance

at all to the figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone

and wood carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or

illuminated MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with

nothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The

Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style,

and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be

produced in the nineteenth century. No great artist ever sees things as

they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an

example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things.

Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are

presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never

understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate

self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a

picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters,

beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not

the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in

Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say,

they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary

about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no

such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming

painters {3} went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the

foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance

of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to

discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs.

Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the

Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite

fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will

not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will

stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists,

and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught

their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in

the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely

Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or, to return again

to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think

that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you

believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures

of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in

the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the

art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes,

for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore

high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their

faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of

our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through

the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the

truth.--_The Decay of Lying_.

THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies.

In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself

'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death' for having been

unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the

British Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now

passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complained

bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of

reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own,

having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was,

had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase,

was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personality

is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law

solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is,

however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was

inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the

prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across

him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searching

for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of

Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but

Macready was 'horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in

former years, and at whose table he had dined.'

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of

fashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their old

literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom

Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,

and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after

all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: 'Sir, you City men enter on

your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your

speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours

happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my

visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have

succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the

position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is

the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take

his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer

and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friend

reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his

shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very

thick ankles.'--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_.

WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN

His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started

a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his

conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he

give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in

which he tried to make away with people who had offended him. But his

hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete

failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian

society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir

John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of

himself as being 'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and

realisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of the

exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.' His request,

however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself by

making those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only known

to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living

companion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinary

affection.

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave

a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work

certainly lacked. In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentions

that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, who

held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young

lady from his clever brush; and it is said that 'he had contrived to put

the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind-

hearted girl.' M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young man

who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish

impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which

bear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr.

Wainewright's style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can

fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.--_Pen, Pencil and

Poison_.

CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS

In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in

the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert

and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it,

and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and

do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having

confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant

nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the

green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows

the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given

it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme

scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his

shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter

very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or

a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own

secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to

silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented--if that

can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual

problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot,

I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that

troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely

church at Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, and

worshippers are few,' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the

yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of

that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's sure recurrence a

prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his

days--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to

be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible.--_The Critic as

Artist_.

ROBERT BROWNING

Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not belong to the Olympians,

and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and it

was but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred by struggle,

violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from

thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker,

and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking

aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the

processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what

the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was

as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did

the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or

looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that

exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its

own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not

merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of

thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a

fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of

sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in

vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme,

the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert

Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him

masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with

his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by

monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the

strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no

Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory

horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he

was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from

it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since

Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could

stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and

speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the

pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks

still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul with

the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is

there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben

Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in

the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard

face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white

satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous

eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as

he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go

down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a

poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,

as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had.

His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not

answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what

more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator

of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been

articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the

hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and

so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.--_The

Critic as Artist_.

THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS

Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The

principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise

in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the

latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can

hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that

which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated

the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material

of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of

reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying,

for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a

modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say,

with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they

were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the

fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower

classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to

appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is

really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek

to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even

the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of

English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of

mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the

true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect

that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a

definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate

design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a

method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its

musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear

the critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness

might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving

to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing

less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul,

but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,

repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the

secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged

with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his

blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poet

owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later

verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing.--_The Critic

as Artist_.

THE SECRETS OF IMMORTALITY

On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green

bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the

empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on

the wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text], as Homer calls it,

copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the

Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits in

his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet, every

morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-

drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and mock their enemies

from behind their iron masks. All day long the fight rages, and when

night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in the

hall. Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but a

single exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited to

one note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes live

have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of

pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddening

pageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them.

They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they grow

old. It is always dawn for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the

window. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of

God's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from

her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers

of Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon made

so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip into

the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers of

the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the

dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In

eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose

tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread

on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the

labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from

evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the

shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the

flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as

Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue

is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the

canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know

nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets

of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of

time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and

can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that

problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.

It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in

its unrest.--_The Critic as Artist_.

THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What

does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so

fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic

music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and

epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful

sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's

Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because

its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety

of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not

through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely

and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with

lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and

with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the

greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the

portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? The

painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have

fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the

Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in

that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I

murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like

the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the

grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day

about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,

as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of

Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,

and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing

lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my

friend, 'The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is

expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to

desire'; and he answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of

the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and

reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the

music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-

player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and

poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any

one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the

world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to

refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the

lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition

and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the

Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none

of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain

arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious

colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that

the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It

treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It

does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so for the moment--to

discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.

And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing

is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in

his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the

beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and

sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital

portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of

what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.--_The Critic as

Artist_.

DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE

There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who

have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are

going to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say to

ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through

the valley of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the

obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the

gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the

horror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces

and their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive

them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh,

and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the withered branches from

the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig

bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Out

of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of

flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the

torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple

air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin,

and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body

into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner

of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry

and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of

clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine

hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites him in

the face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and

loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by

giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store

for us, and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart.

We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat

through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When we

hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the

bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in

which traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes against the

head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in

handfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice

upon his face that he may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, and

when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have

spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who

more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws of

Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the

men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the

stars.--_The Critic as Artist_.

THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art does

not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is

universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so far

from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really

great artist can never judge of other people's work at all, and can

hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision

that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of

fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his

own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around

him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise their

worshippers. That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in _Endymion_ merely a

pretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, was

deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, that

great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the

poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was

hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.

Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his

sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare,

any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists

always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and

free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life

being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those

that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within

its own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge

of it.--_The Critic as Artist_.

WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND

He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new

background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.

The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As

one turns over the pages of his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels

as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of

vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The

jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their

surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd

journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of

literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the

point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than

any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr.

Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority

on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and

his backgrounds are real works of art. As for the second condition, we

have had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to

be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that

fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has

never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the

soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are

stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have

dreamed of, who, like the author of _Le Rouge et le Noir_, have sought to

track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its

dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried

backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit

of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it

seeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think that

creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural an

impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at

the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter

of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for the

mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does

not grow less as the world advances. There was never a time when

Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that

Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.--_The

Critic as Artist_.

WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Goethe--you will not misunderstand what I say--was a German of the

Germans. He loved his country--no man more so. Its people were dear to

him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon

vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songs

of hatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, to

whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which

is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a

part of my own cultivation?' This note, sounded in the modern world by

Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the

cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate

race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the

variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation,

we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own

culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is

regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is

looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will of

course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it. They will not

say 'We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,' but

because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.

Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than

those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us

the peace that springs from understanding.--_The Critic as Artist_.

THE POETRY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way

came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia,

daughter of Claudius.' On opening the coffer they found within its

marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age,

preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time.

Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling

gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet

departed. Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a

new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at

the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the

secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's rough

and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night,

and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the

less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the

antique world. Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the

antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of

antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new

wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn. From the

pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar,' and the

service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit

can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--the arts

of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in the great

Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts

of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the

citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that

chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so

important that large prints were made of them and published--a fact which

is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such

kind.--_The Truth of Masks_.

THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some

form of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious

scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is

of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same

mythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory,

however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic

among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of

Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his

'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology

beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most

vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of

actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth

century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio

also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress

of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the

amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. At

the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two

thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century

was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_.

Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of

Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well

illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the

hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their

knowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased

commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic

missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various

forms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, for

instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of

Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the

strange attire of their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps too

often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came

envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an

important influence on English costume.--_The Truth of Masks_.

HEROD SUPPLIANT

Non, non, vous ne voulez pas cela. Vous me dites cela seulement pour me

faire de la peine, parce que je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree.

Eh! bien, oui. Je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree. Votre

beaute m'a trouble. Votre beaute m'a terriblement trouble, et je vous ai

trop regardee. Mais je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut regarder ni les

choses ni les personnes. Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car

les miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques . . . Oh! Oh! du vin! j'ai

soif . . . Salome, Salome, soyons amis. Enfin, voyez . . . Qu'est-ce que

je voulais dire? Qu'est-ce que c'etait? Ah! je m'en souviens! . . .

Salome! Non, venez plus pres de moi. J'ai peur que vous ne m'entendiez

pas . . . Salome, vous connaissez mes paons blancs, mes beaux paons

blancs, qui se promenent dans le jardin entre les myrtes et les grands

cypres. Leurs becs sont dores, et les grains qu'ils mangent sont dores

aussi, et leurs pieds sont teints de pourpre. La pluie vient quand ils

crient, et quand ils se pavanent la lune se montre au ciel. Ils vont

deux a deux entre les cypres et les myrtes noirs et chacun a son esclave

pour le soigner. Quelquefois ils volent a travers les arbres, et

quelquefois ils couchent sur le gazon et autour de l'etang. Il n'y a pas

dans le monde d'oiseaux si merveilleux. Il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui

possede des oiseaux aussi merveilleux. Je suis sur que meme Cesar ne

possede pas d'oiseaux aussi beaux. Eh bien! je vous donnerai cinquante

de mes paons. Ils vous suivront partout, et au milieu d'eux vous serez

comme la lune dans un grand nuage blanc . . . Je vous les donnerai tous.

Je n'en ai que cent, et il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui possede des paons

comme les miens, mais je vous les donnerai tous. Seulement, il faut me

delier de ma parole et ne pas me demander ce que vous m'avez

demande.--_Salome_.

THE TETRARCH'S REMORSE

Salome, pensez a ce que vous faites. Cet homme vient peut-etre de Dieu.

Je suis sur qu'il vient de Dieu. C'est un saint homme. Le doigt de Dieu

l'a touche. Dieu a mis dans sa bouche des mots terribles. Dans le

palais, comme dans le desert, Dieu est toujours avec lui . . . Au moins,

c'est possible. On ne sait pas, mais il est possible que Dieu soit pour

lui et avec lui. Aussi peut-etre que s'il mourrait, il m'arriverait un

malheur. Enfin, il a dit que le jour ou il mourrait il arriverait un

malheur a quelqu'un. Ce ne peut etre qu'a moi. Souvenez-vous, j'ai

glisse dans le sang quand je suis entre ici. Aussi j'ai entendu un

battement d'ailes dans l'air, un battement d'ailes gigantesques. Ce sont

de tres mauvais presages. Et il y en avait d'autres. Je suis sur qu'il

y en avait d'autres, quoique je ne les aie pas vus. Eh bien! Salome,

vous ne voulez pas qu'un malheur m'arrive? Vous ne voulez pas

cela.--_Salome_.

THE TETRARCH'S TREASURE

Moi, je suis tres calme. Je suis tout a fait calme. Ecoutez. J'ai des

bijoux caches ici que meme votre mere n'a jamais vus, des bijoux tout a

fait extraordinaires. J'ai un collier de perles a quatre rangs. On

dirait des lunes enchainees de rayons d'argent. On dirait cinquante

lunes captives dans un filet d'or. Une reine l'a porte sur l'ivoire de

ses seins. Toi, quand tu le porteras, tu seras aussi belle qu'une reine.

J'ai des amethystes de deux especes. Une qui est noire comme le vin.

L'autre qui est rouge comme du vin qu'on a colore avec de l'eau. J'ai

des topazes jaunes comme les yeux des tigres, et des topazes roses comme

les yeux des pigeons, et des topazes vertes comme les yeux des chats.

J'ai des opales qui brulent toujours avec une flamme qui est tres froide,

des opales qui attristent les esprits et ont peur des tenebres. J'ai des

onyx semblables aux prunelles d'une morte. J'ai des selenites qui

changent quand la lune change et deviennent pales quand elles voient le

soleil. J'ai des saphirs grands comme des oeufs et bleus comme des

fleurs bleues. La mer erre dedans, et la lune ne vient jamais troubler

le bleu de ses flots. J'ai des chrysolithes et des beryls, j'ai des

chrysoprases et des rubis, j'ai des sardonyx et des hyacinthes, et des

calcedoines et je vous les donnerai tous, mais tous, et j'ajouterai

d'autres choses. Le roi des Indes vient justement de m'envoyer quatre

eventails faits de plumes de perroquets, et le roi de Numidie une robe

faite de plumes d'autruche. J'ai un cristal qu'il n'est pas permis aux

femmes de voir et que meme les jeunes hommes ne doivent regarder qu'apres

avoir ete flagelles de verges. Dans un coffret de nacre j'ai trois

turquoises merveilleuses. Quand on les porte sur le front on peut

imaginer des choses qui n'existent pas, et quand on les porte dans la

main on peut rendre les femmes steriles. Ce sont des tresors de grande

valeur. Ce sont des tresors sans prix. Et ce n'est pas tout. Dans un

coffret d'ebene j'ai deux coupes d'ambre qui ressemblent a des pommes

d'or. Si un ennemi verse du poison dans ces coupes elles deviennent

comme des pommes d'argent. Dans un coffret incruste d'ambre j'ai des

sandales incrustees de verre. J'ai des manteaux qui viennent du pays des

Seres et des bracelets garnis d'escarboucles et de jade qui viennent de

la ville d'Euphrate. . . Enfin, que veux-tu, Salome? Dis-moi ce que tu

desires et je te le donnerai. Je te donnerai tout ce que tu demanderas,

sauf une chose. Je te donnerai tout ce que je possede, sauf une vie. Je

te donnerai le manteau du grand pretre. Je te donnerai le voile du

sanctuaire.--_Salome_.

SALOME ANTICIPATES DR. STRAUSS

Ah! tu n'as pas voulu me laisser baiser ta bouche, Iokanaan. Eh bien! je

la baiserai maintenant. Je la mordrai avec mes dents comme on mord un

fruit mur. Oui, je baiserai ta bouche, Iokanaan. Je te l'ai dit, n'est-

ce pas? je te l'ai dit. Eh bien! je la baiserai maintenant . . . Mais

pourquoi ne me regardes-tu pas, Iokanaan? Tes yeux qui etaient si

terribles, qui etaient si pleins de colere et de mepris, ils sont fermes

maintenant. Pourquoi sont-ils fermes? Ouvre tes yeux! Souleve tes

paupieres, Iokanaan. Pourquoi ne me regardes-tu pas? As-tu peur de moi,

Iokanaan, que tu ne veux pas me regarder? . . . Et ta langue qui etait

comme un serpent rouge dardant des poisons, elle ne remue plus, elle ne

dit rien maintenant, Iokanaan, cette vipere rouge qui a vomi son venin

sur moi. C'est etrange, n'est-ce pas? Comment se fait-il que la vipere

rouge ne remue plus? . . . Tu n'as pas voulu de moi, Iokanaan. Tu m'as

rejetee. Tu m'as dit des choses infames. Tu m'as traitee comme une

courtisane, comme une prostituee, moi, Salome, fille d'Herodias,

Princesse de Judee! Eh bien, Iokanaan, moi je vis encore, mais toi tu es

mort et ta tete m'appartient. Je puis en faire ce que je veux. Je puis

la jeter aux chiens et aux oiseaux de l'air. Ce que laisseront les

chiens, les oiseaux de l'air le mangeront . . . Ah! Iokanaan, Iokanaan,

tu as ete le seul homme que j'ai aime. Tous les autres hommes

m'inspirent du degout. Mais, toi, tu etais beau. Ton corps etait une

colonne d'ivoire sur un socle d'argent. C'etait un jardin plein de

colombes et de lis d'argent. C'etait une tour d'argent ornee de

boucliers d'ivoire. Il n'y avait rien au monde d'aussi blanc que ton

corps. Il n'y avait rien au monde d'aussi noir que tes cheveux. Dans le

monde tout entier il n'y avait rien d'aussi rouge que ta bouche. Ta voix

etait un encensoir qui repandait d'etranges parfums, et quand je te

regardais j'entendais une musique etrange! Ah! pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas

regardee, Iokanaan? Derriere tes mains et tes blasphemes tu as cache ton

visage. Tu as mis sur tes yeux le bandeau de celui qui veut voir son

Dieu. Eh bien, tu l'as vu, ton Dieu, Iokanaan, mais moi, moi . . . tu ne

m'as jamais vue. Si tu m'avais vue, tu m'aurais aimee. Moi, je t'ai vu,

Iokanaan, et je t'ai aime. Oh! comme je t'ai aime. Je t'aime encore,

Iokanaan. Je n'aime que toi . . . J'ai soif de ta beaute. J'ai faim de

ton corps. Et ni le vin, ni les fruits ne peuvent apaiser mon desir. Que

ferai-je, Iokanaan, maintenant? Ni les fleuves ni les grandes eaux, ne

pourraient eteindre ma passion. J'etais une Princesse, tu m'as

dedaignee. J'etais une vierge, tu m'as defloree. J'etais chaste, tu as

rempli mes veines de feu . . . Ah! Ah! pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas regardee,

Iokanaan? Si tu m'avais regardee tu m'aurais aimee. Je sais bien que tu

m'aurais aimee, et le mystere de l'amour est plus grand que le mystere de

la mort. Il ne faut regarder que l'amour.--_Salome_.

THE YOUNG KING

All rare and costly materials had certainly a great fascination for him,

and in his eagerness to procure them he had sent away many merchants,

some to traffic for amber with the rough fisher-folk of the north seas,

some to Egypt to look for that curious green turquoise which is found

only in the tombs of kings, and is said to possess magical properties,

some to Persia for silken carpets and painted pottery, and others to

India to buy gauze and stained ivory, moonstones and bracelets of jade,

sandal-wood and blue enamel and shawls of fine wool.

But what had occupied him most was the robe he was to wear at his

coronation, the robe of tissued gold, and the ruby-studded crown, and the

sceptre with its rows and rings of pearls. Indeed, it was of this that

he was thinking to-night, as he lay back on his luxurious couch, watching

the great pinewood log that was burning itself out on the open hearth.

The designs, which were from the hands of the most famous artists of the

time, had been submitted to him many months before, and he had given

orders that the artificers were to toil night and day to carry them out,

and that the whole world was to be searched for jewels that would be

worthy of their work. He saw himself in fancy standing at the high altar

of the cathedral in the fair raiment of a King, and a smile played and

lingered about his boyish lips, and lit up with a bright lustre his dark

woodland eyes.

After some time he rose from his seat, and leaning against the carved

penthouse of the chimney, looked round at the dimly-lit room. The walls

were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A

large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and

facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels

of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets

of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were

broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from

the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the

velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like

white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing

Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the

table stood a flat bowl of amethyst.

Outside he could see the huge dome of the cathedral, looming like a

bubble over the shadowy houses, and the weary sentinels pacing up and

down on the misty terrace by the river. Far away, in an orchard, a

nightingale was singing. A faint perfume of jasmine came through the

open window. He brushed his brown curls back from his forehead, and

taking up a lute, let his fingers stray across the cords. His heavy

eyelids drooped, and a strange languor came over him. Never before had

he felt so keenly, or with such exquisite joy, the magic and the mystery

of beautiful things.

When midnight sounded from the clock-tower he touched a bell, and his

pages entered and disrobed him with much ceremony, pouring rose-water

over his hands, and strewing flowers on his pillow. A few moments after

that they had left the room, he fell asleep.--_The Young King_.

A CORONATION

And when the Bishop had heard them he knit his brows, and said, 'My son,

I am an old man, and in the winter of my days, and I know that many evil

things are done in the wide world. The fierce robbers come down from the

mountains, and carry off the little children, and sell them to the Moors.

The lions lie in wait for the caravans, and leap upon the camels. The

wild boar roots up the corn in the valley, and the foxes gnaw the vines

upon the hill. The pirates lay waste the sea-coast and burn the ships of

the fishermen, and take their nets from them. In the salt-marshes live

the lepers; they have houses of wattled reeds, and none may come nigh

them. The beggars wander through the cities, and eat their food with the

dogs. Canst thou make these things not to be? Wilt thou take the leper

for thy bedfellow, and set the beggar at thy board? Shall the lion do

thy bidding, and the wild boar obey thee? Is not He who made misery

wiser than thou art? Wherefore I praise thee not for this that thou hast

done, but I bid thee ride back to the Palace and make thy face glad, and

put on the raiment that beseemeth a king, and with the crown of gold I

will crown thee, and the sceptre of pearl will I place in thy hand. And

as for thy dreams, think no more of them. The burden of this world is

too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one

heart to suffer.'

'Sayest thou that in this house?' said the young King, and he strode past

the Bishop, and climbed up the steps of the altar, and stood before the

image of Christ.

He stood before the image of Christ, and on his right hand and on his

left were the marvellous vessels of gold, the chalice with the yellow

wine, and the vial with the holy oil. He knelt before the image of

Christ, and the great candles burned brightly by the jewelled shrine, and

the smoke of the incense curled in thin blue wreaths through the dome. He

bowed his head in prayer, and the priests in their stiff copes crept away

from the altar.

And suddenly a wild tumult came from the street outside, and in entered

the nobles with drawn swords and nodding plumes, and shields of polished

steel. 'Where is this dreamer of dreams?' they cried. 'Where is this

King who is apparelled like a beggar--this boy who brings shame upon our

state? Surely we will slay him, for he is unworthy to rule over us.'

And the young King bowed his head again, and prayed, and when he had

finished his prayer he rose up, and turning round he looked at them

sadly.

And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him,

and the sun-beams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than the

robe that had been fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed,

and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed,

and bare roses that were redder than rubies. Whiter than fine pearls

were the lilies, and their stems were of bright silver. Redder than male

rubies were the roses, and their leaves were of beaten gold.

He stood there in the raiment of a king, and the gates of the jewelled

shrine flew open, and from the crystal of the many-rayed monstrance shone

a marvellous and mystical light. He stood there in a king's raiment, and

the Glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their carven niches

seemed to move. In the fair raiment of a king he stood before them, and

the organ pealed out its music, and the trumpeters blew upon their

trumpets, and the singing boys sang.

And the people fell upon their knees in awe, and the nobles sheathed

their swords and did homage, and the Bishop's face grew pale, and his

hands trembled. 'A greater than I hath crowned thee,' he cried, and he

knelt before him.

And the young King came down from the high altar, and passed home through

the midst of the people. But no man dared look upon his face, for it was

like the face of an angel.--_The Young King_.

THE KING OF SPAIN

From a window in the palace the sad melancholy King watched them. Behind

him stood his brother, Don Pedro of Aragon, whom he hated, and his

confessor, the Grand Inquisitor of Granada, sat by his side. Sadder even

than usual was the King, for as he looked at the Infanta bowing with

childish gravity to the assembling counters, or laughing behind her fan

at the grim Duchess of Albuquerque who always accompanied her, he thought

of the young Queen, her mother, who but a short time before--so it seemed

to him--had come from the gay country of France, and had withered away in

the sombre splendour of the Spanish court, dying just six months after

the birth of her child, and before she had seen the almonds blossom twice

in the orchard, or plucked the second year's fruit from the old gnarled

fig-tree that stood in the centre of the now grass-grown courtyard. So

great had been his love for her that he had not suffered even the grave

to hide her from him. She had been embalmed by a Moorish physician, who

in return for this service had been granted his life, which for heresy

and suspicion of magical practices had been already forfeited, men said,

to the Holy Office, and her body was still lying on its tapestried bier

in the black marble chapel of the Palace, just as the monks had borne her

in on that windy March day nearly twelve years before. Once every month

the King, wrapped in a dark cloak and with a muffled lantern in his hand,

went in and knelt by her side calling out, '_Mi reina_! _Mi reina_!' and

sometimes breaking through the formal etiquette that in Spain governs

every separate action of life, and sets limits even to the sorrow of a

King, he would clutch at the pale jewelled hands in a wild agony of

grief, and try to wake by his mad kisses the cold painted face.

To-day he seemed to see her again, as he had seen her first at the Castle

of Fontainebleau, when he was but fifteen years of age, and she still

younger. They had been formally betrothed on that occasion by the Papal

Nuncio in the presence of the French King and all the Court, and he had

returned to the Escurial bearing with him a little ringlet of yellow

hair, and the memory of two childish lips bending down to kiss his hand

as he stepped into his carriage. Later on had followed the marriage,

hastily performed at Burgos, a small town on the frontier between the two

countries, and the grand public entry into Madrid with the customary

celebration of high mass at the Church of La Atocha, and a more than

usually solemn _auto-da-fe_, in which nearly three hundred heretics,

amongst whom were many Englishmen, had been delivered over to the secular

arm to be burned.

Certainly he had loved her madly, and to the ruin, many thought, of his

country, then at war with England for the possession of the empire of the

New World. He had hardly ever permitted her to be out of his sight; for

her, he had forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten, all grave affairs of

State; and, with that terrible blindness that passion brings upon its

servants, he had failed to notice that the elaborate ceremonies by which

he sought to please her did but aggravate the strange malady from which

she suffered. When she died he was, for a time, like one bereft of

reason. Indeed, there is no doubt but that he would have formally

abdicated and retired to the great Trappist monastery at Granada, of

which he was already titular Prior, had he not been afraid to leave the

little Infanta at the mercy of his brother, whose cruelty, even in Spain,

was notorious, and who was suspected by many of having caused the Queen's

death by means of a pair of poisoned gloves that he had presented to her

on the occasion of her visiting his castle in Aragon. Even after the

expiration of the three years of public mourning that he had ordained

throughout his whole dominions by royal edict, he would never suffer his

ministers to speak about any new alliance, and when the Emperor himself

sent to him, and offered him the hand of the lovely Archduchess of

Bohemia, his niece, in marriage, he bade the ambassadors tell their

master that the King of Spain was already wedded to Sorrow, and that

though she was but a barren bride he loved her better than Beauty; an

answer that cost his crown the rich provinces of the Netherlands, which

soon after, at the Emperor's instigation, revolted against him under the

leadership of some fanatics of the Reformed Church.--_The Birthday of the

Infranta_.

A BULL FIGHT

A procession of noble boys, fantastically dressed as _toreadors_, came

out to meet her, and the young Count of Tierra-Nueva, a wonderfully

handsome lad of about fourteen years of age, uncovering his head with all

the grace of a born hidalgo and grandee of Spain, led her solemnly in to

a little gilt and ivory chair that was placed on a raised dais above the

arena. The children grouped themselves all round, fluttering their big

fans and whispering to each other, and Don Pedro and the Grand Inquisitor

stood laughing at the entrance. Even the Duchess--the Camerera-Mayor as

she was called--a thin, hard-featured woman with a yellow ruff, did not

look quite so bad-tempered as usual, and something like a chill smile

flitted across her wrinkled face and twitched her thin bloodless lips.

It certainly was a marvellous bull-fight, and much nicer, the Infanta

thought, than the real bull-fight that she had been brought to see at

Seville, on the occasion of the visit of the Duke of Parma to her father.

Some of the boys pranced about on richly-caparisoned hobby-horses

brandishing long javelins with gay streamers of bright ribands attached

to them; others went on foot waving their scarlet cloaks before the bull,

and vaulting lightly over the barrier when he charged them; and as for

the bull himself, he was just like a live bull, though he was only made

of wicker-work and stretched hide, and sometimes insisted on running

round the arena on his hind legs, which no live bull ever dreams of

doing. He made a splendid fight of it too, and the children got so

excited that they stood up upon the benches, and waved their lace

handkerchiefs and cried out: _Bravo toro_! _Bravo toro_! just as

sensibly as if they had been grown-up people. At last, however, after a

prolonged combat, during which several of the hobby-horses were gored

through and through, and, their riders dismounted, the young Count of

Tierra-Nueva brought the bull to his knees, and having obtained

permission from the Infanta to give the _coup de grace_, he plunged his

wooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the head

came right off, and disclosed the laughing face of little Monsieur de

Lorraine, the son of the French Ambassador at Madrid.

The arena was then cleared amidst much applause, and the dead

hobby-horses dragged solemnly away by two Moorish pages in yellow and

black liveries, and after a short interlude, during which a French

posture-master performed upon the tightrope, some Italian puppets

appeared in the semi-classical tragedy of _Sophonisba_ on the stage of a

small theatre that had been built up for the purpose. They acted so

well, and their gestures were so extremely natural, that at the close of

the play the eyes of the Infanta were quite dim with tears. Indeed some

of the children really cried, and had to be comforted with sweetmeats,

and the Grand Inquisitor himself was so affected that he could not help

saying to Don Pedro that it seemed to him intolerable that things made

simply out of wood and coloured wax, and worked mechanically by wires,

should be so unhappy and meet with such terrible misfortunes.--_The

Birthday of the Infanta_.

THE THRONE ROOM

It was a throne-room, used for the reception of foreign ambassadors, when

the King, which of late had not been often, consented to give them a

personal audience; the same room in which, many years before, envoys had

appeared from England to make arrangements for the marriage of their

Queen, then one of the Catholic sovereigns of Europe, with the Emperor's

eldest son. The hangings were of gilt Cordovan leather, and a heavy gilt

chandelier with branches for three hundred wax lights hung down from the

black and white ceiling. Underneath a great canopy of gold cloth, on

which the lions and towers of Castile were broidered in seed pearls,

stood the throne itself, covered with a rich pall of black velvet studded

with silver tulips and elaborately fringed with silver and pearls. On

the second step of the throne was placed the kneeling-stool of the

Infanta, with its cushion of cloth of silver tissue, and below that

again, and beyond the limit of the canopy, stood the chair for the Papal

Nuncio, who alone had the right to be seated in the King's presence on

the occasion of any public ceremonial, and whose Cardinal's hat, with its

tangled scarlet tassels, lay on a purple _tabouret_ in front. On the

wall, facing the throne, hung a life-sized portrait of Charles V. in

hunting dress, with a great mastiff by his side, and a picture of Philip

II. receiving the homage of the Netherlands occupied the centre of the

other wall. Between the windows stood a black ebony cabinet, inlaid with

plates of ivory, on which the figures from Holbein's Dance of Death had

been graved--by the hand, some said, of that famous master himself.

But the little Dwarf cared nothing for all this magnificence. He would

not have given his rose for all the pearls on the canopy, nor one white

petal of his rose for the throne itself. What he wanted was to see the

Infanta before she went down to the pavilion, and to ask her to come away

with him when he had finished his dance. Here, in the Palace, the air

was close and heavy, but in the forest the wind blew free, and the

sunlight with wandering hands of gold moved the tremulous leaves aside.

There were flowers, too, in the forest, not so splendid, perhaps, as the

flowers in the garden, but more sweetly scented for all that; hyacinths

in early spring that flooded with waving purple the cool glens, and

grassy knolls; yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round the

gnarled roots of the oak-trees; bright celandine, and blue speedwell, and

irises lilac and gold. There were grey catkins on the hazels, and the

foxgloves drooped with the weight of their dappled bee-haunted cells. The

chestnut had its spires of white stars, and the hawthorn its pallid moons

of beauty. Yes: surely she would come if he could only find her! She

would come with him to the fair forest, and all day long he would dance

for her delight. A smile lit up his eyes at the thought, and he passed

into the next room.

Of all the rooms this was the brightest and the most beautiful. The

walls were covered with a pink-flowered Lucca damask, patterned with

birds and dotted with dainty blossoms of silver; the furniture was of

massive silver, festooned with florid wreaths, and swinging Cupids; in

front of the two large fire-places stood great screens broidered with

parrots and peacocks, and the floor, which was of sea-green onyx, seemed

to stretch far away into the distance. Nor was he alone. Standing under

the shadow of the doorway, at the extreme end of the room, he saw a

little figure watching him. His heart trembled, a cry of joy broke from

his lips, and he moved out into the sunlight. As he did so, the figure

moved out also, and he saw it plainly.--_The Birthday of the Infanta_.

A PROTECTED COUNTRY

'The kings of each city levied tolls on us, but would not suffer us to

enter their gates. They threw us bread over the walls, little

maize-cakes baked in honey and cakes of fine flour filled with dates. For

every hundred baskets we gave them a bead of amber.

'When the dwellers in the villages saw us coming, they poisoned the wells

and fled to the hill-summits. We fought with the Magadae who are born

old, and grow younger and younger every year, and die when they are

little children; and with the Laktroi who say that they are the sons of

tigers, and paint themselves yellow and black; and with the Aurantes who

bury their dead on the tops of trees, and themselves live in dark caverns

lest the Sun, who is their god, should slay them; and with the Krimnians

who worship a crocodile, and give it earrings of green glass, and feed it

with butter and fresh fowls; and with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced;

and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than

horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want.

The rest murmured against me, and said that I had brought them an evil

fortune. I took a horned adder from beneath a stone and let it sting me.

When they saw that I did not sicken they grew afraid.

'In the fourth month we reached the city of Illel. It was night-time

when we came to the grove that is outside the walls, and the air was

sultry, for the Moon was travelling in Scorpion. We took the ripe

pomegranates from the trees, and brake them, and drank their sweet

juices. Then we lay down on our carpets, and waited for the dawn.

'And at dawn we rose and knocked at the gate of the city. It was wrought

out of red bronze, and carved with sea-dragons and dragons that have

wings. The guards looked down from the battlements and asked us our

business. The interpreter of the caravan answered that we had come from

the island of Syria with much merchandise. They took hostages, and told

us that they would open the gate to us at noon, and bade us tarry till

then.

'When it was noon they opened the gate, and as we entered in the people

came crowding out of the houses to look at us, and a crier went round the

city crying through a shell. We stood in the market-place, and the

negroes uncorded the bales of figured cloths and opened the carved chests

of sycamore. And when they had ended their task, the merchants set forth

their strange wares, the waxed linen from Egypt and the painted linen

from the country of the Ethiops, the purple sponges from Tyre and the

blue hangings from Sidon, the cups of cold amber and the fine vessels of

glass and the curious vessels of burnt clay. From the roof of a house a

company of women watched us. One of them wore a mask of gilded leather.

'And on the first day the priests came and bartered with us, and on the

second day came the nobles, and on the third day came the craftsmen and

the slaves. And this is their custom with all merchants as long as they

tarry in the city.

'And we tarried for a moon, and when the moon was waning, I wearied and

wandered away through the streets of the city and came to the garden of

its god. The priests in their yellow robes moved silently through the

green trees, and on a pavement of black marble stood the rose-red house

in which the god had his dwelling. Its doors were of powdered lacquer,

and bulls and peacocks were wrought on them in raised and polished gold.

The tilted roof was of sea-green porcelain, and the jutting eaves were

festooned with little bells. When the white doves flew past, they struck

the bells with their wings and made them tinkle.

'In front of the temple was a pool of clear water paved with veined onyx.

I lay down beside it, and with my pale fingers I touched the broad

leaves. One of the priests came towards me and stood behind me. He had

sandals on his feet, one of soft serpent-skin and the other of birds'

plumage. On his head was a mitre of black felt decorated with silver

crescents. Seven yellows were woven into his robe, and his frizzed hair

was stained with antimony.

'After a little while he spake to me, and asked me my desire.

'I told him that my desire was to see the god.'--_The Fisherman and His

Soul_.

THE BLACKMAILING OF THE EMPEROR

'As soon as the man was dead the Emperor turned to me, and when he had

wiped away the bright sweat from his brow with a little napkin of purfled

and purple silk, he said to me, "Art thou a prophet, that I may not harm

thee, or the son of a prophet, that I can do thee no hurt? I pray thee

leave my city to-night, for while thou art in it I am no longer its

lord."

'And I answered him, "I will go for half of thy treasure. Give me half

of thy treasure, and I will go away."

'He took me by the hand, and led me out into the garden. When the

captain of the guard saw me, he wondered. When the eunuchs saw me, their

knees shook and they fell upon the ground in fear.

'There is a chamber in the palace that has eight walls of red porphyry,

and a brass-sealed ceiling hung with lamps. The Emperor touched one of

the walls and it opened, and we passed down a corridor that was lit with

many torches. In niches upon each side stood great wine-jars filled to

the brim with silver pieces. When we reached the centre of the corridor

the Emperor spake the word that may not be spoken, and a granite door

swung back on a secret spring, and he put his hands before his face lest

his eyes should be dazzled.

'Thou couldst not believe how marvellous a place it was. There were huge

tortoise-shells full of pearls, and hollowed moonstones of great size

piled up with red rubies. The gold was stored in coffers of elephant-

hide, and the gold-dust in leather bottles. There were opals and

sapphires, the former in cups of crystal, and the latter in cups of jade.

Round green emeralds were ranged in order upon thin plates of ivory, and

in one corner were silk bags filled, some with turquoise-stones, and

others with beryls. The ivory horns were heaped with purple amethysts,

and the horns of brass with chalcedonies and sards. The pillars, which

were of cedar, were hung with strings of yellow lynx-stones. In the flat

oval shields there were carbuncles, both wine-coloured and coloured like

grass. And yet I have told thee but a tithe of what was there.

'And when the Emperor had taken away his hands from before his face he

said to me: "This is my house of treasure, and half that is in it is

thine, even as I promised to thee. And I will give thee camels and camel

drivers, and they shall do thy bidding and take thy share of the treasure

to whatever part of the world thou desirest to go. And the thing shall

be done to-night, for I would not that the Sun, who is my father, should

see that there is in my city a man whom I cannot slay."

'But I answered him, "The gold that is here is thine, and the silver also

is thine, and thine are the precious jewels and the things of price. As

for me, I have no need of these. Nor shall I take aught from thee but

that little ring that thou wearest on the finger of thy hand."

'And the Emperor frowned. "It is but a ring of lead," he cried, "nor has

it any value. Therefore take thy half of the treasure and go from my

city."

'"Nay," I answered, "but I will take nought but that leaden ring, for I

know what is written within it, and for what purpose."

'And the Emperor trembled, and besought me and said, "Take all the

treasure and go from my city. The half that is mine shall be thine

also."

'And I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not, for in a cave

that is but a day's journey from this place have, I hidden the Ring of

Riches. It is but a day's journey from this place, and it waits for thy

coming. He who has this Ring is richer than all the kings of the world.

Come therefore and take it, and the world's riches shall be thine.'--_The

Fisherman and His Soul_.

COVENT GARDEN

Where he went he hardly knew. He had a dim memory of wandering through a

labyrinth of sordid houses, of being lost in a giant web of sombre

streets, and it was bright dawn when he found himself at last in

Piccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he met

the great waggons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smocked

carters, with their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strode

sturdily on, cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to each

other; on the back of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team,

sat a chubby boy, with a bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keeping

tight hold of the mane with his little hands, and laughing; and the great

piles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky,

like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous

rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There

was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to him

inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in

beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough,

good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London

they saw! A London free from the sin of night and the smoke of day, a

pallid, ghost-like city, a desolate town of tombs! He wondered what they

thought of it, and whether they knew anything of its splendour and its

shame, of its fierce, fiery-coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, of

all it makes and mars from morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely a

mart where they brought their fruits to sell, and where they tarried for

a few hours at most, leaving the streets still silent, the houses still

asleep. It gave him pleasure to watch them as they went by. Rude as

they were, with their heavy, hob-nailed shoes, and their awkward gait,

they brought a little of a ready with them. He felt that they had lived

with Nature, and that she had taught them peace. He envied them all that

they did not know.

By the time he had reached Belgrave Square the sky was a faint blue, and

the birds were beginning to twitter in the gardens.--_Lord Arthur

Savile's Crime_.

A LETTER FROM MISS JANE PERCY TO HER AUNT

THE DEANERY, CHICHESTER,

27_th May_.

My Dearest Aunt,

Thank you so much for the flannel for the Dorcas Society, and also for

the gingham. I quite agree with you that it is nonsense their wanting to

wear pretty things, but everybody is so Radical and irreligious nowadays,

that it is difficult to make them see that they should not try and dress

like the upper classes. I am sure I don't know what we are coming to. As

papa has often said in his sermons, we live in an age of unbelief.

We have had great fun over a clock that an unknown admirer sent papa last

Thursday. It arrived in a wooden box from London, carriage paid, and

papa feels it must have been sent by some one who had read his remarkable

sermon, 'Is Licence Liberty?' for on the top of the clock was a figure of

a woman, with what papa said was the cap of Liberty on her head. I

didn't think it very becoming myself, but papa said it was historical, so

I suppose it is all right. Parker unpacked it, and papa put it on the

mantelpiece in the library, and we were all sitting there on Friday

morning, when just as the clock struck twelve, we heard a whirring noise,

a little puff of smoke came from the pedestal of the figure, and the

goddess of Liberty fell off, and broke her nose on the fender! Maria was

quite alarmed, but it looked so ridiculous, that James and I went off

into fits of laughter, and even papa was amused. When we examined it, we

found it was a sort of alarum clock, and that, if you set it to a

particular hour, and put some gunpowder and a cap under a little hammer,

it went off whenever you wanted. Papa said it must not remain in the

library, as it made a noise, so Reggie carried it away to the schoolroom,

and does nothing but have small explosions all day long. Do you think

Arthur would like one for a wedding present? I suppose they are quite

fashionable in London. Papa says they should do a great deal of good, as

they show that Liberty can't last, but must fall down. Papa says Liberty

was invented at the time of the French Revolution. How awful it seems!

I have now to go to the Dorcas, where I will read them your most

instructive letter. How true, dear aunt, your idea is, that in their

rank of life they should wear what is unbecoming. I must say it is

absurd, their anxiety about dress, when there are so many more important

things in this world, and in the next. I am so glad your flowered poplin

turned out so well, and that your lace was not torn. I am wearing my

yellow satin, that you so kindly gave me, at the Bishop's on Wednesday,

and think it will look all right. Would you have bows or not? Jennings

says that every one wears bows now, and that the underskirt should be

frilled. Reggie has just had another explosion, and papa has ordered the

clock to be sent to the stables. I don't think papa likes it so much as

he did at first, though he is very flattered at being sent such a pretty

and ingenious toy. It shows that people read his sermons, and profit by

them.

Papa sends his love, in which James, and Reggie, and Maria all unite,

and, hoping that Uncle Cecil's gout is better, believe me, dear aunt,

ever your affectionate niece,

JANE PERCY.

PS.--Do tell me about the bows. Jennings insists they are the

fashion.--_Lord Arthur Savile's Crime_.

THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN 'HUMOR'

At half-past ten he heard the family going to bed. For some time he was

disturbed by wild shrieks of laughter from the twins, who, with the light-

hearted gaiety of schoolboys, were evidently amusing themselves before

they retired to rest, but at a quarter past eleven all was still, and, as

midnight sounded, he sallied forth. The owl beat against the window

panes, the raven croaked from the old yew-tree, and the wind wandered

moaning round the house like a lost soul; but the Otis family slept

unconscious of their doom, and high above the rain and storm he could

hear the steady snoring of the Minister for the United States. He

stepped stealthily out of the wainscoting, with an evil smile on his

cruel, wrinkled mouth, and the moon hid her face in a cloud as he stole

past the great oriel window, where his own arms and those of his murdered

wife were blazoned in azure and gold. On and on he glided, like an evil

shadow, the very darkness seeming to loathe him as he passed. Once he

thought he heard something call, and stopped; but it was only the baying

of a dog from the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange sixteenth-

century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty dagger in the

midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage that led to

luckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the wind

blowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesque

and fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then

the clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chuckled

to himself, and turned the corner; but no sooner had he done so, than,

with a piteous wail of terror, he fell back, and hid his blanched face in

his long, bony hands. Right in front of him was standing a horrible

spectre, motionless as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream!

Its head was bald and burnished; its face round, and fat, and white; and

hideous laughter seemed to have writhed its features into an eternal

grin. From the eyes streamed rays of scarlet light, the mouth was a wide

well of fire, and a hideous garment, like to his own, swathed with its

silent snows the Titan form. On its breast was a placard with strange

writing in antique characters, some scroll of shame it seemed, some

record of wild sins, some awful calendar of crime, and, with its right

hand, it bore aloft a falchion of gleaming steel.

Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly frightened,

and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom, he fled back to

his room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as he sped down the

corridor, and finally dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack-

boots, where it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in the

privacy of his own apartment, he flung himself down on a small pallet-

bed, and hid his face under the clothes. After a time, however, the

brave old Canterville spirit asserted itself, and he determined to go and

speak to the other ghost as soon as it was daylight. Accordingly, just

as the dawn was touching the hills with silver, he returned towards the

spot where he had first laid eyes on the grisly phantom, feeling that,

after all, two ghosts were better than one, and that, by the aid of his

new friend, he might safely grapple with the twins. On reaching the

spot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze. Something had evidently

happened to the spectre, for the light had entirely faded from its hollow

eyes, the gleaming falchion had fallen from its hand, and it was leaning

up against the wall in a strained and uncomfortable attitude. He rushed

forward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror, the head slipped

off and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recumbent posture, and he

found himself clasping a white dimity bed-curtain, with a sweeping-brush,

a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip lying at his feet!--_The

Canterville Ghost_.

THE GARDEN OF DEATH

'Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice,

'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there

are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale

sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal

moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the

sleepers.'

Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face in her hands.

'You mean the Garden of Death,' she whispered.

'Yes, Death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown

earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence.

To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life,

to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of

Death's house, for Love is always with you, and Love is stronger than

Death is.'

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for a few moments

there was silence. She felt as if she was in a terrible dream.

Then the Ghost spoke again, and his voice sounded like the sighing of the

wind.

'Have you ever read the old prophecy on the library window?'

'Oh, often,' cried the little girl, looking up; 'I know it quite well. It

is painted in curious black letters, and it is difficult to read. There

are only six lines:

When a golden girl can win

Prayer from out the lips of sin,

When the barren almond bears,

And a little child gives away its tears,

Then shall all the house be still

And peace come to Canterville.

But I don't know what they mean.'

'They mean,' he said sadly, 'that you must weep for me for my sins,

because I have no tears, and pray with me for my soul, because I have no

faith, and then, if you have always been sweet, and good, and gentle, the

Angel of Death will have mercy on me. You will see fearful shapes in

darkness, and wicked voices will whisper in your ear, but they will not

harm you, for against the purity of a little child the powers of Hell

cannot prevail.'

Virginia made no answer, and the Ghost wrung his hands in wild despair as

he looked down at her bowed golden head. Suddenly she stood up, very

pale, and with a strange light in her eyes. 'I am not afraid,' she said

firmly, 'and I will ask the Angel to have mercy on you.'

He rose from his seat with a faint cry of joy, and taking her hand bent

over it with old-fashioned grace and kissed it. His fingers were as cold

as ice, and his lips burned like fire, but Virginia did not falter, as he

led her across the dusky room. On the faded green tapestry were

broidered little huntsmen. They blew their tasselled horns and with

their tiny hands waved to her to go back. 'Go back! little Virginia,'

they cried, 'go back!' but the Ghost clutched her hand more tightly, and

she shut her eyes against them. Horrible animals with lizard tails, and

goggle eyes, blinked at her from the carven chimney-piece, and murmured

'Beware! little Virginia, beware! we may never see you again,' but the

Ghost glided on more swiftly, and Virginia did not listen. When they

reached the end of the room he stopped, and muttered some words she could

not understand. She opened her eyes, and saw the wall slowly fading away

like a mist, and a great black cavern in front of her. A bitter cold

wind swept round them, and she felt something pulling at her dress.

'Quick, quick,' cried the Ghost, 'or it will be too late,' and, in a

moment, the wainscoting had closed behind them, and the Tapestry Chamber

was empty.--_The Canterville Ghost_.

AN ETON KIT-CAT

"Well," said Erskine, lighting a cigarette, "I must begin by telling you

about Cyril Graham himself. He and I were at the same house at Eton. I

was a year or two older than he was, but we were immense friends, and did

all our work and all our play together. There was, of course, a good

deal more play than work, but I cannot say that I am sorry for that. It

is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education,

and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as useful

to me as anything I was taught at Cambridge. I should tell you that

Cyril's father and mother were both dead. They had been drowned in a

horrible yachting accident off the Isle of Wight. His father had been in

the diplomatic service, and had married a daughter, the only daughter, in

fact, of old Lord Crediton, who became Cyril's guardian after the death

of his parents. I don't think that Lord Crediton cared very much for

Cyril. He had never really forgiven his daughter for marrying a man who

had not a title. He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like

a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer. I remember seeing him

once on Speech-day. He growled at me, gave me a sovereign, and told me

not to grow up 'a damned Radical' like my father. Cyril had very little

affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays

with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril

thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate,

I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital

fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very

languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a

strong objection to football. The two things that really gave him

pleasure were poetry and acting. At Eton he was always dressing up and

reciting Shakespeare, and when he went up to Trinity he became a member

of the A.D.C. his first term. I remember I was always very jealous of

his acting. I was absurdly devoted to him; I suppose because we were so

different in some things. I was a rather awkward, weakly lad, with huge

feet, and horribly freckled. Freckles run in Scotch families just as

gout does in English families. Cyril used to say that of the two he

preferred the gout; but he always set an absurdly high value on personal

appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove

that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was

wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines and

college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he

was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere

prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and

nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner.

He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many

people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to

think him dreadfully insincere. It was due, I think, chiefly to his

inordinate desire to please. Poor Cyril! I told him once that he was

contented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed. He was horribly

spoiled. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of

their attraction.

"However, I must tell you about Cyril's acting. You know that no

actresses are allowed to play at the A.D.C. At least they were not in my

time. I don't know how it is now. Well, of course, Cyril was always

cast for the girls' parts, and when _As You Like It_ was produced he

played Rosalind. It was a marvellous performance. In fact, Cyril Graham

was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossible

to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole

thing. It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, as

it was then, was crowded every night. Even when I read the play now I

can't help thinking of Cyril. It might have been written for him. The

next term he took his degree, and came to London to read for the

diplomatic. But he never did any work. He spent his days in reading

Shakespeare's Sonnets, and his evenings at the theatre. He was, of

course, wild to go on the stage. It was all that I and Lord Crediton

could do to prevent him. Perhaps if he had gone on the stage he would be

alive now. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good

advice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error.

If you do, you will be sorry for it."--_The Portrait of Mr. W. H_.

MRS. ERLYNNE EXERCISES THE PREROGATIVE OF A GRANDMOTHER

Lady Windermere, before Heaven your husband is guiltless of all offence

towards you! And I--I tell you that had it ever occurred to me that such

a monstrous suspicion would have entered your mind, I would have died

rather than have crossed your life or his--oh! died, gladly died! Believe

what you choose about me. I am not worth a moment's sorrow. But don't

spoil your beautiful young life on my account! You don't know what may

be in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don't know

what it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned,

sneered at--to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to have

to creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask should

be stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter, the

horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tears

the world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One pays for one's

sin, and then one pays again, and all one's life one pays. You must

never know that.--As for me, if suffering be an expiation, then at this

moment I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been; for to-

night you have made a heart in one who had it not, made it and broken

it.--But let that pass. I may have wrecked my own life, but I will not

let you wreck yours. You--why, you are a mere girl, you would be lost.

You haven't got the kind of brains that enables a woman to get back. You

have neither the wit nor the courage. You couldn't stand dishonour! No!

Go back, Lady Windermere, to the husband who loves you, whom you love.

You have a child, Lady Windermere. Go back to that child who even now,

in pain or in joy, may be calling to you. God gave you that child. He

will require from you that you make his life fine, that you watch over

him. What answer will you make to God if his life is ruined through you?

Back to your house, Lady Windermere--your husband loves you! He has

never swerved for a moment from the love he bears you. But even if he

had a thousand loves, you must stay with your child. If he was harsh to

you, you must stay with your child. If he ill-treated you, you must stay

with your child. If he abandoned you, your place is with your

child.--_Lady Windermere's Fan_.

MOTHERHOOD MORE THAN MARRIAGE

Men don't understand what mothers are. I am no different from other

women except in the wrong done me and the wrong I did, and my very heavy

punishments and great disgrace. And yet, to bear you I had to look on

death. To nurture you I had to wrestle with it. Death fought with me

for you. All women have to fight with death to keep their children.

Death, being childless, wants our children from us. Gerald, when you

were naked I clothed you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Night

and day all that long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, no

care too lowly for the thing we women love--and oh! how _I_ loved _you_.

Not Hannah, Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, and

only love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive.

And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we always

fancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better they will

repay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from our side, and

they make friends with whom they are happier than they are with us, and

have amusements from which we are barred, and interests that are not

ours: and they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter

they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its

sweetness with them . . . You made many friends and went into their

houses and were glad with them, and I, knowing my secret, did not dare to

follow, but stayed at home and closed the door, shut out the sun and sat

in darkness. What should I have done in honest households? My past was

ever with me. . . . And you thought I didn't care for the pleasant things

of life. I tell you I longed for them, but did not dare to touch them,

feeling I had no right. You thought I was happier working amongst the

poor. That was my mission, you imagined. It was not, but where else was

I to go? The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is

pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the

kiss of sin. It was you I thought of all the time; I gave to them the

love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . .

And you thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in

Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the only

house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in my heart,

Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day, at morn or

evensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never repented of my sin.

How could I repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit! Even now

that you are bitter to me I cannot repent. I do not. You are more to me

than innocence. I would rather be your mother--oh! much rather!--than

have been always pure . . . Oh, don't you see? don't you understand? It

is my dishonour that has made you so dear to me. It is my disgrace that

has bound you so closely to me. It is the price I paid for you--the

price of soul and body--that makes me love you as I do. Oh, don't ask me

to do this horrible thing. Child of my shame, be still the child of my

shame!--_A Woman of No Importance_.

THE DAMNABLE IDEAL

Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on

monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but

when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their

follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that

reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.

It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others,

that love should come to cure us--else what use is love at all? All

sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save

loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It

is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are

making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely.

You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down,

show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might

lose your love, as I have lost it now. And so, last night you ruined my

life for me--yes, ruined it! What this woman asked of me was nothing

compared to what she offered to me. She offered security, peace,

stability. The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose up

in front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat. I could

have killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed its

record, burned the one witness against me. You prevented me. No one but

you, you know it. And now what is there before me but public disgrace,

ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonoured

life, a lonely dishonoured death, it may be, some day? Let women make no

more ideals of men! let them not put them on alters and bow before them,

or they may ruin other lives as completely as you--you whom I have so

wildly loved--have ruined mine!--_An Ideal Husband_.

FROM A REJECTED PRIZE-ESSAY

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions. And the

function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is statical in

our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elemental

creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite. Italy was not a

pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution of

thought. The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole land

and found nowhere a resting-place. The dove, which is the bird of

Christ, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. It

was the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval

costume the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which

was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve to us

as an allegory. For it was in vain that the Middle Ages strove to guard

the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose,

the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes laid aside. Humanity had

risen from the dead.

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth of

criticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that education of

modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words

of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a

fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train

of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in

the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a

return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the

pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new

method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of

mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of glad

adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality,

when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends what

was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenth

century, from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the great

authors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words [Greek

text]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous prescience

Polybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the material sovereignty

of Roman institutions and exemplified in himself the intellectual empire

of Greece.

The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has not

been a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought now

antiquated and of no account. The only spirit which is entirely removed

from us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is essentially modern. The

introduction of the comparative method of research which has forced

history to disclose its secrets belongs in a measure to us. Ours, too,

is a more scientific knowledge of philology and the method of survival.

Nor did the ancients know anything of the doctrine of averages or of

crucial instances, both of which methods have proved of such importance

in modern criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the

statical elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all

physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the single

instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole new

science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back to a time when

man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.

But, except these, we have added no new canon or method to the science of

historical criticism. Across the drear waste of a thousand years the

Greek and the modern spirit join hands.

In the torch race which the Greek boys ran from the Cerameician field of

death to the home of the goddess of Wisdom, not merely he who first

reached the goal but he also who first started with the torch aflame

received a prize. In the Lampadephoria of civilisation and free thought

let us not forget to render due meed of honour to those who first lit

that sacred flame, the increasing splendour of which lights our footsteps

to the far-off divine event of the attainment of perfect truth.--_The

Rise of Historical Criticism_.

THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE USEFUL

There are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two different

forms of natures: men to whom the end of life is action, and men to whom

the end of life is thought. As regards the latter, who seek for

experience itself and not for the fruits of experience, who must burn

always with one of the passions of this fiery-coloured world, who find

life interesting not for its secret but for its situations, for its

pulsations and not for its purpose; the passion for beauty engendered by

the decorative arts will be to them more satisfying than any political or

religious enthusiasm, any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow

for love. For art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but

the highest quality to one's moments, and for those moments' sake. So

far for those to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the others,

who hold that life is inseparable from labour, to them should this

movement be specially dear: for, if our days are barren without industry,

industry without art is barbarism.

Hewers of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed among us.

Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour of man after all:

but at least let the pitcher that stands by the well be beautiful and

surely the labour of the day will be lightened: let the wood be made

receptive of some lovely form, some gracious design, and there will come

no longer discontent but joy to the toiler. For what is decoration but

the worker's expression of joy in his work? And not joy merely--that is

a great thing yet not enough--but that opportunity of expressing his own

individuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the source of

all art. 'I have tried,' I remember William Morris saying to me once, 'I

have tried to make each of my workers an artist, and when I say an artist

I mean a man.' For the worker then, handicraftsman of whatever kind he

is, art is no longer to be a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over

the whitened body of a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of his

luxury, but rather the beautiful and noble expression of a life that has

in it something beautiful and noble.--_The English Renaissance of Art_.

THE ARTIST

ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of

_The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment_. And he went forth into the

world to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze.

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere in

the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze of

the image of _The Sorrow that endureth for Ever_.

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had

set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb of

the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his own

fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that dieth

not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And in

the whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image.

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace,

and gave it to the fire.

And out of the bronze of the image of _The Sorrow that endureth for Ever_

he fashioned an image of _The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment_.--_Poems

in Prose_.

THE DOER OF GOOD

It was night-time and He was alone.

And He saw afar-off the walls of a round city and went towards the city.

And when He came near He heard within the city the tread of the feet of

joy, and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud noise of many

lutes. And He knocked at the gate and certain of the gate-keepers opened

to Him.

And He beheld a house that was of marble and had fair pillars of marble

before it. The pillars were hung with garlands, and within and without

there were torches of cedar. And He entered the house.

And when He had passed through the hall of chalcedony and the hall of

jasper, and reached the long hall of feasting, He saw lying on a couch of

sea-purple one whose hair was crowned with red roses and whose lips were

red with wine.

And He went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to him,

'Why do you live like this?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him, and made answer and

said, 'But I was a leper once, and you healed me. How else should I

live?'

And He passed out of the house and went again into the street.

And after a little while He saw one whose face and raiment were painted

and whose feet were shod with pearls. And behind her came, slowly as a

hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours. Now the face of the

woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the eyes of the young man were

bright with lust.

And He followed swiftly and touched the hand of the young man and said to

him, 'Why do you look at this woman and in such wise?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him and said, 'But I was

blind once, and you gave me sight. At what else should I look?'

And He ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and said

to her, 'Is there no other way in which to walk save the way of sin?'

And the woman turned round and recognised Him, and laughed and said, 'But

you forgave me my sins, and the way is a pleasant way.'

And He passed out of the city.

And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the roadside a

young man who was weeping.

And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and said

to him, 'Why are you weeping?'

And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer, 'But I

was dead once, and you raised me from the dead. What else should I do

but weep?'--_Poems in Prose_.

THE DISCIPLE

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet

waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the

woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters

into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair

and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that you should mourn

in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.'

'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.

'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did he

ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look

down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own

beauty.'

And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my

banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own

beauty mirrored.'--_Poems in Prose_.

THE MASTER

Now when the darkness came over the earth Joseph of Arimathea, having

lighted a torch of pinewood, passed down from the hill into the valley.

For he had business in his own home.

And kneeling on the flint stones of the Valley of Desolation he saw a

young man who was naked and weeping. His hair was the colour of honey,

and his body was as a white flower, but he had wounded his body with

thorns and on his hair had he set ashes as a crown.

And he who had great possessions said to the young man who was naked and

weeping, 'I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great, for surely He was

a just man.'

And the young man answered, 'It is not for Him that I am weeping, but for

myself. I too have changed water into wine, and I have healed the leper

and given sight to the blind. I have walked upon the waters, and from

the dwellers in the tombs I have cast out devils. I have fed the hungry

in the desert where there was no food, and I have raised the dead from

their narrow houses, and at my bidding, and before a great multitude, of

people, a barren fig-tree withered away. All things that this man has

done I have done also. And yet they have not crucified me.'--_Poems in

Prose_.

THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT

And there was silence in the House of Judgment, and the Man came naked

before God.

And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast shown

cruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those who lacked

help thou hast been bitter and hard of heart. The poor called to thee

and thou didst not hearken, and thine ears were closed to the cry of My

afflicted. The inheritance of the fatherless thou didst take unto

thyself, and thou didst send the foxes into the vineyard of thy

neighbour's field. Thou didst take the bread of the children and give it

to the dogs to eat, and My lepers who lived in the marshes, and were at

peace and praised Me, thou didst drive forth on to the highways, and on

Mine earth out of which I made thee thou didst spill innocent blood.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And again God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and the Beauty I have

shown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou didst pass

by. The walls of thy chamber were painted with images, and from the bed

of thine abominations thou didst rise up to the sound of flutes. Thou

didst build seven altars to the sins I have suffered, and didst eat of

the thing that may not be eaten, and the purple of thy raiment was

broidered with the three signs of shame. Thine idols were neither of

gold nor of silver that endure, but of flesh that dieth. Thou didst

stain their hair with perfumes and put pomegranates in their hands. Thou

didst stain their feet with saffron and spread carpets before them. With

antimony thou didst stain their eyelids and their bodies thou didst smear

with myrrh. Thou didst bow thyself to the ground before them, and the

thrones of thine idols were set in the sun. Thou didst show to the sun

thy shame and to the moon thy madness.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And a third time God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Evil hath been thy life, and with evil didst

thou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness. The hands that fed thee

thou didst wound, and the breasts that gave thee suck thou didst despise.

He who came to thee with water went away thirsting, and the outlawed men

who hid thee in their tents at night thou didst betray before dawn. Thine

enemy who spared thee thou didst snare in an ambush, and the friend who

walked with thee thou didst sell for a price, and to those who brought

thee Love thou didst ever give Lust in thy turn.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And God closed the Book of the Life of the Man, and said, 'Surely I will

send thee into Hell. Even into Hell will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and for

what reason?'

'Because in Hell have I always lived,' answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.

And after a space God spake, and said to the Man, 'Seeing that I may not

send thee into Hell, surely I will send thee unto Heaven. Even unto

Heaven will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee unto Heaven, and

for what reason?'

'Because never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it,'

answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.--_Poems in Prose_.

THE TEACHER OF WISDOM

From his childhood he had been as one filled with the perfect knowledge

of God, and even while he was yet but a lad many of the saints, as well

as certain holy women who dwelt in the free city of his birth, had been

stirred to much wonder by the grave wisdom of his answers.

And when his parents had given him the robe and the ring of manhood he

kissed them, and left them and went out into the world, that he might

speak to the world about God. For there were at that time many in the

world who either knew not God at all, or had but an incomplete knowledge

of Him, or worshipped the false gods who dwell in groves and have no care

of their worshippers.

And he set his face to the sun and journeyed, walking without sandals, as

he had seen the saints walk, and carrying at his girdle a leathern wallet

and a little water-bottle of burnt clay.

And as he walked along the highway he was full of the joy that comes from

the perfect knowledge of God, and he sang praises unto God without

ceasing; and after a time he reached a strange land in which there were

many cities.

And he passed through eleven cities. And some of these cities were in

valleys, and others were by the banks of great rivers, and others were

set on hills. And in each city he found a disciple who loved him and

followed him, and a great multitude also of people followed him from each

city, and the knowledge of God spread in the whole land, and many of the

rulers were converted, and the priests of the temples in which there were

idols found that half of their gain was gone, and when they beat upon

their drums at noon none, or but a few, came with peacocks and with

offerings of flesh as had been the custom of the land before his coming.

Yet the more the people followed him, and the greater the number of his

disciples, the greater became his sorrow. And he knew not why his sorrow

was so great. For he spake ever about God, and out of the fulness of

that perfect knowledge of God which God had Himself given to him.

And one evening he passed out of the eleventh city, which was a city of

Armenia, and his disciples and a great crowd of people followed after

him; and he went up on to a mountain and sat down on a rock that was on

the mountain, and his disciples stood round him, and the multitude knelt

in the valley.

And he bowed his head on his hands and wept, and said to his Soul, 'Why

is it that I am full of sorrow and fear, and that each of my disciples is

an enemy that walks in the noonday?' And his Soul answered him and said,

'God filled thee with the perfect knowledge of Himself, and thou hast

given this knowledge away to others. The pearl of great price thou hast

divided, and the vesture without seam thou hast parted asunder. He who

giveth away wisdom robbeth himself. He is as one who giveth his treasure

to a robber. Is not God wiser than thou art? Who art thou to give away

the secret that God hath told thee? I was rich once, and thou hast made

me poor. Once I saw God, and now thou hast hidden Him from me.'

And he wept again, for he knew that his Soul spake truth to him, and that

he had given to others the perfect knowledge of God, and that he was as

one clinging to the skirts of God, and that his faith was leaving him by

reason of the number of those who believed in him.

And he said to himself, 'I will talk no more about God. He who giveth

away wisdom robbeth himself.'

And after the space of some hours his disciples came near him and bowed

themselves to the ground and said, 'Master, talk to us about God, for

thou hast the perfect knowledge of God, and no man save thee hath this

knowledge.'

And he answered them and said, 'I will talk to you about all other things

that are in heaven and on earth, but about God I will not talk to you.

Neither now, nor at any time, will I talk to you about God.'

And they were wroth with him and said to him, 'Thou hast led us into the

desert that we might hearken to thee. Wilt thou send us away hungry, and

the great multitude that thou hast made to follow thee?'

And he answered them and said, 'I will not talk to you about God.'

And the multitude murmured against him and said to him, 'Thou hast led us

into the desert, and hast given us no food to eat. Talk to us about God

and it will suffice us.'

But he answered them not a word. For he knew that if he spake to them

about God he would give away his treasure.

And his disciples went away sadly, and the multitude of people returned

to their own homes. And many died on the way.

And when he was alone he rose up and set his face to the moon, and

journeyed for seven moons, speaking to no man nor making any answer. And

when the seventh moon had waned he reached that desert which is the

desert of the Great River. And having found a cavern in which a Centaur

had once dwelt, he took it for his place of dwelling, and made himself a

mat of reeds on which to lie, and became a hermit. And every hour the

Hermit praised God that He had suffered him to keep some knowledge of Him

and of His wonderful greatness.

Now, one evening, as the Hermit was seated before the cavern in which he

had made his place of dwelling, he beheld a young man of evil and

beautiful face who passed by in mean apparel and with empty hands. Every

evening with empty hands the young man passed by, and every morning he

returned with his hands full of purple and pearls. For he was a Robber

and robbed the caravans of the merchants.

And the Hermit looked at him and pitied him. But he spake not a word.

For he knew that he who speaks a word loses his faith.

And one morning, as the young man returned with his hands full of purple

and pearls, he stopped and frowned and stamped his foot upon the sand,

and said to the Hermit: 'Why do you look at me ever in this manner as I

pass by? What is it that I see in your eyes? For no man has looked at

me before in this manner. And the thing is a thorn and a trouble to me.'

And the Hermit answered him and said, 'What you see in my eyes is pity.

Pity is what looks out at you from my eyes.'

And the young man laughed with scorn, and cried to the Hermit in a bitter

voice, and said to him, 'I have purple and pearls in my hands, and you

have but a mat of reeds on which to lie. What pity should you have for

me? And for what reason have you this pity?'

'I have pity for you,' said the Hermit, 'because you have no knowledge of

God.'

'Is this knowledge of God a precious thing?' asked the young man, and he

came close to the mouth of the cavern.

'It is more precious than all the purple and the pearls of the world,'

answered the Hermit.

'And have you got it?' said the young Robber, and he came closer still.

'Once, indeed,' answered the Hermit, 'I possessed the perfect knowledge

of God. But in my foolishness I parted with it, and divided it amongst

others. Yet even now is such knowledge as remains to me more precious

than purple or pearls.'

And when the young Robber heard this he threw away the purple and the

pearls that he was bearing in his hands, and drawing a sharp sword of

curved steel he said to the Hermit, 'Give me, forthwith this knowledge of

God that you possess, or I will surely slay you. Wherefore should I not

slay him who has a treasure greater than my treasure?'

And the Hermit spread out his arms and said, 'Were it not better for me

to go unto the uttermost courts of God and praise Him, than to live in

the world and have no knowledge of Him? Slay me if that be your desire.

But I will not give away my knowledge of God.'

And the young Robber knelt down and besought him, but the Hermit would

not talk to him about God, nor give him his Treasure, and the young

Robber rose up and said to the Hermit, 'Be it as you will. As for

myself, I will go to the City of the Seven Sins, that is but three days'

journey from this place, and for my purple they will give me pleasure,

and for my pearls they will sell me joy.' And he took up the purple and

the pearls and went swiftly away.

And the Hermit cried out and followed him and besought him. For the

space of three days he followed the young Robber on the road and

entreated him to return, nor to enter into the City of the Seven Sins.

And ever and anon the young Robber looked back at the Hermit and called

to him, and said, 'Will you give me this knowledge of God which is more

precious than purple and pearls? If you will give me that, I will not

enter the city.'

And ever did the Hermit answer, 'All things that I have I will give thee,

save that one thing only. For that thing it is not lawful for me to give

away.'

And in the twilight of the third day they came nigh to the great scarlet

gates of the City of the Seven Sins. And from the city there came the

sound of much laughter.

And the young Robber laughed in answer, and sought to knock at the gate.

And as he did so the Hermit ran forward and caught him by the skirts of

his raiment, and said to him: 'Stretch forth your hands, and set your

arms around my neck, and put your ear close to my lips, and I will give

you what remains to me of the knowledge of God.' And the young Robber

stopped.

And when the Hermit had given away his knowledge of God, he fell upon the

ground and wept, and a great darkness hid from him the city and the young

Robber, so that he saw them no more.

And as he lay there weeping he was ware of One who was standing beside

him; and He who was standing beside him had feet of brass and hair like

fine wool. And He raised the Hermit up, and said to him: 'Before this

time thou hadst the perfect knowledge of God. Now thou shalt have the

perfect love of God. Wherefore art thou weeping?' And he kissed

him.--_Poems in Prose_.

WILDE GIVES DIRECTIONS ABOUT 'DE PROFUNDIS'

H.M. PRISON, READING.

April 1st, 1897.

My Dear Robbie,--I send you a MS. separate from this, which I hope will

arrive safely. As soon as you have read it, I want you to have it

carefully copied for me. There are many causes why I wish this to be

done. One will suffice. I want you to be my literary executor in case

of my death, and to have complete control of my plays, books, and papers.

As soon as I find I have a legal right to make a will, I will do so. My

wife does not understand my art, nor could be expected to have any

interest in it, and Cyril is only a child. So I turn naturally to you,

as indeed I do for everything, and would like you to have all my works.

The deficit that their sale will produce may be lodged to the credit of

Cyril and Vivian. Well, if you are my literary executor, you must be in

possession of the only document that gives any explanation of my

extraordinary behaviour . . . When you have read the letter, you will see

the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the

outside seems a combination of absolute idiotcy with vulgar bravado. Some

day the truth will have to be known--not necessarily in my lifetime . . .

but I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into,

for all time; for the simple reason that I inherited from my father and

mother a name of high distinction in literature and art, and I cannot for

eternity allow that name to be degraded. I don't defend my conduct. I

explain it. Also there are in my letter certain passages which deal with

my mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my

character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place:

and I want you and others who still stand by me and have affection for me

to know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world. Of

course from one point of view I know that on the day of my release I

shall be merely passing from one prison into another, and there are times

when the whole world seems to me no larger than my cell and as full of

terror for me. Still I believe that at the beginning God made a world

for each separate man, and in that world which is within us we should

seek to live. At any rate you will read those parts of my letter with

less pain than the others. Of course I need not remind you how fluid a

thing thought is with me--with us all--and of what an evanescent

substance are our emotions made. Still I do see a sort of possible goal

towards which, through art, I may progress. It is not unlikely that you

may help me.

As regards the mode of copying: of course it is too long for any

amanuensis to attempt: and your own handwriting, dear Robbie, in your

last letter seems specially designed to remind me that the task is not to

be yours. I think that the only thing to do is to be thoroughly modern

and to have it typewritten. Of course the MS. should not pass out of

your control, but could you not get Mrs. Marshall to send down one of her

type-writing girls--women are the most reliable as they have no memory

for the important--to Hornton Street or Phillimore Gardens, to do it

under your supervision? I assure you that the typewriting machine, when

played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played

by a sister or near relation. Indeed many among those most devoted to

domesticity prefer it. I wish the copy to be done not on tissue paper

but on good paper such as is used for plays, and a wide rubricated margin

should be left for corrections . . . If the copy is done at Hornton

Street the lady typewriter might be fed through a lattice in the door,

like the Cardinals when they elect a Pope; till she comes out on the

balcony and can say to the world: "Habet Mundus Epistolam"; for indeed it

is an Encyclical letter, and as the Bulls of the Holy Father are named

from their opening words, it may be spoken of as the "_Epistola_: _in

Carcere et Vinculis_." . . . In point of fact, Robbie, prison life makes

one see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns one

to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of

a life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its

unreality. We who are immobile both see and know. Whether or not the

letter does good to narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has done

good. I have "cleansed my bosom of much perilous stuff"; to borrow a

phrase from the poet whom you and I once thought of rescuing from the

Philistines. I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist

the supreme and only mode of life. It is by utterance that we live. Of

the many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor there is

none for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write fully

and at as great a length as I desire. For nearly two years I had within

a growing burden of bitterness, of much of which I have now got rid. On

the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black

soot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almost

shrill green. I know quite well what they are going through. They are

finding expression.

Ever yours,

OSCAR.

--_Letter from Reading Prison to Robert Ross_.

CAREY STREET

Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will realise

what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,--and

natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison

to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,--waited in the long

dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and

simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as,

handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven

for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode

of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or

stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single

word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment

whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a

thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it

in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that

I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept

sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been

profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of

those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my

mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed

for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and

brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the

wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able to

understand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meant

so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will

realise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . .

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we

are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a

casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of

one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the

phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love

in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison

makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air

and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome

when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our

very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are

broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are

denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring

balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain.--_De

Profundis_.

SORROW WEARS NO MASK

Sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the

type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is

the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in

which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of

such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts

preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at

another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of

impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and

making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its

morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape

art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic

perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in

expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a

flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the

ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and

callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike

pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between

the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the

resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to

the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than

it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the

moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing

with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made

incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no

truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to

be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the

appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow

have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there

is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary

reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic

relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single

wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in

symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is

suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to

live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that

we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not

merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years

to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be

starving the soul.--_De Profundis_.

VITA NUOVA

Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so

wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day.

And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One

can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long

hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights

that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move

slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I

need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back

into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange

insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for

their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave

whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it

is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and

comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for

me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of

my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions

makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it

breaks one's heart--hearts are made to be broken--but that it turns one's

heart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of

brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he

who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of

which the Church is so fond--so rightly fond, I dare say--for in life as

in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and

shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these lessons here, if I

am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if my feet are on

the right road and my face set towards 'the gate which is called

beautiful,' though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the

mist go astray.

This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it,

is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of

development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at

Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's

narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my

degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden

of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion

in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake

was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to

me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its

shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair,

suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain,

remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-

abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the

anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink

puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had

determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in

turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at

all.

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it

to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no

pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup

of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived

on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong

because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half

of the garden had its secrets for me also.--_De Profundis_.

THE GRAND ROMANTIC

It is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the

sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the

nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some

divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being

the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary

desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to

a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest

man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid

Society and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a

publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great

achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded

sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes

of perfection.

It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous.

That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creed

I don't doubt myself.

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he

would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is

the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one

alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say

in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ

showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing

he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quite

certain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and

wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-

herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments

in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare

say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth

while going to prison.

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are

false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden

sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold

before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on

barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we

should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none

since. I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God had

given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young

had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of

a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection not

difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do not

require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Francis

was the true _Imitatio Christi_, a poem compared to which the book of

that name is merely prose.

Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like

a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being

brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is

predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks

with Christ to Emmaus.--_De Profundis_.

CLAPHAM JUNCTION

My lot has been one of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, of

ruin, of disgrace, but I am not worthy of it--not yet, at any rate. I

remember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy if

it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the

dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment

of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or

lacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably

always been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdoms

seemed mean to the looker on. The nineteenth century is no exception to

the rule.

Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in

style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow.

We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to

appeal to the sense of humour. On November 13th, 1895, I was brought

down here from London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day I

had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress,

and handcuffed, for the world to look at. I had been taken out of the

hospital ward without a moment's notice being given to me. Of all

possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they

laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could

exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who I was.

As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half an

hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering

mob.--_De Profundis_.

THE BROKEN RESOLUTION

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single

thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and

that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the

moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals

directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is

purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.

Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' merely to

look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I

think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the

lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir

into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss

the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for

me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the

first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the

tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to

whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of

some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not

a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a

shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my

nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those

'pour qui le monde visible existe.'

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though

it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and

shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I

desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate

utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life,

the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely

necessary for me to find it somewhere.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences

of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the

box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of

detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society,

as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer;

but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have

clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence

I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may

walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my

footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in

great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.--_De Profundis_.

DOMESTICITY AT BERNEVAL

DIEPPE,

June 1st, 1897.

My Dear Robbie,--I propose to live at Berneval. I will _not_ live in

Paris, nor in Algiers, nor in Southern Italy. Surely a house for a year,

if I choose to continue there, at 32 pounds is absurdly cheap. I could

not live cheaper at a hotel. You are penny foolish, and pound foolish--a

dreadful state for my financier to be in. I told M. Bonnet that my

bankers were MM. Ross et Cie, banquiers celebres de Londres--and now you

suddenly show me that you have no place among the great financial people,

and are afraid of any investment over 31 pounds, 10s. It is merely the

extra ten shillings that baffles you. As regards people living on me,

and the extra bedrooms: dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me

but you, and you will pay your own bill at the hotel for meals; and as

for your room, the charge will be nominally 2 francs 50 centimes a night,

but there will be lots of extras such as _bougie, bain_ and hot water,

and all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms are charged extra. And if any

one does not take the extras, of course he is charged more:--

Bain, 25 C.

Pas de bain, 50 C.

Cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 10 C. pour chaque cigarette.

Pas de cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 20 C. pour chaque

cigarette.

This is the system at all good hotels. If Reggie comes, of course he

will pay a little more: I cannot forget that he gave me a dressing-case.

Sphinxes pay a hundred per cent more than any one else--they always did

in Ancient Egypt.

But seriously, Robbie, if people stayed with me, of course they would pay

their _pension_ at the hotel. They would have to: except architects. A

modern architect, like modern architecture, doesn't pay. But then I know

only one architect and you are hiding him somewhere from me. I believe

that he is as extinct as the dado, of which now only fossil remains are

found, chiefly in the vicinity of Brompton, where they are sometimes

discovered by workmen excavating. They are usually embedded in the old

Lincrusta Walton strata, and are rare consequently.

I visited M. le Cure {4} to-day. He has a charming house and a _jardin

potager_. He showed me over the church. To-morrow I sit in the choir by

his special invitation. He showed me all his vestments. To-morrow he

really will be charming in red. He knows I am a heretic, and believes

Pusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on account

of England's kindness to _les pretres exiles_ at the time of the

Revolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island.

Stained glass windows are wanted in the church; he has only six; fourteen

more are needed. He gets them at 300 francs--12 pounds--a window in

Paris. I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and so

only gave him something _pour les pauvres_. You had a narrow escape,

Robbie. You should be thankful.

I hope the 40 pounds is on its way, and that the 60 pounds will follow. I

am going to hire a boat. It will save walking and so be an economy in

the end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St. Francis of

Assissi awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen.

Yours,

OSCAR.

--_Letter to Robert Ross_.

A VISIT TO THE POPE

c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME,

April 16th, 1900.

My dear Robbie,--I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, but

to me. It is a mode of paralysis--a _cacoethes tacendi_--the one form

that malady takes in me.

Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eight

days, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world--it

dreams away its life in the _concha d'oro_, the exquisite valley that

lies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were so

entirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed the

ordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligences

would have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in a

green night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisite

detail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us for

the absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that are

not immobile.

Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in the

Capella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: one

really feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comb

looking at angels singing: and _looking_ at angels, or indeed at people,

singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the great

artists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes without

vent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or make

whistlings.

Monreale you have heard of--with its cloisters and cathedral: we often

drove there.

I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in the

cathedral of Palermo--he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath the

roof, like birds.

Every day he showed me all over the cathedral, I knelt before the huge

porphyry sarcophagus in which Frederick the Second lies: it is a sublime

bare monstrous thing--blood-coloured, and held up by lions who have

caught some of the rage of the great Emperor's restless soul. At first

my young friend, Giuseppe Loverdi, gave me information; but on the third

day I gave information to him, and re-wrote history as usual, and told

him all about the supreme King and his Court of Poets, and the terrible

book that he never wrote. His reason for entering the church was

singularly mediaeval. I asked him why he thought of becoming a

_clerico_, and how. He answered: "My father is a cook and most poor; and

we are many at home, so it seemed to me a good thing that there should be

in so small a house as ours, one mouth less to feed; for though I am

slim, I eat much, too much, alas! I fear."

I told him to be comforted, because God used poverty often as a means of

bringing people to Him, and used riches never, or rarely; so Giuseppe was

comforted, and I gave him a little book of devotion, very pretty, and

with far more pictures than prayers in it--so of great service to

Giuseppe whose eyes are beautiful. I also gave him many _lire_, and

prophesied for him a Cardinal's hat, if he remained very good and never

forgot me.

At Naples we stopped three days: most of my friends are, as you know, in

prison, but I met some of nice memory.

We came to Rome on Holy Thursday. H--- left on Saturday for Gland--and

yesterday, to the terror of Grissell {5} and all the Papal Court, I

appeared in the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got the

blessing of the Holy Father--a blessing they would have denied me.

He was wonderful as he was carried past me on his throne--not of flesh

and blood, but a white soul robed in white and an artist as well as a

saint--the only instance in history, if the newspapers are to be

believed. I have seen nothing like the extraordinary grace of his

gestures as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless--possibly the

pilgrims, but certainly me.

Tree should see him. It is his only chance.

I was deeply impressed, and my walking-stick showed signs of budding,

would have budded, indeed, only at the door of the Chapel it was taken

from me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course,

in honour of Tannhauser.

How did I get the ticket? By a miracle, of course. I thought it was

hopeless and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at five

o'clock H--- and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l'Europe. Suddenly,

as I was eating buttered toast, a man--or what seemed to be one--dressed

like a hotel porter entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope on

Easter Day. I bowed my head humbly and said "Non sum dignus," or words

to that effect. He at once produced a ticket!

When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and

that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no

more.

An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do

constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an

obsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better.

On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music

quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--such

as Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony and

showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A

sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved

on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at

stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The

sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the

great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in

Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad

portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and

he has gone on posing ever since.

I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me

some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.

Kindest regards to your dear mother.

Always,

OSCAR.

--_Letter to Robert Ross_.

FOOTNOTES

{1} "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of

Oscar Wilde," by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1914.

{2} "The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of the

Nineteenth Century," by Holbrook Jackson. London: Grant Richards Ltd.,

1913.

{3} Mortimer Menpes.

{4} M. Constant Trop-Hardy, died at Berneval, March 2, 1898.

{5} Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, a Papal Chamberlain.

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