The invincible alliance : and other essays, political, social, and literary

a
PyPatatat
viyfatatan

yee
‘7

|

1001 139230

VINA

The Library

SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT

t¢ % * ¥
ay
th J, } ir.
me & Mi i

a, oe pp (3? = ye be

eg ' fe

Meee 5 -Ueaee

- beth

sal 4".

“WOO
cs“,
SN

f Vy

THE
INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

AND OTHER ESSAYS
POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND LITERARY

~~ BY

FRANCIS GRIERSON

LONDON—JOHN LANE—THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK—JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO—BELL & COCKBURN MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
Joun Lane Company

Theology Library

SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT
California

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A,

CONTENTS

Tue INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE .

THe PrRopHEeT WitTHOUT HoNovUR .

THE NEW PREACHER
REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? .

THE PARLIAMENTARY ARENA .
Tue Sout’s NEw REFUGE .
IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY .
MATERIALISM AND CRIME
Hampton Court AND VERSAILLES
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW .
THE AGNOSTIC AGONY .

Tue PsycHoLtocy or DREss
BENJAMIN DISRAELI .
SAVONAROLA

FRANCE OLD AND NEW

THE NEw ERA

II

31

42

60
100
IIo
I21
132
142
160
167
180
186
193
200

213

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

I

the progress of a people there are two ele-
ments which constitute what may be called
their destiny — material force and _ spiritual
power. Experienced politicians frequently fore-
see commercial events with striking accuracy,
because they reason from a visible cause to a
direct and logical result; but the material eye,
no matter how keen, fails to penetrate the world
of spiritual will, where the elements at work are
invisible and silent, and out of which grave events
often occur without any warning whatever. It
is this that lends a sort of blind meaning to the
word Fate.

Physical needs precede intellectual necessity,
and from the physical arise the humane, the philo-
sophic, and the intuitive; and just as soon as a
nation ceases to display a sustained and sober
energy it begins to lose on the side of the spiritual
aspirations of Will and Intellect. India attained
intellectual power after she had risen to a certain
plane of material development, She rose to philo-

12 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

sophic heights, but in the ascent she forgot the
needs of the material. India was caught in a
metaphysical slumber, and was conquered; and
China, after producing her philosophers and
law-makers, lapsed into a long and peaceful
lethargy.

“Place your ear to the bosom of the earth and
you will feel the living throb of the universe,”
says the Celtic seer, Lamennais. And similarly,
if you sit perfectly still in a room in some isolated
palace, you will feel the present gradually fading
into oblivion, and out of the strange silence vi-
sions of coming events will mingle in a sort of
whispering gallery of portents and impressions,
until it seems possible to sense the destiny of
empires.

I have not forgotten the impressions created
by my sojourn at Gatschina. The old Marshal
of the Palace, Prince Bariatinsky, one of the
heroes of Sevastopol, escorted me through the
immense structure. Arriving at a small iron bed
in one of the most interesting rooms he crossed
himself, bent his knee to the floor, and remarked:
“This is the bed of my late beloved master,
Nicolas I.” I stopped, and while looking with
surprise at the hard, uncomfortable-looking
couch, the Prince coolly remarked: “He had his

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 13

mind fixed on Constantinople.”’ My escort gave
a slight shrug of the shoulders, as much as to
say he failed, and he died of a broken heart; and
the Prince added as we walked away: “But
we shall have Persia, and we have an eye on
Manchuria.”

My escort led the way upstairs to the Chinese
museum. When we arrived among the splendid
objects which filled a great gallery, he said again,
with a wave of the hand: “There is something
worth fighting for,” meaning the Chinese Empire.
Then I began to realise what the Eastern question
meant for the people of Russia. But when we
entered the throne room of Catherine the Great,
with its maze of mellow light, its wonderful calm,
and its fascinating simplicity, all this, united to
something singularly Oriental, made me realise
how unnatural Russian dominion is in Western
Europe, and how much in harmony it is with
Eastern thought and religion.

There will be no Russian question in Western
Europe, but the time will come when Germany
will possess the whole of North-western Russia,
and Constantinople will belong to Austro-Ger-
mania. And here we have the question of the
yellow races pressing home closer and closer. In
Russia there is a Far Eastern question, which

14 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

means China and Japan; in Australia and New
Zealand there is the same question, but more im-
perative; while on the Pacific Coast of America,
from Mexico to British Columbia, the question
has even now shaped itself into one of imminent
peril. The whole thing seems so remote from the
England we are living in that to fear trouble from
that source seems like an idle dream. And yet
that is where future trouble will be found. Our
very existence is bound up in this question of
China and Japan because of Australia directly and
the United States indirectly.

It was in San Francisco in 1875 that I first had
an opportunity of studying the Chinese character.
There was at the time a population of 30,000
Chinese, with two large theatres of their own;
but not till I crossed the Pacific on the City of
Sydney in 1877 from California to Australia did
I get a real vision of a Chinese horde on the move
from one part of the world to another.

The steamer was the largest plying between the
ports of San Francisco and Sydney, carrying hun-
dreds of Chinese en route for Honolulu. A huge
hole in the middle of the steamer permitted one
to contemplate the wonderful scene. The weather
was very warm, and down below, so far that it
looked like another world, hundreds of limp and

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 15

listless Chinese fanned their feverish faces with
great coloured fans, and from the bunks, which
rose tier upon tier, hung the legs and arms of the
half-stifled horde as in a picture out of Dante’s
Inferno. Most of them were reclining, while some
sat cross-legged on the floor.

As I stood there, faint waves of weird Chinese
music were wafted up with whiffs of sandalwood,
odours that became lost in the stronger scent of
tobacco smoke on deck. Then, with the setting
sun, came a scene of transcendent magic. A
voice rose from somewhere below, it may have
been a chant of jubilant prophecy or it may have
been a song of encouragement and hope, accom-
panied by Chinese fiddles, the rasping tones sub-
dued and modified to a sort of uncanny wail by
the partitions separating the invisible musicians
from the deck; and as the song continued the
colours in the sky slowly spread out into thou-
sands of small cloudlets, filling the western heavens
with a blaze of molten gold, the sun sank below
the waters, the moon rose in the east, the ship
glided on, the voice came and went, as if in keep-
ing with the long, monotonous roll of the ocean,
and it seemed as if I were sailing the Pacific with
a band of Argonauts from the Celestial Empire in
search of a new Golden Fleece in the vast untram-

16 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

melled spaces of worlds yet to be conquered. I
had caught a glimpse of the Chinese avantguards.
I had seen the first off-shoots of a people endowed
with a patience and endurance unknown to any
of the nations of the West.

*™~ No one who sits at home can possibly realise

: i 4 wv) what the great world-movements are. They
ys nb must be seen, heard, and sensed. To understand
Aa them we have to enter into their rhythmic action.

It is not enough to read about them. All
primitive national movements are symbolical.
They symbolise a greater and a vaster future,
and every act has a special significance.

Sir Robert Hart was the greatest authority on
China. ‘‘The words ‘imperil the world’s future,’”’
he says, “‘may provoke a laugh, but let the words
stand. Twenty million or more of Boxers, armed,
drilled, and disciplined, animated by patriotic
motives, will take back from foreigners everything
foreigners have taken from China, and will pay
off old grudges with interest.”

The Chinese are now, like the Japanese, fully
aware of their importance. A Japanese Ambassa-
dor has recently declared that a triple Alliance
composed of England, the United States, and
Japan could dominate the world. It is easy to see
that in the near future new and startling alliances

ro

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 17

will be formed, but any combination that seeks to
separate England and America will be directed
not only against the peace of the nations but
against Anglo-Saxon civilisation in the West, and
a combination that would debar either of the
great English-speaking countries would speedily
inaugurate a series of wars and revolutions that
would devastate the whole civilised world.

IT

Two things will force England and America into
a coalition of material aims and interests — the
menace of famine on one hand and the menace of
the yellow races on the other. America can never
hope to grapple with the yellow peril single-
handed, England can never hope to avoid star.
vation without a binding political agreement with
the great Republic. All other dangers seem in-
significant compared with the laissez faire policy
now in vogue in regard to this all-important
question.

Yet there has never been a political agreement
based on material interests alone which has stood
the test of a great crisis. A commercial entente
without a natural attraction means nothing in
the hour of political and social strain. France

18 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

to-day would as soon join forces with Germany as
bind her forces to any compact with Anglo-Saxon
interests if the French people thought they were
losing more, even a little more, than they were
gaining.

Has any diplomat in this country figured to
himself the position of the King were England
bound to the precepts of a revolutionary Gov-
ernment in France? France can no more escape
being governed by militant rulers in the near fu-
ture than she can help being sceptical, logical,
ironical, and Gallic. All political agreements with
European nations are but props and crutches.
Italy and Spain will follow the example of France
as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow, and
even at this moment Rome is governed by a
Mayor more militant than the most revolution-
ary Parisian.

The time is gone when the great nations will
go to war like schoolboys in a passion. There
will be no passion in Germany’s next war. It
will be a war of cool calculation. Englishmen
who have not lived in Berlin do not understand
the Prussian. Bismarck divorced the Prussian
mind from sentimentality. The next war will
be no dress parade show, but a simple affair of
calculated famine. The manceuvres will be di-

a

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 19

rected not against the head and the heart, but
against the stomach.

Just after the Franco-Prussian war some French
friends of mine described the conduct of the vic-
torious Germans during the invasion. ‘The
Prussians,”’ said my friends, “fought with the
coolness of human machines which nothing could
stop. The French soldiers fought with a passion
that soon cooled, the Germans with a cold-
blooded will that was crushing; when they made
raids on private families in search of wines and
provisions they did so with perfect politeness,
but with pitiless determination.” But if the
Prussian in 1870 was a fighting automaton with
a will wound up like a clock, what would he be
now after forty years of drill, and discipline far
more reasoned, far more desperate, than any
training ever conceived by the Romans in their
supremest triumphs?

The danger menacing England is not military.
The old Roman question of feeding the populace
is revived once more. We are an exception to
almost every case presented in history. We are
an island, and in our dreams of eternal prosperity,
dreams which have lasted ever since the destruc-
tion of the Spanish Armada, we have been hyp-
notised into a condition of universal languor and

20 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

semi-conscious indifference. We are like men
clutching at phantoms, while avoiding realities.
Few seem able to see that the gravest danger lies
not in anything military near us, but in the danger
created by a distance of full three thousand miles
of water, the danger of not having enough to
eat. The old opium dreams of ease and opulence
have gone on for ages, until the habit has become
a second nature. This was the sort of security
felt by the French nobles at the breaking out of
the French Revolution, when hunger began to
gnaw at the vitals of the Parisian populace. But
the nobles were not saved. Nonchalance and
sang-froid are effective in the senate, the drawing-
room, on the Stock Exchange, and in Rotten Row.
But a hungry mob pays no respect to what it
considers a mixture of political debility and social
callousness. Even virtue appears vapid in times
of violence, and the wisest words from the wisest
orators fall like so much rain on a people tottering
on the verge of ruin.

At the first intimation of famine there would
be a general rush for food. The farmer would
soon cease to sell and begin to hide his provisions
against the time of his own hunger; the people
of the cities would rush for bread and flour; for
the first time in England the proverb “bread is

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE a1

the staff of life,” would suggest something hollow
and sepulchral, for the very thought of being sur-
rounded on all sides by hostile fleets or airships
would of itself paralyse the moral faculties of half
the population of these islands. The certain
knowledge of the close proximity of battle-ships
as formidable as our own, intercepting, destroy-
ing, or delaying the merchant steamers arriving
from America or the Mediterranean, would appal
the most courageous hearts.! All would feel the
crushing imminence of the new danger. Not a
shopkeeper, not a butcher or a baker, not a draper
or a stockbroker or a banker, not a bishop in his
palace or a lord in his castle, not a publican or a
politician, but would be made to realise the para-
lysing effects of impending ruin. All bombast
would cease.

1 Under the heading “Key of the Empire,” the London
Daily Telegraph of June 22nd, 1912, says: ‘‘The withdrawal
of the British battle-force from the Mediterranean brings this
question once more into prominence, because by that route
nearly half the wheat and other cereals required by the British
people reaches this country. What would be the position of
the Government in time of war if these supplies were suddenly
cut off? More than 8,000,000 of the inhabitants of the United
Kingdom are in receipt of wages of about a guinea a week, and
to them a small rise in prices would be a matter of such grave
moment that they might give way to panic, and the whole
defensive policy of the country might be deflected in response to
an uprising, and the essential victory of the fleets in the main
strategical theatre might be risked by the demand for the
detachment of forces to secure the safe arrival of food.”

22 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Nothing would remain as it was. The island
known as England would appear like a ship parted
from her moorings, gone from what seemed fixed
and eternal.

To draw an antithetical picture of what would
happen to the highest and lowest social grades
in such an emergency we have but to scan the
doomsday pages of Jerusalem, Rome, Carthage,
and, above all, to contemplate the “wonders and
terrors” of the French Revolution. In every in-
stance doom was achieved by hunger. Even in
cases where the city had been provisioned for a
long state of siege, hunger at last was the doom
of all. It is the lack of imagination that renders
so many people in London, Liverpool, and the
great manufacturing centres content to live on
year after year in a state of chronic apathy, they,
the very people who would be the first to feel the
slowly accumulating horrors of starvation.

The two classes most steeped in apathy are the
millionaires and titled rich on one hand and the
irresponsible poor on the other; the first have
many things to lose, the second, nothing but their
lives, to which they would cling with frenzied
tenacity. The rich live in mock security, think-
ing it an easy affair to escape in yachts, steamers,
motors, etc. An attempt would be made to cross

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 23

the water by night, but the danger on the water
would be greater than the danger at home. The
first thing the Government would do would be
to put the people on short rations. Then all the
available orators throughout the land would talk
to the people. The people! Alas, yes! For the
people hate the pangs of hunger even more than
the gouty member of Parliament, so often ad-
vised by his physician to starve himself for a
week or two as a cure for his aches and disorders.
The rich would find the first weeks of the block-
ade rather exciting and agreeable. But the man
in the street would begin to growl on the very
first day famine cast her grim shadow across his
path. On him, the hungry man with a family of
starving children, sermons, speeches, and reasoned
editorials would produce no effect. All political
parties would be blamed, and the end of famine
would be a pandemonium of drunkenness, frenzy,
and destruction. ‘The Paris commune would be
repeated with this difference — the ruin wrought
in London would be incalculably greater.

In France the Parisian mob caused the destruc-
tion which was principally confined to Paris, but
in England all the great seaports and manufac-
turing centres would come under the fury of the
populace, rendered insane from drink taken from

24 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the helpless publican around whose doors would
swarm the sturdy vagrants and lazy hordes vom-
ited from every portion of the land as if the lid
had been lifted from some long-hidden inferno
under our feet. In the universal fury and confu-
sion one party would blame the other, rage and
dismay would seize on all, a chorus of curses
and vituperation would arise to drown authority
and urge the remnant on to national annihila-
tion. Forty-eight hours of cumulative delirium
would wipe out a thousand years of accumulated
civilisations.
Tl

“Tell your peoples,” said Lord Rosebery in a
recent speech, “if they can believe it, that Europe
is rattling into barbarism, and of the pressure
that is put upon this little England to defend
itself, its liberties and yours.”

The signs are hopeful when men like Lord
Rosebery begin to tell the people the truth. He
has not told all the truth, but a little will do to
start with. When the speaker said: “I should like
Parliament to vote supplies for two years and then
pack itself up in three or four obsolete warships
and go for a trip in order to find out something
about the Empire,” he touched a sore spot.

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 25

There are politicians who talk about Australia
and Canada much as they would talk about the
Pigmies of Central Africa or the ‘“‘ Nigger of the
Narcissus.”” They find these countries and their
people good subjects for an idle hour, but mighty
boring when discussed seriously. Even now
Western Canada, which is certainly the most fer-
tile part of that splendid country, is being invaded
by determined settlers from the United States,
peaceably and swiftly, and it looks as if the whole
of the country west of Winnipeg would before
long be in possession of Americans. This of itself
may force England and America into a coalition
of material and spiritual forces, and what looks
like a menace may turn out a blessing.

We saw, not long ago, with what enthusiasm
the American Fleet was received by the people of
New Zealand and Australia. This popular out-
burst was a sign of the times. In London it was
accepted in the “blood is thicker than water”
type of sentiment. But sentiment had very little
to do with this singular manifestation. It was
inspired by fear of the yellow man; fear and dread
of a descent into Australia of the Chinese and
Japanese. This is not the time to bring cheap
platitudes to bear on one of the most appalling
outlooks that ever confronted an old, rich, and

26 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

lethargic nation. More than thirty years ago, I
spent one year in Sydney and Melbourne, and
some years later I wrote and spoke on the subject
of a Chinese invasion of Australasia, and was the
first to bring this question before the public. War
occurred between Russia and China, as I pointed
out, and Australia and America are now fully
aroused to the actualities of the time.

The question of war in our day is no longer a
question of passion, but of commercial expansion.
“Powerful influences,” says the Yorkshire Post,
“some of them pecuniarily interested, others con-
cerned for ambitions, the exclusion of this or that
commercial competition from this or that market,
are constantly at work pressing forward the de-
velopment of armaments, and hence the imper-
ative need for a union of defence that shall
embrace the whole Empire.”’ But a union of the
whole Empire will not turn the yellow man from
the Pacific nor keep famine from England’s shores.

The London Daily News hopes that, whether
as the result of a catastrophe or not, the working
men of the world will refuse to be sacrificed as the
creatures of destruction. But to my mind there
is no way for the people of England to escape
being sacrificed in the impending Continental
commercial-war expansion but a social and com-

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 27

mercial union of all English-speaking countries
throughout the world. All other combinations
are purely chimerical, intended for dreamers who
do not understand the signs of the day, and who
do not realise what is going on in the dominat-
ing centres of commerce and politics. What, for
instance, would a few men-of-war avail Canada
were America to declare war against England?
In that case Canada would be swiftly invaded
by a million men from the Western States.

On the other hand, were England, Australia,
New Zealand, and Canada to federate with Amer-
ica in a social-commercial union, it could not
make any real difference whether Canada called
herself British or American, or Anglo-American.
What common-sense Englishmen want is secur-
ity instead of doubt, order instead of confusion,
progress instead of decadence. What common-
sense Americans want is the certainty of peace
and progress. As for Canada arming against an
attack from some European Power, the notion
is absurd. The reason is obvious — America
would never permit so much as the landing of a
single regiment of foreign troops on Canadian
soil. The truth is, as the Evening Post of New
York has pointed out, the building of a Canadian
navy will only serve to irritate and cause friction

28 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

between the two peoples, where at present there
is no cause of inharmony or misgiving.

Look where we may, we cannot escape from the
idea of an Anglo-International Federation. There
is scarcely a limit to possible combinations and
alliances against England, but only one alliance
possible for England’s permanent good, and no
friend of Anglo-Saxon progress would think of
preaching an Anglo-American alliance based
solely on political and material interest. All
merely political understandings are foredoomed
to short life. The forthcoming Anglo-American
Federation, to endure, must include four working
elements in combination: (a) the political, (6) the
commercial, (c) the religious, (d) the social. It
would be the business of the British Parliament
and the U. S. Congress to take the initiative in
all matters respecting politics and commerce.
These questions would form the least of the diffi-
culties to be overcome.

It would not require much in a moment of im-
minent peril to cause a fusion of American and
British material interests. What is more diffi-
cult and vastly more important is the work to
be done by ministers of religion from English and
American pulpits in conjunction with workers
in the field of social, scientific, and intellectual

THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE 29

progress. A movement should be started which
would make it possible for the leading preachers
of all denominations in England and America to
make periodical international visits, the English-
man preaching from an American pulpit, the
American preaching from an English pulpit, hav-
ing for a universal text the spiritual and social
unification of Anglo-American peoples; the main
part of the great work would be accomplished in
a year from the day of departure. In such a case
it is easy to see what would happen — politicians
at Washington and Westminster would be forced
to join in a movement that embraced all de-
nominations of English-speaking Christians. In
conjunction with this religious movement, the
intellectual social element would harmonise and
develop on the same lines.

The destiny of America is wrapped up in that
of England. On the day that England sinks to
a second-class Power in Europe, a European co-
alition will develop which will have for its prime
object the partition of Mexico, Central America,
and the States of South America. European ex-
pansion beyond the seas is no idle dream, since
both Germany and France are now fairly em-
barked on colonial schemes for commercial de-
velopment.

30 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

On the day England drops into a second-rate
Power, America’s troubles will begin; the com-
binations for America would present infinite
possibilities, and the Chinese and Japanese ques-
tions in the Pacific would prove but a small part
of the danger. There would be the combined
navies of the two greatest Continental nations in
Europe, and perhaps three to deal with, possibly
four — Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. But
far graver still is the thought that in America the
foreign population is gaining on the Anglo-Amer-
ican population, and without the union of the
English and the Americans of British and English
descent the United States could in twenty years
from now become absolutely detached from the
sentiments and aspirations of the Anglo-Saxon
mind. For this reason, if for no other, a strenu-
ous effort will have to be made towards Anglo-
American solidarity.

THE PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR!

HE thought has often occurred to me: what
would Tolstoy’s disciples, rich or otherwise,

do if, by some stroke of fate, he were suddenly
deprived of three things — his title, his inde-
pendence, and his prestige, I mean his prestige
as a prophet perpetually facing the supposed
dangers of a fixed residence in Russia? What
would become of him were he to land in England
to-morrow possessed of nothing but the clothes
on his back, with no prospect of future social or
political glory? If I know the world, and I think
I do, here is something like what would happen.

Scene. — The wealthy soi-disant Christian So-
cialist, Sir Percy Prim and Lady Prim, in
their home. '

Sir Percy: And so Tolstoy has actually ar-
rived in London! We must have him here to tea.
Lapy Pri: That would be very nice, if we
could get him before Lady Castlegarden has him
at her house. You know what an outspoken
enthusiast she is about all such things: Christian

1 This study was written in 1909.

32 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Science, Christian Socialism, and especially Tol-
stoy and his teachings, and she is sure to be
among the very first to invite him; you know
how very up-to-date she is, and she says old-
fashioned people always make her feel weak,
they ‘‘draw” from her. She is certain to pounce
on him like a hungry old cat on a country
mouse.

Sir Percy: Country mouse, perhaps, but any-
thing but a young one.

Lapy Prim: In the eyes of Lady Castlegarden
young and old are all one if up-to-date.

Sir Percy: Well, anyhow, it’s about time we
offered our friends something in return for enter-
tainment they have given us lately. That last
evening at Lady Kant’s — quite entertaining! —
although no one pretends to understand the airs
and tricks of that prodigy with his fiddle, young
Vichy — Vichy — what’s hisname? Quite amus-
ing Lady Kant declaring that the saucy brat is
not doing it himself, but Paganini is doing it
through him. Quite novel, I must confess.

Lapy Prim: She draws the bow rather long,
but you know she loves the sensational.

Str Percy: And there is Lady Castlegarden,
with her mind-reader, who failed to tell the num-
ber of the banknote I had in my pocket, but

PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR 33

described in detail the ticket the pawnbroker
gave the Duchess of Rigglesworth when she
pawned a tiara to raise money to send a mission-
ary to the niggers in Fiji. Most amusing — the
silly geese! I think if we can’t off-set that by
showing them the greatest Russian that ever
lived, a born nobleman and a gentleman, a prophet
in his own country as well as out of it; if we can’t
go them one better on their puppy prodigies and
mind-reading buffoons, the sooner we cease try-
ing to entertain anyone the better. And, then,
the one man in all the world who has made
Christian Socialism respected, the man who has
made the whole world look towards the Russian
Bethlehem with awe and reverence —in one
_ word, the saviour of modern society.

Lapy Prim (opening the latest edition of the
evening paper, and reading): What’s this? I can
hardly believe my eyes! Tolstoy is no longer a
count, and he has landed here without a penny
in his pocket!

Str Percy: Who says so?

Lapy Prim: Here it is in the paper. He has
lost everything, and is now no better than the rest
of them. We could n’t have him here without
appearing flagrantly absurd and highly provincial.

Str Percy: Good heavens! I’m glad we knew

34 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

that in time. Had we invited the old fellow here
he might have asked me for money.

sinter the COUNTESS OF CASTLEGARDEN.

Lapy CASTLEGARDEN: Have you heard the
news? Tolstoy is in London!

Sir Percy: Yes, but stripped of everything,
without so much as a change of clothes, every-
thing gone, titles, estates, everything!

Lapy CASTLEGARDEN: And my son Robert
comes of age next week, and he has always de-
clared he will give half his income to Tolstoy for
the propagation of his teachings!

Lapy Prim: But something must be done!

Sir Percy: Certainly something must be
done, and done in time. He must be kept away
from Tolstoy.

Lapy CASTLEGARDEN: How fortunate! Here
comes Robert now! Do you know, we were just
talking about something very serious? Your
‘idol, Tolstoy, is in London, but broken and utterly
done for. He is no longer even a Russian
count!

RoseErt (coolly): I hope I’m not so stupid as
to assist a man who has nothing to recommend
him but his writings.

Sir Percy: Most certainly not! A man must

PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR 35

at least be a gentleman, and these writers with-
out means are simply vagabonds in disguise —
that’s what I say!

RoBeERT: Somehow I had an idea Tolstoyism
would n’t last very long.

Lapy Prim: In my opinion, when he lost his
title he lost everything.

Sir Percy nods his head, LADY Pru frowns, and
RoBERT looks up vacanily at the ceiling.

The scene changes. A group of successful literary
men.

First Writer: So the old fanatic is actually
here at last!

SECOND WritTER: ‘‘Old fanatic” sounds good,
coming from one who was received in Russia by
Tolstoy, and who wrote a glowing account of
the visit to the Daily Boomerang, in which the
“Count” was depicted as a man with the face
and the figure of a prophet, only a little lower
than an archangel.

THIRD WRITER: Well, I always knew there
was no bottom in Tolstoyism. All an illusion, you
see — illusion of time, place, and circumstance.

First WriTER: How’s that? What do you
mean?

Tumrp WRITER: I simply mean that Tolstoy

36 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

managed things while he was at it much as
Rockefeller managed things in the oil line, and
just as successfully, except that he asked for no
money. Tolstoy was something more than a
novelist @ la mode; he was a great psychologist.
He knew how to bring the English and Americans
to his home, and how to make them talk about
him after they left. What the world wants is not
a poor shoemaker sitting mending shoes, but a
live prophet, dressed like Elijah; only, instead
of being fed by ravens, fed by a mighty good
cook, and a small army of servants in attend-
ance, with a fashionable countess to give them
their orders, and to take good care that the
prophet has everything his mind and body re-
quire to make his journey through this vale of
tears as jaunty and luxurious as it is possible for
money to make it.

SECOND WRITER: We are living in a picturesque
age.

First Writer: Don’t you think it is senti-
ment that has turned picturesque?

SECOND WriTER: Most men are like most
women; they like sentiment, but they want
plenty of “show” behind it. They want it
picturesque.

THIRD WRITER: Romantic, in one word.

PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR 37

SECOND WRITER: Certainly, but they want
their romance with all modern comforts.

THIRD WRITER: If Tolstoy’s cook had fed his
foreign visitors on cabbage and celery tips he
would have had few callers from a great distance.

SECOND WRITER: Snobbery avoids three things
— individualism, inconvenience, and indigestion.

THIRD WRITER: And that leads me to what I
was going to say about Tolstoyism being founded
on illusions. You know the old saw, “Distance
lends enchantment”; well, this question of dis-
tance was a great factor in Tolstoy’s life. When
we know a man is difficult to get at, our desire
rises fifty per cent in the scale of illusions. Follow
this up by the illusion of place, his remote country
mansion, all in the Russian style, so unlike any-
thing in the lives of western authors; follow that
up again by the peculiar circumstances of his
strange existence, the flat contradictions, the
impossible paradox, and I say you have enough
to float the reputation of three novelists and keep
them wellabove the Wilbur Wright line of success-
ful aeroplane manceuvring. It is wonderful what
proper management will do. Tolstoy was a great
manager. He neglected nothing that could by
any possibility attract the gaze of the whole world
to himself. His contradictions and denials of men

38 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

of genius equal to, if not greater than, himself,
was a tactical stroke in keeping with everything
else in his luxurious and easy life.

SECOND WRITER: It is amazing what an attrac-
tion there is in cheap things that are not quite
easy to get.

First Writer: As a proof of that, compare
the miracle worker, the late Father John, with
Tolstoy. Father John expected money from the
rich to carry on his charitable work; he was a
poor priest with no social standing, and the Eng-
lish and the Americans ignored the humble priest
and passed on to Tolstoy, who was more difficult
to reach — and cheaper. There was absolutely
nothing to pay.

SECOND WRITER: Sometimes I wonder if
Tolstoy did not begin by taking to heart Carlyle’s
saying that most people are fools, and simply
acting on that.

TumrD Writer: All the same, I’m sorry this
thing has happened. Had Tolstoy remained in
his old position in Russia two months longer I
should have been better off by nearly four hundred
pounds. I was making arrangements to go out
and beard the prophet in his palatial den, take a
series of sensational views, one or two sketches,
something novel, my own idea, be away about a

PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR 39

month, spend twenty or thirty pounds, come
home, and clear about three hundred and eighty,
with the satisfaction of having had a rousing
good time.

First WRITER: Lucky thing for some people
that Tolstoy was not in the boot and shoe busi-
ness instead of a great landed proprietor.

SECOND WRITER: Shoemaking is not romantic
enough!

THIRD WRITER: Yet, I’ll bet you it’s the last
profession he will stick to now that he is in Eng-
land dead broke.

Scene changes again. A fine country house in the
Surrey hills. Rich proprietor known as a keen
disciple of Tolstoy, enthusiastic, always will.
ing to spend money on the Tolstoyan Utopia.
The proprietor is sitting at his desk, engaged
in writing a pamphlet on how best to dissemi-
nate the Tolstoyan idea. Enter a newspaper
reporter from London.

REPORTER: Have you heard what has
happened?

PropriEToR: Nothing very serious, I hope.

REPORTER: Tolstoy has arrived in London
without a penny; his title, his estates, his social
prestige, all gone.

4o THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

PROPRIETOR: What! You mean to say he has -
nothing left!

REporTER: Nothing but his genius.

PROPRIETOR: Great Cesar! Then he is only
another Maxim Gorky!

He sits back in his chair, stupefied.

REpoRTER: He is stopping at a cheap hotel
in the Strand, and has been assisted by some
working-men who have pawned their watches for
the purpose. They say Tolstoy must come out
here to you, where he can have a good home; he
intends setting up as a shoemaker, working at
the usual rates at that trade.

PROPRIETOR (gasping): You don’t mean it!

REPORTER: That is the intention,

Proprietor: This takes my breath away
What am I to do? This thing has knocked me
all in a heap. It is a nightmare! And, hang it
all, Tolstoy on his estates in Russia is one thing,
Tolstoy a beggar living on my estate is another.
And, besides, fancy people coming here to have
their boots mended! Why will Russian counts
get broke and turn themselves into dirty
mujiks!

REPORTER: Perhaps you could take him for a
few days, and then pass him on to the common

PROPHET WITHOUT HONOUR ar

working-men, who seem to have remained his
warm disciples in spite of all.

PROPRIETOR (tapping his forehead): Stay! I
have an idea. Tolstoy is an old man. He can’t
live long at the most and worst. His keep would
not cost much. I have a vacant room in the ser-
vant’s house, at the top over there, where he can
mend boots and write without bothering me;
and at the same time things will appear to be as
they were. No one need be compromised.

ReEpPoRTER: And when he dies bury him in
your back garden.

Proprietor: A splendid idea! And hang it
all, later on I’ll reimburse myself by charging the
beggars a shilling per head when they come here
on their annual visits to view the grave. His
drawing power is gone now, but his grave will
draw later on. A splendid idea!

THE NEW PREACHER

HEY had listened to the first sermon of the
new minister, and the people, now slowly
leaving the church, were more than usually
silent, more profoundly impressed than on any
former Sunday within the memory of the oldest
member of the congregation. Something had
happened. The people might have been coming
away from a long and solemn funeral service;
but, as a young stockbroker remarked to his
friend as they walked down the street, it was a
funeral service with an immediate resurrection.
The old was gone, the new had taken its place.
The broker as he walked tried to explain.
“That man,” he said, alluding to the new
preacher, “has what artists call the true magic.
He tears down the false and then builds up the
reality. Did you notice what an influence settled
down over the congregation when he began his
description of worldly actions and reactions?
Did you feel the sensation of sinking down and
then rising up and out into a clearer and better
atmosphere?”

THE NEW PREACHER 43

His companion answered that he was fully
conscious of the sensation at the time, and
asked:

“Does it not come under the heading of rheto-
rical eloquence? Is it not due to the artistry of
the words and sentences?”

‘All fine preaching is more or less rhetorical,’’
was the answer; “‘but the sermon of the new
minister had in it something both higher and
deeper than rhetoric; it was full of emotion’, No
concoction of empty phrases and fine words will
ever influence critical and sensitive people. To
revive drooping plants the water must sink to the
roots. Words and sentiments must touch the
deepest recesses of emotion. Mere argument can
never be made to influence in the same way.
Cold logic is useless when you want to reach the
high and touch the deep.”

The stockbroker’s companion admitted all this
to be true, but he demanded to know how it came
about that the preaching of certain revivalists,
and notably that of the early revivalists, ap-
pealed to an order of mind quite the opposite to
that of the mind used to rhetorical culture and
classical learning. The broker stopped, and,
facing his companion, explained:

“The emotion of the ordinary revivalist and

44 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the emotion displayed by this new minister are
not on the same level.”

“You mean the one is dominated by a sort
of blind feeling, the other by a conscious intelli-
gence?” -

“This new preacher is an artist in words.”

“You mean,” said the other, “that the ordinary
revivalist daubs his colours on the congregational
canvas while this new preacher blends his colours
and uses his brush with skill and caution?”

“He does all that and more. I noticed while
he was preaching how every word fit the idea,
how every sentence fit every sentiment. Things
were unified. His whole sermon was as orderly
as a musical composition and as harmonious as a
beautiful picture.”

“So you think he was conscious of being the
master of his sermon, instead of the sermon the
master of him?” _

< ‘Impressional preaching)is a good thing if the
congregation is not Critical. An audience of
educated and experienced people have the critical
faculty too strongly developed to be influenced
by a preacher’s impulsiveness, no matter how
eloquent he may be. As soon as I know that a
preacher is as critical as I am I listen to what he
has to say, ready to be moved by his words if

THE NEW PREACHER § 45

there is anything in them superior to the kind
of argument we hear every day. This new
preacher is logical, but we who have lived on
logic want something more. We want the thing
which we do not possess.”

“You mean the art?”

“T mean the art if you care to call it by that
word; the art that goes hand in hand with a sort
of verbal inspiration, a sort of word-magic, the
sort of thing no fellow can quite explain, no
matter how we reason over it. You see, the
thing is too simple to be explained.”

“Too simple!” The broker’s companion
stopped suddenly and looked the other in the
face.

“Yes, it is too simple! Have you forgotten
your Emerson already? The simple is always
the result of the complex.”

They remained silent for some time, then the
broker continued:

“In every art the finest things are the clearest
things; they bear a vital exterior evidence, full
of significant power. When any art fails to do.
this it is not fine art; it is crude art.”

“You mean to imply that the majority of
preachers fail to influence their congregations
because of their want of such art?”

46 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

“The vast majority fail to impress their hear-
ers, not from lack of sincerity, or honesty, or
deep conviction, but from lack of this poetic art,
", which means beauty united to power, conviction
united to what critics call the ‘creative faculty.’”

“T must admit,” said the other, “that I rarely
attend church simply to hear the preacher. If I
know what he is going to preach about I usually
know what he is going to say. I sit and listen
to the old platitudes in the name of ethics, and
am mighty glad when the sermon is over.”

“This is true of the majority of church-goers
to-day,” returned the broker. “Most of us go
to hear the music first; the sermon is thrown
in to give the service some show of moral and
religious sentiment. I confess I, too, went to
church to-day to hear the music. Now I have
forgotten all about the music and am still under
the spell cast by the new minister, whose correct
name I hardly know.”

“And yet all the words he used in his twenty-
minute sermon are to be found in Webster’s
Abridged,” said the other, smiling.

“Truth on Sunday requires Sunday clothes.”

“You mean the common truths expressed by
the ordinary preacher are too common to
impress?”

THE NEW PREACHER 47

“The ordinary preacher comes before his con-
gregation with the same sentiments, the same
expressions which served him during the week.
He has changed nothing. The people have put
on their Sunday best, the beauty of the women -
has been enhanced by colour and elegance, the
character of the men has been enlivened by a
more fastidious attention to cut of garment, but
in his words, his attitude, his moods, the preacher
remains exactly what he was on the previous
Friday or Saturday. He is not on the art level of
his congregation.”

“Thatis a great point,” said theother musingly.

“Every.ineffectual effort sinks to the level of
the €ommonplacey” continued the broker; “but
in these matters the simple and the common are
as wide apart as two poles. Most people, in try-
ing to be natural and simple, become ordinary
to the verge of boredom.”

“So you think the homely truths have ceased
to influence church-goers?”

“A highly educated congregation demands
something different. What we of the big cos-
mopolitan cities want to-day is not household
preaching, but household inspiration.”

“What do you mean by the word ‘inspira-
tion’?”’

48 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

“Religious feeling united to intellectual im-
agination, added to a something which eludes
definition.”

“A sort of divine mood, in which the preacher
and the artist are one.”

“Our senates, law courts, universities, studios,
and literary coteries contain more gifted men than
the churches.”

“The fact is,” said the other with emphasis,
“the rapid progress made in the world of art
and music in recent years has made the efforts
put forth by our leading area look small and
insignificant in comparison.”

“But they have clutched at music cy’ said the
broker, “clutched at it like a donne man at a
straw.”

“Yes, it is a grave error.”

After a significant silence the other said:

“The mood evoked by music is transcendental.
We soar on airy wings while we listen, but we
descend to earth as soon as the last strains have
ceased. Music entrances, but the trance is brief.
The religious spirit is very different. We feel it
as a waking reality. It is something we take with
us from the home to the office in the city. Music
1s a passion, religion is a principle.”

“Ts not fine music a good thing for the church?”

THE NEW PREACHER $49

Its true mission is to open a way. Viewed in
this light, its effect is sometimes marvellous, but
so is the effect produced by an application of
electric power to the human nerves — a power
which thrills, but does not feed. Real religion
is much more than a mental stimulus.”

“You mean to imply that the churches are
depending on music to take the place of effective
preaching?”

“They are trying to feed the people on electric
shocks.”

“And in the meantime the people are under-
going a spiritual famine. Some churches offer a
regular Sunday banquet, where everything is
present but the staff of life. As matters stand
now, music is the champagne of the banquet, the
sermon a fricassee composed of fish, flesh, and
fowl.”

“We have made great strides forward in every
line of accomplishment except that of original,
true, and emotional preaching,” said the other,
as if malig: out of a reverie.

“T agree,” said his companion; “but emotion
in itself is not an art, but a gift. The business
of the artist is to direct notion, tone it into
rhythm, and make it effective.”

“We are too young to remember the oldtime

50 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

actors who used to tear a passion to tatters, or
the great revivalists like Peter Cartwright who
swung sinners over the jaws of Tophet until their
feet touched perdition; but in giving up the old,
we have taken to pulpit talk which is hardly up
to the intellectual level of the ordinary scientific
lecturer.” ;

“Ts that not why the majority of preachers
pass in society as intellectualists without a special
religious gift, and without a real spiritual mis-
sion, possessing no vital influence on the people
they meet in daily life?”

“Ministers have too long flattered the people
by all sorts of notions cloaked under the name of
religion, in which the soul has no more place than
a sermon would have in the arena of the Stock
Exchange on a busy day.”

Can ‘science and religion Jever be made to
mingle and“Harmonise?” asked the other with
feeling.

“Formerly we humbugged others’ while we
remained undeceived, but now each man does
his best to humbug himself. Science has as much
to do with religious sentiment and psychic emo-
_ tion as it has to do with the natural flowers that
grow unaided in the woods and fields. The
smart man in the pulpit is no better than the

THE NEW PREACHER 51

smart man on the Stock Exchange. He receives
no more respect from the world generally. In
taking away the grosser superstitions from religion
our ministers have taken away reverence and all
the finer feelings and sentiments that belong to
the realm of the psychic. There is no such thing
as scientific poetry, no such thing as scientific
emotion, no such thing as scientific religion.”

“That means that no science will ever touch
even the hem of the nee of the soul,” said
the other. ye

“Quite so. ‘ Intellectual preaceane ds a religious vt G

illusion, like operatic music in the church on
Sunday. There are people who think such things
fill a long-felt want; what they really fill is a
social vacuum on Sunday.”

“Religious leaders have got hold of the wrong
art,” said the other, with a luminous smile.

“Worldly art,” said the broker curtly. “Sci-
ence is a material state of the mind, religion a
spiritual state of the soul.”

“The new minister possesses the last; it
seemed to me he filled the whole church with an
aura of religious intensity. He impressed all,
even the most fashionable and worldly.”

“That is because all great art is a psychic
effusion.”

52 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

They ceased speaking for a time. Then the
broker said:

“A word is but a spark of light; a fine sentence
is a thought made radiant. A splendid sermon
is to a congregation what the rays of the sun are
to the things of the earth. Plants grow aided by
rain and sunshine; souls develop under discipline
and the right words spoken at the right time. The
new minister began his sermon in a sort of gloom;
the clouds gathered, and at the right moment
the rain descended, with interludes of sunshine
to let us see that the sun exists above the clouds,
and that religious happiness is not an illusion.”

“Because people were never so fed up on
worldly illusions as they are to-day, and I fear
we are Stall-fed optimists ready for the slaughter.
We have listened too long to empirics who come
and feel our pulse, look at our tongue, and then
tell us, with a nonchalant air, that nothing ails
us but a passing indigestion, advise us to go for a
trip to the country or to take a long sea voyage.”

“T am not sure but that an age of optimism is
not an age given over to pleasure,” said the other.

“Many people are optimists from intellectual
conceit. Pride, ignorance, and vanity are at the
bottom of most of our optimistic pretensions,
and if you look at things closely you will soon see

THE NEW PREACHER 53

how most of our so-called religious people are
in exactly the same fix as our political parties.
Before an election all parties are bursting with
optimism, pretending to be happy. As a matter
of fact, all are in doubt, many in a state of fear.
After the election ask your political optimist if
he is happy! The bitter irony! Ask your fair-
weather church-goers if they are happy on the
day the doctor whispers the final word that all
is over with them —no more illusion, no more
flattery, no more lying, no more pleasure, no
more hope. Awful hour! When the optimistic
catchwords sound as hollow as the cold clods
falling on a coffin!”

“T think a good deal of the trouble arises from
the fact.that many of our pulpits are occupied
by (agnostics\who are groping for truth just like
their congregations. Their sermons are spiced
with Spiritism, Theosophy, and mysticism, and
the sauce for this intellectual pudding is called
Christianity. These agnostics oppose nothing
but real religion, for which they have neither
feeling nor understanding.”

“Stockbrokers are called bulls and bears. I
regard an agnostic in a pulpit as a wolf in sheep’s
clothing; no grizzly is so formidable amidst a
wilderness of souls.”

54 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

“And why?” exclaimed the other. “Because
the agnostic could not hold his position in such
a church six months if he did not flatter the divers
opinions and beliefs to be found among the lead-
ing members of his congregation. Such a minister
must be ondoyant and correctly vague, innocently
vacillating and plausibly progressive, believing
in everything, secure in nothing. As soon as a
preacher pleases all the members of a cosmopoli-
tan congregation be certain you are dealing with
a man of the world who knows how to lecture,
but cannot preach.”

“T make no profession of religion; my friends
call me an agnostic; I have even been called a
materialist; and when I go to church it is for the
music. But I have never deceived myself. I do
not profess to be spiritually contented. The man
who is to influence me must, first of all, be con-
vinced and contented himself. It is not possible
to deceive a well-read agnostic for long; there is
nothing he respects and admires so much as
eloquent speech from a convinced preacher,
nothing he despises more than a man of learning
who pretends to know more than the agnostic.
It is not ignorance we despise; it is false claims to
knowledge.”

“But was there ever a time when the clubman

THE NEW PREACHER 55

and the millionaire, the fashionable woman and
the society leader, felt so near moral salvation
without feeling certain of it?”

“Tt all results from the absurd notion that a
man ought to profess a spiritual optimism on a
level, so to speak, with his wealth and his busi-
ness capacity.”

“But it is a far cry from the bodily ease that
affluence provides to an easy conscience. And,
if I am to judge by my own feelings, after having
made a fortune of several millions while yet a
young man, I can say with some assurance that
no amount of luck or progressive prosperity will
ever compensate for the lack of spiritual repose.
I go to books for some signs of enlightenment, to
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, to Emerson,
but a living orator who can wrestle with the
conscience of a people is worth more than books.
He comes in direct contact with us, we feel his grip,
we admit his superior force, we are conquered,
and we shake hands with the victor as a friend.”

“There are two classes of men who ought to
be able to tell us what ails us — medical men and
religious ministers: the one for the body, the
other for the soul. The medical man succeeds
fairly well, the minister fails in the great majority
of cases. And why? Because few ministers in

56 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

our day feel certain they possess a soul. Negative
themselves, they fail to bring conviction to
others.”

“Besides that, I see a grave danger to the
churches in presenting, as some leaders are do-
ing, the subject of immortality in a purely
material light. In their efforts to prove im-
mortality they have created in the minds of many
worldly people an atmosphere of security that
fringes the borders of every selfish vice. I once
met a business man who had been a Congrega-
tional minister in a large town. Some of the
leading members of his congregation were in-
clined to Be doubting Thomases. He hit on the
notion that a series of sermons based on psychical
manifestations as proofs of the soul’s survival
would be just the thing for the doubters. He
preached for four Sundays on this subject, and at
the close of the series had the doubters so well
convinced that several of the richest ceased to
take an active interest in religion. They no
longer feared anything, declaring that the other
world being just like this one, it was needless to
worry about the soul’s future. The pastor left
the ministry for a business career; he could no
longer raise the necessary funds to keep the
church going.”

THE NEW PREACHER 57

“Preachers who attempt to reduce the spiritual
to the plane of the material must always fail. It
is madness to convince a man who is already a
lover of self that he is going to live on unchanged
after death. Preachers who do this may be sin-
cere, wise they are not. The new minister we
have just heard is not one of these. What we
want to-day is not the grosser proofs of immor-
tality, but the finer, more spiritual proofs. We
want to get hold of the true feeling, the aspiration
of continued spiritual progress — I hardly know
what to call it. I should be sorry to think that
things go on after death as they do here; it
would make me more selfish than I am now.”

“And that brings up the subject of charity and
utilitarianism.”

“What in reality is the thing called utili-
tarianism?”

“Tn my opinion, it is a multitude of sins under
a cloak of wholesale charity. It is so easy to give
wholesale, so easy to order things by the gross,
so bothersome to handle them in detail.”

“Ts not mechanical charity an insult to all the
recipients?”

“Tt is charity without spiritual sympathy, it
is goodness made automatic, virtue made hypo-
critically vicious, penny-in-the-slot religion, all

58 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the more dangerous because the machine works
so smoothly.”

“T object to it just because it is so cheap,”
said the other with a bitter tone.

“What the wealthy utilitarian lacks is senti-
ment.”

“But is he not often a sentimentalist?”

“Sentiment gives distinction, sentimentality is
as crude as it is blind. This is why your wealthy
parvenu gives so much to public institutions.
He thinks he is buying distinction. Note that
he or she always takes care to give to something
that is, or will be, popular.”

“Don’t you think that as soon as the whole-
sale utilitarian philanthropist realises that giving
to public institutions is a sign of decadent taste,
to say nothing about judgment, the custom will
cease?”

“The custom will cease as soon as the custom
is regarded as bad form. Society has placed a
ban on the person who eats with a knife and
drinks wine out of a cup. I see the day coming
when the ostentatious giver will have no place
in refined social circles.”

“And this brings us to a main point: the
State will be compelled to maintain universities,
hospitals, libraries, and all institutions connected

THE NEW PREACHER 59

in any way with public utility. Individuals will
cease to be utilitarians. The rich will turn their
attention to work of a distinctly private nature.
Struggling men and women of talent and genius
will no longer be objects of charity; they will be
sought out and made to realise that their efforts
are not in vain; poets, artists, philosophers,
scientists, musicians, preachers with a gift will
no longer languish in obscurity. The gifted will
take their proper place in the world’s work; they
will cease to be the tools of cunning avarice and
high-handed greed, the playthings of ignorance
and pretentious fashion.”

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE?

I

CENE: A private room in the Waldorf-
Astoria Hotel, New York. Coffee is being
served after a sumptuous dinner. Persons pres-
ent: A senator, a judge, a general, an ex-ambas-
sador, an episcopal rector, a professor of history,
a professor of psychology, a multi-millionaire.
They had come together to welcome home the
man who had been an ambassador only a short
time before, and after some speeches the company
settled down to the ordinary talk of the evening.
“Tt is a great and moving subject,” remarked
the senator (taking a couple of whiffs at his cigar),
“a very great subject. When you pronounce the
word Empire in a country like ours you bring
into play the greatest stops of the organ; you
sound the trumpet notes of heroism, romance,
and adventure.”

“T should say,” said the judge, “it includes
much more than that. An American Empire
would involve the whole world in its meshes.
Were we ruled by an emperor, not only all the

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 61

present social factors would be changed in our
country, but Europe and Asia would be involved
in the progressive changes, the flux and the reflux
of political, religious, and material development.”

The judge, as he ceased speaking, extended his
arm, eyed his cigar with deliberation, brushed the
ashes off with his fat little finger, while every
member of the party watched him as if he were
about to deliver judgment in a case of life or
death.

The judge was one of those men who exert a
ponderable influence by “heft.” He was a polit-
ical heavy-weight. The bulk of his body sus-
tained and balanced his words, his looks, and
his gestures, while the senator, who was thinner
and taller, was a physical feather-weight, whose
muscles were in his brains, and whose knock-
downs were in his arguments.

There was a pause, as there usually is in cases
when a grave question has been suddenly brought
on the tapis, and the listeners are taking sound-
ings in the shallows of their own ignorance. Evi-
dently, by the shifting of legs, and slight, but
significant, clearings of the throat, most of the
party were beginning to “sit up.”

“Do you know,” said the professor of psycho-
logy, with a rather serious smile, “I always think

62 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

there is something in the quality of the wine
that decides or influences these after-dinner
discussions.” To which the ex-ambassador re-
plied good-humouredly: ‘You look at the cham-
pagne label before judging the import of the
conversation.”

“We have been drinking Veuve Clicquot this
evening,” returned the professor, “and I have
little fear of the quality of the conversation. If
we are going to discuss the question of an emperor
in this country we should do it with ‘unmuddled
heads.’”

“And, I should add, with strong nerves,” said
the senator.

“Tt takes moral courage to face the subject
under any circumstances,” retorted the judge.

“Ts this question not in the air?” It was the
professor of history who asked the question.

“Tt is in the air, but not yet on people’s
tongues,” remarked the senator. “We require
to breathe microbes before we feel their effects;
the incubation always takes time”’; but the rector
said, “Now that this question has been brought
frankly before us I am reminded that a good many
people have lately been feeling Imperial without
knowing just how to describe their feelings.”

“Perhaps the time has come to diagnose the

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 63

symptoms,” put in the psychologist. “Is it, or
is it not, a disease?”

“You touch a vital point,” chimed in the judge.
“Tt would be impossible to over-rate its far-reach-
ing importance. If it is a disease, everything de-
pends on whether it is ‘catching’ or not.”

The psychologist now spoke with much anima-
tion: “We know that ‘fashion’ is nothing but
the working of one imagination on the mind of
another. One or two persons fix upon a certain
fashion, then groups begin to imitate the thing
that is set before them, after which the public fall
into line, and no one questions the utility or the
futility of the fashion imposed.”

“That is true,”’ declared the senator; “if we
are destined to have an emperor it is but a ques-
tion of who begins to suggest the ‘Imperial’
game — merely a question of time. What is in
the heart will one day be expressed by the hand.”
He suited the action to the word by lighting a
fresh cigar.

“Not long ago,” said the rector, “I heard a
clergyman say that fully eighty per cent of his
congregation were secretly ready for an Empire.”
He gave a furtive glance at the company.

The rector despised Democracy, not so much
because he thought it all wrong, but because his

64 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

secret inclinations opposed it. With him, as
with the class he represents, Democracy was not
so much a thing to be feared as a thing to be
shunned.

As for Socialism, he would as soon think of
learning Chinese as of reading up the philosoph-
ical and economical arguments of its leaders.
The rector stood for a large and powerful class
that rule in the social circles of New York, Balti-
more, Philadelphia, and Boston. His class stand
for the letter as opposed to the spirit, the form
as opposed to the substance, manner opposed to
method. In their eyes the Episcopal Church is
a barrier against what they deem the common and
the vulgar. In America it is the only symbol of
royalty left after the Declaration of Independence.
Deep down in the bosom of all good Episcopalians
there remained, and there still remains, the secret
sympathy with the old manners, the old beliefs,
the old social habits and customs. Between the
intellectual Unitarians of New England and the
Episcopal Church, as represented in cities like
Baltimore and Philadelphia, there is the differ-
ence of a whole world. With certain Episcopa-
lians aristocracy has much to do with class, little
to do with intellect.

“You mean to say,”

remarked the ex-ambas-

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 65

sador, “they are weary of the present social con-
ditions; tired of doubt and that chaotic equality
which nothing seems to mollify, and that they
would welcome any change that would clear the
social air.”

“Tt would take a mighty big thunderstorm to
do that. Our country is big.”” It was the general
who spoke.

“Tt would take a series of thunderstorms that
would reach from New York to San Francisco and
from Chicago to New Orleans,” added the judge.

“Tt would all depend on the actual mood of the
people,” declared the senator, “or the mood of
the class with the most power.”

“And these would, of course, be influenced by
the actual political and social conditions of the
time. It is a complicated subject,” saying which
the judge leaned back in his easy-chair, and with
a grimace in which his mouth, nose, eyes, and
eyebrows all played a part, he slowly puffed a
long cloud of smoke towards the ceiling; and again
he riveted the gaze of the whole company.

The ex-ambassador, becoming restless, asked
of the senator, ‘‘What, in your opinion, is the
cause of a people’s mood?”

“A nation’s moods are exactly like the moods
of an individual,” he replied, with a nonchalance

66 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

in which a glow of nervous energy was manifest
from the deep sockets of his grey-blue eyes. “A
nation has its whims, caprices, humours, like
private persons. The statesman who ignores this
simple fact is a man who has not mastered the
art of governing.”

“Fashions again,” said the professor of psy-
chology. ‘The need of change, the dislike of mo-
notony, the love of pomp and show inherent in
all human nature, the same spirit that creates the
fashions creates the political and social moods.”

“Action and reaction,” said the judge, fixing
his gaze on the professor. ‘Every law passed
is an act which is bound, sooner or later, to pro-
duce a reaction in some form. Too much De-
mocracy is bound to produce a reaction towards
aristocracy; too much aristocracy is bound to
revert to Republicanism, as in France; but if
France ever goes to war with Germany, and is
beaten, Germany will impose a Monarchy on
France, and that will be her reaction.”

“T agree,” said the professor of history, ‘“‘there
is nothing else in the world on which we can safely
reckon. History means nothing else. In 1789
French Democracy reacted against the Monarchy;
then Bonaparte caused a reaction against Democ-
racy and founded an Empire, after which there

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 67

was a reaction in favour of the Monarchy, which
again gave place to the rule of Napoleon, after
which another reaction came with the third
Republic. In our country we have tipped to the
see-saw of the two parties — the Republicans and
the Democrats.”

The senator moved in his seat, and, raising his
eyebrows, asked in a voice that implied something
more than the ordinary, “Do you not concede the
reign of a moral law in all this?”

“There is no chance,” replied the professor of
psychology; “there must be law, or the world
would go to pieces. We speak of anarchy and
chaos because these loose terms suit our feelings
and manner of speech for the time being. Pas-
sion runs away with reason, but after the event
we have time to consider and weigh. All history,
to my understanding, is but the working out of
destiny, and nothing that philosophers do or say
ever hinders its march. We are ignorant par-
tisans watching the game of the gods, the stu-
pendous show of the flux and reflux of cities,
nations, republics, crowns, and empires.”

“‘T wonder,” said the professor of history, ‘‘if
people will ever consent to lead the simple
life?”

“We might as well ask if people will ever be

68 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

content to mind their own business,” said the
ex-ambassador, with a twinkle in his cold blue
eyes; but the judge caught him up with the re-
tort, “Sir, an ambassador is one who is sent to
induce other nations to mind their own business
while he takes advantage of their absent-minded-
ness by attending to his and theirs at the same
time.”

The rector was fascinated by the look, the tone,
and the solid posture of the judge, as weak birds
are fascinated by the sight of snakes; and he was
thinking to himself how fine it would sound when
in the Prayer Book on Sunday he would be able
to read the prayer for the preservation of his
Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the two Amer-
icas instead of the prayer for the plain President,
which always sounds flat, especially to the ears
of the fashionable female members of his Phila-
delphia congregation after their return from pro-
tracted visits to England.

As for the general, he had never given the sub-
ject any thought, being a practical man engaged
in the common-sense attitudes of civil and mili-
tary government, but he could not help wondering
how he would look seated on a spanking charger
as aide-de-camp to his Imperial Majesty, and he
concluded that it would, to say the very least, be

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 69

exceedingly picturesque and curiously romantic;
and just as this thought was passing through
his mind the multi-millionaire remarked, with
a cynical smile which harmonised well with the
utter absence of any sign of illusion or poetry in
the expression of his face, ‘‘People will consent
to any form of government if you ensure them
three full meals a day and plenty of eye-show.”’

But the senator differed.

“That,” he said, “is true of the unlettered
crowd, but in this country there is the religious
element to count with. At present there are
only two vital forces in America: the one is
finance, the other is the churches. The first rep-
resents the financial attitude of cities like New
York, Chicago, and Pittsburg; the second rep-
resents the sentiments of the agricultural popu-
lation, the country towns, the small dealers and
the professional classes with local powers. Some
of these would die sooner than live under an
Empire.”

“That is true,’ remarked the judge; “but all
history is full of examples of sudden changes of
government, and the people at large have always
acted pretty much the same. What can people
do under stress of power? The old history re-
peats itself. There is a great outcry for a time.

70 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Then people settle down after getting weary of
futile opposition.”

The general, now fairly interested in the sub-
ject, remarked, ‘‘An American Empire would be
impossible unless it included all South America.
If we ever become an Empire we shall be a great
naval power, with an army to match our navy,
and we should repeat in the two Americas what
England accomplished in India. It seems won-
derful when we think of it, how it was done.”

“What makes present social conditions in
America so interesting is the unprecedented com-
plexity of the social, political, and religious ele-
ments. It is futile to go back to Athens and
Rome for parallels. Never in history have the
social elements been so mixed, so inextricably
mixed.”” The professor of history spoke these
words with intense seriousness, and the judge
and senator were about to reply at the same mo-
ment; but the senator rose to his feet, and the
company saw before them the dominant mind of
the evening, tall, solemn, with a presence that
some would describe as serenely satanic and others
as serenely Imperial, and as he loomed above the
sitters he seemed an enigmatic oracle of the pres-
ent and a prophet of the immediate future.

“Gentlemen,” he said, ‘I agree with the sen-

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 71

timent expressed by the supreme bard of the
English-speaking races when he said, ‘There’s a
divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them
how we will.’”

He paused here to give the company time to
imbibe all they possibly could of that mystical
truth. Then he continued:

“By these words the poet included individuals,
peoples, countries, nations, and empires. He
meant them to apply as much to parties as to men,
as much to politics as to principles. Meditate on
the marvels of the past, think of Rome, Carthage,
the invasion of the Moors, the Spanish conquest,
the Declaration of Independence, the apparition
of Bonaparte, the advent of Abraham Lincoln,
the freeing of the slaves, the war with Spain, the
acquisition of the Philippines, the imbroglio with
Japan, the incommensurable theme of the yellow
race wrenched from the rock of Asia to be cast
before us as a token of defiance, or a stimulus to
conquest, and then tell me whether you are sleep-
ing or waking; whether you are standing on the
brink of a precipice, or dreaming in a fool’s para-
dise of transient pleasures and ephemeral passions.
Gentlemen, we are at the dawn of anewera. We
resemble Columbus and his crew just before they
sighted the shores of the New World. The tide

7

72 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

of Empire is rising. Whither will it land us?
When it recedes will it carry us with it far beyond
the islands of the Pacific? Will it sweep us on
and on till it touches the shores of Eastern Asia?”

It would be difficult to depict the conflict of
sentiments, hopes, fears, vague desires, and slum-
bering ambitions evoked by the senator’s startling
and enigmatical outburst. The judge, who had
been quietly puffing at his cigar, was now chewing
its stump, and his face showed all the symptoms of
a suppressed and suffocating emotion. The gen-
eral had become visibly agitated in spite of his
seeming coolness and indifference, while the
multi-millionaire, his round face flushed with
the varying emotions of the discussion, could
hardly keep his seat.

“Tf you want to know how I feel about it, I
can tell you,” he said, the wrinkles between his
hard grey eyes making one think of three fur-
rows in a field of thistles. “It is a question of
expediency. If the financial interests of the coun-
try are better served by Imperial power, then let
us have an Empire and be done with it. I have
always been a democrat. Let everything go by
the board sooner than become a nation of money
slaves depending on Europe for supply and de-
mand, It ain’t a time for guess-work, it ’s a time

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 73

for action. I have made what money I possess,
but I want more; we all want more; we want to
push the thing clear through from Australia to
China and Japan and from there to the Pole. I
don’t care a hang who leads the people. Presi-
dent or emperor won’t make any difference.”

“Tt seems to me,” said the judge, “it’s a case
of hanging our banners on the outer walls.”

“For the cry is still they come,” smiled the pro-
fessor of history.

“And you can take my word for it,” added the
general, ‘we can afford to let ’em all come.”

“We have been doing that for some time,” re-
marked the rector.

“ Assimilate Republicans and Democrats, Cath-
olics and Protestants, transmute the tendencies
and turn all into a rollicking Empire headed by the
strong man,” went on the judge.

Several members of the company left the room,
and the discussion on that subject was at an end,
but not the thoughts and the impressions. More
than one of the party lay awake till late brooding
over the portents of the future in America, in
Europe, in Asia, in the whole world.

74 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

II

Scene: A library in a Fifth Avenue mansion,
New York. Tea is being served. Persons pres-
ent: A bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
a governor of a Western State, a Social Democrat,
a lawyer from Kentucky, a Trust magnate, a
Christian Socialist, a mining millionaire.

“There are times,” said the bishop, sipping his
tea, ‘“when it looks as if we were being pushed or
driven by some inexorable influence not properly
belonging to our people as free political agents in
a country where instruction has for years been
at the command of all. I can well remember the
ante-bellum days. The character of the people
has changed.”

“Tt must be so,” remarked the Trust magnate;
“all new countries go the same road.”

“Progress!”’ ejaculated the lawyer.

“That word, in our day,” said the bishop, “‘is
void of religion and void of sentiment. What do
they mean by progress?”

“The betterment of all classes, particularly the
classes that have for ages been held in the bond-
age of the rich and the strong,” said the Social
Democrat. “‘So long as the people suffer, the
discoveries of science do no real good and nothing
really matters.”

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 75

““A nation has to become powerful before she
can help herself,” remarked the lawyer. “A na-
tion that is playing second fiddle can never pro-
gress. Progress begins when we are absolutely
free to create our destiny.”

“We are a sentimental people like the Eng-
lish,” said the Trust magnate, with a frown that
seemed fixed and immovable; he wore it as he
wore his clean, straight, upper lip which met his
lower lip like a carving-knife, and gave to his
light-grey eyes the trenchant quality for which
they clamoured. He carved his phrases from the
joints of the argument in choppy slices, which
often passed as bonnes bouches at the boards of
political and social discussions, and he reasoned,
argued, lived, and even loved in the “dry light.”
“There is too much sentimental vapour in the
national atmosphere,’ he went on; “it prevents
us from seeing. We must get rid of poetry, ma-
laria, artists, indigestion, temperance, and wo-
man’s rights before we become a nation.”

“Then we shall never become a nation,” said
the bishop.

“And when we are rid of dyspeptics, artists,
and poets, to say nothing of the other things,”
said the governor, ‘“‘apoplectics will take their
place. Our capitalists are even now in the apo-

76 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

plectic stage, and those who are not suffering
from a rush of blood to the head have symptoms
of water on the brain.” He spoke with his ha-
bitual good humour, and the bishop replied in the
same mood: ‘Better water on the brain than
whisky, governor; and as for woman’s rights, we
have to thank our brave women for what progress
we have made in the drink question. The sal-
vation of this country is in the hands of the
women.”

“As for drink,” said the lawyer, “‘it works two
ways: it makes some people devils and others
angels or pet lambs; what is poison for devil is
sometimes food for angel.’

He spoke from the depths of a thick dark beard
capped by a bushy moustache which gave to his
small bead-like eyes the aspect of a black snake
ensconced in a crow’s nest. His attitude was
formidable. The lawyer was not a “‘spell-binder,”
his speech was too laconic; but there was some-
thing in the expression of his eyes which put a
spell on weak-kneed politicians at Washington
and sitters-on-the-fence at New York. His very
presence in a committee-room gave sensitive
people a feeling of “‘pin-feathers,” while others
went so far as to declare he was Satan unbound.

The Trust magnate listened to the lawyer and

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 77

was silent. He was doing his best to get at the
true inwardness of this man who was living in
the ‘dry light” of hard fact and impersonal logic,
and he could not restrain a feeling of repugnance
as he thought to himself: “I wonder if I look
as mean as that.” Then he thought: “Better
look like the devil than an ineffectual angel;
American economy has no place for Christian
doctrine.”

“You can cut and dry apples and peaches and
find them very good,” remarked the governor,
“but you can’t make anything out of human
beings by the cutting and drying process.”

“There is no better way,” said the bishop,
“than first to catch your sinner, then ‘convict’
him, then convert him. This’ was the way of the
early Methodists. I have witnessed thousands
of conversions on the old camp-meeting grounds
in the West and the South. I am opposed to force
and in favour of argument, persuasion, and con-
version. This nation must be converted back to
the simple old customs of the early churches, and
all this outcry about a Monarchy or an Empire
must cease or we shall be shortly incorporated
forcibly in some sort of paganism.”

“Before we can get back to a simpler life,”
said the Social Democrat, ‘‘we must first deal

78 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

with material things. We have worried too long
over the spirit. The spirit will take care of itself
once the body is set free. We have been trying
to live on compromises, and we become leaner
every day.”

“But the fabric must have a solid foundation,”
said the Christian Socialist. ‘The thing we need
is Socialism based, not on mere material figures
and systems of government, but on the absolute
rules of simple Christian teaching. Socialism
without religion would be as a rose without colour
or odour.”

“T am with you in that,” remarked the bishop.
“When it comes to the actual fighting time all
good Methodists will take sides with any form of
Socialism founded on the Christ spirit. In my
opinion we shall soon be called on to take sides,
not in theory, but in practice; we shall soon be
forced to show our hand.”

“No doubt about it,” said the lawyer. ‘“‘We
are in a political and social hot-house, where the
heat is more than tropical and things are being
forced along at an extraordinary speed; and I
don’t object to speed myself. Speed is a stimu-
lant to mind and body. The quicker we get away
from all the refuse heaps the better. We have
been going at a trot of sixty miles an hour. I

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 79

should like to see it changed to a canter of
ninety.”

“You would empty the Imperial quarts into a
decanter, eh? and let all taste the vertigo of life,”
said the Trust magnate, with a grin that hardened
optimists might have mistaken for a smile.

The multi-millionaire gave a loud guffaw and
said: “See that you fellows take a return ticket;
after you ’ve had enough of Empire you may want
to get back to a Republic”; to which the governor
replied: ““You don’t mean to say the Imperial
game can be played as you play football? If ever
we get an Empire it will come to stay; there won’t
be any ins and outs, but a thing the whole nation
will get used to and fight for.”

“Gentlemen,” remarked the bishop bluntly,
“there will be no Empire without .reckoning
with many millions of Methodists, Baptists,
and Congregationalists, to mention only three
denominations.”

With these words the Social Democrat took
from his pocket a recent copy of the Louisville
Courier Journal, and began to read an editorial
by the editor, Colonel Henry Watterson, one of
the great editors of the world.

The governor straightened himself in his seat
and exclaimed: “I find it amazing that a great

80 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

editor should have to ask the question, ‘Is
Representative Government in America a
failure?’”’

“Governor,” said the lawyer, “you seem to
talk as if you were amazed for the first time; I
have not known what it is to be amazed since I
was a boy of fifteen. When we are surprised it
shows that we have not profited by experience;
a man who is overtaken by surprise is, in my
opinion, a man who is at the mercy of any inci-
dent that may happen at any time anywhere. A
successful man in our day should be ready for
anything. To feel surprise is sufficient proof that
you are not ready.”

“A man who is learning every day is not yet
ready for effective action,” said the Trust mag-
nate. ‘The successful man in these days is the
man who has ceased to fear.”’

“Tt is all a matter of knowing human nature,”
remarked the mining millionaire. ‘‘Human na-
ture never changes,”’ he went on, with a broad
and self-satisfied smile. “The poor man com-
plains, but if the poor man was in our place he
would feel just as we do; he would want more, and
be bound to get it if he could. If we millionaires
know how to stick to our guns it is because we
understand. And besides that, there is something

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 81

in the nature of things that makes people what
they are.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the bishop,
“that millionaires are predestined to be what they
are, and that they follow a sort of divine law?”

“Well, yes, if you like to consider it that way.
The big millionaires of our time occupy the place
the kings used to occupy. In these days we give
the orders and the crowned heads obey,” saying
which the mining king broadened his smile to an
extraordinary degree and in a manner not to be
described, it was so bland, so self-confident, so
all-embracing.

“Things have shifted,” remarked the lawyer
drily. “The power once vested in princes and.
crowned heads is now vested in commerce and
speculation. Diplomacy is now in the hands of
the manipulators of cotton, wheat, town-planning,
trust-building, irrigation schemes, and railroad
management; and to these things will soon be
added ship-building and a vast commerce with
Asia and South America. The political diplomat
has been forced into a back seat. Every move
of the diplomat is made at the dictates of the
money market. State-craft is money-craft.”

“‘Because we are mostly in the hands of Satan,
and we are nearing the hour spoken of by the

82 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

prophets,” said the bishop. ‘The descent has
been rapid, but the awakening will appal by its
suddenness. The first will be last and the last
will be first; America is not ruled by the people,
but by Mammon. The people are being deceived,
not by sentiment but by the policy of money
grubbers. God Almighty has willed two sorts of
government for the human race: government by
light and government by darkness. The worst
things live in the dark. It is much easier to live
according to impulse and passion than it is to live
controlled by wisdom. The Greeks began to de-
cline as soon as they sought to make worldly
knowledge take the place of the laws of the spirit
and the simple life. Knowledge alone is the most
dangerous thing man can handle. We in America,
as well as the English, are suffering in the bonds of
worldly knowledge, and our learning and our
science are cheap substitutes for wisdom. Science
is still a mystery which has explained nothing
that is of any vital importance to the human soul.
It can never be made to explain the beginning of
things, neither can it explain any end. People
who live under the authority of science may learn
how to destroy microbes and build wonderful
machines of destruction, but under this rule we
are growing more barbarous, more arrogant, more

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 83

restless and discontented. We borrow all the old
vices of the old countries without the seeming
contentment and repose of the older peoples.
We have got rid of the idea of equality since our
rich people consider themselves better than the
others, and learned men obtain no footing in our
leading social circles.

“When you millionaires visit the old country
you are tolerated because of the money you fling
about to the servants of the nobility, and because
of various other things all touching on the fatness
of your pocket-book. You are too blind, your
heads are too swollen for you to feel your position,
to realise your humiliation. As for the feeling
of patriotism, you have lost that. The words
democrat and republican mean with you not love
of home and country, but love of money, worldly
power, and the perquisites of Mammon. We
were at one time used to the comforts of a free
and sober people, but now we are used to the
luxuries and the licence which rapacious idleness
and vacuous ambitions bring, and there are no
signs of any decrease in the luxurious expenditure.
On the contrary, the spirit of extravagance is
manifest everywhere in all parts of the land. Your
boasted equality is a sham. You refuse to meet
aman on his merits. You fear the few people who

84 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

are still left who have the moral courage to tell
you your vices; and this is but natural, since you
think that money ought to be made to atone for
wickedness in any shape; but in the day of reck-
oning there will be no atonement.”

Here the bishop fixed his look on the Trust
magnate: “Your evil deeds will live after you.
Nothing you can do on your death-bed will atone
for the evil example you set now. There will be
retribution, and your, children and your chil-
dren’s children will feel the yoke of your evil do-
ings. You talk lightly of Empire, and consider
that nothing matters as to the form of govern-
ment we live under so long as you amass wealth,
and you seem to be willing to welcome any change
of government that will promise still more licence.
This is all very natural. You have been on the
down grade so long that it is only natural you
should hasten to touch bottom. In my opinion
you will, before long, receive an impetus in your
journey towards catastrophe. You live in palaces
which will prove no refuge in the hour of danger
and distress; for in that hour the poor will not
pity you, and the people of your own class will be
too occupied in looking to their own separate and
individual interests to care a fig what becomes
of the others. You will, sir, when the hour of

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? = 85

judgment strikes, find that your friends the
millionaires, who now show no pity or love for
people in humbler walks, will show no pity or love
for you and yours. Judgment will compass you
with the force of a tidal wave, and although you
may purchase your ransom for a time your gold
will fail to bring you to your freedom.”

The bishop’s words came with such unexpected
force that no one could find a reply. His remarks
illuminated the minds of the company, and at
the same time closed their mouths. The Trust
magnate, his vanity stung to the quick, looked at
the mining millionaire and hoped he would off-set
the bishop’s words by one of his cool, happy-go-
lucky observations that usually came to him with
such ease, but the mining millionaire had wilted
in his seat. He felt like a guilty one in a court of
justice. He felt that, for the first time in his
life, judgment had been pronounced in his case.
The Trust magnate felt as if he would suffocate
if he sat in that room for another five minutes,
and just in the nick of time the governor turned
the talk to another subject and the bishop rose
to go. The Christian Socialist remarked to the
bishop: “If our preachers would preach as you
have talked this evening how much better people
would be.”

86 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

III

Scene: A palatial mansion near Central Park,
New York. It is four o’clock in the afternoon.

The Marquis.of Roehamptonisseated in a'room
which suggests to him the aspect of an audi-
ence chamber. There is a canopy under which
stands a large chair carved in figures which sym-
bolise royalty. The room is in fact half throne-
room, half salon, and the objects in it represent
a large fortune. As the Marquis, son and heir of
the Duke of Ballywick, sits musing, he asks him-
self what sort of a dress the hostess would appear
in to-day. He had seen her many times, but never
twice in the same dress. The Duke and the
Duchess were urging him on to marry this woman,
the possessor of so much money that no one could
say within twenty or thirty million dollars what
her fortune was. He felt that he was beginning
to appear ridiculous. He was half in love with
the woman he had been courting for more than a
year, yet he feared her as a human enigma who
might turn out to be a minx as well as a sphinx,
and he was beginning to feel worried as well as
interested.

With these thoughts rushing through his brain
the hostess made her appearance.

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 87

She was seven-and-twenty. Her eyes looked
very dark under her dark and rather thick eye-
brows, and her olive complexion never showed the
slightest trace of colour, no matter what the ex-
citement of the moment might be. She was tall,
her figure was well-proportioned, but she had prac-
tised certain movements and attitudes so long
before the looking-glass that she often appeared
theatrical and self-conscious, and self-conscious-
ness was the thing above all others she most
dreaded. She was, in fact, suffering from a com-
plaint quite frequent in the society in which she
moved, a complaint which might be described as
the disease of the “ever present.” She had not
yet invented a way of escaping from herself.
Night and day she was haunted, not by spirits
freed from the flesh, but by her own spirit im-
prisoned in her own body.

The hostess was arrayed in the strangest orien-
tal costume the Marquis had ever laid his expe-
rienced and much-travelled eyes on. It was a
combination of Turk, Persian, and Hindoo, and
on her head rose a turban head-dress in the form
of a pyramid festooned with ropes of black pearls.
She advanced towards the Marquis with a forced
air of languor and indifference, and held out her
hand for the Marquis to kiss. This he did, saying

88 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

to himself what an idiotic attitude for an Eng-
lishman, the colour mounting to his cheeks as
he thought: ‘That petty German prince and that
poor French duke in search of a situation have
taught her this trick!”

“How perfectly radiant you look to-day!” he
said.

The words coming to her at the moment they
did, and in that peculiar condition of airs and
elements, the hostess forced her mouth into one
of those hard, mechanical smiles which she felt
must resemble a hideous grin, but on the instant
her face relaxed into its natural expression, which
was one of restlessness and a vague ill-defined
ambition, embedded as it was in a foundation of
hereditary ennui. As a girl she had never
laughed, and as a woman she could not smile.

To-day the hostess had decided to lay the law
down to the Marquis. It was useless for a woman
in her unique position to mince matters with
anyone, and after the Marquis had for the twen-
tieth time broached the question of marriage, she
said: ‘‘I shall never marry you unless you consent
to sign a written agreement that I shall be ap-
pointed the leading lady of honour to the Queen
of England. American girls who marry English
lords are in my opinion no better off than they

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 8g

were in America. If I marry you I shall renounce
forever all connection with Republicanism”; but
just as the hostess uttered these words, and the
Marquis had made up his mind to bring the ab-
surd courtship to an end and return to England,
a butler, with a pompous mien and a stentorian
voice, announced His Royal Highness the Duc de
Bordeaux, and in walked a spruce young man,
whose age was about that of the hostess.

The Marquis took his leave, and the Duc de
Bordeaux, after having kissed hands in the most
courtly manner, found himself enveloped in the
meshes of political and social intrigue.

The hostess was, after all, getting somewhat
bored with the same mechanical compliments
uttered day after day, and the Frenchman was
too subtle a judge of human nature not to know
when to desist. ‘‘I have good reasons for believ-
ing there will soon be a return of the Monarchy
in France,’ he began. ‘‘The Republicans are
growing weak, and the Socialists are threatening
landed proprietors with utter ruin, and our cause
never looked so bright. If you will marry me and
bring your great fortune to bear on the political
situation in Paris we shall have a restoration of
the Monarchy within two years. Nothing can
resist the power of such a fortune as yours.”

90 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Here the Duc named the journals in France
which he knew could be subsidised in favour of
the cause, and the hostess listened with all the
sang-froid at her command. She looked coolly at
the Duc for some time, and at last she said:
“What you say of France fits America about this
time. I hear that in this country people are grow-
ing tired of Republicanism, and the Democrats
are weary of Democracy.” But the Frenchman,
reading her thoughts, cut short her remarks: “In
America you have to create a Monarchy or an
Empire, while we in France have a Monarchy and
an Empire ready and waiting. We have the titled
aristocrats to give the proper social atmosphere
to the throne. If you wait for an Empire in Amer-
ica you may wait a lifetime, and even then —”’

“Well, I don’t know about that,” she replied.
“T prefer being a princess in my own country in
my own right to being a titled woman in Europe
just because my husband possesses a title. I
prefer being original. My French coiffeur told
me this morning that I shall look young at forty.
If we become an Empire I shall be created an
Imperial princess in my own right, and I shall set
up a court in Washington. I don’t know but
what I shall wait ten or twelve years and see.
The other day a senator told me the fear of So-

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 1

cialism is so great that the millionaires will plan
to bring about a coup d’état in America. They
will stand anything but a Socialistic Republic.”

The Duc replied: “If you become the Duchesse
de Bordeaux and the French Monarchy is re-es-
tablished, I can promise you the position of first
lady at the French Court. With my social po-
sition and your fortune you will be without a
rival. Should the king die I shall occupy the
throne and you will be Queen of France.”

“ How delightful!” thought the hostess to her-
self, image after image whirling through her brain.
She was for the moment intoxicated with the
illusions of the actual situation, with these arch-
aristocrats kissing her hand, and the prospect of
one day being Queen of France, and in the mad
wave of cerebral excitement and neurasthenic
folly she forgot the spruce, unkingly-looking
Frenchman seated before her, and, although she
seemed to be gazing straight at him, she was
seeing herself in a royal mirror of the future, and
she thought: “Only by being a queen seated on a
throne can I ever get even with these New York
women. Oh, to see them walk before me, bowing
low while I sit on the throne, just as I had to do
when I was presented to Queen Alexandra! What
a memory it would be to humble that pretentious

92 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

young upstart who has just married two hundred
millions, and that old, false goddess who expects
the four hundred to do salaams before her altar!
I’ll show them some day what I think of a
Republic.”

In the midst of such thoughts in walked a
banker’s wife and her daughter — the daughter
a languid blonde with the manner and look of a
young woman of intellectual distinction and aris-
tocratic tastes. The banker’s wife belonged by
nature to the money set, and could not, to save
her life, keep out of it; but her daughter’s tastes
would have led her elsewhere had she been free
to lead the kind of life she preferred. Every
movement the young woman made was easy and
natural, and every word she uttered was the
simple expression of her unaffected thought.
Looking at her the hostess said to herself: “I
shall never succeed in walking and talking in her
manner,” and she admired and envied her for
the aristocratic airs which the banker’s daughter
did not even know she possessed.

These two visitors were quickly followed by
others. There was the elderly wife of a Trust
magnate, whose sharp features, keen grey eyes,
and remorseless social ambition filled the hostess
with so muchsecretresentment. Shehad a tongue

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 93

as sharp as her features, and often let it wag as it
would, regardless of consequences. The other
women were more afraid of her tongue than her
husband’s vast wealth, yet the hostess could buy
and sell them all. Then came the young and
beautiful wife of a great land magnate, frivolous,
gay, irresponsible, dashing, voluble. This was
one of the ladies most disliked by the hostess,
for she never seemed to pay her sufficient atten-
tion. This young person took nothing seriously.
She did not seem surprised at the outré costume
of the hostess, and did not remark upon it; but
the elderly woman had exclaimed: “Why, you
look for all the world like the sultan’s favourite!
Where did you find that wonderful head-dress?”’

“Oh! those black pearls!”’ exclaimed the daugh-
ter of a millionaire senator, who had just arrived
with her mother, a stately woman with a long,
serious face, a long neck, and long, slender figure.
What a power she would have been had her cul-
ture equalled her dignity! At least, that is what
the aristocratic blonde always thought when she
looked at the senator’s wife.

The wife of a governor arrived, followed by a
woman with grey hair, and looking ten years
older than her real age. The governor’s wife was
fat, fair, and fifty. She lived in perpetual good-

94 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

humour, with the tap of contentment turned on
from what seemed a mountain of physicalstrength
and social prosperity, and if she had any tears in
her composition she kept them well corked up
for private use.

As for the visitor with grey hair, she was a
small, quiet woman, the wife of a railway mag-
nate, who did not realise why she existed. She,
like her husband, possessed things, saw things,
touched things, tasted things, did things, and
sometimes said things, without understanding
anything. She lived by the hour; never thought
of the past and never reflected on the future.
Once, when reading a simple novel, she tapped
herself to see if she were actually alive; for the
moment she had forgotten where or what she was.

On entering, the governor’s wife cried out:
“Just think, Lord Roehampton sails for England
to-morrow on the Lusitania!”

“To-morrow!” exclaimed the young wife of
the mining magnate. ‘Why, he promised to dine
with us on Friday!”

The visitors soon separated into small groups.
The wife of the Trust magnate was seated on a
divan with the wife of the governor, and the first
lady remarked: “‘What a whim! Where did she
get the idea of that turban or whatever you

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 95

might call it? I suppose she is beginning to
think we ought to cough when she sneezes.”

The fat lady gave one of her chuckling laughs
and said: “If she expects us to cough every time
she sneezes we shall all have consumption; you
know she has influenza three times a year.”

“Then we ’Il have to come to grippes with her,’
said the other.

The fat lady laughed again, this time louder
and longer than before, for the face of the elder
woman had that serio-comic look which always
provokes hilarity, and for a moment she feared
she would end in a fit of laughing hysterics.

At that very moment the banker’s wife, who
was seated beside the wife of the railway magnate,
was discussing the political outlook as affecting
the money-market and the railroads, saying:
“My husband thinks we shall have a change in
our form of government one of these days; he
says there will be a great crash and then everyone
will demand some kind of a dictator to put things
to rights”; but the wife of the railway magnate
smiled mechanically, and replied with her usual
mechanical platitudes. It was all one to her.
She had never felt maternal instinct, never ex-
perienced a feeling of patriotism, and nothing
mattered. And while this talk was going on the

96 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

stately wife of the senator took a seat beside
the banker’s wife and the wife of the Trust
magnate.

The Duc had taken his leave, and gossip was
now the order of the moment.

“T believe she’s given him his congé,’”’ said
the banker’s wife.

“T presume she has,” said the wife of the sen-
ator. ‘She usually does.”

“In my opinion,” said the Trust magnate’s
wife, “she is likely to lead them all a pretty chase
for a while. I have just seen Doctor X, and he
inquired particularly about our hostess. You
know what an expert he is in cases of neuras-
thenia. He says we are becoming a class of
nervous subjects —”’

“Not responsible for our actions,” added the
senator’s wife, without waiting for the other to
finish.

The wife of the Trust magnate simply closed
her eyes and deliberately and slowly nodded her
head twice, without uttering a word.

“Well,” said the banker’s wife, “I never felt
better in my life. I always thought the men were
more subject to nervous breakdowns; they have
the most worry.”

“Worry!” exclaimed the wife of the Trust

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? oy

magnate. “There isn’t a business-man in New
York to-day who feels as worried as our hostess.
To-day she looks like a museum freak with that
impossible headgear. Where did she get the
idea?”

“My husband says it’s the Imperial mania,”
chimed in the banker’s wife. ‘Once bitten there
is no cure.”

“Who was the mad dog here?”’ asked the sen-
ator’s wife, in allusion to the hostess.

“She has had two bites, one by an English bull
and another by a French poodle,” replied the
wife of the Trust magnate; “and of the two the
poodle has the worst virus.”

“And the worst of it is,” said the senator’s
wife, “there isn’t a man in America who can
counteract the poison. We fly to Europe for
everything. Only yesterday I was talking to my
daughter about the creation of a literary salon.
She asked me to give her carte-blanche in the
matter. I have given my consent, and her father
will give her a million to start with.”

The senator’s daughter and the daughter of
the banker were now seated together in a corner,
and the first said: “I don’t care how soon we get
an Empire; even my father thinks that culture
cannot exist under a Democracy. Everything

98 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

is tainted with money. Society is becoming
intolerable.”

The blonde said: “Next winter I’m going to
begin the formation of a salon exclusively for
artists.”

“And I am going to form one for poets and
writers,’ said the other, her face lit up with a
smile as serene as it was intelligent. “You know
I am an only child, and my father says I shall in-
herit all the money I need to carry on the work I
have planned. By the time I am thirty I shall
be in a position to put these society women to
shame.”

“How splendid!” exclaimed the banker’s
daughter. “Let us combine our forces to render
our society women even more owiré than they
are.”

“We ought to make New York shine with the
splendour of Florence under Lorenzo the Mag-
nificent,”’ said the Senator’s daughter. ‘‘ Father
says if we women begin the glorious work in New
York men will be found later on to join us, and
money-making for the love of money will become
absolutely unfashionable. Who knows, perhaps,
if America is to remain a great Republic it will
be because of art, literature, poetry, and philo-
sophy. If the Republic can develop and foster

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? 99

an aristocracy of intellect the Republic is safe.
Anyway, the next five or ten years will tell the
tale.”

“And suppose the next ten years comes and
goes like Halley’s comet, without a tail, then
what?”

It was the sharp, acrid voice of the Trust mag-
nate’s wife. She had approached the two young
women for a moment before taking her departure.
When she was gone the senator’s daughter said to
her companion: “What an acquisition she would
be to our work if her culture were as quick as her
tongue!”

“Alas, yes!” said the other, “but if she had
culture she would not be in this room — that is,
not at her age.”

“And just think,” went on the senator’s
daughter, “what a treat it will be to assist and
encourage genius according to individual merit!
I feel certain we are happier than our poor hostess
with her impossible ambitions and her —”

“Good heavens!’ exclaimed the other, “she ’s
taking her seat under the canopy she put up last
year to receive the princess.”’

“Let ’s be off. Shell expect us to kiss her
hand.”

THE PARLIAMENTARY ARENA

N the Parliamentary world there are but two

kinds of power — the material and the intel-
lectual. The material fascinates all who are
moved by an eagle eye, a bull-dog chin, a grama-
phone voice, and machine-made rhetoric. There
are politicians who control the people not by
grasping but by gazing. They have top-knots
but no beaks, gimlet eyes but no talons. Power
is exerted by looks instead of deeds, symbols
instead of sentiments. Others combine looks
with words, the gymnastics of gesture with the
shibboleths of political hygiene, and there are
bulls who toss patriotism like a red flag, and
gore capital without mercy.

As a rule the pervading aura emanates not
from the spirit but from the carcass. Their
mandates have the rumbling of the thunder-
cloud, minus the lightning. They are the whales
of the political ocean, avoiding the harpoon
while bolting the gudgeon. But Mr. Arthur
Balfour is like a political eel who darts and glides
where the Mammals did nothing but spout and
flounder.

PARLIAMENTARY ARENA tor

He has been taken twice by the net, once by
the tail, but never by the hook. He ignores the
flounders, darts past the sharks, and skims the
surface of the social sea faster than any flying-
fish.

No one knows the mysterious breeding-place
of the eel, and no one has ever delved into the
intellectual broodings of Mr. Balfour. Light of
weight, he stands forth a mere shadow thrown
across the balked bodies of beery knights and
bloated barons, a sore menace to the worshippers
of bulk and the idolators of blood and muscle.
He has none of the outward and visible signs of
Mammon; no bulbous nose, no flaming cheeks,
no dome, no rotundity, no beefy charlatanism,
no quack-nostrum-panacea-look; he is no patent
political syringe-spray-disinfectant-medicine-man,
but the proper companion of artists and aristo-
cratic determinists, as distant from diabolian
debaters as Jupiter from hot-headed Mars.

He is protean at a time when others are mak-
ing vain protestations of omnipotence. He plays
with the schemes of certain members in the non-
chalant way a skilled dowager plays with the
stakes of an unsophisticated Miss, who imagines
herself in the fashionable swim when she is only
having her pores and her pocket-book opened at

102 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

a hot game of bridge. Arthur Balfour is one of
the few long-headed statesmen since Chatham.
For he, and he alone, has applied a sort of ‘“‘prac-
tical mysticism” to the beef-and-potato policy of
the cooks at Westminster. He is a metaphysician
who considers the earth, times the pulse of his
opponents, looks at their tongues, whacks their
knee-joints, meditates long enough to know the
day and the hour of their locomotor-ataxy-finale.
He has watched Lord Rosebery play Apollo to
young dukes at banquets and Apollyon to old
duchesses at the Derby; watched him attempt
the réle of Puck in the midsummer madness by
trying to put a girdle round the earth with the
belt of an Earl; watched him bamboozle the
Lords by fine phrases and champagne rhetoric.
For the real difference between Balfour and Rose-
bery is to be seen in the management of their
public performances.

The noble Earl never keeps his eye off the
social function and the social effect. Society
takes first place in his scheme of razzle-dazzle.
Politics come into the banquet much as a roast
bird of paradise with an ostrich plume stuck in
its tail, He is our only statuesque statesman.
After riding into the hearts of his countrymen on
the back of a thoroughbred, he poised like Mer-

PARLIAMENTARY ARENA 103

cury for a brief moment on the globe of Empire,
with one toe touching the ball at the top of the
social staircase; both feet on the floor would
have been a desecration of divinity. For at one
time Lord Rosebery was a transcendental demo-
crat, who beat the religious air with mercurial
wings, deftly sounding the harp of Nonconformity
with vague eolian numbers without once playing
a tune anyone could remember. In these days
he comes forth at the hour of political hunger,
like old Mother Hubbard, pointing a lean finger
at the remnants left by Scotch terriers, Irish
bulls, and English half-breeds, for something has
happened during his absence — the artful Arthur
has found the bones and picked them bare. For
he, and not Rosebery, is the watchdog of castle
and close; he it is who makes the silent rounds
while the others are snoring under their parti-
coloured quilts, he it is who sniffs the proletarian
pole-cats from afar, catches the sound of foot-
pads beyond the garden gate, who knows the
difference between a brindled cat and a black
nondescript in a London fog. Our only Arthur
is not playing a game of aristocratic seclusion.
Lord Rosebery times his speech-making to the
psychological social moment, but Mr. Balfour is
on hand, equipped like a doctor with a large prac-

104 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

tice and small medicine case full of specifics for all
forms of national malaria, parochial quinsy, reli-
gious tic-doloureux, paradoxical neurasthenia, and
Imperial hysterics. Besides this, he is a musician
of parts as well as of parties; he knows all the
Celtic tunes, with the English airs thrown in, and
that is saying more than one could say of Lord
Rosebery, who dare not venture further than
“Rule Britannia” or “Polly put the kettle on.”
No need for Arthur Balfour to harp on one string;
England is his organ, Scotland his bagpipes, Par-
liament his fiddle; he is gravedigger in the House
of Commons (as the noble Earl is Hamlet in the
House of Lords), and plays a lament at every
fresh burial of the other Party. Without Mr.
Balfour the Commons would fall below concert
pitch, excepting when the Irish have the floor or
when the Labour leaders are rehearsing for the
millennium under the baton of Mr. Keir Hardie.

Mr. Balfour can smile with dignity and be
sociable with sang-froid. Give a statesman the
reputation of a fashionable clubman and he be-
comes like Ceylon tea that has been drawn once.
Chronic after-dinner speech-making is a danger-
ous indulgence. There is no occasion where dis-
illusionment can come with a stroke so sudden.
A man who does it once with the felicity that

PARLIAMENTARY ARENA 105

unites a godlike grip with the golden mean of wit
and humour has run the gauntlet of bayonets in
a pitched battle, escaped the bullets, and missed
the bombs. He may well apply for a medal, not
for having lost a limb, but for having emerged
from so deadly an affair without a scratch. Be-
fore he begins to speak the toast-responder has
to recruit and skirmish for facts, then marshal his
words and drill his sentences. In the middle of
the speech the rhetorical manceuvres begin, and
here, on the Champ de Mars of his own imagi-
nation, he assaults the passions of the feasters,
storms their emotions, scales the Spion Kop of
their patriotism, and takes his seat on the summit.
Four things go to the making of such an accom-
plishment — art, intuition, opportunity, and
power. Since Disraeli, no statesman in the Brit-
ish Parliament has been in possession of such a
gift. To be master of such an art a statesman
cannot appear to order at all times and seasons
and pass for a recluse in a castle whose walls defy
the maddest Romeos in search of the most illu-
sive Juliets.

Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is the only one who
could eat, drink, and make merry in the midst
of City Fathers and bloated Aldermen, and re-
main the gimlet-boring, screw-driving Joe Cham-

106 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

berlain of old. He could rise at a dinner and quaff
a glass of port to the health of the portly barons,
and be paradoxical in wishing them a better
mien on a still more gouty diet. He could revise
their tariff, subdivide their lands, supervise their
food, subsidise the Navy, and patronise the Lords.
If Mr. Balfour is the eel among politicians,
Joseph Chamberlain is the ferret in the rabbit
warren of the long-eared financiers. He does not
hunt like the fox and hide with the hare. He
does no hunting, yet his pack are hounding the
moss-backs out of their lairs and out of their wits.
He follows no man’s horn but that of his own
proboscis, asks for nothing but the power to
stand up in Parliament and by a flash of those
steely eyes make them sing a new song:

“Of gout where is thy sting!
Oh Joe where is thy victory!”

Mr. Lloyd George is cock of the walk in little
Wales, but on the big cock-walk of the Terrace
of the House the bipeds with goose quills preen
their feathers to Imperial flights while hatching
dragons.

Parliament now contains a plethora of parties
of a nondescript order who suggest strong mustard
in a sham-sandwich, watercress on a stream filled

PARLIAMENTARY ARENA 107

with Scotch salmon and Tipperary trout, or a
dash of lemon juice in a cosmopolitan toddy.

What they need is another edition of Tim
Healy. At the beautiful Parliamentary banquets
he is pepper, salt, vinegar, champagne, and the
carving-knife. His slices are thin, but no one
asks for a second helping. Our only Tim holds
some members in their seats by a mere glance,
and for a very good reason. His words are
prussic-acid applied to political gilt. They burn
through to the brass bottom. The vitriol hisses
‘and the House becomes like a place undergoing
disinfection; dead men have been carried out
stricken by a microbe which is not down in the
medical books. He makes people laugh; but
there are people who would laugh even in a room
given over to vivisection. Everything goes on
the floor of the House, that dear old floor, whose
cracks are wide enough to let the fumes of Hades
rise and choke many an honourable and virtuous
member with the vapours of envy, jealousy, and
social rivalry. Evidently the House exists for
three purposes: as a figure-head of aristocracy, as
a figure-head of commerce, and as a figure-head
of democracy.

Just at present Mr. Balfour stands for the first,
Mr. Lloyd George for the second, Mr. Keir Hardie

108 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

for the third. The Irish are there, and will remain
there; they are there to wake the dead, deter-
mined to give each corpse a decent burial; they
constitute a fourth estate. But there is a fifth
estate, formed by the moths whose wings have
been scorched by those fatal candles at St.
Stephens, that burn at both ends, one tallow,
that smokes in the Lower House, the servants’
hall, the other wax, that burns serenely in the
Upper House, the gentlemen’s club — the place
where pipe-clay becomes marble, where every
good politician would like to go when he shuffles
off the mortal coil of non-conforming, demagogu-
ing, two-a-penny existence. But what a crowd
of moths are attracted by the glare of the tallow
dip! Rosebery himself, not content with the
halo of the aurora borealis of the House of the
silver spoons, flits about the candles of the Lower
House.

There is but one party that can afford the
luxury of doing what they please; that party
counts among its members Mr. Keir Hardie.
They can wear dickies, play skittles with modes
and manners, thump tables, and call names. The
only way to succeed in Parliament to-day is to
begin by being rude. To win the respect of the
“hupper succles,”’ take them on the level of the

PARLIAMENTARY ARENA 109

mood you happen to be in. Tell them you have
no objection when the social upheaval comes for
them to cultivate a cabbage patch a la Wiggs
at Government expense. This will take their
breath away, and the social whales will not at-
tempt to swallow the prophetic Jonah. A poli-
ticlan may change his policy, but pure politics
means get on and keep on! Nevertheless, as
Emerson said: “An aristocrat is one who is doing
his best to become a democrat.”

The philosophical democrat is the true blue
aristocrat. That is why there is an Upper House.
But the Upper House is top heavy with men
who cannot tell the difference between a tallow
dip and a wax candle. It has long been the
dumping-ground for the decrepit who were once
intrepid, for shambling figure-heads minus the
culture of the real aristocrat and lacking the
ordinary business capacity of a successful green-
grocer. The majority are porous-plasters on the
national body, leeches on the old war-horse of
glorious memories. We may now expect a series
of the most astounding games ever played on a
Parliamentary chess-board.

THE SOUL’S 'NEW REFUGE

F Walter Pater had said music will soon take

precedence of all the other arts, he would have

been as much in the right as when he said: “All
art aspires towards music.”

Sentiment and emotion must have an outlet.
Modes of expression shift from one art to another.
And if it is true that realism has taken the place
of romance in the novel, if it is true that the
cynical has banished the ideal from literature, if
the commonplace has taken the place of beauty
in art, music restores all that the other arts have
lost. It is the only art untrammelled by sects,
opinions, parties, and geographical limits, with
an adequate expression for all the varying moods
of humanity and the most subtle intimations of
a world lying beyond that of reason and will.

Individualism and contradiction have driven
the soul to seek a refuge in the overworld of har-
monic vibrations. In England, puritanism put a
ban on music, and the people were driven to
poetry for a psychic appeal to the higher states
of consciousness. Milton was a musician who ex-
pressed his emotions in verse, and was the first

THE SOUL’S NEW REFUGE 111

to fill the void; but not till the death of Tennyson
did poetry in England begin to give way to musi-
cal inspiration.

Shelley was a lyrical metaphysician, Browning
tried to wed philosophy to rhyme, Wordsworth
did his utmost to bring the divinity in Nature to
the comprehension of the people, but all the
English poets of the past hundred years were
agitated by a spirit of transition. They re-
presented not so much a state of the soul as a
spirit of agitation and discontent. They were
always reaching out for something just above
attainment. Swinburne came the nearest to
wedding words to music, and his poetry might
have been as psychic as it was musical had he not,
in the beginning, steeped his mind in the transient
commonplaces of political and transitory pas-
sions. He revelled in combinations of rhyme as
Richard Wagner often revelled in combinations
of chords behind which there was no meaning. |
Swinburne reached the borderland where words
cease and music begins, and it is a significant
fact that just as he finished his career, music
established her dominion not only in England
but in all the English-speaking countries.

It required four centuries of English poetry to
prepare the Anglo-Saxon ear for a return of the

112 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

art that dominated all the arts of the Greeks,
and nearly three thousand years for the Orphean
vibration to encircle the Western worlds. With
the Greeks, music was the basis of all great
thought and all artistic inspiration. With them
certain modes of music had an esoteric meaning,
a positive bearing on creative thought, a power
to awaken dormant faculties and engender ideas.
With the materialistic Romans, under the Cesars,
music lost its psychic power; but with the advent
of Palestrina it became a. means of religious ex-
altation. Palestrina made it a method of praise
instead of a channel of inspiration as with the
Greeks. Later, the Italian opera became a vehicle
for the display of dramatic passion and trivial
humour, a form of amusement for the passing
hour, with little suggestion of the mystical or
the esoteric. With the symphony began that
combination of melody, form, and rhythm which
was to lead the way to a return of the tonal sym-
bols and esoteric meanings of the ancients.
Wagner, whose genius was dominated by move-
ment and agitation, frequently achieved the
sublime without attaining the desired esoteric
serenity, but Debussy succeeded in attaining by
modern orchestral means a much nearer approach
to the subtle suggestiveness of the Greeks at the

THE SOUL’S NEW REFUGE 113

time of Pythagoras. Since Debussy began his
work orchestral music has become more abso-
lute, more transcendent, forcing technique and
counterpoint to take an inferior place.

The first popular expression of music in Eng-
land was shown in the works of Gilbert and Sulli-
van. Previous to their advent musical art in this
country was intended for musicians. Concerts
and operas were patronised by a restricted class,
and the number seemed never to increase. But
now the public began to awaken to the possibili-
ties of the rhythmic in comedy and in drama.
The music-halls gradually became more musical
than farcical, the lyric-dramas of Wagner began
to free the public ear from the bondage of the
puritanical mode, and musical comedy and
burlesque began to detract from ordinary plays
and dramas. The melodrama, like the operetta,
was an importation from Paris, and still newer
musical forms have come from there and from
Germany, for music is now the one cosmopolitan,
universal art whose power is recognised in every
land. It is now much more international than
literature. And the reason is simple enough —
opinions in books clash with other opinions, and
one country may fail to become interested in the
sentiments and doings of another country; but

114 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

music ignores opinions and deals directly with
feeling and emotion. It is for the senses, while
books are mainly for the intellect, and the intel-
lect is always at war with the intellectual.

“One touch of Nature makes the whole world
kin,” says an old saw, and it is just as true that
one touch of music puts all the world in tune.
It is the quintessential magic whose potency is
now felt by all the peoples of the earth, from the
most intellectual to the most illiterate.

With but few exceptions, in former times, com-
posers could not reason profoundly. The mar-
vellous Mozart seemed all nerves, and Chopin
was incapable of profound reasoning about any-
thing; but his contemporary, Berlioz, was a
writer of real talent and militant convic-
tions. Beethoven was the profoundest thinker
of them all.

And now once more in the history of civilisa-
tion the signs point to a union of music, literature,
and philosophy, with music as the key to all. If
such a union is consummated it will metamor-
phose the world of art, literature, and psychology.
One thing may be taken for granted — music, in
our day, has become for many thousands of
people a refuge against the onslaughts and delu-
sions of materialism, and just in proportion as

THE SOUL’S NEW REFUGE 115

opinions become more positive, music will be-
come more imperative. Society having become
chaotic, people will be more and more attracted to
the harmony created by rhythmic sounds. But
more than all else, music is becoming a psychic
necessity.

There never was a time when so many lead-
ing thinkers, artists, and writers were practical
musicians.

In France, Auber was the first to express a
national musical taste; he was the forerunner
of Offenbach, who brought music to the compre-
hension of the wits and writers of the boulevard,
forming a bridge between the Italian opera and
musical burlesque. In the operetta, he embodied
the sentiment and esprit of the typical boule-
vardier. He sentimentalised Parisian cynicism.
He was the first musical genius whose work was
acclaimed within the space of a single decade in
Berlin and St. Petersburg, in Vienna and Rome,
in London and New York. Offenbach began to
compose in 1858, and he was famous long before
Arthur Sullivan achieved celebrity. He revo-
lutionised the musical world as much in his own
sphere as Wagner did in his, and, between the
two, music began to take a firm hold in places
where it had little, if any, influence before. While

116 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Wagner was regarding the world from Parsifalian
heights, Offenbach was raising wit and gaiety to
a higher level, appeasing the sentimental cynics
of a blasé empire, inspiring writers and artists
with suave melodies that often attained the serene
dignity of Meyerbeer or the most passionate out-
bursts of Rossini.

Logic is the enemy of musical originality, and
the French mind, being the most logical in Europe,
at first refused Wagner, who was a musical Goth,
and, for a time, resisted Offenbach, who was a
musical Visigoth, for both were Germans. But
music defies logic and ignores reason. It did in
France what literature could not do, and the
more people boasted of their Voltairian scepti-
cism the greater the attraction they felt for the
new musical modes of expression.

Rousseau was the first modern writer to defy
French logic and begin to talk about Nature as
a poet-musician would talk about flowers, bees,
and birds. He was the first modern to attain a
universal psychic rhythm by words. He was the
first to make literature musical. This was his
secret. Voltaire, devoid of the musical sense,
remains but a catchword for people whose souls
are like dried parchments for the shibboleths of
negation, while the rhythmic vibrations set in

THE SOUL’S NEW REFUGE 117

motion by Rousseau still continue. He did what
French poetry failed to do because of the bond-
age placed upon it by logical form and the re-
strictions of Latin art. He turned on the faucets
of inspiration, and let the musical waves descend
from a mountain of emotional rhythm which in-
undated two continents, fertilising the intellec-
tual deserts of the Gaul, the Teuton, the Slav, the
Anglo-Saxon, and the Anglo-American.

The vibrations of wit and humour are not con-
tinuous. This is why people reason about Vol-
taire as they reason about shoe-leather. He was
a figure-head, Rousseau a fountain-head. Cyni-
cism has never conquered sentiment. But senti-
ment had to be embodied in the musical mode;
yet Rousseau was not a sentimental automaton;
he was a born artist who turned to Nature and
the simple life for deliverance from the Parisian
plague of sceptical logic and witty sophistry, a
writer who wielded a power that defied all the
schools of classical art and every system of Latin
philosophy. Behind all, deep in the recesses of
his nature, there resided the quintessential har-
mony of form and number, the secret of all literary
magic. It was not what he taught that influenced
the world, but the way he taught; not the matter,
but the manner. Had anyone else taught some-

118 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

thing different with the same verbal power, the
results would have been the same. Others be-
fore him had said much the same things, but the
writers were not endowed with the harmonic
mysteries of speech.

Rousseau spread over the world a psychic aura
fashioned in the mould of harmonic law. In his
symphonic sentences his baton was not wielded
by reason but by emotion. Millet and Manet did
much the same for art a hundred years later,
proving once again that form without psychic
vitality is void of power. Form must embody
feeling before it can act on the feelings of others,
and all great art is the result of combined com-
prehension and feeling. The greatest are those
who can both see and transcribe.

“Francis Bacon,” says Mr. Arthur Balfour,
““was a prophet and a seer; he is never tired of
telling us that the kingdom of Nature, like the
kingdom of God, can only be entered by those
who approach it in the spirit of the child.”

Bacon, like a great artist-seer, “‘created the
atmosphere in which scientific discovery flour-
ishes.” But it required upwards of two centuries
for his prophecies to begin to be realised, while
Rousseau lived to see marvellous results follow
the appearance of his works. Bacon had to fight a

THE SOUL’S NEW REFUGE 119

wilful and blind science, but Rousseau had to
battle with the prevailing logic and the Voltairian
gossips of the salons, and these were often as
formidable as an army of well-drilled apes armed
with rapiers. Wit was too blunt and common a
weapon to be of any use here, and argument
alone was futile. Everybody could argue. The
call was for a magician who could operate by
revulsion. The fashionable mania had to be
stilled by a new Orpheus who could sing while
he operated, whose divine art swamped gossip,
drowned persiflage, and led people captive towards
the green fields of a new Eden.

Rousseau was in no sense a humorist. Neither
was Chateaubriand, who succeeded him, nor
Hugo, who succeeded Chateaubriand. Tolstoy
was influenced more by Rousseau’s politics than
he was by the deeper meanings of his art. The
Russian realist could not grasp the harmonic
significance of Rousseau the poet, and perhaps
it was the lack of humour in Tolstoy that made
him respond to the fanatical and visionary ele-
ments of the Social Contract and the insanity of
the Confessions, for Tolstoy was a Russian Jean
Jacques without his Orphic charm.

And this leads me to remember that Russian
prose has always lacked the rhythmic element.

120 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Russian writers have possessed dramatic and
psychological power, but the want of the rhyth-
mic quality in the novelists of that country is
now driving the Russian public from literature
to music, the last refuge from realistic negation.

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY

HE bane of the modern travelling world is
to be found in the tendency to see people,
climate, countries, and art through someone’s
tinted spectacles, and, above all, by the aid of
someone’s guide-book. Italy has suffered more
than any other country from the guide-book pest.
Few sightseers are able to give you a vivid per-
sonal impression of people and things in that
country. Even learned travellers, before com-
ing to Italy, think the proper thing to do is to
steep their minds in books about this or that art,
this or that city, until they are so full of the opin-
ions and sensations of others that they have no
place for personal feeling or personal opinion. It
would be instructive to find out how many Anglo-
Americans have steeped their brains in Ruskin
before coming to Italy, how many Germans have
been hypnotised by Goethe’s impressions, how
many novel readers have made themselves drunk
on Madame de Staél’s Corinne before seeing this
country.
The only people who escape this blunder are
the French. It is all but impossible to fool a

122 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Frenchman in this way; he persists in being in-
fluenced by his own impressions. He makes use
of a guide-book only for the routine details.
Another fatal drawback is to come to Florence
expecting to see the Florence of Dante. There
is about as much relation between Dante’s age
and the present as there is between Shake-
speare’s age and the age of Dickens. The fact
that Italians dress like other people and in the
modern fashions ought to be sufficient to bring
people to their senses in this matter.

What concerns me when I walk in the Lung
Arno is what the living people look like, what
they are doing, and what they think. Foreign
visitors rarely see a thing as a whole. Their im-
pressions are just as often wrong as right, and
some of the supposed authorities are positively
colour-blind. There are writers on Italy who
are unable to distinguish the difference in shades
of trees, hills, sky, and atmosphere. The actual
colour of the olive tree, seen at a little distance,
is not green but a neutral grey; seen close at
hand it becomes a grey-green. The cypress at a
little distance is what artists call a terre-verte,
and under a cloudy sky a cypress grove becomes
much nearer being black than any shade I ever
saw in the Black Forest of Baden.

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 123

There is what one might call a fixed orthodox
superstition about Italy. The superstition is
imbibed not in Italy, but long before people come
here. This perversion teaches the horde of visit-
ors to smile or weep at the wrong things and in
the wrong places. Ruskin’s exaggerations have
had, and are still having, much to do with this
far-fetched sentimentality. Ruskin, in about
eighty per cent of cases, is admired not for his
real beauty as a writer, not for his rare esthetic
penetration, but for his errors of judgment.

As for the lesser writers, most of them spoil a
good thing by trying too hard to depict what is
perhaps beyond anyone’s powers to depict ade-
quately in words. Italy is at once illusive and
real, and to describe things as they are writers
should be artists and poets, with a strong sense
of the real. Italy is too clearly wrought, too
positive, too realistic, to be treated metaphysi-
cally. Abstruse ethical criticism renders the sub-
ject still more illusive. The Italians come to the
reality through the medium of poetry, music,
and literature; they have never been much in-
fluenced by the abstract methods of the cold
North nor even by the cold logic of the French,
and the present renaissance is appealing to the
scientific and philosophical mode of thought in

124 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

a manner which is quite new to Italy. But while
the Italians are becoming more scientific they
remain at heart poets and musicians, because the
Italian temperament cannot, even if it would,
get rid of poetry and music.

To be in Italy again after an absence of nearly
twenty years has ushered me through a series
of sensations as fresh and new as any I ever
experienced.

It is now many years since I received my first
impressions of Italian art, not from brick, or
marble, or anything plastic, but from the living
embodiment of the highest expression of dramatic
genius of that time, the incomparable Ristori,
whom I saw in her greatest réles—as Medea,
as Mary Stuart, as Queen Elizabeth, as Lady
Macbeth, and, above all, in her haunting imper-
sonation of Lucrezia Borgia, the only dramatic
creation which in my mind is always linked with
Michelangelo’s “Pieta” in marble. Most trage-
dies are inhuman. In Lwucrezia Borgia, Ristori
attained the summit of tragedy and touched the
deeps of maternal tenderness. Her two supremest
moments arrived when, as Lady Macbeth, she
heard the announcement of the murder of Dun-
can and cried out: “What! In my house?” and
as Lucrezia Borgia when on her knees she im-

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 125

plored Gennaro to save himself by swallowing
the antidote to the poison she had given him. I
saw the crowd leaving the theatre transformed,
hushed into silence by the passion, the power,
and the magic of the reality.

After Ristori the next great dramatic event
in my experience was with Salvini, certainly the
greatest tragedian of modern times. After see-
ing him as Othello one could not endure anyone
else in the same réle. His Macbeth, also, wasa
thrilling performance; but by far the most im-
pressive and realistic impersonation of Macbeth
I ever witnessed — and I have seen all the most
noted actors in that réle during the past fifty
years — was an English actor whose name I have
forgotten, who played the part when I was in
Melbourne in 1878. The acting of this man, an
artist of the old school, was the human flesh and
blood Macbeth, passing on through all the grades
of ambition, hesitancy, fear, harassed by halluci-
nations, driven from horror to terror, and from
terror to the last stages of desperation, standing
in the final scene like a stag at bay, the beads of
sweat rolling down his haggard face, terrible and
desperate to the last.

In the late ’sixties I heard Italian opera for
the first time. There were the tenors Brignoli

126 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

and Fancelli, and later Campanini, who took
London by storm in the early ’seventies, but
Fancelli was divine. Between the tenors of
those days and the tenors of the present a great
gulf is fixed. With the advent of the husky,
blatant German school of singing musical art
has all but vanished. When the Italian school
held the boards a false note, a husky voice were
things unknown in opera.

I once heard Titiens sing the réle of Lucrezia
Borgia at Covent Garden in a fog, with the stage
lighted by torches, and even then the singer was
not more than half visible. A shadow was seen
walking about the stage, emitting sounds.

Patti and Scalchi in Semiramide, at a time
when their voices were still fresh and without a
flaw, was an event not to be forgotten.

T think I have witnessed Lucrezia Borgia, both
as drama and opera, at least a hundred times in
different parts of the world. In former days
Italian opera was usually accompanied by a
ballet. There was Bonfanti, who was almost
too fat to dance, and could do little more than
walk gracefully through her part; there was the
sylph-like Morlacchi, white, thin, and pure as a
lily, who turned the stage into a kind of temple
while she was dancing; and the wonderful San-

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 127

galli, a terpsichorean Cleopatra, whose very walk
had in it something majestic. All these, and
scores of others, were from La Scala, the one
institution that gave the world its dominant tone
in operatic art, and without which the art-world
would be still more barbarous than it is.

I had for the moment forgotten Duse, an
Italian of the Italians. Ristori was a tragedienne
who acted as a woman, Duse is a woman who
enacts tragedy. Rachel achieved greatness by
her beautiful voice and an extraordinary percep-
tion of the artifices of dramatic art. Ristori and
Duse became great because of an innate sense of
an art that was natural and could afford to dis-
pense with artifice. Now, in French dramatic
art one can never forget that the actor is acting.
The school of declamation and gesture is always
before us. We know what is going to happen
for the reason that we know what ought to hap-
pen. Genius is the only thing that can afford the
luxury of naturalness. Duse did the very thing
no playgoer expected her to do. And so did
Salvini. He surprised his audiences by his unique
attitudes, his startling gestures and passionate
outbursts. Scratch a Russian and you will find
a Tartar and a mystic; scratch a Frenchman and
you will find a critic and a logician; scratch an

128 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Italian and you will find an artist and an
actor.

Never did I realise the full force of Italian ex-
pression until I witnessed a performance of Pon-
chielli’s La Gioconda in Rome some twenty years
ago, with Gemma Bellincioni in the leading rdle.
Previous to that experience I considered Lohen-
grin the final attainment of expression in the
realm of opera. In the second act of Lohengrin
the chorus wafts one out of the actual into
spaces never attained before, but how vague and
mystical is the feeling evoked! It is a meta-
physical triumph in music — an apotheosis of
hope deferred, desire rendered futile, passion ex-
tenuated, vanity stripped of illusion, a spiral
symphony of sounds gradually mounting towards
the summit of disillusionment, and the higher it
mounts the further it recedes from human senti-
ment and human passion. In the great chorus of
La Gioconda what we hear inthe music is not a
process of disillusionment but dissolution itself.
Here we are not listening to musical metaphysics
but something human, far beyond the power of
words to express. Wagner manipulates the
nerves and the imagination, Ponchielli appeals to
reality. By a tremendous mass of concentrated
melody, in which there is nothing tortuous or

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 129

spiral, he lets a great wave of emotion descend
like an avalanche from a vast height, and in the
midst of amazement and horror the voice of pity
rises superhumanly serene as from an abyss of
tragedy. Here and there in A'schylus, in Euripi-
des, in Virgil and Dante, in Shakespeare, in the
opening lines of Shelley’s Queen Mab, and in
Goethe’s Faust such moments are achieved.

What, then, is the secret of Italian expression?
Italian art has never left the real to grapple with
the illusive. German romanticism was a search
after the romance of the impossible. The same
may be said of the romantic period of France.
While Northern peoples were groping about for
unknown and untried ideals, Italy remained her-
self. Every intelligent Italian is well endowed
with the critical faculty. The cultured Italian
possesses taste, the quality which, according to
Haydn, gave Mozart his impeccable charm.
Italian music may have dull and monotonous
moments, but nowhere, even in the old Italian
operas, is there anything to match Wagner at
his worst.

A Frenchman achieves taste through a sense
of reason. There is something mathematical in
French art. In Italy taste is an instinct. An
Italian does not begin to criticise until he begins

130 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

to create. Metaphysics and sentimentality are
inimical to taste, and German philosophy, like
German art and music, has represented with
but few exceptions what one might call a con-
dition of metaphysical incoherence. What, it
may be asked, was the cause of German roman-
ticism? It originated from a want of social,
philosophical, and zsthetic repose. Goethe was
suffering from severe sentimental agitation when
he wrote Werther. Germany first, and then
France, suffered not from the romance of art and
poetry but from the romance of neurasthenia.
It was not a sane and vital power but a disease.
Goethe was cured of it later, but Victor Hugo
was never wholly free. In the meantime, Italy
began to be agitated politically, while remaining
patient, and even serene.

The smile of the Italian is a perpetual peace-
offering for the repose of his own soul. I have
already discovered in this smile, at certain times,
a strange mingling of cynicism and pity, a mingl-
ing of superhuman patience with a sense of the
inevitable, a sense of inherent beauty struggling
to maintain a fitting and harmonious exterior.
It is sometimes the union of Macchiavellian wis-
dom, Dantesque feeling, and whole tomes of
other things never expressed in poems, novels, or

IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 131

dramas. Nothing but the most complex music
could translate the Italian smile into audible
expression. Perhaps it would be better to say
that it does duty at the moment where language
ceases and music is suggested. Compared with
it domes, dramas, operas, and architecture take
a second place, for these things are the products
of the national smile, which, I am convinced, is
as old as Cesar, and must have lit the face of
Virgil and Mecenas at the banquets of Augustus.

MATERIALISM AND CRIME

ILL materialism bring our civilisation to
an end, or will crime and insanity compel
our civilisation to get rid of materialism? The
time has come not only to put these questions,
but have them answered. They are questions,
not only for philosophers and politicians, but for
the people who call themselves “progressive”
thinkers, agnostic scientists without a fixed be-
lief, and that numerous body of empirical “‘re-
searchers” who dabble in various quasi-scientific
experiments supposed to assist the mere believer
to form a more positive and comforting concep-
tion of a state of the soul after death.

Scepticism, when it endures beyond two gen-
erations, ends in materialism.

The Greeks and the Romans became decadent
through scepticism; they ended in national dis-
ruption because there was no faith left on which
to build anything, and crime kept pace with
progressive decadence until there was no place
left for genius and philosophy, and the arena of
politics became a public slaughter-house for

MATERIALISM AND CRIME 133

murderers and criminals of every description.
Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome ended in material-
ism; then came the new faith. Christianity
brought with it a new civilisation, a new art, and
a new literature. It did not bring a new philoso-
phy; but it has ended by introducing, familiaris-
ing, and imposing a new science.

We are now at the point when, leaving out
many other considerations, we have to ask: Will
nations be compelled to suppress materialism as
they are suppressing consumption, or will the
nations end in an orgy of crime?

In former times men feared a God, and when
they ceased to fear they still feared death.
Shakespeare makes Hamlet soliloquise about the
after-life, and he frankly admits that were he
assured that death ends all he would put an end
to his life with a “bare bodkin.”

No one can doubt the affinity existing between
murder and suicide, both being in many cases
the result of mingled scepticism and materialism.

Germany is the hot-bed of modern materialism,
and in no other country are there so many sui-
cides. Haeckel attempts to explain away the
universe from a scientific point of view, without
leaving a gleam of psychic enlightenment.

There are times when I consider France the

134 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

mother of modern materialism. My long ac-
quaintance with French philosophy, with French
wit, and the cynicism of the boulevards, gives me
authority to speak. The difference between Ger-
man and French scepticism is the difference
between science and art. The Germans have at-
tacked spiritual things by the use of the smelting
pot, the French by logic. The Teuton hits with
bars of pig-iron, the Gaul with rapiers of steel.
It requires a long and intimate acquaintance
with the typical wit of Berlin and Paris to pene-
trate to the depths of their shiftless nescience.
But the danger of French materialists lies not
so much in their method as in their manner.
Voltaire fooled the people by the diamond flash
of his wit; German sceptics fool the people by
their ponderosity. German science is the pugil-
ism of the intellect, French materialism is the
neurosis of the spirit.

On the other hand, materialism in England is
the product of three centuries of unobstructed
political and commercial expansion; it has de-
veloped out of a drowsy and stall-fed optimism,
imitating, by a singular stroke of destiny, the
lethargy which existed in Rome just before the
inrush of northern hordes. Materialism in Amer-
ica is largely borrowed from Germany because it

MATERIALISM AND CRIME 135

looks scientific, from France because it smacks
of wit, and from England because it is fashionable.

Our civilisation is not face to face with a ques-
tion of religious form, but a question of far greater
importance. We have to face the fact that the
church a man belongs to counts for nothing now;
his creed matters nothing, one way or the other.
What does matter is the private belief of the
people. The question used to be: Do you belong
to some religious sect? Business men used to
put that question to young men seeking employ-
ment. It is too late now to look for success in
any such vain manoeuvring, since it has been
amply proved that professing or not professing
religion makes no real difference in the general
conduct of the thing called business. The out-
ward and visible form has ceased to count for
anything; the one vital point to be considered
is the secret conviction of the individual; what
do all the millions think who jostle each other in
the street every day — the soldiers, the sailors,
the clerks, the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the
judges who preside at great trials, the bishops
and fashionable clergymen, the professional poli-
ticians, the lords and the ladies who set the
fashions and who hang on the skirts of the court:
what do all these people actually think about

136 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

death and the after-life? Have they or have
they not got a conscience? Do they stand in
legitimate fear of ‘anybody or anything? If not,
all alike are dangerous. An agnostic bishop is as
dangerous to a community as a traitor in a high
social position, and far worse than a common
murderer.

A man who does not believe he has a soul is a
man who does not believe I have a soul, and
there is nothing to stop him but fear of the law.
So long as he escapes the law he cares for no one.
Why should he fear conscience if death is the
end of consciousness? Christian civilisation has
been descending lower and lower for a period of
four centuries. It used to occupy the roof of a
sort of tower of Babel which looked towards the
stars. There was air, space, vision. Civilisation
and barbarism are now separated by a few laws,
a few conventions, one or two ideals, and a single
religion. To-day nothing but a hatch separates
us from primitive barbarism. Underneath is the
lair of the wild beast, whose growls are as audible
and menacing as were those of the old Roman
arena when Rome thirsted for human blood.

It must be evident to anyone who gives the
subject a moment’s serious thought that no sane
man who is a believer in the immortality of the

Were spy crn see te meeD

MATERIALISM AND CRIME 137

soul would commit a murder in cold blood. Nor
would anyone who believes in a return of the
dead ever think of murdering anyone. Nor is
the question confined to murder: all the greater
crimes are influenced more or less by a man’s
secret beliefs. There never was a time when so
many officers in Germany and France have tried
to sell their country for “a mess of pottage”; it
is the spirit of materialism, which urges such
people on to reap what pleasures they may be-
fore death arrives.

We may be at the beginning of a reign of a
state of affairs the like of which the world has
never known, a state of things which may cause
a pandemonium of unrelenting fury in which all
the so-called Christian nations, become material-
istic at heart, after playing at hypocrisy so long,
will throw off their masks and engage in an Ar-
mageddon of slaughter in which the thing called
humanity will have no part, in which the total
destruction of commercial rivals will be the only
incentive and the only aim. And the soldiers
most likely, to win in the final rounding up are
the Russians in Europe, the Turks in the Near
East, and the yellow races in the Far East. Be-
cause these people still believe they have souls.
They are not afraid to die. The materialist hates

138 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

to die, although he may not fear death. His
desire is to live as long as he can and enjoy all
he can.

And not only this, but there is likely to come
a time, and that before very long, when the
soldiers of the sceptical nations will refuse to
fight; the feeling of patriotism will evaporate.
When this happens they will feel as if one ruler
is as good as another — a Czar of Russia would
prove as welcome as a King of England or an
Emperor of Germany.

While the Continental nations like Germany
and France have been made materialistic by
science, England and America have been made
so by a sentimental form of religion, with science
and commercialism as props. We are an emo-
tional people with sentimental whims, seldom
able to give a sound reason for believing in any-
thing, because sentimentalism and sound sense
do not dwell together. This being so, there is
a rude awakening in store for the Anglo-Saxon
sentimentalist. In the hour of inexorable crime
and universal upheaval all the sentimentalisms
of the present would go as chaff in a whirlwind.
The sentimental materialists, without real faith
in anything or anybody, would fail to render the
people any real courage or consolation.

MATERIALISM AND CRIME 139

That our civilisation is becoming more and
more materialistic is proved by the astounding
number of child suicides which occur year after
year. Two or three decades ago child suicides
were rarely known. This state of things is the
result of the first harvest of our materialistic
sowing, and a curious phase of the union of
materialism and sentimentality is the hatred of
authority which the combination so often pro-
duces. Children left to their own whims and
devices turn out unrelenting free-will sentimen-
talists. The wonder is that more suicides do not
occur, and if blood-crimes do not increase under
our present mode of civilisation it will be still
more wonderful. One characteristic of murder
is its frequent concurrence with suicide. Whole
families often disappear instead of a single mem-
ber, and double suicides are too frequent to cause
any unusual comment. We are growing used to
horrors. And what is still more curious, from
lack of real ordeals produced by prolonged wars,
people gloat over sordid crimes and vulgar crim-
inals as they never did in former days. A murder
mystery gives profound satisfaction. The most
stimulating and melodramatic murders now oc-
cur in England and America, the two most “re-
ligious” and sentimental countries in the world;

140 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

also the two nations where the dollar is most
worshipped.

The void left by the passing of heroic emotions
is filled by the horrible, the monstrous, and the
sadic. Geneva, the greatest stronghold of sec-
tarian religion in the world, is now to become an
arena for the Spanish bull-fight. And yet senti-
mentalists tell us that the passing of war means
the arrival of the millennium. From having been
heroic we have grown pusillanimous, superstitious,
and cruel. We seek horrors instead of heroes.

Another astonishing thing in this so-called
scientific age is the prevalence of superstition.
With all our science we were never so Steeped in
the slough of superstitious isms. We pretend to
be agnostics and sceptics, while a cheap irony
covers great chasms of fear, apprehension, and
dread. Irony may fool a good many people in
the beginning, but nothing so soon wears out. It
is the one thing which is powerless to produce
anything. It became fashionable at the break-up
of the Victorian era, when the old Pickwickian
humour had run its course and the creative
faculty was as good as dead. When we become
impoverished in pocket we buy the cheapest
stuffs, when we become impoverished in mind we
use the cheapest phrases, when we become bank-

MATERIALISM AND CRIME 141

rupt in morals we hide the nudity of our souls in
ironic platitudes.

Irony is the bluntest arrow in the quiver of our
ineffectual lucifers, who might rise to a terrestrial
heaven if their wings, like their weapons, were
not made of goose quills. Underneath all the
persiflage is the haunting fear of final collapse,
for with the vanishing of the religious spirit there
seems to be no place left for a sense of the higher
mystical forces of the universe. There is but one
thing that can lift people and nations above the
sordid and the sensational, and that is a high
order of mystical optimism which shall take the
place of materialistic religion and materialistic
science.

A great revival of art, poetry, and literature
will not be possible until a new religious spirit
pervades the world.

HAMPTON COURT AND
VERSAILLES

HE history of Hampton Court is that of a

thousand dreams and a thousand illusions.

In Henry VIII's time it had a thousand rooms

and a thousand bay-windows, and Henry had a
retinue of a thousand persons.

Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court, but
Henry made it famous; and more of the business
of state was transacted there than in any other
place during his reign.

With Wolsey began the pomp and magnificence.
The great Cardinal’s ambition was to make
Hampton Court a unique place of entertainment
and festivity; and this he accomplished by
“feasting all ambassadors of foreign potentates,”’
says Cavendish, a gentleman of Wolsey’s house-
hold. Indeed, it was even then considered a royal
dwelling, for the Cardinal’s creation was always
resorted to as “a king’s house with noblemen
and gentlemen, with coming and going in and out,
feasting and banqueting these ambassadors di-
vers times and all others right nobly.”

Several times a year Henry VIII repaired to

HAMPTON COURT 143

the Cardinal’s house, and on each occasion “there
wanted no preparations or goodly furniture,
with viands of the finest sort that could be gotten
for money or friendship.” Imagination was set
to work to invent new pleasures; suppers,
masques, and mummeries were devised in so
gorgeous and costly a manner that nothing equal
to the magnificence was ever seen in Europe.
The fairest ladies of the realm were invited to
dance with the maskers, and the music provided
must have been wonderfully original and effective.

It was not enough that the King was often
entertained in this way; an impulse would seize
him to go to Hampton Court, and he would
arrive by water, secretly, without the slightest
noise, masked, and accompanied by a crowd of
maskers, dressed like shepherds, with garments
of fine cloth of gold and crimson satin “paned,”
and with beards of fine gold or silver wire. With
these came torch-bearers and drummers. When
they had landed guns were fired off and the noble-
men and officers of the Palace roused Wolsey,
who, pretending ignorance of the King’s arrival,
desired the Lord Chamberlain to see what was
the cause of the commotion; on looking out of
the windows near the river-bank, the crowd in
masks was discovered approaching. The Cardi-

144 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

nal, pretending to take them for ambassadors
from some foreign prince, gave orders for them
to be received in the hall, afterwards to be con-
ducted to the banqueting-room. When all the
maskers had come in the King pulled down his
visor and disclosed his presence to the joy of all
the company. Wolsey invited the King to take
the “place of estate,”’ which he did after exchang-
ing his dress for rich and princely garments.

In the meantime the table was spread again
with new and perfumed cloths, when a fresh
banquet of “two hundred divers dishes of won-
drous devices and subtleties” was served.

The greatest occasion of all during the days of
Wolsey was the splendid reception of the em-
bassage of eighty French noblemen headed by Du
Bellay and Anne de Montmorency. For this
reception and feast scores of caterers and pur-
veyors were sent out to bring in all the expert
cooks and culinary artists they could find in Lon-
don or elsewhere to concoct new and fantastic
dishes.

The cooks worked day and night to provide a
feast such as had never been seen, “where lacked
neither gold, silver, nor any costly thing meet
for the purpose.” Hundreds of yeomen and
grooms were kept busy fitting the different cham-

HAMPTON COURT 145

bers and halls with costly hangings and beds of
silk. For weeks Hampton Court was invaded by
an army of carpenters, masons, painters, and
artificers of every description. Two hundred and
eighty extra beds were provided for the foreign
visitors, and such a carrying of gold and silver
plate to and fro, such a tramping up and down,
in and out, was never seen, even in a king’s
palace.

When the memorable day came the French
embassy arrived long before the hour of their
appointment, but Wolsey’s wit was equal to the
occasion; he caused them to ride to Hanworth,
a royal park three miles away, there to hunt
until evening, when they returned to Hampton
Court, and each guest was shown to a separate
chamber “‘having a great fire and wine for their
comfort and relief, remaining there till the great
banquet was ready.”

The principal waiting-room was hung with
rich arras, as were all others, one better than
another, with tall yeomen waiting ready to serve;
great tables were spread, and a cupboard as long
as the room was laden with white plate, with
four huge plates of polished silver, set to reflect
the great wax candles. But in the “chamber of
presence” there was a sumptuous cloth of estate,

146 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

with many goodly gentlemen to serve; and again
a cupboard as long as the whole room, the five
top shelves filled with burnished silver plate, the
lowest one garnished with massive gold, with
immense candlesticks of gilt containing wax
lights as big as torches. The whole place dazzled
and glittered with light and radiance — the
plates of silver that hung on the walls had in
them huge perchers of burning wax, the immense
chimneys were ablaze with flame.

At last, everything being ready, the officers
caused the trumpeters to warn to supper. Then
officers were sent to conduct the French guests
to the halls appointed for the banquet, and no
sooner were they all seated than up came dishes
of such “costly subtleties and abundance” that
the Frenchmen, as it seemed ‘“‘were rapt in a
heavenly paradise.” Before the second course
the Lord Cardinal came in, booted and spurred,
and every one rising in his place Wolsey was
greeted with an acclamation of joy. The Car-
dinal called for a chair, and seating himself in
the midst of the high table he made merry with
the rest of the company.

The second course, consisting of a hundred
dishes, was now served, and caused the foreign-
ers to stare with wonder: there were dishes rep-

HAMPTON COURT 147

resenting castles, churches, beasts, birds, fowls,
and personages—some fighting with swords,
some with guns and cross-bows, some vaulting
and leaping, some dancing with ladies, others on
horses in complete harness, justing with long
sharp spears. Then Wolsey took a bowl of gold
filled with hippocras, and taking off his cap drank
to King Henry and then to the King of France,
after which it is not surprising that many of the
Frenchmen were “fain to be led to their beds.”
The Cardinal, who had eaten nothing yet,
retired to his own apartment, divested himself
of his spurs and boots, had supper alone, then
returned to the banquet-hall among his guests.
During this time hundreds of yeomen and
lackeys were busy carrying to the chambers of
the guests basins and ewers of silver, great livery
pots of wine and beer, bowls and goblets of silver
and gilt, silver candlesticks, with both white and
yellow lights of three sizes, staff torches of wax,
fine manchets, and cheat loaves. And in spite of
every room being furnished in this manner
throughout all the house the cupboards in the
two banqueting-halls were not once touched.
These displays, however, were even surpassed
by the gorgeous train of ecclesiastical dignitaries
connected with the Cardinal’s chapel in the

148 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

Palace. He had a dean and a sub-dean, ten
priests, a choir of twenty-two men and boys;
and in a procession through the hall a hundred
rich copes and other vestments might be counted;
while he had for his daily life twelve gentlemen
ushers, six gentlemen waiters for his private
chamber, and nine lords, with two servants to
wait on each, without counting forty other cup-
bearers, carvers, and sewers, six yeomen ushers,
eight grooms of the chamber, sixteen doctors and
chaplains, two secretaries, three clerks, and four
counsellors at law.

A gifted historian has drawn a picture of the
Court of the great Cardinal. ‘Nobles vied with
each other in the splendour of their retinue;
poets, painters, and musicians were called upon
to entertain the royal guest; and in the midst
of these gorgeous festivities Henry and his young
wife sat in the balconies or paraded in the gardens
like Amadis and Oriana, the magnets to which
every eye was attracted. The old romances, with
their endless legends of enchanted castles, haunted
and trackless wildernesses, cruel sorcerers, valiant
knights, and devoted damsels, were the fashion-
able reading of the day, and it was not undig-
nified for bishops and statesmen to compose
masques and melodramas.”

HAMPTON COURT 149

In 1529 Wolsey’s fate was sealed.

“His misfortunes are such,” said the French
ambassador, “‘that his enemies, even though they
were Englishmen, could not fail to pity him.”

As soon as the great Cardinal had breathed his
last Henry VIII began to make additions to the
Palace. He built a tennis-court, a bowling-alley,
and the splendid hall in the clock-court, the last
of the medizval creations of its kind, with its
magnificent single hammer-beam roof, of seven
compartments.

Henry spent his time in hunting, gaming, and
making love; one queen succeeded another in
rapid succession, tragedy followed comedy; and
in the most romantic and delightful of spots his
life became a round of merry jesting, interspersed
with theological discussions and political intrigue.

At Hampton Court, in 1537, Edward VI was
born, and his mother, Jane Seymour, died; and
here, three years later, the ill-starred Catherine
Howard took her place; here, in 1543, Henry
married Catherine Parr; and here Edward the
boy-king alighted like a phantom of royalty, pass-
ing away before he was old enough to realise the
serene and placid beauty of the place.

Here, on Christmas Day, Mary Tudor enter-

150 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

tained her fickle Spanish consort, Philip, at a
wonderful banquet, when the great hall shone
with a thousand fantastic lamps flickering in a
mellow glow over a sea of orange and opal, when
Elizabeth, the future queen, supped at the royal
table, and was served later with “‘a perfumed
napkin and a plate of confects by the noble Lord
Paget,” retiring to her own apartments before
the revels and masques of that romantic and
memorable night.

To Hampton Court came Charles I, in 1625,
to escape the plague then ravishing London; and
he returned again twenty-two years later as a
prisoner, escorted by soldiers, to make his escape
three months later for a brief respite between
Hampton and the headsman at Whitehall.

Here Charles II spent his honeymoon, and
James II created a scandal by publicly receiving
the Pope’s Nuncio, and here the unromantic
Queen Anne was wont to drink tea and take
counsel from her ministers; and Alexander Pope,
while taking his accustomed promenades with
the beautiful Lady Hervey, embellished the con-
versation by witty phrases and poetic couplets.

Ambrosial was the epithet Byron applied to
the region about Hampton Court, Richmond,

HAMPTON COURT I51I

and Twickenham, while Chateaubriand called
it a “terrestrial paradise.” Hampton Court,
situated on the Thames half-way between London
and Windsor, is the gem of this terrestrial para-
dise, the one locality in England without a
rival.

Old houses and palaces charm, not by their
cost, nor even by the people who have lived in
them, but by that rare and inscrutable combina-
tion of mystery, beauty, and illusion formed by
a long series of historical events, ending at last
in what may be termed the romantic and personal
associations of the place. There are old sites
which possess every thing needful save one: the
magical ingredient best described by the word
“atmosphere.” Hence their bricks and stones
seem bare, their towers bleak and barren; and
their grounds may be elaborate and costly, yet
uninteresting. We visit them but once. From
no point of view does Hampton Court Palace
suggest a quasi-ruin stripped of its glories. Never
does it hint at fire or famine, having passed
through wars, revolutions, and centuries of social
change without being touched by mobs or bullets.
It is a region of stately parks shrouded in dreamy
enchantment, the limpid atmosphere often as
mellow and serene as that of an Indian summer.

\

152 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

About these old brick walls you will find no
pretentious ornaments. It is the art of being
impressive without pretension. The whole place,
with its buildings, courts, passages, halls, gar-
dens, flowers, trees, and terraces, seems to have
sprung from a dream of fairyland; for the on-
looker is never made conscious of the efforts of the
architect, the decorator, the professional restorer
of cracked walls and crumbling towers. It has
a naive dignity of its own which the lover of
Nature has seen nowhere else.

An immense fan-shaped garden, with lawns as
soft and compact as a cloth of velvet, sprinkled
with small white daisies, dotted here and there
with yellow buttercups, in keeping with the
medizval simplicity of everything, is bordered
and set off by rows of yew as old as the place
itself, the symbolical tree of the primitive bards
and mystics. And they are in their proper ele-
ment here, in front of the great brick pile, their
deep green forming a striking contrast to the
airy lightness of the rows of willowy lime behind
them. And what incomparable avenues of limes
these are! No other tree would look so well here:
the leaf of the elm is too small and compact, the
foliage of the chestnut too luxuriant and opaque,
the branches of the sycamore too sparse to

HAMPTON COURT 153

harmonise with the peculiar beauty and serene
blithesomeness of Hampton Court.

Its flowers and flower-beds are unrivalled in
Europe; the eye is bewildered, not so much by
the colours as by the groupings of colour — the
artless beauty everywhere displayed.

The matchless simplicity of arrangement seems
careless, but in reality it is the result of science
and natural art.

Great scarlet poppies, on long stems, droop
over pillows of yellow pansies or beds of deep
velvety purple, the faces all turned one way,
with pale saffron eyes fixed on the sun. The
colours of May are somewhat flamboyant, but
June ushers in the ochre and the amber, the
medizval yellows, in keeping with the dull red-
dish brick and the old walls, with their flat coping-
stones, devoid of ostentation. And June brings
the rose, here to be seen everywhere, in beds and
clinging all about the walls, as far as one can see,
mingled with a hundred other shapes and hues.
And the long, old walls and borders festooned
with trailing vines, heavy with scented bloom,
present, in August, a picture of all the hues of
red, pink, and scarlet, interspersed with mauve
and saffron and clusters of white lilies, all brought
to the utmost perfection of tint and form.

184 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

A bewitching simplicity in park and garden
adds an indefinable element to the historical
associations of site and structure. It gives to
the ensemble an air of poetic refinement, a natu-
ral grace to be met with nowhere else. Indeed,
the best art is achieved solely through the aban-
donment of the artist to his inspirations; in his
work he must imagine himself free, even if he is
not. And Wolsey, in building Hampton Court,
must have been impelled to the task as by a de-
cree of fate. The longer one meditates on the
unique beauty of the whole the more one realises
the ennobling quality of this beauty; the more
one considers its imminent meaning in the scheme
of things, its satisfying influence, and its universal
relation to art, history, religion, and romance, the
greater will be the feeling of gratitude to this man
who abandoned himself to the conception and
execution of a work which has given instruction
and delight to artists and lovers of Nature for
nearly four centuries.

The two chief things which give this Tudor
palace its peculiar charm are its red brick and its
quaint forms. The new part, erected in imitation
of Versailles by William III, is not without its
charm, and the two palaces do not conflict, in
spite of the difference in period and architecture.

VERSAILLES _iss

But, fortunately for lovers of the natural, William
did not succeed in turning Hampton Court into
an English Versailles. At the Court of Louis XIV
things were made to shine and dazzle. Art be-
came fantastic and superficial. Caprice and con-
vention usurped the place of the natural and the
intimate.

The fétes champétres of Watteau depict the life
and sentiment of Versailles; the pictures of
Claude Lorraine suggest the atmosphere of
Hampton Court. The first expressed the Gallic
spirit of the time, beginning with the founding
of Versailles and lasting till the romantic period
of 1830, when Hugo, inspired by Chateaubriand,
brought new life to French art and literature.
The types of the Watteau period are symbolised
by Louis XIV at its beginning and by Marie
Antoinette at its close. We know all about them;
there are no illusions, because there was no poetry.
Under Louis thought was didactic and formal:
Labruyére was the polished essayist, La Roche-
foucauld the trenchant wit, Racine the elegant
weaver of the “‘alexandrine,” Condé the polite
hero, Madame de Maintenon the inflexible hero-
ine. With but few exceptions every one, from
the King to the head cook, seemed to belong to
one family. There were rules for walking, talk-

156 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

ing, eating, sitting, yawning, bowing, and back-
ing out. Louis himself was afraid to peep from
his bed-curtains in the morning to address a ser-
vant without first donning his pompous wig.

How different were people and things at
Hampton!

Wolsey began by being original; Henry VIII
lived his own life; Mary, the vehement mystic,
with her mind made up, followed; and Elizabeth
succeeded with a long period of stately and ro-
mantic triumphs. Every one of these lived an
individual life and copied no one. And somehow
they managed to leave natural things as they
found them. At Hampton Court they had the
good sense to assist Nature; at Versailles Nature
was trimmed and suppressed. The laws of land-
scape harmony are as absolute as those of music.
The romantic mood framed in renascent art, ex-
pressed in such perfection at Hampton, is not the
result of fancy or caprice; plays, pictures, and
palaces do not happen to be romantic or poetic;
and, reason about it as we may, these buildings,
avenues, trees, and flowers are what we see them
because of an innate harmony of object and senti-
ment. Everything at Hampton Court is in keep-
ing with the things that surround it, fitting the
ensemble of earth, sky, and water. No wonder

VERSAILLES 157

it is a paradise of feathered hosts! The song of
birds, the ripple of brooks, the swish of winds in
the tree-tops satisfy the musician, while the mel-
low tints in field, atmosphere, and forest satisfy
the artist.

There is consolation in the soft, wistful serenity
of this extraordinary union of medievalism and
modernity, a satisfying sense of the eternal in all
this romance of artless art, an inexorable calm
in the long, stately avenues bordered with giant
limes, leading the eye to other vistas too distant
to distinguish anything but a soft veil of indefin-
able blue. The use of the yard-measure is here
never apparent. Versailles perfected conven-
tional art and conventional forms. The witty
took the place of the poetic, mechanical phrases
the place of natural sentiment. It seems as if
the French nobles, artists, and architects con-
spired together to force Nature to walk on stilts.
There is not a trace of romantic medievalism, not
a suggestion of poetic mysticism, not a corner left
anywhere for the display of spontaneous beauty.
The structure of the Chateau forbids any illusion
suggested by form. Nor is its history more than
a development of sordid Court intrigues, ending
with the scandal of the diamond necklace. The
truth is, at Versailles kings, queens, and courtiers

158 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

were stage performers in what looks to us now as
a comedy of errors which only once bordered on
tragedy: when the hungry hordes of Paris arrived
at the gates with spikes garnished with human
heads. They were puppets skilled in the etiquette
of the table, the chase, and the minuet, the whole
spiced with wit and flavoured with epigram.

As the Versailles of the Capets was made up
of people who were always rehearsing a political
or social réle, Hampton Court, in the days of the
Tudors, and even at later periods, was the home
of characters. Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth stood
boldly for what they were: strong or weak, wise
or foolish. And with what pomp Wolsey un-
rolled the pageant from the wheels of time by
erecting Hampton Court for the unimagined
dramas of the epoch, consecrating it, by every
device of naive wonder and art, to the exigent
mysteries of the future, with its medieval ban-
queting-hall, its dream-like chapel, its red-brick
turrets and towers, lattice and oriel windows, the
most quaint and bewitching ever conceived by
architect or poet. Here, romance, pageant, and
poetry were one. Wolsey was both last and first
— he brought medizvalism to a close and ushered
in the English renascence. Hampton Court and
Elizabeth made the Shakespearian era possible.

HAMPTON COURT 150

Wolsey cast over it a glamour which time
cannot dim, Henry VIII immortalised it with his
fatal whims and some of the grimmest dramas
of the English Reformation, Mary by her senti-
mental and religious vehemence, Elizabeth by
the ardent glow of heroic and passionate romance,
while Shakespeare affixed his magic seal to the
triumphs and tragedies of the whole Tudor

dynasty.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

T is interesting to note that both in England
and America humour is losing itself in wit and
wit in cynicism. Material success added a bitter
drop to Mark Twain’s humour, and the same
kind of success has added a taste of hyssop to the
medicinal catnip, snap-dragon, and hellebore of
Mr. Bernard Shaw’s genius. But the most
curious thing of all is the fact that G. B. S. ex-
pects to win people to Socialism by a sting-bee
process instead of by pleasant potions of honey
from the common hive. Perhaps he is imitating
the tactics of Disraeli, who understood the crowd
and used his wit as a fanning machine to clear
the way to the goal of his choice, who stood just
outside the political circus, hailed the idlers and
clubmen by clever antics, filled his tent at the
side-show, and then began a bare-back perform-
ance in a ring in which the other riders used pads,
palfreys, and salaam alek carpets to ease the fall
of their reckless and break-neck somersaults.
Anyhow, none of them can plunge with the
dexterity of G. B. S. There is a wonderful
elasticity in his bouncing-board. He is a past-

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 161

grand-master in the art of diving, although he
sometimes goes to the bottom, and seemingly for
good; but he always bobs up like a bladder, and
by a hocus-pocus of word massage and mental
calisthenics he resuscitates himself and is at it
again.

No matter what G. B. S. does he is always
diverting, but, like a good many of his “‘com-
rades,” he does not care much for the humble life.
He believes in success. He does not believe in
being a communistic caterpillar; it is better to
be a butterfly, because there are no limits to
what a butterfly may do, from sitting on a pro-
letarian paling to flitting over fields and fashion-
able pleasure grounds, alighting on a daisy here,
a buttercup there, a cabbage leaf here, a rose
bush somewhere else, for no full-grown butter-
fly will consent to flutter long on a cabbage. Fine
flowers and fine scents are wanted, and these can
only be had in the gardens of success.

If it is harder for a rich man to enter the king-
dom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the
eye of the needle, it is still harder for rich artists
and writers to become serious Socialists. And
some of Mr. Shaw’s ‘‘comrades” are doing their
level best to become richer. If you ask them for
their patent of equality they will show you a pair

162 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

of patent boots, with the answer that equality
may reside under tanned hide, but not under
curled hair. Brain power is good, but success is
still better. It makes millions of unthinking
people mistake sophistry for philosophy and
selfishness for the teaching of democratic saints.

G. B. S. likes to preach against sentiment and
preside at anti-vivisection meetings. Is it his
love for dogs that makes him a cynic, or his
cynicism that makes him pity the dogs? Co-
nundrum that can only be explained by the great
Saint Bernard himself. It is probable that if
someone were to tell us that a cabbage has nerves,
a beet a heart, and a turnip a gizzard, G. B. S.
would eschew them and begin to chew something
else. We are to show sentiment, but never in the
place where most people expect it. The proper
thing seems to consist in doing the opposite
thing. If the partition that separates wit from
madness is only a page of tissue paper the parti-
tion might disappear by the turning of a leaf.
Some people prefer the sentimental to the cynical
because, like somebody’s cocoa, it goes furthest
and lasts the longest. In some things it is
better to side with the majority.

When G. B. S. is not plunging he swims entre
deux eaux, as when he writes: “If the Judgment

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 163

Day were fixed for the centenary of Poe’s birth
there are among the dead only two men (Poe
and Whitman) born since the Declaration of
Independence whose plea for mercy could avert
a prompt sentence of damnation on the entire
American nation.”

Our humorist ignores Lincoln. The great
President was neither an artist nor a poet, and
Mr. Shaw is bound to appear in artistic company,
even though he should miss the company of the
greatest humanist of the past hundred years.
But in ignoring Lincoln, G. B. S. negatives his
attitude as a democratic leader. It is like talk-
ing about the history of Socialism while ignoring
Fourier, the history of art while ignoring Michel-
angelo, the history of music while ignoring
Beethoven.

G. B. S. is often most amusing when he intends
to be serious, as when he writes about Mark
Twain and music. “Twain,” he says, “de-
scribed Lohengrin as a ‘shiveree,’ though he liked
the wedding chorus, which shows that Mark,
like Dickens, was not properly educated; for
Wagner would have been just the man for him
if he had been trained to understand and use
music as Mr. Rockefeller was trained to under-
stand and use money.” So! then, a man can be

164 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

trained to appreciate what he cannot possibly
understand! But G. B.S. goes one better when
he says: ‘America did not teach Mark Twain
the language of the great ideals, just as England
did not teach it to Dickens and Thackeray.”
The notion of a writer like Twain occupying him-
self with any ideal is very funny. The truth is —
Mark Twain is the greatest cynic America ever
produced. A good many people have failed to
grasp the fact, because his cynicism is varnished
by a species of bland and natural humour, which
hides the reality.

The notion of Mark Twain dabbling in
“Tdeals” is excruciating; this word pronounced
over the graves of Dickens and Thackeray would
make them turn in their coffins. The American
humorist never cared to be an expert in anything
but the dangerous science of piloting boats full
of passengers on the Mississippi; G. B. S. would
undertake to pilot all England through the
shallows of art, the whirlpools of politics, and the
social rapids of no-man’s land, a place that looks
to some people ten times more dangerous than
the shifting sand-bars of the Mississippi. Mark
Twain looked after the safety of bodies; G. B. S.
would look after mind and body. He writes as
if mind can be manufactured. He is labouring

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 165

under the delusion that art is a trick and authority
book knowledge.

Darwin wrote: ‘The longer I live the more
inclined I am to agree with Francis Galton that
most of our faculties are innate and that what
is acquired is very little.’ These words should
be pondered just now, when discrimination and
judgment seem to be about as cheap in the world
of distracted wits as footballs in the world of
distorted sports.

Mr. Shaw is not capering in a fool’s paradise;
he has the range of a new garden of Eden, where
he alone is the only regenerate Adam, and where
from the tall tree-tops of fruitarian delights he
lets the cocoa-nuts of communistic conundrums
crack on the bewildered heads of the bourgeoisie
to give them the only taste of the milk of human
kindness they will ever get at his hands; his
humour is greater than his humanism.

G. B. S. is our master cynic. He is without
a rival even in the salon and the dining-room.
His dress matches nothing from curtains to
cantaloupes. Artists and poets do pretty much
what they please. Whistler tied a blue ribbon
in his hair and wore an impudent eye-glass.
But Socialism, when it is wrapped in wit and
tied in knotty paradox, alarms the average

166 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

business man. They take G. B. S. too seriously.
Even when he presents his paradox in the most
beautiful bonbon baskets, with gold and silver
trimmings, they fear some intellectual dynamite
at the bottom. He mystifies people by his plays,
walks the tight-rope of theatrical surprises,
stands on his heels, toes, or head with the balance-
pole of paradox quivering in the teeth of the
public; for no one knows which end of the pole
will go highest in the air — the Tolstoy-Ibsen or
the Nietzsche-Wagner end.

But, in spite of all, some people will continue
to ask, in what does G. B. S. take himself seri-
ously? This question might be answered by
asking some others: How does he compare with
some of the masters he most admires? Has he
the tartaric sincerity of Tolstoy? Has he the
long-suffering patience of Ibsen, the passion of
Wagner, the fine frenzy of Nietzsche?

Mr. Shaw’s weakness lies in the intellectuality
of his wit. He can tear down but he cannot con-
struct; he can scatter but he cannot concentrate,
and the instruction he affords is rarely in pro-
portion to the amusement.

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY

HE chief difference between pessimism and
agnosticism is this: a pessimist may believe
in a cfeed, but an agnostic has to live without the
aid of any religious system or “ism.” A man can
be a pessimist and a Christian; he cannot be an
agnostic and take comfort in any ism or religion.
The moment he “believes” he ceases to be an
agnostic. The danger lies in becoming fanatical
with conviction and an incurable cynic with
scepticism. It is a fact that an avowed sceptic
is never welcome in any company of people. The
reason is plain: he can sympathise with no one’s
sentiments.

A period of agnosticism gives some minds time
to think, look about, and choose; but if the
period be prolonged a sort of psychological
atrophy begins to develop which often ends in a
state of chronic apathy, out of which no psychic
incident or influence can rouse them.

Some men boast of their ability to doubt, as
others boast of their good fortune in perceiving
and knowing. I have noticed that some agnostics
are prone to damn the opinions and beliefs of

168 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

others; but the people who believe do less sneer-
ing and mocking. The fact is, as soon as we say
we don’t know we assume a negative attitude.

No general could long retain command of any
body of troops if he gave it out that he was in
ignorance of the strength and the movements of
the enemy; it is his business to know something
about the other side, for if the enemy remain
invisible the greater will be the clamour to find
out some facts about his strength, position,
morale. The general, I say, who sits down and
says he knows nothing would not long be left
in command of any body of troops. His busi-
ness is to send out scouts and spies to bring back
some knowledge, little or great, of the other
side.

In the commercial world the law of knowledge
rules, as it does elsewhere. The merchant who
refuses to look about him and keep up with the
rules of progress will soon see his business pass
beyond his control. The modern thinker who
refuses to probe, analyse, investigate, and search
out, places himself in a negative position, and he
is promptly ruled out of the race of thinkers. 3

But there is a great change in the attitude of
intelligent agnostics; for agnostics are of two
kinds — the wilfully apathetic and those who

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 169

wish to learn. Certainly no man can call himself
a thinker who refuses to do battle with the
mysterious forces which encompass us round
about, as palpable as the air we breathe. If
there were no mysteries there would be no such
thing as science, and if book-learning contained
all practical wisdom there would be no such
thing as intuition. Everything is like everything
else. There is but one source; but an infinite
variety of appearances. The soul of the universe
is one — its manifestations are without limit in
variation. Phenomena produce mystery; the
whole conscious world is engaged in the unravel-
ling of mystery.

Consciously or unconsciously, every human
being is engaged in the pursuit to become wiser.
This is the aim and meaning of conscious exist-
ence. Without this aim there would be no mean-
ing attached to life. I think it impossible, at the
present moment, for any true man of science to
deny the force and influence of anything visible
or invisible. The scientist who to-day declares
that a thing is not true because he has not seen it
and felt it is put down as shallow and superficial.
The paradox is amusing: mystery is rendering
mystery less mysterious! We have but to go to
wireless telegraphy and hypnotism to see how

170 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the unscientific is controlling and dominating
science, so-called.

The old-fashioned scientist, who denied every-
thing new, like the old-fashioned musician, is a
being without voice or power in the world to-
day. For although he may talk and write and
preach, no one pays him serious attention. It is
the manifestation of the invisible which rivets
the attention of the world now, not the de-
nials, the subterfuges, and the explanations of the
positive. The word “science” has now little of
the old meaning, and a new word may have to be
invented to cover the attitude, the aims, and the
power of the new tendency. The man who hopes
and expects is far more interesting than the man
who believes nothing, expects nothing. Illusion
is more fascinating than disillusion. No mafican _
have an active influence on any body of people
who admits his inability to proceed farther, be
it through light or through darkness. [Illusions
are transitory realities; in accepting them as
such we are often led to the permanent. The
agnostic, in getting rid of all illusion, has placed
himself in a state of helplessness. He is like a man
who has fasted too long — his digestive organs
have come, at last, to refuse nourishment.

I believe that there are as many diseases in

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 171

the mental as in the physical man. Every ism,
no matter under what guise, must be classed as
a mental disorder the moment we are bound up
in it. The instant we cease to progress we enter
upon a decline, whether it be towards intellec-
tual stagnation or towards physical decay. But
mystery, illusion, and curiosity keep the world
from universal decadence. The forces which
impel men to move on and on, through maze after
maze of disappointment and disillusion, are hope
and egoism.

One of the principal reasons for new isms is
this: without new ones the old would hold us
fast; we should be sitting still and enjoying the
so-called revelations of our grandfathers. Every
new ism, therefore, is an effort towards greater
freedom. It makes no difference what the belief
is, every man who remains quiescent gives him-
self out as a negative quantity in the world of
thought and action. The thirsty who sit down
in the oasis, and remain there, are still in the
desert; the world of the contented man is a speck
around which the simoon sweeps the sands of
isolation and forgetfulness.

Agnosticism properly belongs to a period of
scientific transition. Critical minds wait; but
while they wait doubt knocks at the door, and

172 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the door is often open to scepticism. And so,
without knowing it, the agnostic glides into a
state of positiveness which he mistakes for truth.
His mind is positive, while his senses are inactive.
The agnostic attitude seemed natural and proper
from 1860 to 1895. The tide turned with the
conjunction of several influences in the material
and psychological world a few years ago. Tyn-
dall, Haeckel, and Huxley all did a work which
had to be done. But that work was limited to
chemical and biological demonstration. It was
science, but science of the old school.

Just as the reign of a man of genius like Goethe
makes thousands of intelligent men appear like
pigmies, so the revelations in the domain of light
and sound, electric transmission, and mental sug-
gestion, make the discoveries of Darwin and all
his contemporaries appear trivial in comparison.
The simple fact that thought can be transmitted,
as well as electric currents, without wires, is
enough to stupefy the conservative mind. Even
now, efforts are being made to develop an inde-
pendent action of mind and will outside of the
body, so that while the body is sleeping or re-
posing in one place the mind, or double, may
visit a friend or a locality, at a great distance,
and return with the knowledge which it went

g

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 173

to seek. Indeed, several schools of hypnotism
claim this faculty for some of their pupils. What
this means may be conjectured if we consider
for a moment the possibility of a mind gifted in
this way setting to work to discover the secrets
of some great chemical business or political
intrigue.

We are at the beginning of a cycle of invisible
forces; the coming age will be one of invisible
action. The submarine torpedo-boat typifies the
development of the century. This is pre-emi-
nently the age of mind, as the past century was
the age of matter. So far as we know, electricity
is the soul of visible form. What we call brain-
waves have an analogy with electric waves.

In former times intuitions were presented in
systems of philosophy. It is no exaggeration to
say that the discoveries and inventions of the
past ten years have made child’s-play of every
known system of philosophy. Never again will
any man be able to build up a philosophical sys-
tem which will stand the assaults of the new
science. The little that we now know is more
than all the philosophers of the past knew, from
Aristotle to Leibnitz. The absurdity of the old
systems may be summed up in the Positivism of
Auguste Comte, which aimed at hard-and-fast

174 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

rules of life and conduct, as if such things could
ever be in a world in its infancy.

Every fresh discovery delivers a blow at the
old and fixed formulas; every disclosure of mental
power bids defiance to some stereotyped belief.
But the most wonderful fact of the present is that
we are being ruled by the seeming impossible.
Some of the most successful inventors of the
present day would have passed for madmen
twenty years ago. The so-called dreamers are
now the men of action; they have proved their
power and competence, and thinking people-turn
to them for more miracles of discovery and
invention.

While people are tired of ethical platitudes,
they are equally tired of scepticism. Scientific
progress has made it impossible for thinking
minds to put up with either one of these postu-
lates. As in electrical invention the word “im-
possible” is no longer spoken, so in the realm of
the mind the word no longer discourages the
philosopher and psychologist. Hesitancy and
fear have an affinity. No one who is in doubt
can attain that plane of fearlessness so necessary
to progress and achievement.

Every thinker who has accomplished anything
excellent has begun by believing in something.

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 175

First, he has confidence in himself; second, he
has confidence in others; third, he feels that in
the eternal mysteries there resides a law and a
force which may be revealed by flashes of intui-
tion; fourth, he knows that the world is not
standing still. The greatest pessimists have felt
something of all this, but the most typical agnos-
tics have not. For no one can wait and work at
the same time. They have made the grave mis-
take of not seeking to disentangle themselves
from the web of doubt and uncertainty; they sit
still and rub their eyes at every fresh discovery,
and cry out: “It may be true, but I don’t know.”
Would it be possible for a merchant or shop-
keeper to hold his business successfully while
saying he knows nothing about the business
methods of a formidable rival ? Look where we
may, it is the men who hope and work who are
triumphing. And the people who are wide awake
to new inventions and discoveries are the ones
who do the best business and make the greatest
progress. In the great struggle of the future
the nation most keenly alive to intellectual and
invisible force will triumph. The nations most
bound up in the material will succumb. Intel-
lect will dominate material force, no matter how
formidable the material force may be.

176 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

The future belongs to scientific power, applied
by genius of a psychic and intuitive order. The
dreamers of the future will be the ones who de-
pend on the old-fashioned methods of scientific
research. They will dream on and on in a sort
of fool’s paradise, placing crowns and kingdoms
at the mercy of a cannon shot, and they will lose.
The time is not far distant when a science of the
mind will treat material science as if it were a
plaything. The rulers of the future need not
make themselves visible in public; their work
will be done in silence. Material riches will play
but a secondary part, and Mammon will be
forced under by purely intellectual pressure. No
people are more conscious of limitation than
materialists. But the day is coming when the
psychic power of the intellect will kill material-
ism. There will be no battle, no strife, no intrigue;
the blows will be delivered silently, like the
stroke of an electric bolt.

I am not a believer in bloody revolutions. I
see signs that millionaires are beginning to con-
sider the question of spiritual versus material
power. Materialism and agnosticism have sup-
plied nothing in the place of the old superstitions.
Did not Darwinism prove that the survival of the
fittest was the natural order of life? And what

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 177

is a rich man but the survival of the fittest? The
fact was so patent that every miner and railway
magnate could appropriate it.

At its worst, the doctrine of the survival of the
fittest is a gilded lie; at its best, a ghost at a
banquet. But the old scientists and the new
millionaires are beginning to perceive that mind
is superior to muscle, that it will eventually con-
trol and dominate the impulses and ambitions of
the brute instincts in man. Up till quite recently
rich men had a sort of contempt for genius, look-
ing on it as something visionary. For what had
genius to do with the buying and selling of stocks,
the building of railroads, or the smelting of ore?
But with the discoveries of Edison it was seen
that genius could, directly or indirectly, influence
the money market. It was seen that this wizard
was revolutionising science. The rich began to
consider the meaning of intuition and genius;
they had here a force to reckon with, and, above
all, a force to respect. Later came wireless
telegraphy, hypnotic control, and mental-inter-
communication, to accomplish for the vulgar
world, as well as the learned world, what the
genius of Edison had left undone, and to open the
eyes of all but the blind to the possibilities of the
future.

178 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

It is a fact that doubt, hesitancy, scepticism
are inherently destructive, and that what affects
the mind also affects the body. But the mental
agony endured by some agnostics can hardly be
defined in words, as I well know from personal
experience. A chronic state of agnosticism not
only renders a man discontented with himself,
but it renders him irritable and contradictory
whenever the belief of others comes up for dis-
cussion. In spite of the attitude of some writers
of the present, the age of stoicism is past. A man
who is indifferent can neither fill the position of
thinker nor scientist. And indifference is only
make-believe when we see it turn into fury —
which is half envy and half spite — against some
author who dares to express something a little
more hopeful and a good deal more helpful than
the humdrum of the ordinary writer.

I remember the outcry against the attitude of
Robert G. Ingersoll, who at one time was in a
fair way to make agnostics of the majority of
thinking Americans. While the most eloquent
preachers in the different churches were listened
to by wealthy congregations they made no prog-
ress. The churches had plenty of substance, but
no spirit. He attacked them on their weakest
side, and had it all his own way for twenty years.

THE AGNOSTIC AGONY 179

But there came a day when Colonel Ingersoll
found himself too old, and fixed in his ideas, to
take any interest in the new order of things.
Young men were bringing with them a new science
and a new faith. The future was for the young
inventors and thinkers, and Colonel Ingersoll
belonged to the past. But were he beginning his
career now he would be compelled to face a whole
world of electric, magnetic, and psychic prob-
lems, to deny any one of which would make him
appear ridiculous.

Robert Ingersoll filled a gap in the world of
thought which Nature intended him to fill.
Everything has its own time. Phenomena come
and go in cyclic order. There is nothing before
or after the proper time. We know what a
scientific mind means to-day, and we know what
a scientific mind meant thirty years ago; and
the thinkers of to-day are as far removed from
the thinkers of 1870 as electricity is from steam.
We know steam to be a crude and clumsy thing
compared with electricity, and to-morrow we
shall awake to the fact that mind is just as
superior to the crude electric current.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS

eel

EN wear fine clothes for two principal rea-
sons, to wit: to satisfy their vanity and to
impress other people. Sometimes men dress well
from an innate sense of refinement, and sometimes
from sheer business motives, hating the very
clothes which worldly policy forces them to put
on. Dress, therefore, is not the silly thing that
some would-be moralists think it, but a power, an
influence, a symbol in the world of fact and real-
ity, a power which even the moralists are often
the first to acknowledge.

Why did the late Mr. Gladstone wear a very
high and prominent collar? What made Disraeli
wear a dandy waistcoat? Why did Tennyson
walk about London with a flowing purple mantle?
Why did George Borrow carry a huge green um-
brella? Why did Liszt walk about Paris with a
huge red umbrella? Why does a man wear a
single eye-glass? And last, but not least, why do .
judges and lawyers wear wigs? Lawyers and
judges wear wigs and gowns to impress both
saints and sinners with the dignity of the law.

PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS 181

Precisely. And men of talent and genius wear
conspicuous things for exactly the same reason.
Tennyson wore his purple cloak because it not
only suited him, but it distinguished him from the
fashionable nobodies of Bond Street, and George
Borrow carried his green umbrella in Richmond
Park as a sort of canopy to protect the head of a
man the like of whom never walked in Richmond
Park before. But there are business and material
reasons for men wearing striking apparel. Some
men wear silk hats because they think a high hat
gives them a dignity which they themselves do
not possess. Some wear eye-glasses to distinguish
them from the millions who could not be hired to
wear them.

The philosophy of dress! What a world there
is in that phrase. The people who ignore this
philosophy are perhaps the people who have
failed in life. We are living in a world where men
judge everything by appearances. It makes no
difference what your banking account may be, if,
from an attack of gout, you are compelled to go
about in old patched-up shoes, for you will be
taken for a ruined gentleman or some bohemian
actor waiting for an engagement.

One philosopher has told us that the world is
a lie, and another that all we see and touch is

182 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

illusion. Certainly the greatest error we can fall
into is the error of not taking the world as it is.
I had travelled about for years, ignoring the
value of dress and growing more and more indif-
ferent to all that pertains to fashion, considering
life too serious to lose time over what I regarded
as trivial and superfluous. A friend said to me:
“As you won’t dress in the fashion, you ought
to wear, as a matter of material benefit, one of
the presents your friends have given you. There
is the king’s ring. Wear that and you will soon
see its good effects.” Jewellery I always disliked,
and the king’s ring, in particular, was so big, so
brilliant, and so conspicuous that the few times
I wore it I always put it off with a sense of relief,
and it lay for months, and even years, hidden
away with other souvenirs from friends titled
and untitled. “What,” I asked, “has jewellery
to do in my life? and how were such things as
rings and scarf-pins to influence me in the world
of thought, in the region of pure intellect?”

But the same friend answered: “You are not
reasoning like a philosopher. We are living in
a world of matter and of fact, and not in the
clouds; consider things and people as they are.”’
And then he laid stress on these words: “You
have made a great mistake in not looking upon

PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS 183

that ring and other similar objects as symbols
of power.”

Then I began to reason about it. Was the
ring, indeed, a symbol of power?

“Don’t you see,” said the friend, “that such
presents were not given you for doing nothing?
Do you think for a moment that such an object
as the king’s ring could have been obtained if you
were a clerk in a city bank?”

“T admit,” I said, ‘‘that these souvenirs all
represent so much money, and in looking at them
the ordinary mind immediately thinks of their
material value.”

“But this is not all,” said the friend; ‘‘there
is another side of the question, and one of much
more importance; artists know that these things
represent something which money cannot pur-
chase; in your case they symbolise a success
which came to you unsought. But leaving aside
these reasons, take my advice and wear the
king’s ring to offset the bad effect of your un-
fashionable clothes.”

“Here is an idea,” I said. ‘I will wear the
king’s ring and take particular note of what
follows.”

The result was both amusing and instructive.
Cabmen demanded a shilling a mile more, news-

184 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

boys expected a penny for a ha’penny paper.
The ring had an extraordinary effect on waiters.
Under the electric light the big ruby shot forth
crimson flashes which were reflected in the facets
of the brilliants surrounding it, and every mo-
tion of the hand was the cause of new combina-
tions of colour. The waiters expected their tips
to be just double. But all these details were in-
significant compared to the effect of the ring on
another class of minds, the minds of that large
class who are incapable of any deep or critical
thought. In their eyes the ring had changed me.
I was no longer the humble person of old whom
they knew but did not honour. They now saw
in me a personage and a power. What I was and
what I could do made very little difference with
them. The one thing which stood out beyond
all others was the possession of this ring; it made
them sentimental, it caused them to look upon
my presence in their house as an honour. Here
was a force at once visible and tangible. In its
light the snobbish mind saw nothing but royalty.

Thackeray claimed all Englishmen as snobs;
but supposing eighty per cent of the people to be
snobs, that would leave a powerful majority to
live, move, and act in a world of illusion and
show. Read and tremble, says the edict of the

PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS 185

Chinese dictator. Look and kow-tow, says the
modern bauble worshipper. After becoming
acquainted with these facts no one can wonder
at the talented young artists who seek, by hook
or by crook, to paint the portrait of some titled
personage. But the game of snobbery works
both ways; it is played by lords and by laymen,
by grand ladies and by ladies’ maids, by painters
and the people who sit to be painted, by states-
men and the tradespeople who supply them with
wine and meat. Why does a nobleman go about
with his coat of arms painted on his carriage door?
Does the earl wish to impress the marquis? Does
the marquis expect to influence the duke? Not
at all. Among themselves the game isa bore. A
nobleman goes about with the symbols of nobil-
ity emblazoned on his carriage to impress the
world of snobbery. The snobs are deeply im-
pressed, and it does not hurt the lord.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

HE nineteenth century may yet be called the
most ‘‘demonic”’ of all the centuries of the
Christian era. At its beginning three men were
living who, in the words of Goethe, “were con-
trolled by the demonic afflatus of their genius,”
namely, Byron, Bonaparte, and Disraeli. Of
these three Bonaparte and Disraeli attained the
miraculous. A mistake has been made in allud-
ing to the first half of Queen Victoria’s reign as
a period of sentimentality. As a matter of fact
it was sentimental only in art; but the long
necks in the pictures of Rossetti were more than
matched by the long heads in Parliament; the
languorous eyes in Burne-Jones were more than
rivalled by the Mephistophelean glances of wily
Whigs and the Machiavellian winks of a Tory
Demiurgus whose advent all the wiseacres failed
to predict and all the fools failed to prevent. No;
the novels, the manners, the fertile Disraelian
wit more than counterbalanced the lotus-languors
of the come-into-the-garden Maudies of the early
Victorian period.
Byron was a sentimental Don Juan who turned

BENJAMIN DISRAELI_ 187

the heads of women and the stomachs of men.
Disraeli turned all heads, touched all fancies,
wrought upon all hearts, opened all pocket-books,
filled all imaginations, and brought to the festive
board of British politics the spice of a new life, a
ragout unnamed in the political cookery-books,
unknown to the most fastidious faddists of the
Parliamentary palate, a dish of birds of a feather
which had refused to flock together, but which,
when caught, killed, and baked in a pie, rose when
the pie was opened and sang in chorus “Rule
Britannia” to the baton of Benjamin Disraeli,
Prime Minister of England by the Grace of God,
most of the landlords, and all the publicans.
Never before was such a thing seen with the
naked eye, never was such a thing heard with the
naked ear. People who were not stricken with
wonder would be likely to remain unmoved at
the sound of the last trump.

Bonaparte struck terror into all Europe, but
he did so with sabre and bullet. People could
see him at the work even if they failed to under-
stand how his work was done. He seemed to his
soldiers to be part of themselves, They regarded
him as a descended God made one with the com-
mon esprit de corps, democratic as well as de-
monic; they followed blindly where they could

188 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

not see, and obeyed willingly what they could not
understand.

With all his colossal originality Napoleon the
Great was less demonic, less oriental, than Dis-
raeli. Bonaparte often blundered, and he came to
his defeat through a blunder that showed more
madness than sanity. He possessed will, tact,
daring, originality, but he lacked patience and
composure. The serene Hebraic spirit was not
his. Serenity means supremacy. Once lose the
sense of equanimity and the balance of power is
gone. An ambitious, irritable man is doomed.
That was the doom of Napoleon. The supreme
minds are those that know themselves. A man
can afford to wait when he understands his own
powers, the meaning of parties, the pretensions
of his enemies, and the chimeras of the world.
While men with limitations are in a hurry, the
others, possessing a sense of the eternal, are
never tempted to force events, never tempted to
hurry through the phenomena of life.

Understand a man’s mind and you can defeat
him in his aims, his plans, his ambitions. No
one understood Disraeli. And yet the man in
the street will tell you he understands the wit
in the play, the clown in the circus, the dandy
in the red waistcoat. Not these do people under-

BENJAMIN DISRAELI 189

stand. What people understand is the speaker
without wit, the writer without humour, the
politician without imagination, the preacher
without passion.

Beau Brummell died in 1840, and in that year
another dandy found himself in a conspicuous
place on the stage of London life. But what a
difference between the two dandies, Brummell
and Disraeli! The first was a fool, the second a
genius who played at burlesque because he knew
the fools would like it. Captivate them and you
have won half the battle. The foolish are won
through the sight, the weak through hunger,
the vain by flattery, the wicked by ambition,
the cunning by promises, and the wise by knowl-
edge and judgment. The new dandy made up
his mind to give all a taste in turn. In the begin-
ning he made himself as picturesque as it was pos-
sible to be without becoming a peacock or a bird
of paradise, and he managed to surpass them in
his strut and rival them in colour. He was a
human chanticleer. He began to crow as a
chicken and fought in the Parliamentary cock-
pit when his spurs were mere corns and his wings
pin feathers. Well might the Puritans cry,
“Coxcomb!” He stormed the barnyard first,
the hen-house second, the House of Commons

190 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

third, then the lordly House of the Turkey
Cocks, whose cry is, “Gobble, gobble, and let
the sparrows take the crumbs!” ‘The idle were
intensely amused, society was kept bobbing up
and down like a devil in a bottle, but the men
in search of power were seized with mingled feel-
ings of wonder, fear, admiration, and panic.

Whence came this Titan who began his career
as a social mountebank? Who was this Jew
without prestige, this politician without a pedi-
gree, this upstart without a fortune? Well might
his enemies scratch their heads and ask if their
pyramid of statescraft did not hide more mum-
mies than men, more dummies than live issues.

We are a peculiar people.

When we call a statesman a charlatan we mean
that he has the true political afflatus, when we
call a poet a charlatan we mean that he has the
true poetic afflatus, and when we call an artist a
charlatan we mean, of course, that he possesses
the Whistlerian root that will grow not brussels
sprouts, but roses with thorns enough to make
prickly foolscaps for every R. A. in the three
kingdoms.

As Disraeli rose step by step he was greeted
with stronger and stronger epithets. The admira-
tion of his enemies knew no bounds. They cried

BENJAMIN DISRAELI ior

in a chorus, “Charlatan, mountebank, adven-
turer, impostor!” In the meantime he kept his
wits, he stored his irony, he reserved his sarcasm
and wore on his face the impervious mask of per-
petual serenity, Nature’s hall-mark of demonic
genius. Nor did he walk alone in his dashing
glory. He was surrounded by social meteors,
sparks from the wheel of fashion and passing
fame, dynamical dandies, Count D’Orsay, Bul-
wer Lytton, Brummell, and others, who made
Disraeli’s sun appear all the brighter in com-
parison with the dandies who wanted but a
whiff of creative afflatus to make their intellects
shine like their clothes.

Disraeli was a bard who preferred oriental
prose to verse, and the poetic license of Parlia-
ment to the practice of Byronic rhyme.

He was the first modern to turn the tables on
the prophets by forestalling their predictions, the
greatest practical pessimist since Moses, the
clearest seer since Daniel. It required a serene
eye, an unruffled brow, and a menacing top-knot
to enter the lion’s den at Westminster with
nothing but words to allure and nothing but
manners to fascinate. He was not long there
when he began to twist their tails, pull their
teeth, singe their manes, and clip their claws

192 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

without using so much as a sniff of chloroform.
He soon became the whip of the whole menagerie,
as well as tamer of lions, wild cats, hyenas, and
the leopards who longed to change their spots as
well as their seats.

Like all men of demonic genius, he had his
moods, his days, his seasons, when he thought,
spoke, and did what he pleased. At one moment
he lured the proletariat from the flesh pots of
Egypt by a mess of pottage, at another he kept
his party from attempting a second crossing of
the Red Sea before he was ready to divide the
waters, at another he swapped hobby-horses in
the middle of a doubtful stream, and he actually
hobbled the Liberals to the skirts of unhappy
chance at a time when Gladstone and his bishops
were getting ready to walk the aisles of untram-
melled freedom in the most flowing robes ever
invented to show off the new and flouncing
crinoline.

SAVONAROLA

HRISTIAN Italy twice endured a wave of

what seemed like universal madness. The

first arrived with the breaking up of the Roman

Empire, the second arrived about the time of

Savonarola’s birth in 1452. The first was caused

by the slow dissolution of paganism, the second
by a revival of paganism.

In the fifteenth century prelates and philoso-
phers were far more concerned with the writings
of Aristotle and Plato than they were with the
precepts of the saints. With the revival of clas-
sical learning in Italy came rapacious greed,
cruelty, and fierce personal struggles for temporal
power. Science and philosophy had no place for
religion in the Christian sense. The old vices
returned. Rome and Florence in the latter part
of the fifteenth century played the old réles of
Jerusalem, Athens, and the Latin Emperors.

Classicism has always meant, not a revival of
power, but a preparation towards decline.

Up to the present time a national renaissance
has meant nothing more than what the hectic
flush meant on the cheeks of a consumptive. As

194 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

for the “humanities,” Savonarola has told us
what that word meant in his day: ‘Throughout
all Christendom, in the mansions of the great
prelates and lords, there is no concern, save for
poetry and the critical art; go thither and thou
shalt find them all with books of the humanities
in their hands, telling one another that they can
guide men’s souls by means of Virgil, Horace,
and Cicero, and there is no prelate nor lord that
hath not intimate dealings with some astrologer
who fixeth the hour and moment in which he is
to ride out or undertake some piece of business.”’
They were unable to distinguish inter bonum et
malum, inter verum et falsum.

As for Savonarola, the greatest Italian of his
time, and one of the greatest minds Christianity
ever produced, the man who gave Florence the
best form of republican government it had ever
enjoyed, he boasted of hearing voices in the air,
of seeing the sword of the Almighty, and of being
the ambassador of Florence to the Virgin! In that
day science was a thing which developed mad-
ness on one hand and clairvoyance on the other.

The lunatic asylums of our day would be
filled with philosophers and scientists were they
to exhibit anything like the intellectual fever of
the Renaissance.

SAVONAROLA 105

Marsilio Ficino lectured from the professional
chair on the occult virtues contained in amulets
composed of the teeth and claws of animals. He
changed the jewels in his rings to suit the impres-
sions, whims, and moods of the day or the hour.
Cristoforo Landino went so far as to ‘‘draw the
horoscope of the Christian religion”; Francesco
Guicciardini encountered aerial spirits. Nothing
that Savonarola ever saw, or dreamed that he
saw, equalled the visions, the dreams, the obses-
sions of Cardano, Porta, and Pomponaccio, those
daring minds who, as Villari says, hewed out a
path for Galileo “while apparently living in a
state of delirium.” The sight of a wasp flying
into his room inspired Cardano to write whole
pages of predictions, and we wonder that out of
the chaos and psychological barbarism of the
age a man like Galileo could have emerged sane
and sound at last.

When Savonarola began to preach all Italy
was in a state of ferment. Borgia was a papal
Nero in Rome, Lorenzo de Medici a new Augustus
in Florence, Borso a new Maecenas in Ferrara,
but Savonarola in the pulpit of the Duomo shone
like a koh-i-noor in a tiara of mock jewels and
tawdry tinsel.

The wonder is not that they destroyed him at

196 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the time they did, but that they ever permitted
him the use of a public pulpit the second time.
In the midst of a thousand confusions, hallucina-
tions, dreams, theories, revivals, passions, occult
insanity, scientific raving, and philosophical de-
lirium, when everything the world ever knew
was revived except the religion of St. Augustine,
his denunciations fell like hot hail on the heads
of prelates and courtiers, princes and peasants.
His complexion was dark, his grey eyes shone
with a piercing brightness, his long, aquiline
nose resembled a hook, which gave to his features
something massive and menacing; he preached
with the trenchant phraseology of a prophet.
What a difference there is between the elo-
quent speaker and the inspired preacher! The
prophetic preacher inspires not only admiration
and respect, but apprehension and awe, with
something merging into the indefinable and the
mystical; at certain moments he diffuses terror
— lerrificam praedicationem egi, as Savonarola
declared when writing of himself. His age was a
time in which political, religious, and social con-
ditions became so confused that it required an
intellectual giant to rise head and shoulders above
all the greatest men in Italy and produce an im-
pression at once profound and universal.

SAVONAROLA 197

Men like Savonarola often put an end to
tragedy by the consummation of the tragic.
September 21st, 1494, was a memorable one in
the history of Florence. It marked the beginning
of the end for this wonderful man. Early on
that day people began to arrive at the Duomo.
They came from every direction, rich and poor,
philosophers and courtiers, and at last the great
edifice was filled with a multitude palpitating
with suppressed emotion hardly able to endure
the suspense created by so much hope, apprehen-
sion, doubt, and presentiments of coming calam-
ity. When Savonarola mounted the pulpit he
stood for a moment surveying the vast congre-
gation like some revenant from the tombs; then,
catching something of the nervous tension that
prevailed everywhere around him, he shouted
in a voice that rang through the vast edifice:
“Ecce ego adducam aquas super terram!” The
words came like a clap of thunder, and Pico Della
Mirandola tells us he felt “a cold shiver” run
through him. People left the Duomo “be-
wildered, speechless, and, as it were, half dead,”
and for days the terrible sermon was the talk of
Florence.

May ioth to the 23rd witnessed the last act
in the great tragedy. Frenzy was now added to

198 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

the prevailing insanity. The people, with but few
exceptions, turned against their idol. When the
Papal Commissioners entered Florence they
were surrounded by the dregs of the people
shouting, “Death to the Friar!” The Spanish
desperado, Francesco Romolina, Bishop of Ilerda,
answered back with a smile, “‘He shall die with-
out fail!” In fact, the Pope had instructed
Romolina to put Savonarola to death, “even
were he another John the Baptist.”

Again and again Savonarola was tortured on
the rack. His replies were always the same; but
each time they were falsified by the notaries.
The inquisitors could do nothing with such a man.
Then came the last scene of the last act. A
scaffold was built in the public square; a gibbet
was erected at one end. It resembled a cross
with the upper part shortened. From it hung
three chains and three halters. The halters were
for Savonarola and his two companions; the
chains were to hold their corpses suspended over
_the fire.

The blasphemies of the populace surpassed
anything ever witnessed or imagined in Florence,
and the savage cries of thousands of madmen
resounded through the streets and the Piazza.
The vilest criminals were released from prison in

SAVONAROLA 199

order to add a more terrible frenzy to the general
delirium. The three prisoners were ordered to
be stripped of their robes, and they were led out
in their tunics, barefooted. Savonarola was the
last to be executed. He met his death amidst
scenes of indescribable horror, and the Arrab-
biati hired a mob of boys to shout, dance, and
throw stones at the half-consumed victims.

FRANCE OLD AND NEW

HERE comes a time in the history of every

A nation when to the casual observer the
changes that occur in the intellectual world seem
sudden, paradoxical, and without apparent
reason. I remember the time when ‘“‘imperson-
ality’? was the leading note of French journal-
ism; now the leading note is personal. Yet the
change was not brought about suddenly. Jour-
nalism forced the French Academy to become
more representative than it was under the Second
Empire of Louis Philippe, when it accepted a
critic like Sainte-Beuve and a poet like Lamartine
while excluding Balzac. Jules Sandeau was the
first novelist to take a seat among the so-called
Immortels, and Prévost-Paradol the first journal-
ist. Thus we see the Academy changes, although
the process of change is slow, the spirit timid
and the vision hazy. The new spirit in French
literature and philosophy is more apparent and
much more striking among the young writers,
thinkers, and poets. Between these and the
celebrities of middle age a great gulf is apparent.
I cannot think of some of the older writers with-

FRANCE OLD AND NEW 201

but a feeling that they belong to a past epoch
which is out of touch with the spirit and the aims
of the rising generation and that still greater
world lying beyond Paris, especially the world of
creative thought embodied in Anglo-American
productivity. For instance, a representative
writer like Anatole France has no idea of the
vastness and variety of the literary world be-
yond that of his own country. He is under the
fatal illusion that writers and novelists of other
countries look to Paris now as they did during
the great days of the romantic movement, when
translations of Hugo’s Les Misérables appeared
in all the principal languages as soon as the work
was issued in French.

Most French writers of middle age are under
the illusion that Paris must be as compelling to
thinkers as it is to women in the world of fashion.
But while Paris can still set the fashions for
women, its most famous novelists occupy the
position in the world of thought that the Know-
Nothing Party occupied in politics some seventy
years ago. For instance, the difference between
the books of Anatole France and those of Pierre
Loti is the difference between wit that charms
and romance that fascinates. Both are limited
to a world of action without ideas. Although the

202 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

greatest creator of “atmosphere” in the world
of literature to-day, Pierre Loti is sure of nothing.
His intellectual world is bounded on one side by
atmosphere, on the other by sentiment; it is
like a vague music which produces no psychic
action in subconscious thought; he is as limited
without wit and humour as Anatole France is in
their full possession. The graces of style and
humour are not adequate substitutes for the
qualities we find in Hugo, Balzac, George Sand,
and Flaubert; in their presence we walk not
with the Graces but with the Gods. Their limita-
tions were not apparent. The greatest writers of
the Second Empire did not limit themselves to
atmosphere, nor to feeling, nor to subtle expres-
sions of psychological states, nor to characterisa-
tion. They were free to roam the world of will,
intellect, imagination, and ideas. They lived in
an Empire of creative thought, while the writers
of the present live in a Republic of vacillating and
negative sentiment. They of the past transcribed
life; the Academicians of to-day record sensa-
tions and opinions, the things that hover on the
surface of ideas. Anatole France, Pierre Loti,
Maurice Barrés, and Marcel Prévost write about
the things most appreciated by a people not ready
for the fundamental principles of sound demo-

FRANCE OLD AND NEW 203

cracy on the one hand, and not ripe for imperial
ascendancy on the other. Maurice Barrés has a
charm all his own, yet he seldom succeeds in
creating anything more than atmosphere, rare
enough in itself and too difficult to be attained
by any save writers of real distinction, but he
is held in the same bondage as his gifted con-
frére, Anatole France. They walk within the
limits of the same Parisian garden.

Le Jardin de Bérénice is made up of flowers too
frail to flourish in the open air; they belong to
the hot-house. Their odour is too delicate and
subtle, and their form and nature too illusive,
to be easily classified by the literary botanist.
Maurice Barrés has achieved that rarest of all
things, originality, and in him, as in Pierre Loti,
Nature has done her best to offset the common-
place sentiments of the modern bourgeoisie by
a manifestation of extreme refinement and deli-
cacy from which all sense of power has vanished.
Nothing more opposed to the bourgeois spirit
could be imagined than the subtle irony of Ana-
tole France, the romantic remoteness of Pierre
Loti, and the quintessential refinement of Maurice
Barrés. These and some other French writers of
our time express themselves in a language which
exhales a quality too subtle to be distinguished

204 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

by the typical Parisian of the Third Republic.
The great writers of the Second Empire had posi-
tive and militant convictions. The greatest
writers of the present take refuge in an aristo-
cracy of atmosphere, in a world of intellectual
exclusiveness, ‘absolutely remote from republi-
can tastes and democratic grooves of thought.
Nothing could be less socialistic than the art of
Anatole France, who passes for a socialist; noth-
ing could be less popular than the writings of
Pierre Loti, who is an officer in the Republican
Navy; nothing more removed from the masses
could be imagined than the writings of Maurice
Barrés, who passes for a sincere patriot; while
Paul Bourget, a Catholic, preaches against the
things which the majority of Frenchmen uphold.
I see no evidence that the French Academy is
more democratic now than it was under the
Empire. The more democratic the Government
becomes, the more pronounced the line that
separates the best writers from the sentiments
and opinions of the people in the street. Things
remain much as they were except for one exceed-
ingly curious fact —the writers and thinkers
who have become celebrated are more exclusive
than were the great writers of the Second Empire,
while at the same time the masses pride them-

FRANCE OLD AND NEW 205

selves on being more scientific and more demo-
cratic. Among the most gifted Academicians,
feeling and atmosphere take the place of the
creative and militant power displayed by Hugo,
Balzac, and Flaubert; it is a world of sentiment
opposed to action, refinement opposed to move-
ment, imagination opposed to ideas.

If the most celebrated French writers are ultra-
refined and negative, the younger writers are
positive, self-assertive, and often militant. They
too make frequent use of the personal pronoun,
but with a different intention. Considered from
a psychic view-point, the elderly critics are often
vacillating and sometimes flippant. Very differ-
ent are the young writers and critics; they are
fearlessly independent and keenly analytical.
They are cosmopolitan in certain directions,
scientific, mystical, and philosophical. And yet
they are further from the bourgeois mind than
the middle-aged men of the Academy, more re-
mote from the opinions and the sentiments of
the man in the street. They display a spirit of
research unknown to writers like Barrés, France,
and Bourget. They have discovered worlds of
sentiment and experience lying beyond the con-
fines of Paris, for which they have to thank poets
like Verhaeren and Whitman — admirably trans-

206 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

lated by M. Léon Bazalgette — and writers like
Maeterlinck and Emerson. The tendency is
toward a cosmopolitan culture, but I cannot see
any evidence of a literary socialism; nor can I
discover any evidence of philosophical collec-
tivism among these young poets and writers. On
the contrary, there is more individualism than
ever before.

Since my first sojourn in Paris in 1869 I have
witnessed the birth and death of several literary
and artistic movements, among them ‘“Parnas-
sianism.” The young poets of 1885 were not
influenced by the “Parnassians,” but by Baude-
laire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, then Mallarmé,
Laforgue, and some others. Out of these groups
there arose some gifted men whose names are
now celebrated among lovers of poetry: Moréas,
the Greek, whom I used to see playing dominoes
with a friend at the Café Voltaire in the ’eighties;
and Henri de Regnier, whom I often met at the
salon of Stéphané Mallarmé, and for whom I
predicted a seat among the immortals; and later
Paul Fort, to name but these out of a score. The
real individualism began about 1885, and in
1893 M. Gabriel Vicaire, writing in the Revue
Hebdomadaire, says of the new poets and their
work: “Jamais pareille confusion ne s’était vue”’;

FRANCE OLD AND NEW 207

and M. Tristan Deréme, writing in Rhythm for
August, 1912, declares that in this respect noth-
ing has been changed during the last nineteen
years. There are no “schools,” he says, but
many doctrines, and even the theorists are among
the first to oppose their own theories.

If, as David Hume said, there is a standard of
taste; there are not many young writers in France
who have any desire to seek a standard. The
majority plump boldly for individuality. This,
of course, is in defiance of all academical prece-
dent, and therecent triumphs of Paul Fort, whose
poetic output has but little affinity with any other
French poetry, is a proof of the great change in
the taste of the younger generation, M. Fort hav-
ing recently received the title of “Prince des
Jeunes” by a large majority of votes cast exclu-
sively by writers and critics. The revolt against
the old classical forms is even more pronounced
than that headed by Hugo in 1830, but there is a
difference. The present revolt is not led by any
one man, but by a score. Young men are in
revolt against academical restrictions and philo-
sophical systems; and if the older men are ex-
cluded from the masses by literary refinement,
the young men are equally excluded, but in
another manner: and for another reason they are

208 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

interested in things which are too subtle and too
abstract for the public, too psychic even for the
academical. Many of these young men are bold
enough to declare a positive belief in the things
ignored or denied by the older writers like Ana-
tole France and Pierre Loti. They are no longer
afraid of ridicule. Independence is the keynote
of their point of view, a free expression of their
personal sentiments and their personal feelings
their leading aim. This accounts for the differ-
ence of style and the multiplicity of individual
beliefs. Among the young men there are those
who might be taken for social reformers were it
not that they are without system and without
method. Others might be taken for pagan wor-
shippers of Nature were it not that they have
psychic convictions which give them a marked
leaning towards Catholicism or Buddhism; while
the number who are absorbed in the study of
purely psychical matters, philosophical or experi-
mental, surpasses the belief of persons who judge
intellectual Paris by the things said and done by
members of the French Academy. It cannot be
too positively stated that at the present time
there is hardly a member of that body who has
any real influence on the minds of young men.
The young admire, but remain independent;

FRANCE OLD AND NEW 209

they read, but remain uninfluenced. The general
tendency is towards a spiritualised action, in-
dependent of fixed literary forms, towards spirit-
ual influence as opposed to mere sentiments and
opinions; and in this tendency the present move-
ment in no way resembles the Parnassian move-
ment which was headed by the marmorean stoic,
Leconte de Lisle. There is no room now for the
stoical poet or the stoical thinker, although there
are those who may be classed as philosophical
mystics owing to the serene way in which they
look at life, art, and nature. But the calm sur-
face under which some of them work serves but
to hide a spirit of ethical and scientific exploration
and a consciousness of the tremendous mysteries
that surround and envelop the soul, mysteries
never so imperative in their demands as at this
stage of human progress.

Naturally, where there are so many different
temperaments at work trying to voice their con-
victions and impressions, incoherence must be a
marked feature of much of the printed work.
Anyone not thoroughly acquainted with the in-
tellectual life of Paris would, after a casual glance
at many of the books recently published, incline
to the opinion that incoherence is the keynote to
a universal cacophony of verbal sounds and philo-

210 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

sophical disorder. Had I not known Paris under
the Second Empire and followed with a critical
eye the literary, political, social, and artistic
schools and movements that have come and gone
since 1869, I might now be under the impression
that the real France is represented by the elderly
men like Bourget and Barrés, and that the young
men are without influence because seemingly
without order, method, or fixed purpose. But
it is the appearance which deceives and confuses.
Underneath the surface, beneath the incoherence
and the contradiction, there may be discovered
a spirit of unity compact enough to make the
typical Academician pause and reflect on the
changes due within the next ten years. The
French Academy will soon cease to be the collec-
tive centre of writers of talent who are without
positive convictions. The younger men will give
to it a new philosophy and a psychic stimulus
which will render materialism futile and sordid in
comparison.

If anyone doubts the power and originality
displayed among the ranks of young writers,
poets, and thinkers in France to-day, I advise
a careful perusal of M. Alexandre Mercereau’s
book, La Littérature et les Idées Nouvelles. For
critical insight and discriminating judgment it

FRANCE OLD AND NEW art

has not been surpassed by any work written in
French during the past decade. Alexandre Mer-
cereau is a young man, and in the short space of
three or four years has created for himself a posi-
tion in the intellectual world of Paris that seems
to me unique. At the head of several groups of
writers and artists, he is in a position to render a
sane and just account of the general tendency of
the young minds who are destined to exert a pro-
found influence on literary thought in France
during the next two or three decades.

To do justice to this book in a short résumé
would be impossible. M. Mercereau is severely
critical and yet surprisingly just, free from timid
and vulgar prejudices, astonishingly cosmopolitan
in his outlook on philosophical thought and lit-
erary productivity. Viewed in this light I con-
sider him as representing the highest type of the
new tendency in the world of intellectual expres-
sion in the France of our day. Without such
writers and thinkers the outlook on the future
would be gloomy indeed. His ascendancy means
the introduction into French philosophy, art, and
literature of a sound spirit of progress and an
optimism devoid of sentimental weakness and
vacillating opinion. Alexandre Mercereau is a
writer and thinker with ideas of his own, and he

212 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

has rightly named his book La Littérature et les
Idées Nouvelles. Were is a Parisian born who
understands and appreciates foreign genius like
Emerson, Whitman, Verhaeren, William James,
and Ruskin, and his influence on the minds of
young poets, writers, and philosophers has been
widespread and potent.

THE NEW ERA

-

|b are aien develop according to fixed law, and
we know what material progress and pros-
perity mean. The merest tyro can tell the dif-
ference between a country which has everything
in its favour and one which has everything
against it.

National misfortunes are never avoided by the
excitement of change and the realism of war.
On the contrary, misfortune follows in the train
of every victory gained for the sake of personal
aggrandisement. Seek where we may in history,
the note of warning is there; the futility of do-
minion for the sake of dominion.

In order to see things as much as possible as
they are, it is necessary to consider the lessons of
history. What are the earliest signs of national
decadence? How are they manifest to the minds
of thinkers and philosophers? There is but one
answer: in the disintegration of social, religious,
and political forces. Wherever decadence has
already set in, there you will find the hand on the

214 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

milestones pointing towards the vale of ease and
lethargy, where the mind may dream in the lazy
afternoon of life, and where the flight of time has
no longer any meaning. The descent may be
slow; it may proceed in a joyous and a merry
mood, or it may laugh and weep by turns, but the
descent never ceases.

Dickens depicted the happy-go-lucky mood of
the typical Londoner of his time with masterly
fidelity in photographic word-pictures, by which
he unconsciously exposes the helplessness, the
impotence, and the illusions of the people of
London. The works of Dickens all point toward
municipal and social decrepitude. The principal
characters manifest a sentimental humor or a
cynical selfishness which belongs to the early
symptoms of national helplessness. They live
in a world of illusions, never fully realising their
condition as working, thinking entities. Micaw-
ber, among the people, is the living symbol of
that undiscerning optimism, now so general, in
which, at last, many leaders of state-craft and
religion are steeped. Dickens depicted men and
conditions as he found them, and the significance
of his work lies not in his plots and his style, but
in the faithfulness of his characterisation.

With the age of Dickens came dissensions in

THE NEW ERA 215

the Established Church. Episcopalianism was
undermined by the democratic spirit of the Sal-
vation Army, while in the world of politics a
band of men appeared whose chief business lay
with the chimeras that hover about the horizon
of the dusky future. They sought excitement
and glory in distant countries, in questions and
interests that in no way concerned the welfare
of the people at home, in regions that touch
the romantic, and in adventures that touch the
fabulous.

A certain capricious humour, on the one hand,
and a stoical demeanour on the other, precede
and predict national disruption. Writers who
foresee a decline often turn to cynicism or stoicism
for relief. Grecian ascendancy was brought to an
end not so much by what philosophers taught as
by what the politicians and generals did. The
cynics and the satirists, headed by Antisthenes
and Aristophanes, appeared just at the time
when Athens thought herself secure against civil
and military decadence; but Alexander followed,
with his feverish orgies of conquest in distant
lands, and material disruption began.

In a like manner the humoristic and satirical
element in Dickens and Thackeray marks an
epoch in the social history of England. Here,

216 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

too, we find the spirit of melancholy seeking relief
and distraction in comical description and cynical
humour. For genius can do no more than observe
and depict contemporary man. The great deline-
ators and caricaturists of history invented noth-
ing. There is no such thing as the creation of a
type. The writers of every age, be they satirical,
philosophical, or sentimental, are impressed and
impelled by the persons and events of their own
epoch. Thus we find Juvenal satirising decadent
and Imperial Rome, while a little later Epictetus
and Aurelius took refuge in stoical resignation.
Under the Republic there was no need for stoicism
and no occasion for satire. So, too, Epicurus ap-
peared when Athens had witnessed her greatest
triumphs, and not very long before Greece be-
came a province of Rome.

Thinkers, prophets, philosophers, and novelists
all make their appearance at the proper time.
Men of genius never appear too soon or too late.
Dickens represented the happy-go-lucky, senti-
mental humour of the people; Thackeray the
cynicism and the snobbery of the middle classes;
George Eliot the philosophical element of the
cultured few. She represented modernised stoi-
cism. It was Seneca and Aurelius clothed in Vic-
torian romance; it was the science and resignation

THE NEW ERA 217

of Epicurus and Epictetus brought down to our
very doors, speaking through the illusions of
imperial power, evading to the last the secret
presentiment of social and political disruption.

Thus we find ourselves face to face with two
formidable signs, the like of which Europe has
not seen since the beginning of the Roman de-
cline: a cheap stoicism and puerile cynicism.
These symptoms of decadence, long apparent in
Continental Europe, are now palpably visible in
England, where cynicism has assumed a form
that is almost devoid of sensibility, and where
pessimism is attaining the last limits of moral
resignation.

In the Elizabethan age there was no place for
the cynical, the satirical, and the stoical. An age
of action and progress is an age of hope, and the
idea that poets, writers, and artists spring up here
and there like spurts of capricious Nature is a
superstition. Nowhere is there a manifestation
of intellect which has not a direct bearing on the
political and social world of fact and experience.
Blind though the forces of Nature appear to be,
still there are laws regulating these forces. The
optimistic prophecies of Walt Whitman, for
instance, were no haphazard production of a
dreamer, but of one reasoning from cause to effect

218 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

in a country teeming with intellectual and physi-
cal energy. Had Whitman produced his poems
in London they would have mirrored the lethargy
and the indifference of the larger part of its
inhabitants.

The art-world has expressed the mood of the
passing dispensation. Burne-Jones and Rossetti
were masters of the illusive, the immaterial. The
sadness which crowns the summit of achievement,
the melancholy coeval with perfection attained,
the longing for the things that are passed, all this
was transcribed on canvas with singular beauty
and vividness. This is why the pictures of these
masters give the impression of artistic dreams,
of something belonging to another age.

In contrast to this we have the art of the cari-
caturist and the satirical symbolist, typifying
an age of cynical callousness. In England and
France caricaturists are not only doing with the
pencil what Dickens and Thackeray did with the
pen, but they have arrived at a far closer intimacy
with human deceits and chimerical ambitions.
Never in the history of English art has anything
appeared at all comparable to the drawings of
the late Aubrey Beardsley. With an artistic in-
sight into the social foibles and the follies of the
epoch he added something that went straight to

THE NEW ERA 219

the heart of character, and by a sort of Mephisto-
phelian penetration depicted the naked soul of
the time. This, too, was an art that attained the
apex of delicacy and precision, a perfection which
laughed at perfection, a consciousness turned in
upon itself, mindful at once of power and decline.

And it is not only art that has furnished bitter
examples of the breaking up of old ideals and old
systems. Music has been evoked in the cause of
sarcasm, irony, and ridicule. In the world of
music we are confronted with the trivial on the
one hand, and on the other with the Wagnerian
symbols of the futile and the chimerical. The
first stands for the persiflage of the masses, the
second represents a hopeless struggle against the
irremediable. Wagner’s final pronouncement is
Renunciation. Parsifal, for example, means nega-
tive pessimism. Parsifal renounces the struggle
for life, and this, after all, is the Schopenhauerian
philosophy distilled into music. An earthly Nir-
vana is evoked by a combined musical and verbal
magic in which all the arts have a place, in which
illusion is followed by disenchantment and weari-
ness. Wagner’s work symbolises the disruption of
the old civilisation. He scaled the heights of long-
tried systems, and from the last pinnacle sounded
the bugle-call of disillusion and retreat.

220 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

The call was heard by Germany, France, and
England, who recognised in it a solace for error
and deception. When, in “Parsifal,” the walls
of the palace of illusion fall to the ground with a
crash, something more than mere personal dis-
enchantment is symbolised. The falling of the
walls of the house of pleasure and sense typifies
the dislocation of every system and thing founded
on material dominion. How comes it that such a
work was produced during the ascendancy of a
man like Bismarck? Genius everywhere has an
ascendancy over all other manifestations of intel-
lect, and its business is to see as well as to act.

I

When we leave the world of art and music and
enter that of the drama we are confronted once
more by a repetition of the signs and symptoms
of cynical indifference on one hand and senti-
mental weakness on the other. Mr. Pinero pro-
duces stage dialogues so true to contemporary
life that many of his plays are masterpieces of
their kind. And they represent social apathy,
ironical humour, trivial ambitions, and vulgar
passions. He possesses one of the most observ-
ing and penetrating minds that ever depicted the

THE NEW ERA 221

follies of the human heart. In his plays, men
and women of the world see themselves as in a
mirror. And they are at once nonchalant and
eager, frivolous and tragic, witty and pathetic.
Their wealth is as millstones, and their titles
hindrances, yet, from an instinct born of degen-
eracy, they seek greater wealth and higher titles,
and the dramatic ensemble represents a cynical
and callous class of people, born without the
instinct of affection and bred without distinction
of feeling. Mind and heart are wanting here for
the reason that in the typical society of the day
there is no sense of the human and confraternal.

In the plays of Mr. Sydney Grundy and others
the same frankness and fidelity to the spirit of the
time are manifest. On the other hand, there is
the romantic drama, meaningless and impotent.
If anyone doubts this it is only necessary to con-
sider for a moment the negative results of The
Sign of the Cross. The very success of this play
attested its impotence as a religious factor. The
emotion which it caused was another symptom
of dramatic and religious hysteria. That play
galvanised the nerves of a people long tired of
the ordinary religious emotions, of a people
fatigued by the monotony of chapel-going and
Salvation Army gymnastics, of a people in need

222 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

of a glimpse of the pagan arena, a cry from the
dungeons of the Roman Coliseum, the mingled
horrors and splendours of Imperial and neurotic
Rome; in need, above all things, of the spectac-
ular, the poignant, and the puerile.

The masses would seek relief in signs and in
symbols, in promises of to-morrow, in shifting
scenes and varying movement, in panoramic and
illusive pleasures which keep the mind from the
real cause of misery and the heart from the real
cause of sorrow. How to escape from the reality
is the one consuming thought of the hour. Be-
cause, hidden deep down in the recesses of human
nature, there dwells a consciousness of decay and
helplessness.

This consuming desire to escape is the cause
of romantic adventure, symbolical idealism,
feverish commercial activity, inane social ambi-
tions, political excitement, spectacular show, and
the chimeras of war. Here lies the inner and
secret meaning of that movement known as the
Celtic Renaissance. After Dickens and Thack-
eray, George Eliot and George Meredith, after
Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, after three
centuries of literary glory unequalled in the
history of the world we arrive at a period when
aspiration, sentiment, and emotion assume a

THE NEW ERA bg:

mystical and symbolical form. A climax has been
attained in the long series of literary schools.
But in the realm of British ascendancy it means
the passing from a dream of contentment to a con-
sciousness the reality of which is again screened
by a veil of poetic and allegorical illusion. For
this literary perfection means that hope and faith
have reached a barrier, and a refuge is sought in a
region of symbolical mysticism, pure and noble in
itself, but still quixotic and allusive.

If Mr. Yeats willingly seeks the legendary and
the symbolical, Mr. Kipling tries“to escape by
means of the active. But while Mr. Yeats takes
refuge in a world of poetic symbols which he has
created for himself, Mr. Kipling, without knowing
it, is living in a fool’s paradise. The stimulant of
Mr. Kipling’s verse and prose may be likened to
the spurs applied to a tired horse. His writings
stimulate, but, like all stimulants, they do no more
than make the patient think himself stronger. In
reality there has been no strength gained. The
heart of the Empire is London, and he has left it
untouched. He has dissected the veins, sinews,
and arteries of the Empire, but the heart he has
scarcely seen. He has been deceived by appear-
ances. At a distance everything looks promis-
ing; the young countries have before them a great

224 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

future, and action is visible everywhere without an
immediate danger of reaction. He is good enough
to bid the patient at home look beyond himself
and his surroundings for relief, and he bids him
hope without a shadow of practical or material
benefit. For the young emigrant this is well; for
the overgrown, lethargic metropolis it is optimis-
tic poison. It means that for the home habitant
of the British Empire fiction is offered and ac-
cepted in lieu of the real and the practical; it
means that the foreign wine of life is preferable
to bread made at home; it means joy for the
robust young adventurer who leaves England
never to return, but for the Mother Country
it means decay and disaster. For while Mr.
Kipling plants one tree he eradicates two old
ones.

We have, therefore, two forces in literature
which demonstrate by a sort of prescience the
extremity of material dominion. The Celtic
Renaissance is an indirect proclamation by sym-
bols of the close of the old dispensation, while
the writers of actuality announce the end by go-
ing direct to fact and experience, despising politi-
cal pretension and optimistic superstition. And
thus from the region of poetic intuition we have
a prophetic cry, and from the plane of actual fact

THE NEW ERA 225

the voice of the world-wise seer. In the writings
of Robert Louis Stevenson we have romantic
idealism, which was this gifted author’s mode of
escape from dying systems. Romantic adventure,
romantic action, rendered as real as possible; a
never-ending bustle and movement typifying
everything modern in adventure and suggesting
everything medieval in spirit! With a mind at
once critical and philosophical he refused to look
at things as they existed in his native country.
An escape was eagerly sought, until at last it was
found in remoteness and seclusion; yet still ina
sort of romantic action.

It is this rush to escape from the pain and the
turmoil of monotony and routine which consti-
tutes the striking similarity between Mr. Kipling
and Robert Louis Stevenson. Notwithstanding
the difference between the culture of Steven-
son and the rugged power of Mr. Kipling, they
belong to the same school. But a wide gulf sepa-
rates Mr. Kipling from Dickens. For Dickens,
as well as Thackeray and George Eliot, dealt
with the life and manners of their own people
and country. Mr. Kipling repudiates London.
He leaves the Mother Country with as much
deliberation as an emigrant would who no longer
has any binding sympathy with her customs or

226 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

her people. He flees the thing that is, to seek
the thing that is not.

It is astounding that in the hour of need, when
London and the great cities of England are swarm-
ing with poverty-stricken and helpless people, at
a time when all the signs of unrest and disintegra-
tion are plainly manifest, literature of this kind
can not only gain the popular ear, but that of
the classes which govern. It is not too much
to assert that the majority of popular English
authors belong to the chimerical school. The
reading public, caring only to escape from the
actual through the open door of legend and make-
believe, mistake the mythical for the mystical, so
that what is true in the political world is also true
in the world of literature. If the governing
powers find momentary escape in the excitement
of sport and luxurious living, the reading public
finds a narcotic in fictional nonsense, one popular
novelist going so far as to pack three dukes into
one novel, and this at a time when we are asked
to believe in the great vogue of democratic ideals.
It is no wonder, then, that the middle-class mind
of the present day rests secure in the fool’s para-
dise of popular romance and popular plays.

THE NEW ERA 224

Tit

It took three centuries for the hand of progress
to mark the high noon of Empire, which arrived
with Elizabeth. Athens and Rome both followed
the same route marked by the same inexorable
law. We are at the close of a dispensation which
has lasted for six hundred years.

The Elizabethan era was one of proud rulers,
proud adventurers, and proud moralists. Vanity
and sentimentality were crushed under the power
of authority or held in abeyance under the weight
of dignity. Work and faith are supreme in an age
of pride, scepticism and pretence in an age of
vanity. Proud nations are unconscious of the
thing that braces them to perpetual victory, and
when pride becomes self-conscious vanity sets in
and decline is certain.

National security leads to individual indolence,
the delusion of collective unity, and the illusions
of personal efficiency. Once on the decline, the
optimist begins to boast. Nationally, it is the
optimist who is negative, the pessimist who is
positive — he is the watcher on the tower.

Vain optimism leads to vainglory, and the re-
sult is sentimentality. The sentimental has ruled
Christendom for nearly two thousand years. But

228 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

there were periods when it did not rule in the
world of politics. Bonaparte and Bismarck rose
superior to all manifestations and surprises of
the sentimental; yet England remains chained
to this weakness in politics, in religion, in art, in
literature, in music, in charity, and utilitarianism.
From being weak and effeminate the sentimental
has now become threatening and vicious. Its
politics is only rivalled by its pulpit. Many of
the churches are governed by men who lack the
courage to preach punishment, by agnostics who
have long parted with the anchor of faith, clutch-
ing at the last straws of hope in a sea of conflict-
ing and baffling currents.

Examine the raison d’étre of the persistent con-
servation of so many illusions. The reason is to
be found in the seeming security bestowed by
vast territorial possessions and the false intel-
lectuality bestowed by vast material wealth.
England has been dreaming ever since the de-
struction of the Spanish Armada. During the
Napoleonic game on the chess-board of Europe,
when crowned heads were the pawns, England
felt some slight emotional shocks while watching
the players. Waterloo was an earthquake only
felt in England as a tremor. It was hardly more
than the excitement of a Derby witnessed at a

THE NEW ERA 229

great distance. The illusions of security aug-
mented with the capture of Napoleon. The Titan
dead, nothing remained to menace the nation.
Comfort now slipped into the lap of luxury, ease
into the lap of indolence, opulence changed to
arrogant optimism, and religion to a species of
hypocrisy which passed the bounds of foreign
credibility.

Micawbers made their appearance on the one
hand and predatory Shylocks on the other. At
this time the German States were little more than
coloured blots on the map situated between
France and Russia, which made the map interest-
ing in the eyes of the sentimental and the roman-
tic. France was a nation that only needed patting
on the back; Italy a place for pleasure tours;
America a combination of wilderness and negroes.

Into this desert of chimeras came the scientific
agnostic, a personage unknown elsewhere in the
whole world of learning. From the laboratory
he entered the pulpit, and, like a human wolf in
sheep’s clothing, preached a religion of flattery
to sentimental Red Ridinghoods in the front pews
and blue-stocking sceptics looking down from
the gallery. British science here gave the lie to
British optimism, because agnosticism is the
bivouac of tired minds in a wilderness of illusions,

230 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

In a dying dispensation everything partakes
of doubt and fatigue. Our philosophy is now a
hybrid jumble of physical science, psychic delu-
sions, sentimental morality, and pusillanimous
patriotism. We are intellectually incapable of
grappling with the draconian maxims of the Con-
tinental giants whose works have freed Germany
and France from the incubus of ethical lethargy.
and intellectual senility. At a time when the
leading thinkers of Continental Europe have ac-
cepted a positive philosophy of life we are steeped
in the old mode — the sentimental rules us with
an iron hand, the yoke of the negative drags us
to the gutter of intellectual pauperism. We have
no voice in the counsels of Continental thinkers.
Darwin discovered a path into a new country;
foreign philosophers and scientists have found
the treasures. These treasures we repudiate
with the scorn which could only have originated
in a species of insanity caused by perverted pride
and degenerate optimism.

A score of isms unheard of in France, Germany,
Italy, and Austria flourish, in the hour when
every nerve of the national body-politic ought to
be strained towards grappling with the impend-
ing crisis. These isms have turned us into a
psychological paradox; we flirt with science,

THE NEW ERA 231

dabble in art, and use religion as a fashionable
function.

Authority has gone from Episcopalianism and
power from the Dissenters. Bishops apologise
before preaching to unwilling congregations.
Where would our clergy be without the faults
and the vices of the poor? Without the slums
there would be nothing to contrast with Imperial
splendour, without our rags nothing to contrast
with the Royal ermine.

A great gulf separates us from Continental
thought. It is forty years since we ceased to bear
any relationship with the German people. To-
day we stand separated by philosophy, separated
by militarism, by social aims and material watch-
words. The closing dispensation finds us between
’ two stools. The question of disarmament is in
itself a sign of sentimental degeneracy. The fact
that we possess men like Andrew Carnegie, who
are naive enough to cry ‘“‘Peace, peace!” before
the Teutonic Juggernaut, ought to be enough to
bring the most wavering doubters to their senses.
It requires Anglo-maniacal effrontery to broach
the subject of disarmament when dealing with
a people like the Germans. Whence comes this
effrontery? From ignorance of the Bismarckian
ambition, ignorance of the Nietzschian philoso-

232 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

phy, ignorance of the tendency of German youth
to these ambitions and ideals, ignorance of every-
thing pertaining to the Teutonic race of to-day.

Germany entered upon a new era in 1866, when
she defeated Austria. The Imperial seal of blood
and iron was affixed to this epoch on the day
Sedan capitulated in 1870. Ten years latera
philosopher arose who imposed a new scale of
moral values to the iron mandates of Bismarck
and made it impossible for the German people
ever again to think, write, or act in the senti-
mental mode.

In consequence of these facts, Germany is
forty years ahead of England and America, and
we are still in the agonies of the dying dispensa-
tion. We are about to enter a phase of existence
so new, so strange, so unlike, so fantastically
paradoxical, so extravagantly unhistorical, so
ironically bewildering that itis hardly possible to
bring home to the minds of the unlettered masses
anything like an adequate sense of the situation.

For good or for bad, for better or for worse, the
dawn of the new dispensation ‘will see China a
military nation. The Juggernaut of events will
not stop to persuade, will not stop to argue, will
not stop to sentimentalise, will not stop to reason.
It will move on, drawn by the unnamed beasts

THE NEW ERA 233

whose horns are sealed with the fulness of Time,
whose hoofs are shod with bands of steel driven
by the force of destiny. Multitudes await its
coming, and the question arises how many will
prostrate themselves before the sinister car com-
pletes one full circle. It is destiny we now have
to face. But the people, like the people of every
other country, will accept, at the appointed hour,
the mandates of the unwritten and universal law.
The characteristic feature of the new dispensa-
tion will be whatever the dominant European
forces impose; that will be transmitted and trans-
fused into us. It is not a question of being con-
quered. The new era will not conquer in the old
way. It will come with the impulsion of a rising
tide, which gradually overwhelms, submerges,
transforms. There will be no second edition of
the Elizabethan or the Victorian era. Condi-
tions will change to such a degree that in nothing
will the coming dispensation resemble anything
in the old. Sects, parties, and individuals will be
swept along with the tidal wave of Continental
transformation, and imperative necessity will
place a dominant yoke on the old characteristics
of habit and opinion. Men will cease to say “I
believe.” They will bow before the inexorable.
The nation will be drawn by superior material

234 THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE

forces or driven by crushing material forces.
The imperative will rule. Peremptory mandates
will not leave a niche for the lodgment of the
sentimental and the vainglorious. We shall no
longer resemble men who are living on the inter-
est of their capital, not being permitted to live
bolstered up on the illusions produced by past
glory.

In the coming dispensation there will be no
place for the old illusions, science having filled
their place with inevitable fact. The awakening
will be more bewildering than that of optimistic
France in 1870. Millions will rub their eyes and
ask questions no one will have the time to answer.
Utopists with sentimental schemes for the millen-
nium by Act of Parliament will find themselves
swept off their feet by the tidal wave of action,
in which words, opinions, personal likes and per-
sonal idiosyncrasies will have neither weight nor
meaning. For the first time since the reign of
Henry the Eighth authority will dominate both
the masses and the classes, and under such a
régime a duke will have no more influence than a
smart soldier of the ranks. The question will be
not “Who are you?”’ but “What do you know?”
A few iron-willed men will assume control, and
their judgment will become law. Necessity and

THE NEW ERA 235

action will absorb parties as a sponge absorbs
water.

The new dispensation will be a forcing time,
not only for grains and fruits, but for individuals.
It will be an age of applied science, but out of
science a new spiritual element will spring forth,
which in turn will dominate the material. The
new era will bring with it a spiritual renaissance
and the unity of the Anglo-American people.

THEOLOGY LIBRARY
CLAREMONT, CALIF

A224)

PR
4728
GT
15

Grierson.

oh

The invincible allia

Francis, 1848-1997.
nce, and Other essa

vost a I A A

Grierson, Francis,1848-1927.

The invincible alliance, and other essays,
political, social, and literary, by Francis
Grierson. New York, John Lane company, 1913

235p.. 2ZOcm.

Contents.e-The invincible alliance.—The prophet without
honoure=-The now preacher.=-Republic or empire?-=The parlia
arenas=-The soul's new refuge.=-Impressions of Italy.--Mate
jem and crime.--Hampton Court and Versailles.--George Berna
Shaw.--The agnostio agonye=--The psychology of dress.Benjami
Disraeli.-~Savonarola.=-France old and newe--The new era,

ti Title. ay,

y

Coan]:

ete Ser aie

Saye
ae

sit

C

eters

aR OTTO ORTE?
esis

PPLE SD Od oh
. Corer

std atari rrr
AILS PISA LID LASALLE
EveS ee OLE O Tl oe at is

Serer ees

+3

to}
st

y be
Severe s
aerate