Part 8

Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tête-á-tête with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers’ day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, ‘Discharge two more.’ Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.

Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, will have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.

You have to look rather far behind you for the time when ‘the servant question,’ as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively ‘knowing their place,’ as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that ‘Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded’ not to do this and that. But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not ‘obliging’ but obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment’s more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, ‘followers’ were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month’s notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. ‘Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills, not her own.’ Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father’s. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.

Even in the ‘sixties there were many dark and cumulose clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. ‘Punch,’ our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano! ‘Punch’ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in the ‘sixties. Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the ‘some’ a measure of the gulf between themselves and the ‘others.’ Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.

Anthony Trollope was not, like ‘Punch,’ a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given ‘Orley Farm’? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? ‘As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust but of few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering’--and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word--‘we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must,’ etc., etc.

You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn’t any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn’t any in 1862, when ‘Orley Farm’ was published. Servants really were ‘most desolate’ in those days, and ‘their sufferings’ were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the ‘sixties. Trust Trollope.

Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist’s privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb’s ‘History of Trade Unionism’ the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants’ campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What’s done can’t be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can’t be left undone. Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?

Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of the conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their license to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said ‘Sarah, your master wishes--’ or Mr. Smith said ‘Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether--’ I am well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service, in its old form, depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.

Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so ticklish. Consider, in your friend’s house, the cheerful smile of yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid’s light brisk tread in the corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman’s shoulders as he noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin’s Anne. With them there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it’s too late to begin now. For a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw’s Castle. He stands there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as richly local as the pond there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had ‘bin down to London a matter o’ three or four times,’ he would tell me, ‘an’ slep’ there once.’ He knew me to be a native of that city, and, for he was the most respectful of men, did not make any adverse criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, ‘a gen’leman with summut long hair, settin’ in a small cart, takin’ a pictur’.’ To me Ford Madox Brown’s ‘Work’ is of all modern pictur’s the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he was ‘took on as stable-lad at the Castle.’ His pride was in the Castle, wholly.

Part of his charm, like Hampstead’s, was in the surprise one had at finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of past decades was undone butlers: were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, is only a temporary setback. At the restoration of peace butlers will reappear among us as they were in 1915, and anon will be losing height and weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less gracious kind than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming--a faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.

These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was ‘a flame of old-world fealty all bright.’ Were these but the finer comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in a merely aesthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw him often, both in town and in country. Against the background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett’s supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human--that he had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, ‘I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that there’s a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn.’ I thanked him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense interest in ‘the little fellow.’ I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.

What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett’s flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself--but did he really lose it? There were only four people at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for drollery), and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had turned on early marriages. ‘I,’ said the young man presently, ‘shall not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of seventeen.’ His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, ‘Oh, Tom, what a perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn’t born yet!’ ‘No,’ said the young man, ‘but I have my eye on her mother.’ At this, Brett, who was holding a light for his master’s cigarette, turned away convulsively, with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a genuine lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an equilibrist so secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?

If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time. Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great tensity--even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate evening cloak. Brett’s back must have conveyed to her in every curve his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry in her behalf was such as Burke’s for Marie Antoinette--little had he dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical and ear-piercing had become heartrending and human when I saw from whom it proceeded--a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But was it a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett more than a mere virtuoso?

He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever so able to pay his wages, should never covet him--no, nor anything like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we look out at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they also--except the two or three ancients aforesaid--have always struck some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly disliked being a monitor’s fag. Other fags there were who took pride in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it myself, and that if I mightn’t eat it myself I would rather it were not very good. Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy--dear Italy, where I have lived much--servants do still regard service somewhat in the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon of some local festa there is no servant at all in the little house! Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I promptly freed you.

Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.

GOING OUT FOR A WALK 1918.

It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator. When I grew up it seemed to me that the one advantage of living in London was that nobody ever wanted me to come out for a walk. London’s very drawbacks--its endless noise and hustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in it--assured this one immunity. Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say ‘Come out for a walk!’ in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk. Any one thus desirous feels that he has a right to impose his will on whomever he sees comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading. It is easy to say simply ‘No’ to an old friend. In the case of a mere acquaintance one wants some excuse. ‘I wish I could, but’--nothing ever occurs to me except ‘I have some letters to write.’ This formula is unsatisfactory in three ways. (1) It isn’t believed. (2) It compels you to rise from your chair, go to the writing-table, and sit improvising a letter to somebody until the walkmonger (just not daring to call you liar and hypocrite) shall have lumbered out of the room. (3) It won’t operate on Sunday mornings. ‘There’s no post out till this evening’ clinches the matter; and you may as well go quietly.

Walking for walking’s sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the brain. Many a man has professed to me that his brain never works so well as when he is swinging along the high road or over hill and dale. This boast is not confirmed by my memory of anybody who on a Sunday morning has forced me to partake of his adventure. Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have of power to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting on a chair, or standing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The ideas that came so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they now? where that encyclopiedic knowledge which he bore so lightly? where the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning over any topic that was started? The man’s face that was so mobile is set now; gone is the light from his fine eyes. He says that A. (our host) is a thoroughly good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds that A. is one of the best fellows he has ever met. We tramp another furlong or so, and he says that Mrs. A. is a charming woman. Presently he adds that she is one of the most charming women he has ever known. We pass an inn. He reads vapidly aloud to me: ‘The King’s Arms. Licensed to sell Ales and Spirits.’ I foresee that during the rest of the walk he will read aloud any inscription that occurs. We pass a milestone. He points at it with his stick, and says ‘Uxminster. 11 Miles.’ We turn a sharp corner at the foot of a hill. He points at the wall, and says ‘Drive Slowly.’ I see far ahead, on the other side of the hedge bordering the high road, a small notice-board. He sees it too. He keeps his eye on it. And in due course ‘Trespassers,’ he says, ‘Will Be Prosecuted.’ Poor man!--mentally a wreck.

Luncheon at the A’s, however, salves him and floats him in full sail. Behold him once more the life and soul of the party. Surely he will never, after the bitter lesson of this morning, go out for another walk. An hour later, I see him striding forth, with a new companion. I watch him out of sight. I know what he is saying. He is saying that I am rather a dull man to go a walk with. He will presently add that I am one of the dullest men he ever went a walk with. Then he will devote himself to reading out the inscriptions.

How comes it, this immediate deterioration in those who go walking for walking’s sake? Just what happens? I take it that not by his reasoning faculties is a man urged to this enterprise. He is urged, evidently, by something in him that transcends reason; by his soul, I presume. Yes, it must be the soul that raps out the ‘Quick march!’ to the body.--‘Halt! Stand at ease!’ interposes the brain, and ‘To what destination,’ it suavely asks the soul, ‘and on what errand, are you sending the body?’--‘On no errand whatsoever,’ the soul makes answer, ‘and to no destination at all. It is just like you to be always on the look-out for some subtle ulterior motive. The body is going out because the mere fact of its doing so is a sure indication of nobility, probity, and rugged grandeur of character.’--‘Very well, Vagula, have your own wayula! But I,’ says the brain, ‘flatly refuse to be mixed up in this tomfoolery. I shall go to sleep till it is over.’ The brain then wraps itself up in its own convolutions, and falls into a dreamless slumber from which nothing can rouse it till the body has been safely deposited indoors again.

Even if you go to some definite place, for some definite purpose, the brain would rather you took a vehicle; but it does not make a point of this; it will serve you well enough unless you are going for a walk. It won’t, while your legs are vying with each other, do any deep thinking for you, nor even any close thinking; but it will do any number of small odd jobs for you willingly--provided that your legs, also, are making themselves useful, not merely bandying you about to gratify the pride of the soul. Such as it is, this essay was composed in the course of a walk, this morning. I am not one of those extremists who must have a vehicle to every destination. I never go out of my way, as it were, to avoid exercise. I take it as it comes, and take it in good part. That valetudinarians are always chattering about it, and indulging in it to excess, is no reason for despising it. I am inclined to think that in moderation it is rather good for one, physically. But, pending a time when no people wish me to go and see them, and I have no wish to go and see any one, and there is nothing whatever for me to do off my own premises, I never will go out for a walk.

QUIA IMPERFECTUM 1918.

I have often wondered that no one has set himself to collect unfinished works of art. There is a peculiar charm for all of us in that which was still in the making when its maker died, or in that which he laid aside because he was tired of it, or didn’t see his way to the end of it, or wanted to go on to something else. Mr. Pickwick and the Ancient Mariner are valued friends of ours, but they do not preoccupy us like Edwin Drood or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair at Gad’s Hill become empty but a few weeks later than it actually did, or had Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the act of setting down his dream about the Eastern potentate not been interrupted by ‘a person on business from Porlock’ and so lost the thread of the thing for ever, from two what delightful glades for roaming in would our fancy be excluded! The very globe we live on is a far more fascinating sphere than it can have been when men supposed that men like themselves would be on it to the end of time. It is only since we heard what Darwin had to say, only since we have had to accept as improvisible what lies far ahead, that the Book of Life has taken so strong a hold on us and ‘once taken up, cannot,’ as the reviewers say, ‘readily be laid down.’ The work doesn’t strike us as a masterpiece yet, certainly; but who knows that it isn’t--that it won’t be, judged as a whole?

For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher repute than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But what if Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those years he spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius’ tomb, and again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare pedestals for his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we to regret them quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to think him an impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there may have been a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere lovable fault of temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a thing off, the result was not always more than magnificent. His David is magnificent, but it isn’t David. One is duly awed, but, to see the master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind’s eye, just that very best.

It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel of the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum of incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my own account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with such a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope’s web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary ‘Iphige’nie’ which Racine laid aside so meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Treves--‘quoque cela fut de mon mieux’; and there an early score of that one unfinished Symphony of Beethoven’s--I forget the number of it, but anyhow it is my favourite. Among the pictures, Rossetti’s oil-painting of ‘Found’ must be ruled out, because we know by more than one drawing just what it would have been, and how much less good than those drawings. But Leonardo’s St. Sebastian (even if it isn’t Leonardo’s) shall be there, and Whistler’s Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous other pictures that I would mention if my mind were not so full of one picture to which, if I can find it and acquire it, a special place of honour shall be given: a certain huge picture in which a life-sized gentleman, draped in a white mantle, sits on a fallen obelisk and surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna Romana.

The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading Goethe’s ‘Travels in Italy.’ I have. Or rather, I have just been reading a translation of it, published in 1885 by George Bell & Sons. I daresay it isn’t a very good translation (for one has always understood that Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well--an accomplishment which this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And I daresay the painting I so want to see and have isn’t a very good painting. Wilhelm Tischbein is hardly a name to conjure with, though in his day, as a practitioner in the ‘historical’ style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome, Tischbein did great things; big things, at any rate. He did crowds of heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on clouds; he did centaurs leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of Troy. And he did this portrait of Goethe. At least he began it. Why didn’t he finish it? That is a problem as to which one can but hazard guesses, reading between the lines of Goethe’s letters. The great point is that it never was finished. By that point, as you read between those lines, you will be amused if you are unkind, and worried if you are humane.

Worried, yet also pleased. Goethe has more than once been described as ‘the perfect man.’ He was assuredly a personage on the great scale, in the grand manner, gloriously balanced, rounded. And it is a fact that he was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of flesh and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as he went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn’t sublime. Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a moderately successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if it befall some thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience. He, we know, cannot have been a thoroughly good fellow. Of Goethe we are shy for such reasons as that he was never injudicious, never lazy, always in his best form--and always in love with some lady or another just so much as was good for the development of his soul and his art, but never more than that by a tittle. Fate decreed that Sir Willoughby Patterne should cut a ridiculous figure and so earn our forgiveness. Fate may have had a similar plan for Goethe; if so, it went all agley. Yet, in the course of that pageant, his career, there did happen just one humiliation--one thing that needed to be hushed up. There Tischbein’s defalcation was; a chip in the marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in the great grand tapestry.