 Section 8 of Idle Ideas in 1905. My desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels, attending to my work improving my mind. Brussels is a bright and cheerful town, and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the Belgian army. The Belgian army would follow me about and worry me. Judging of it from my own experience, I should say it was a good army. Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be permitted to get away from you. Never ought to be allowed to feel even for a moment that he had shaken you off. What tactics the Belgian army might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but against me personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried out with a success that was astonishing even to myself. I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian army. I made a point of choosing the quietest and most unlikely streets. I chose all hours, early in the morning, in the afternoon, late in the evening. There were moments of wild exultation when I imagined I had given it the slip. I could not see it anywhere. I could not hear it. Now, said I to myself, now for five minutes peace and quiet. I had been doing it in justice. It had been working round to me. Approaching the next corner I would hear the tattoo of its drum. Before I had gone another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me. I would jump upon a tram and travel for miles, then thinking I had shaken it off I would alight and proceed upon my walk. Five minutes later another detachment would be upon my heels. I would slink home, the Belgian army pursuing me with its exultant tattoo. Vanquished, shamed, my insular pride forever vanished, I would creep up into my room and close the door. The victorious Belgian army would then march back to barracks. If only it had followed me with a band. I like a band. I can loaf against a post listening to a band with anyone. I should not have minded so much had it come after me with a band, but the Belgian army apparently doesn't run to a band. It has nothing but this drum. It has not even a real drum, not what I call a drum. It's a little boys' drum, the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time until people took it away from me and threatened that if they heard it once again that day they would break it over my own head. It is cowardly going up and down, playing a drum of this sort when there's nobody to stop you. The man would not dare to do it if his mother was about. He does not even play it. He walks along tapping it with a little stick. There's no tune, there's no sense in it. He does not even keep time. I used to think at first, hearing it in the distance, that it was the work of some young gamma who ought to be at school, or making himself useful taking the baby out in the perambulator. And I would draw back into dark doorways determined as he came by to dart out and pull his ear for him. To my astonishment, for the first week, I learnt it was the Belgian army getting itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war. It had the effect of making me a peace at any price, man. They tell me these armies are necessary to preserve the tranquility of Europe. For myself, I should be willing to run the risk of an occasional row. Cannot someone tell them they are out of date with their bits of feathers and their odds and ends of ironmongery, grown men that cannot be sent out for a walk unless accompanied by a couple of nursemen, blowing a tin whistle and tapping a drum out of a toy shop to keep them in order and prevent their running about. One might think they were chickens. A herd of soldiers with their pots and pans and parcels and all their deadly things tied on to them, prancing about in time to a tune, makes me think always of the white night that Alice met in Wonderland. I take it that for practical purposes, to fight for your country or to fight for somebody else's country, which is, generally speaking, more popular, the thing essential is that a certain proportion of the populace should be able to shoot straight with a gun. Now standing in a line and turning out your toes is going to assist you, under modern conditions of warfare, is one of the many things my intellect is incapable of grasping. In medieval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been advantage in combined and precise movement. When armies were mere iron machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the earth, then the striking simultaneously with a thousand arms was part of the game. Now, when we shoot from behind cover with smokeless powder, brain, not brute force, individual sense not combined solidity, is surely the result to be aimed at. Cannot somebody, as I have suggested, explain to the military man that the proper place for the drill sergeant nowadays is under a glass case in some museum of antiquities? I lived once near the Hyde Park barracks and saw much of the drill sergeant's method. Generally speaking, he is a stout man with a walk of an egotistical pigeon. His voice is one of the most extraordinary things in nature. If you can distinguish it from the bark of a dog, you are clever. They tell me that the privates, after a little practice, can, which gives one a higher opinion of their intelligence than otherwise one might form, but myself I doubt even this statement. I was the owner of a fine retriever dog, about the time of which I am speaking, and sometimes he and I would amuse ourselves by watching Mr. Sergeant exercising his squad. One morning he had been shouting out the usual, for about ten minutes, and all had hitherto gone well. Suddenly, and evidently to his intense astonishment, the squad turned their backs upon him and commenced to walk towards the serpentine. Halt! yelled the sergeant. The instant his amazed indignation permitted him to speak, which fortunately happened in time to save the detachment from a watery grave, the squad halted. The thunder and the blazes and other things told you to do that! The squad looked bewildered, but said nothing, and were brought back to the place where they were before. A minute later precisely the same thing occurred again. I really thought the sergeant would burst. I was preparing to hasten to the barracks for medical aid, but the paroxysm passed. Calling upon the combined forces of heaven and hell to sustain him in his trouble, he requested his squad, as man to man, to inform him of the reason why to all appearance they were dispensing with his services and drilling themselves. At this moment Columbus barked again, and the explanation came to him. Please go away, sir, he requested me. Oh, can I exercise my men with that dog of yours interfering every five minutes? It was not only on that occasion. It happened at other times. The dog seemed to understand and take a pleasure in it. Sometimes meeting a soldier walking with his sweetheart, Columbus from behind my legs would bark suddenly. Immediately the man would let go the girl and proceed involuntarily to perform military tricks. The War-Office Authorities accused me of having trained the dog. I had not trained him. That was his natural voice. I suggested to the War-Office Authorities that instead of quarrelling with my dog for talking his own language, they should train their sergeants to use English. They would not see it. Columbus was in the air and living where I did at the time I thought it best to part with Columbus. I could see what the War-Office was driving at, and I did not desire that responsibility for the inefficiency of the British army should be laid at my door. Some twenty years ago we in London were passing through a riotous period, and a call was made to law-abiding citizens to enroll themselves as special constables. I was young, and the hope of trouble appealed to me more than it does now. In company with some five or six hundred other more or less respectable citizens, I found myself one Sunday morning in the drill-yard of the Albany Barracks. It was the opinion of the authorities that we could guard our homes and protect our wives and children better if, first of all, we learned to roll our eyes right or left at the given word of command and to walk with our thumbs stuck out. Accordingly, a drill sergeant was appointed to instruct us on these points. He came out of the canteen, wiping his mouth and flicking his leg according to rule with the regulation cane. But as he approached us his expression changed. We were stout, pompous-looking gentlemen, the majority of us in frock coats and silk hats. The sergeant was a man with a sense of the fitness of things. The idea of shouting and swearing at us fell from him, and that gone there seemed to be no happy medium left to him. The stiffness departed from his back. He met us with a deferential attitude and spoke to us in the language of social intercourse. "'Good morning, gentlemen,' said the sergeant. "'Good morning,' we replied, and there was a pause. The sergeant fidgeted upon his feet. We waited. "'Well now, gentlemen,' said the sergeant, with a pleasant smile. "'What do you say to fall in?' We agreed to fall in. He showed us how to do it. He cast a critical eye along the back of our rear line. "'A little further forward, number three, if you don't mind, sir,' he suggested. Number three, who was an important-looking gentleman, stepped forward. The sergeant cast his critical eye along the front of the first line. "'A little further back, if you don't mind, sir,' he suggested, addressing the third gentleman from the end. "'Can't,' explained the third gentleman. "'Much as I can do to keep where I am.'" The sergeant cast his critical eye between the lines. "'Oh,' said the sergeant, "'a little full-chested, some of us. We will make the distance another foot, if you please, gentlemen.' "'In pleasant manner, like to this,' the drill proceeded. "'Now then, gentlemen, shall we try a little walk? Quick march!' "'Thank you, gentlemen, sorry to trouble you, but it may be necessary to run. Forward, I mean, of course. So if you really do not mind, we will now do the double-quick. Halt! "'And if next time you can keep a little more in line, it has a more imposing appearance, if you understand me. The breathing comes with practice.' "'If the thing must be done at all, why should it not be done in this way? Why should not the sergeant address the new recruits politely?' "'Now then, you young chaps, are you all ready? Don't hurry yourselves. No need to make hard work of what should be a pleasure to all of us. That's right. That's very good indeed, considering you are only novices. But there is still something to be desired in your attitude, private bully boy. You will excuse my being personal, but are you knocked need naturally? Or could you with an effort, do you think, contrive to give yourself less the appearance of a marionette whose strings have become loose? Thank you. That is better. These little things would be a trivial I know, but after all we may as well try and look at our best. Don't you like your boots, private moderancy? Oh! I beg your pardon. I thought, from the way you were bending down and looking at them, that perhaps their appearance was dissatisfying to you. My mistake!' "'Are you suffering from indigestion, my poor fellow? Shall I get you a little brandy? It isn't indigestion. Then what's the matter with it? Why are you trying to hide it? It's nothing to be ashamed of. We've all got one. Let it come forward, man. Let's see it!' Having succeeded with a few such kindly words in getting his line into order, he would proceed to recommend healthy exercise. "'Shoulder! Arms! Good, gentlemen, very good for a beginning. It's still, if I may be critical, not perfect. There is more in this thing than you might imagine, gentlemen. May I point out, to Private Henry Thompson, that a musket carried across the shoulder at right angles is apt to inconvenience the gentleman behind. Even from the point of view of his own comfort, I feel sure that Private Thompson would do better to follow the usual custom in this matter. I would also suggest to Private St. Leonard that we are not here to practice the art of balancing a heavy musket on the outstretched palm of the hand. Private St. Leonard's performance with the musket is decidedly clever, but it is not war. Believe me, gentlemen, this thing has been carefully worked out, and no improvement is likely to result from individual effort. Let our idea be uniformity. It is monotonous, but it is safe. No, then, gentlemen, once again! The drill-yard would be converted into a source of innocent delight to thousands. Officer and gentleman would become a phrase of meaning. I present the idea for what it may be worth with my compliments to Palmael. The fault of the military man is that he studies too much, reads too much history, is over-reflective. If instead he would look about him more, he would notice that things are changing. Someone has told the British military man that Waterloo was one upon the playing fields at Eaton, so he goes to Eaton and plays. One of these days he will be called upon to fight another Waterloo, and afterwards, when it is too late, they will explain to him that it was one not upon the playfield, but in the classroom. From the mound on the old Waterloo plain one can form a notion of what battles under former conditions must have been. The other battlefields of Europe are rapidly disappearing. Useful Dutch cabbages, as Carlisle would have pointed out with justifiable satisfaction, hiding the theatre of man's childish folly. You find, generally speaking, cobblers happily employed in cobbling shoes, women gossiping cheerfully over the wash tub on the spot where, a hundred years ago, according to the guidebook, a thousand men dressed in blue and a thousand men dressed in red rushed together like quarrelsome fox terriers and worried each other to death. But the field of Waterloo is little changed. The guide, whose grandfather was present at the battle, quite an extraordinary number of grandfathers must have fought at Waterloo, there must have been whole regiments composed of grandfathers, can point out to you the ground across which every charge was delivered, can show you every ridge still existing behind which the infantry crouched. The whole business was began and finished within a space little larger than a square mile. One can understand the advantage then to be derived from the perfect moving of the military machine, the uses of the echelon, the purposes of the linked battalion, the manipulation of centre, left wing and right wing. Then it may have been worthwhile, if Warby ever worth the while, which grown men of sense are beginning to doubt, to waste two years of a soldier's training teaching him the goose step. In the 20th century teaching soldiers the evolutions of the 30 years war is about as sensible as it would be loading our ironclads with canvas. I followed once a company of volunteers across Blackfriars Bridge on their way from Southwark to the temple. At the bottom of Ludgate Hill, the commanding officer, a young but conscientious gentleman, ordered, left wheel. At once the vanguard turned down a narrow alley, I forget its name, which would have led the troop into the perlews of Whitefriars, where in all probability they would have been lost forever. The whole company had to be halted, right about faced and retired a hundred yards. Then the order, quick march, was given. The vanguard shot across Ludgate Circus and were making for the meat market. At this point that young commanding officer gave up being a military man and taught sense. Not that way, he shouted, up Fleet Street and through Middle Temple Lane. Then, without further trouble, the army of the future went upon its way. End of Section 8 of Idle Ideas in 1905. Recording by Roger Clifton, St. Albans, England. Section 9 of Idle Ideas in 1905. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Idle Ideas in 1905 by Jerome K. Jerome. Section 9. Ought stories to be true. There was once upon a time a charming young lady, possessed of much taste, who was asked by her anxious parent, the year's passing and family expenditure not decreasing, which of the numerous and eligible young men then paying court to her, she liked the best. She replied, that was her difficulty. She could not make up her mind which she liked the best. They were all so nice. She could not possibly select one to the exclusion of all the others. What she would have liked would have been to marry the lot, but that, she presumed, was impracticable. I feel I resemble that young lady, not so much in charm and beauty, as an indecision of mind, when the question is that of my favourite author or my favourite book. It is as if one were asked one's favourite food, by her times when one fancies an egg with one's tea, on other occasions when dreams of a kippa. Today one clemmers for lobsters, tomorrow one feels one never wishes to see a lobster again. One determines to settle down for a time to a diet of bread and milk and rice pudding. Asked suddenly to say whether I preferred ISIS to soup or beef steak to caviar, I should be completely non-plus. There may be readers who care for only one literary diet. I'm a person of gross appetites, requiring many authors to satisfy me. There are moods when the savage strength of the Bronte sisters is companionable to me. One rejoices in the unreleaved gloom of weathering heights, as in the lowering skies of a stormy autumn. Perhaps part of the marvel of the book comes from the knowledge that the authors was a slight delicate young girl. One wonders what her future work would have been had she lived to gain a wider experience of life. Or was it well for her fame that nature took the pen so soon for her hand? Her suppressed vehemence may have been better suited to those tangled Yorkshire byways than to the more open, cultivated fields of life. There is not much similarity between the two books, yet when recalling Emily Bronte, my thoughts always run on to Olive Shreiner. Here again was a young girl with the voice of a strong man. Olive Shreiner, more fortunate, has lived, but I doubt if she will ever write a book that will remind us of her first. The story of an African farm is not a work to be repeated. We have advanced in literature of late. I can well remember the storm of indignation with which the African farm was received by Mrs. Grundy and her then numerous, but now happily diminishing, school. It was a book that was to be kept from the hands of every young man and woman, but the hands of the young men and women stretched out and grasped it to their help. It is a curious idea, this of Mrs. Grundy's, that the young man and woman must never think that all literature that does anything more than echo the conventions must be hidden away. Then there are times when I love to gallop through history on Sir Walter's broomstick. At other hours, it is pleasant to sit and converse with wise George Illet. From her garden terrace, I look down on Loamshire and its commonplace people. While in her quiet, deep voice, she tells me of the hidden hearts that beat and throb beneath these velveteen jackets and lace folds. Who can help loving Thakre, widdiest, gentlest of man, in spite of the faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him? There is something pathetic in the good man's horror of this snobbishness, to which he himself was a victim, may it not have been an affectation, born unconsciously of self-consciousness. His heroes and heroines must need to be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him, the livery was too often the man. Under his stuffed calves, even James Lapluce himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thakre could never see deeper than the silk stockings. Thakre lived and died in clubland. One feels that the world was bounded for him by temple bar on the east and park lane on the west, but what there was good in clubland he showed us, and for the sake of the great gentleman and sweet ladies that his kindly eyes found in that narrow region, not too over-peopled with great gentlemen and sweet women, let us honour him. Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, and Tristram Shandy are books a man is the better for reading if he read them wisely. They teach him that literature, to be a living force, must deal with all sides of life, and that little help comes to us from that silly pretense of ours that we are perfect in all things, leading perfect lives, that only the villain of the story ever deviates from the path of rectitude. This is a point that needs to be considered by both the makers and the buyers of stories. If literature is to be regarded solely as the amusement of an idle hour, then the less relationship it has to life, the better. Looking into a truthful mirror of nature we are compelled to think, and when thought comes in at the window, self-satisfaction goes out by the door. Should a novel or play call us to ponder upon the problems of existence or lure us from the dusty high road of the world for a while into the pleasant meadows of dreamland, if only the latter, then let our heroes and our herons be not what men and women are, but what they should be. Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true. Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter, and let us assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx. Very pleasant are these fairy tales where the prince is always brave and handsome, where the princess is always the best and most beautiful princess that ever lived, where one knows the wicked people at a glance by their ugliness and ill temper, mistakes being thus rendered impossible, where the good fairies are by nature more powerful than the bad, where gloomy paths lead ever to fair palaces, where the dragon is ever vanquished, and where well-behaved husbands and wives can rely upon living happily ever afterwards. The world is too much with us late and soon. It is wise to slip away from it at times to fairyland, but alas, we cannot live in fairyland and knowledge of its geography is of little help to us on our return to the rugged country of reality. Are not both branches of literature needful? By all means, let us dream on midsummer nights of fond lovers led through devious paths to happiness by puck, of virtuous dukes, one finds such in fairyland, of faith subdued by faith and gentleness. But may we not also, in our more serious humours, find satisfaction in thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus, may not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in vanity fair. If literature is to be a help to us as well as a pastime, it must deal with the ugly as well as with the beautiful. It must show us ourselves, not as we wish to appear, but as we know ourselves to be. Man has been described as an animal with aspirations reaching up to heaven and instincts rooted elsewhere. Is literature to flatter him or reveal him to himself? Of living writers it is not safe, I suppose, to speak, except perhaps of those who have been with us so long that we've come to forget they are not of the past. As just as ever been done to weed us, undoubted genius by our shallow school of criticism always very clever in discovering faults as obvious as pimples on a fine face. Her guardsmen toy with their food. Her horses win the derby three years running. Her wicked women throw guinea-peaches from the windows of the starring garter into the thumbs at Richmond. The distance being about 350 yards, it is a good throw. Well, well, books are not made worth reading by the absence of absurdities. Oida possesses strength, tenderness, truth, passion, and these be qualities in a writer capable of carrying many more faults than Oida is burned with. But that is the method of our little criticism. It views an artist as gulliver-soul abrupting our nades. It is too small to see them in their entirety. A mole or wart absorbs all its vision. Why was not George Gissing more widely read? If faithfulness to life were the key to literary success, Gissing's sales would have been counted by the million instead of by the hundred. Have Mark Twain's literary qualities apart altogether from his humour been recognized in literary circles as they ought to have been? Huck Finn would be a great work where there not a laugh in it from cover to cover. Among the Indians and some other savage tribes, the fact that a member of the community has lost one of his senses makes greatly to his advantage. He is then regarded as a superior person. So, among a school of Anglo-Saxon readers, it is necessary to a man if he would gain literary credit that he should lack the sense of humour. One or two curious modern examples occur to me of literary success secured chiefly by this failing. All these authors are my favourites, but such Catholic taste is held nowadays to be no taste. One is told that if one loves Shakespeare, one must of necessity hate Ibsen, that one cannot appreciate Wagner and tolerate Beethoven, that if we admit any merit in door, we are incapable of understanding Whistler. How can I say which is my favourite novel? I can only ask myself which lives clearest in my memory, which is the book I run to more often than to another in that pleasant half hour before the dinner bell, when, with all apologies to good Mr. Smiles, it is useless to think of work. I find, on examination, that my David Copperfield is more dilapidated than any other novel upon my shelves. As I turn its doggie of pages, reading the familiar headlines, Mr. McColber in difficulties, Mr. McColber in prison, I fall in love with Dora, Mr. Barkus goes out with the tide, my child-wife, trattles in a nest of roses. Pages of my own life recur to me. So many of my sorrows, so many of my joys, are woven in my mind with this chapter or the other. That day, how well I remember it when I read of David's womb, but Dora's death I was careful to skip. Poor pretty little Mrs. Copperfield at the gate, holding up her baby in her arms, is always associated in my memory with a child's cry, long-listened full. I found the book, faced downwards on a chair, weeks afterwards, not moved from where I'd hastily laid it. Old friends, all of you, how many times have I not slipped away from my worries into your pleasant company? Pagedy, you dear soul, the sight of your kind eyes is so good to me. Our mutual friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, is prone, we know, just ever so slightly to gush. Good fellow that he is, he can see no flaw in those he loves, but you, dear lady, if you'll permit me to call you by a name much abused, he is drawn in true colours. I know you well, with your big heart, your quick temper, your homely, human ways of thought. You yourself will never guess your worth, how much the world is better for such as you. You think of yourself as of a commonplace person, useful only for the making of pastry, the darning of stockings, and if a man, not a young man, with only dim half-opened eyes, but a man whom life had made keen to see the beauty that lies hidden beneath plain faces, or to kneel and kiss your red, coarse hand, you'll be much astonished. But he would be a wise man, Pagedy, knowing what things a man should take carelessly, and for what things he should thank God, who has fashioned fairness in many forms. Mr. Wilkins McCorber, and you, most excellent of faithful wise, Mrs. Emma McCorber, to you I also raise my head. How often has the example of your philosophy saved me, when I, likewise, have suffered under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities, when the sun of my prosperity, too, has sunk beneath the dark horizon of the world, in short, when I also have found myself in a tight corner? I've asked myself, what would the McCorbers have done in my place? And I've answered myself. They would have sat down to a dish of lamb's fry, cooked and breaded by the deft hands of Emma, followed by a brew of punch, concocted by the beaming Wilkins, and have forgotten all their troubles for the time being. While upon, seeing first that sufficient small change was in my pocket, I have entered the nearest restaurant, and have treated myself to a repulse of such sumptuousness as the aforesaid small change would command, emerging from that restaurant stronger and more fit for battle. And lo, the sun of my prosperity has peeped at me from over the clouds with a sly wink, as if to say, cheer up, I'm only round the corner. Cherry, elastic mystery, Mrs. McCorber, I would half the world face their fate, but by the help of a kindly, shallow nature such as yours, I love to think that your sorrows can be drowned in nothing more harmful than a bowl of punch. Here's to you, Emma, and to you, Wilkins, and to the twins. May you and such childlike folk trip lightly over the stones upon your path. May something ever turn up for you, my dears. May the reign of life ever fall as April showers upon your simple, bold head, McCorber. And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends deem you foolish. Ah, silly Dora, fashioned by wise mother nature, who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man. Trouble yourself not unduly about the oysters and the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us. Your work is to teach us gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just here, child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at you. Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the needless roses from the garden, would plant in their places only useful, wholesome cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers. Foolish wise folk asking for what purpose? Gallant trattles of the strong heart and the unruly hair. Sophie, dearest of girls, Betsy Trotwood, with your gentlemanly manners and your woman's heart, you've come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal place seem bright. In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the shadows, your kindly voices have cheered me. Little Emily and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my friend Dickon's enthusiasm for them. Dickon's good women are all too good for human nature's daily food. Esther Semerson, Florence Dombie, little Nell, you have no fault to love you by. Scott's women were likewise mere illuminated texts. Scott only drew one live heroine, Catherine Seaton. His other women were merely the prizes the hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for which the yokel climbs the greasy pole. That Dickon's could draw a woman to some likeness he proved by Bella Wilfer and Estella in great expectations. But real women have never been popular in fiction. Men readers prefer the false, and women readers object to the truth. From an artistic point of view, David Copperfield is undoubtedly Dickon's best work. Its humour is less boisterous, its path is less highly coloured. One of Leach's pictures represents a capman calmly sleeping in the gutter. Oh, poor dear, he's ill, says a tender-hearted lady in the crowd. Ill retorts a mill bystander indignantly. Ill? Is that too much of what I ain't had enough of? Dickon suffered from too little of what some of us have too much of criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth his powers. Too often his pathess sings to bathess, and this not from want of skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentality, or rather the public sentimentality, to run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul Donby and Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sydney Carton and of Barkis the willing. The death of Barkis, next to the passing of Colonel Newcomb, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect pieces of pathess in English literature. No very deeper motion is concerned. He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to a commonplace box. His simple wife and the old boatman stand by, waiting calmly for the end. There is no straining after effect. One feels death enter, dignifying all things, and touched by that hand, foolish old Barkis grows great. In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickon draws types rather than characters. Pexniff, Potsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turvey Drop, Mrs. Jellybee. These are not characters, they are human characteristics personified. We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. At mid all Dickon's faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickon's never lived, such a little critic. Nor was Prometheus type of the spirit of man, nor was Naiobi, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often during a morning stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and Orlando knows the path to glades, having much resemblance there too. Steer forth upon whom Dickon's evidently prided himself, I must confess, never late hold of me. He is a melodramatic young man. The worst I could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose D'Artel and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so attractive. Old Pegaty and Ham are, of course, impossible. One must accept them also as types. These brothers Cherable, these kids, Joe Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerbingles, will accept as types of the goodness that is in man. Though in real life the amount of virtue that Dickon's often wastes upon a single individual would by more economically-minded nature be made to serve a fifty. To sum up, David Copperfield is a plain tale, simply told, and such are all books that live. Exentricities of style, artistic trickery, may please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us, boys and girls, men and women. It is a sad book, and that, again, gives it an added charm in these sad, later days. Humanity is nearing its old age, and we have come to love sadness as the friend who has been longest with us. In the young days of our vigour we were merry, with Ulysses Boatman we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic welcome. The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of strength and hope. Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire, and the stories that we love are sad stories, like the stories we ourselves have lived. End of Section 9. I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantelpiece. It helps me to maintain my head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all literary work. It presents in the centre a neatly written address in excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading, around which arrange some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he likes you, he does not hesitate to let you know it, not only by every action possible, but by what happens is just as useful in this gray old world by generous impulsive speech. We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. Max Adler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years. Then, one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old couple and announced himself as their long-lost child returned at last. Well, you haven't hurried yourself, grumbled the old man, and blarm me if now you haven't forgotten the wood. I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table nearby. Glancing round and meeting my friend's eyes, he smiled and nodded. Excuse me a minute, said my friend. I was just speaking to my brother, haven't seen him for over five years. He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his mustache before strolling across and shaking hands. They talked for a while. Then my friend returned to me. Never thought I'd see him again, observed my friend. He was one of the garrison of that place in Africa. What's the name of it, that the Mahdi attacked? Only three of them escaped. Always was a lucky beggar, Jim. But wouldn't you like to talk to him some more, I suggested? I can see you any time about this little business of ours. Oh, that's all right, he answered. We have just fixed it up. Shall be seeing him again tomorrow. I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian friends in a St. Petersburg hotel. One of the party had not seen his second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly 18 months. They sat opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair and run round to embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one another in both cheeks, and then sit down again with moist eyes. Their behavior among their fellow countrymen excited no astonishment, whatever. But the Russian's anger is as quick and vehement as his love. On another occasion I was supping with friends in one of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up until the previous moment had been engaged in a makeable conversation, suddenly sprang to their feet, and went for one another. One man secured the water bottle which he promptly broke over the other's head. His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my hostess. Do please be careful, said the lady. A thousand pardons, madam, returned the stranger, from whom blood and water were streaming in equal copiousness, and taking the utmost care to avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in flooring his antagonist by a well-directed blow. A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt to interfere, but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another policeman. This is going to cost them a pretty penny, observed my host, who was calmly continuing his supper. Why couldn't they wait? It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes as elapsed, and each one claimed his bribe. Then they wished both combatants good night, and trooped out evidently in great good humor, and the two gentlemen with wet napkins around their heads sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed freely as before. They strike the stranger as a child-like people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits underneath. The workers, slaves, it would almost be more correct to call them, allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming. But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not police spies. I was discussing politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old housekeeper entered the room, a soft-eyed, gray-haired woman who'd been in his service over eight years, and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the conversation, so soon as the door was closed behind her again, he explained himself. It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone, he left. But surely you can trust her, I said. She appears to be devoted to you all. It is safer to trust no one, he answered, and then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted. It is gathering, he said. There are times when I almost smell blood in the air. I am an old man, and may escape it, but my children will have to suffer, suffer as children must for the sins of their fathers. We have made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel and undiscriminating, right and wrong and differently going down before them. But it has to be. It is needed. It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress a dead wall of selfishness. The history of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again, but with this difference, that the educated classes, the thinkers who are pushing forward the dumb masses, are doing so with their eyes open. There will be no marabout, no dentin, to be appalled at a people's ingratitude. The men who are today working for revolution in Russia, number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no misconceptions concerning the blind monster into which they are breathing life. He will crush them, they know it, but with them he will crush the injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love themselves. The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more brutal. They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, while they work. They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo. They sing it in the factory. They chant on the weary, endless steps, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having of the feastings and the merry makings, of the laughter of the children, of the kisses of the lovers. But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you, he shrugs his shoulders. Oh, it means, he says, that their time will also come, someday. It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg and somehow the light talk and laughter die away and a hush, like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and passes through. It is a curious song, like the wailing of a tired wind and one day it will sweep over the land, heralding terror. A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying his workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money, he paid the men, each one, nearly a ruble short. He discovered his error before the following Saturday and then put the matter right. The men accepted his explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The thing astonished him. But you must have known I was paying you short, he said to one of them. Why didn't you tell me of it? Oh, answered the man. We thought you were putting it in your own pocket and then if we had complained it would have meant dismissal for us. No one would have taken our word against yours. Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of things. A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me. It was a valuable animal and I wish to keep it with me. It is strictly forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of the pains and penalties for doing so frightened me considerably. Oh, that'll be all right, my friend assured me. Have a few rubles loosen your pocket. I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard and started pleased with myself. But I had not anticipated what was in store for me. The news that an Englishman with a dog and a basket and rubles in his pocket was coming must have been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every stopping place, some enormous official wearing generally a sword and a helmet boarded the train. At first these fellows terrified me. I took them for field marshals at least. Visions of Siberia crossed my mind, anxious and trembling. I gave the first one a gold piece. He shook me warmly by the hand. I thought he was going to kiss me. If I had offered him my cheek, I am sure he would have done so. With the next one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of rubles he blessed me, so I gathered, and commending me to the care of the Almighty departed. Before I had reached the German frontier, I was giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the dress and carriage of major generals, and to see their faces brighten up and to receive their heartfelt benediction was well worth the money. But to the men without rubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more coins, I got my dog through the customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me. A miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and he, his lean face puckered up into a snarl, was returning them snappish answers. The whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being worried by schoolboys. A slight informality had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveler with whom I had made friends informed me. He had no rubles in his pocket, and in consequence, they were sending him back to St. Petersburg, some 18-hour journey, in a wagon that in England would not be employed for the transport of oxen. It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom. They would drop in every now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the waiting room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face. A dull, listless indifference had taken its place. The look one sees in the face of a beaten dog. After the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders whether it is thinking. The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem to be known to him. There is a prison on the banks of the Neva in St. Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up till very recently, there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice, and prisoners placed there would be found missing a day or two afterwards. Nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the fishes of the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves, the sleigh drivers round their charcoal fire, the field workers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by the rattle of the looms. I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was one I was sent to in a small street leading out of the Avenue Louise. It was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They covered the walls of every room. These pictures explained to me, the landlady, an old, haggard-looking woman, will not be left. I am taking them with me to London. They are all the work of my husband. He is arranging an exhibition. The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had been living in Brussels, eking at a precarious existence as a lodging housekeeper for the last ten years. You have married again, I questioned her. The woman smiled. Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My husband was transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never seen him since. I should have followed him, she added. Only every year we thought he was going to be set free. He is really free now, I asked. Yes, she answered. They set him free last week. He will join me in London. We shall be able to finish our honeymoon. She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl. I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London. It was said the artist showed much promise. So possibly a career may at last be opening out for him. Nature has made life hard to Russians, rich and poor alike, to the banks of the Neva, with its ague and influenza bestowing fogs and mists. One imagines that the devil himself must have guided Peter the Great. Show me in all my dominions the most hopelessly unattractive sight on which to build a city Peter must have prayed, and the devil, having discovered the sight on which St. Petersburg now stands, must have returned to his master in high good feather. I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique. It is a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and marrow-chilling fogs. While during the brief summertime, the wind will bring you sand. In this way, you will combine the disadvantages of the North Pole with those of the Desert of Sahara. In the wintertime, the Russians light their great stoves and doubly barricade their doors and windows. And in this atmosphere, like to that of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never venturing out of doors. Even the men only go out at intervals. Every office, every shop is an oven. Men of forty have white hair and parchment faces, and the women are old at thirty. The farm laborers, during the few summer months, work almost entirely without sleep. They leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like dormice in their hobbles, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor. For days together, they sleep, they wake, and dig, and then sleep again. The Russian party lasts all night. In an adjoining room are beds and couches. Half a dozen guests are always sleeping. An hour contents them, then they rejoin the company, and other guests take their places. The Russian eats when he feels so disposed. The table is always spread. The guests come and go. Once a year, there is a great feast in Moscow. The Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day, and a sort of thick, sweet pancake is served up hot. The feast continues for many hours, and the ambition of the Russian merchant is to eat more than his neighbor. Fifty or sixty of these hotcakes a man will consume at a sitting, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result. Ununcivilized people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are young. Russian history is not yet three hundred years old. They will see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their intelligence, when these show above the groundwork, are monstrous. I have known a Russian learned Chinese within six months. English, they learn it while you are talking to them. The children play a chess, and study the violin for their own amusement. The world will be glad of Russia, when she has put her house in order. END OF CHAPTER X Folks suffering from jingoism, spread eagleism, chauvinism, all such like isms, to whatever country they belong, would be well advised to take a tour in Holland. It is the idea of the moment that size spells happiness. The bigger the country, the better one is for living there. The happiest Frenchman cannot possibly be as happy as the most wretched Britisher, for the reason that Britain owns many more thousands of square miles than France possesses. The Swiss peasant, compared with the Russian surf, must, when he looks at the map of Europe and Asia, feel himself to be a miserable creature. The reason that everybody in America is happy and good is to be explained by the fact that America has an area equal to that of the entire moon. The American citizen, who has backed the wrong horse, missed his train, and lost his bag, remembers this, and feels bucked up again. According to this argument, fishes should be the happiest of mortals. The sea, consisting at least, so says my atlas, I have not measured it myself, of 144 millions of square miles. But maybe the sea is also divided in ways we what not of. Possibly the Sardine, who lives near the Brittany coast, is sad and discontented, because the Norwegian Sardine is the proud inhabitant of a larger sea. Perhaps that is why he has left the Brittany coast. Ashamed of being a Brittany Sardine, he has emigrated to Norway, has become a naturalised Norwegian Sardine, and is himself again. The happy Londoner, on foggy days, can warm himself with the reflection that the sun never sets on the British Empire. He does not often see the sun, but that is a mere detail. He regards himself as the owner of the sun. The sun begins his little day in the British Empire, ends his little day in the British Empire. For all practical purposes, the sun is part of the British Empire. Foolish people in other countries sit underneath it and feel warm, but that is only their ignorance. They do not know it has a British possession. If they did, they would feel cold. My views on this subject are, I know, heretical. I cannot get it into my unpatriotic head that size is the only thing worth worrying about. In England, when I venture to express my out-of-date opinions, I am called a little Englander. It fritted me at first. I was becoming a mere shadow, but by now I have got used to it. It would be the same, I feel, wherever I went. In New York, I should be a little American, in Constantinople a little Turk. But I wanted to talk about Holland. A holiday in Holland serves as a corrective to exaggerated imperialistic notions. There are no poor in Holland. They may be an unhappy people, knowing what a little country it is they live in, but if so, they hide the fact. To all seeming, the Dutch peasant, smoking his great pipe, is as much a man as the whitechapel hawker or the moocher of the Paris boulevard. I saw a beggar once in Holland, in the town lit of Enghausen. Crowds were hurrying up from the side streets to have a look at him. The idea at first seemed to be that he was doing it for a bet. He turned out to be a Portuguese. They offered him work in the docks, until he could get something better to do, at wages equal in English money to about ten shillings a day. I inquired about him on my way back, and was told he had borrowed a couple of forms from the foreman and had left by the evening train. It is not the country for the loafer. In Holland, work is easily found. This takes away the charm of looking for it. A farm labourer in Holland lives in a brick-built house of six rooms, which generally belongs to him, with an acre or so of ground, and only eats meat once a day. The rest of his time, he fills up on eggs and chicken and cheese and beer. But you rarely hear him grumble. His wife and daughter may be seen on Sundays, wearing gold and silver jewellery, worth from fifty to one hundred pounds, and there is generally enough old delft and pewter in the house to start a local museum anywhere outside Holland. On high days and holidays, of which in Holland there are plenty, the average Dutch flower would be well worth running away with. The Dutch peasant girl has no need of an illustrated journal once a week to tell her what the fashion is. She has it in the portrait of her mother, or of her grandmother, hanging over the glittering chimney-piece. When the Dutch woman builds a dress, she builds it to last. It descends from mother to daughter, but it is made of sound material in the beginning. A lady friend of mine, thought the Dutch costume would serve well for a fancy dress ball, so set about buying one, but abandoned the notion on learning what it would cost her. A Dutch girl in her Sunday clothes must be worth fifty pounds before you come to ornaments. In certain provinces, she wears a close-fitting helmet made either of solid silver or of solid gold. The Dutch galant, before making himself known, walks on tiptoe a little while behind the loved one, and looks at himself in her headdress just to make sure that his hat is on straight and his front curl just where it ought to be. In most other European countries, national costume is dying out. The slop shop is year by year extending its hideous trade. But the country of Rubens and Rembrandt, of Tenius and Gerard Dau, remains still true to art. The picture postcard does not exaggerate. The men in those wondrous baggy knickerbockers, from the pockets of which you sometimes see a couple of chicken's heads protruding, in gaudy-coloured shirts, in worsted hose and mighty sabbots, smoking their great pipes, the women in their petticoats of many hues in gorgeously embroidered vest, in chemisette of dazzling white, crowned with a halo of many frills glittering in gold and silver, are not the creatures of an artist's fancy. You meet them in their thousands on holiday afternoons, walking gravely, arm in arm, flirting with sober Dutch solidity. On colder days the women wear bright-coloured capes made of fine spun silk, from underneath the ample folds of which you sometimes hear a little cry, and sometimes a little hooded head peeps out, regards with preternatural thoughtfulness the toy-like world without, then dives back into shelter. As for the children, women in miniature, the single difference in dress being the gay pinafore, you can only say then that they look like Dutch dolls, but such plump, contented, cheerful little dolls. You remember the hollow-eyed, pale-faced dolls you see swarming in the great big, and therefore should be happy countries, and wish that mere land-surface were of less importance to our statesmen and our able editors, and the happiness and well-being of the mere human items worth a little more of their thought. The Dutch peasant lives surrounded by canals, and reaches his cottage across a drawbridge. I suppose it is in the blood of the Dutch child not to tumble into a canal, and the Dutch mother never appears to anticipate such possibility. One can imagine the average English mother trying to bring up a family in a house surrounded by canals. She would never have a minute's peace until the children were in bed. But then the mere sight of a canal to the English child suggests the delights of a sudden and unexpected bath. I put it to a Dutchman once. Did the Dutch child by any chance ever fall into a canal? Yes, he replied. Cases have been known. Did you do anything for it? I inquired. Oh yes, he answered. We haul some out again. But what I mean is, I explained, did you do anything to prevent their falling in, to save them from falling in again? Yes, he answered. We spank him. There is always a wind in Holland. It comes from over the sea. There is nothing to say its progress. It leaps the low dykes and sweeps with a shriek across the sad, soft dunes, and thinks it is going to have a good time and play havoc in the land. But the Dutchman laughs behind his great pipe as it comes to him shouting and roaring. Welcome, my hearty! Welcome, he chuckles! Come, blustering and bragging! The bigger you are, the better I like you! And when it is once in the land, behind the long, straight dykes, behind the waving line of sandy dunes, he seizes hold of it, and will not let it go till it's done its tail of work. The wind is the Dutchman's servant. Before he lets it loose again, it has turned ten thousand mills, has pumped the water and sawn the wood, has lighted the town and worked the loom and forged the iron, and driven the great, slow, silent wary, and played with the children in the garden. It is a sober wind when it gets back to sea, warm and weary, leaving the Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting pipe. There are canals in Holland, down which you pass as though a field of wind-blown corn, a soft, low, rustling murmur ever in your ears. It is the ceaseless whirl of the great mill sails, far out at sea the winds are as foolish savages, fighting, shrieking, tearing, purposeless. Here, in the street of mills, it is a civilised wind, crooning softly while it labours. What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks. In a Dutch household life must be one long spring cleaning. No milk-pale is considered fit that cannot just as well be used for a looking-glass. The great brass pans hanging under the penthouse roof outside the cottage door flash like burnished gold. You could eat your dinner off the red-tired floor, but that the deal-table scrubbed to the colour of cream cheese is more convenient. By each threshold stands a row of empty sabbots, and woe betide the Dutchman who would dream of crossing it in anything but his stockinged feet. There is a fashion in sabbots. Every spring they are freshly painted, one district fancies an orange-yellow, another a red, a third white, suggesting a purity and innocence. Members of the smart-set indulge in ornamentation, a frieze in pink, a star upon the toe. Walking in sabbots is not as easy as it looks. Attempting to run in sabbots I do not recommend to the beginner. How do you run in sabbots? I asked a Dutchman once. I had been experimenting and had hurt myself. Wie don't run? answered the Dutchman. And observation has proved to me he was right. The Dutch boy, when he runs, puts them for preference on his hands and hits other Dutch boys over the head with them as he passes. The roads in Holland, straight and level, and shaded all the way with trees, look from the railway carriage windows if they would be good for cycling, but this is a delusion. I crossed in the boat from Harwich once with a well-known black-and-white artist and an equally well-known and highly respected humorist. They had their bicycles with them intending to tour Holland. I met them a fortnight later in Delft, or rather, I met their remains. I was horrified at first. I thought it was drink. They could not stand still. They could not sit still. They trembled and shook in every limb their teeth chattered when they tried to talk. The humorist hadn't a joke left in him. The artist could not have drawn his own salary. He would have dropped it on the way to his pocket. The Dutch roads are paved their entire length with cobbles, big round cobbles over which your bicycle leaps and springs and plunges. If you would see Holland outside the big towns, a smattering of Dutch is necessary. If you know German, there is not much difficulty. Dutch, I speak as an amateur, appears to be very bad German mispronounced. Myself, I found, my German goes well in Holland, even better than in Germany. The Anglo-Saxon should not attempt the Dutch G. It is hopeless to think of succeeding, and the attempt has been known to produce internal rupture. The Dutchman appears to keep his G in his stomach, and to haul it up when wanted. Myself, I find the ordinary G, preceded by a hiccough and followed by a sob, the nearest I can get to it. But they tell me it's not quite right yet. One needs to save up beforehand, if one desires to spend any length of time in Holland. One talks of dear old England, but the dearest land in all the world is little Holland. The Florin there is equal to the Frank in France and to the Schilling in England. They tell you that cigars are cheap in Holland. A cheap Dutch cigar will last you a day. It's not until you've forgotten the taste of it that you feel you ever want to smoke again. I knew a man who reckoned that he'd saved hundreds of pounds by smoking Dutch cigars for a month steadily. It was years before he again ventured on tobacco. Watching building operations in Holland brings home to you forcibly what previously you've regarded as a meaningless formula, namely that the country is built upon piles. A dozen feet below the level of the street, one sees the labourers working in fishermen's boots up to their knees in water, driving the great wooden blocks into the mud. Many of the older houses slope forward at such an angle that you almost fear to pass beneath them. I should be as nervous as a kitten, living in one of the upper stories, but the Dutchman leans out of a window that is hanging above the street six feet beyond the perpendicular and smokes contentedly. They have a merry custom in Holland of keeping the railway time twenty minutes ahead of the town time, or is it twenty minutes behind? I never can remember when I'm there, and I'm not sure now. The Dutchman himself never knows. You've plenty of time, he says. But the train goes at ten, you say, the station's a mile away and it's now half-past nine. Yes, but that means ten-twenty, he answers. You have nearly an hour. Five minutes later he taps you on the shoulder. My mistake, it's twenty to ten. I was thinking it was the other way about. Another argues with him that his first idea was right. They work it out by scientific methods. Meanwhile, you've dived into a cab. The result is always the same. You're either forty minutes too soon, or you've missed the train by twenty minutes. A Dutch platform is always crowded with women explaining voluably to their husbands, either that was not any need to have hurried, or else that the thing would have been to have started half an hour before they did, the man in both cases being, of course, to blame. The men walk up and down and swear. The idea has been suggested that the railway time and the town time should be made to conform. The argument against the idea is that if it were carried out, there would be nothing left to put the Dutchman out and worry him. End of Section 11. Recording by Roger Clifton St Albans, England. Section 12 of Idol Ideas in 1905. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Juleefa Wallacham. Idol Ideas in 1905 by Jerome K. Jerome. Should we say what we think, or think what we say? A mad friend of mine will have it, that a characteristic of the age is make-believe. He argues that all social intercourse is founded on make-believe. A servant enters to say that Mr. and Mrs. Ball are in the drawing room. Oh, damn, says the man. Hush, says the woman. Shut the door, Susan. How often am I to tell you never to leave the door open? The man creeps upstairs on tiptoe, and shuts himself in his study. The woman does things before a looking-glass, waits till she feels she's sufficiently mischievous of herself not to show her feelings, and then enters the drawing-room with outstretched hands and a look of one welcoming an angel's visit. She says how delighted she is to see the balls. How could it was of them to come? Why did they not bring more balls with them? Where is Naughty Ball, Junior? Why does he never come to see her now? She will have to be really angry with them, and sweet little flossy ball, too young to pay calls nonsense, and at home-day is not worth having where old balls are not. The balls, who had hoped that she was out, who have only called because Yetik had booked, told them that they must call at least four times in the season, explain how they have been trying and trying to come. This afternoon, recounts Mrs. Bohr. We were determined to come. John dear, I said this morning, I shall go and see your dear Mrs. Bowder this afternoon, no matter what happens. The idea conveyed is, that a print of Wales on calling at the balls must hold that he could not come in. He might call again, and the evening will come some other day. That afternoon, the balls were going to enjoy themselves in their own way. They were going to see Mrs. Bowder. And how is Mr. Bowder? demands Mrs. Bohr. Mrs. Bowder remains mute for a moment, straining her ears. She can hear him creeping past the door on his way downstairs. She hears the front door softly open and close to. She wakes, as from a dream. She has been thinking of the sorrows that will fall on Bowder when he returns home later and learns what he has missed. And thus it is, that only with the balls and Bowders, but even with us who are not balls or Bowders, society in all ranks is founded on the make-believe, that everybody is charming, that we are delighted to see everybody, that everybody is delighted to see us, that it is so good of everybody to come, that we are desolate at a thought that they really must go now. Which would we rather do? Stop and finish our cigar, or hasten into the drawing-room to hear Mrs. Creature sing? Can you ask us? We tumble over each other in our hurry. Mrs. Creature would really rather not sing, but if we insist. We do insist. Mrs. Creature with pretty reluctance consents. We are careful not to look at one another. We sit, with our eyes fixed on the ceiling. Mrs. Creature finishes and rises. But it was so short, we say, so soon as we can be heard above the applause. Is Mrs. Creature quite sure that it was the whole of it? Or has she been playing tricks upon us, the naughty lady, defrauding us of a verse? Mrs. Creature assures us that a thought is a composer, but she knows another. At this end, our faces lighten again with gladness. We clamour for more. Our hostess, Wine, is always the most extraordinary we have ever tasted. No, not another glass. We dare not. Drs. Orders are very strict. Our hostess, Cigar. We did not know they made such cigars in this workday world. No, we really could not smoke another. Well, if he will be so pressing, may we put it in our pocket? The truth is, we are not you so high smoking. Our hostess is coffee. Would you confide to her a secret? The baby, we hardly trust ourselves to speak. The usual baby, we have seen it. As a rule, to be candid, we never could detect much beauty in babies, have always held the usual gush about them to be insincere. But this, baby, we are almost on the point of asking them where they got it. It is just a kind we wanted for ourselves. Little Janet's recitation, a visit to the dentist. Hitherto, the amateur reciter has not appeared to us. But this is genius, surely. She ought to be trained for the stage. Her mother does not altogether approve of the stage. We plead for the stage, that it may not be deprived of such talent. Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple costume of, forfeit the particular sea logo papers. Every marriage is a course for universal rejoicing. With our wine-glass in our hand, we picture the ideal life we know to be in store for them. How can it be otherwise? She, the daughter of her mother, cheers. He, while we all know him, more cheers. Also involuntary guffot from ill-regulated young man at end of table promptly suppressed. We carry our make-believe even into our religion. We sit in church, and in voices, swelling with pride mentioned to the Almighty, at stated intervals, that we are miserable worms, that there is no good in us. This sort of thing, we gather, is expected of us. It does us no harm, and is supposed to please. We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest, until they insist on forcing us against our will to observe that they are not. And then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that they, being sinners, are not folk fit to mix with us perfect people. Our grief, and our rich arm dies, is hardly to be borne. Drapers make fortunes, helping us to express feebly our desolation. Our only consolation is, that she has gone to a better world. Everybody goes to a better world, when they have got all they can out of this one. We stand round the open grave, and tell each other so. The clergyman is so short of it, that, to save time, they have written out a formula for him, and had it printed in a little book. As a child it used to surprise me, this fact, that everybody went to heaven. Thinking of all the people that had died, I pictured the place overcrowded. Almost I felt sorry for the devil, nobody ever coming his way, so to speak. I saw him, in imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, hoping against hope, muttering to himself, maybe, that it hardly seemed worth a while from his point of view, keeping the show open. An old nurse whom I once took into my confidence was sure, if I continued talking in this sort of way, that he would get me anyhow. I must have been an evil-hearted youngster. The thought of how he would welcome me, the only human being that he had seen for years, had a certain fascination for me. For ones of my existence, I should be made a fuzz about. At every public meeting, the chief speaker is always a jolly good fellow. The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, would be convinced that every member of parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-hearted, generous sort saint, with just sufficient humanity in him, to prevent the angels from carrying him off bodily. To nod the entire audience, moved by one common impulse, declare him three times running, and instantorium voice to be this jolly good fellow. So say all of them. We have always listened with the most intense pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend to us just sat down. When you thought we were yawning, we were drinking in his eloquence, open mouth it. The higher one ascends into social scale, the wider becomes of this necessary base of make-believe. When anything sad happens to a very big person, the lesser people round about him hardly care to go on living. Seeing that a world is somewhat overstocked with persons of importance, and that something or another generally is happening to them, one wonders sometimes how it is a world continues to exist. Once upon a time there occurred an illness to a certain good and great man. I read in my daily paper that a whole nation was plunged in grief, people dining and puzzling restaurants, on being told the news by the waiter, dropped their heads upon the table and sobbed. Strangers meeting in the street flung their arms about one another, and cried, like little children. I was abroad at the time, but on the point of returning home, I almost felt ashamed to go. I looked at myself in the glass and was shocked at my own appearance. It wasn't that of a man who had not been in jobber for weeks. I felt that a burst upon this grief-stricken nation with a countenance such as mine would be to add to their sorrows. It was born in upon me that I must have a shallow, egotistic nature. I had had luck with the plain America, and for the life of me I could not look grief-stricken. There were moments when, if I was not keeping a watch over myself, I found myself whistling. Had it been possible, I would have remained abroad till some stroke of ill fortune had rendered me more in tune with my fellow countrymen. But business was pressing. The first man I talked to on Dover Pier was a customer house official. You might have thought Sorrow would have made him indifferent to a mere matter of forty-eight cigars, instead of which he appeared quite pleased when he found them. He demanded three and four pens and chuckled when he got it. On Dover platform a little girl laughed because a lady dropped a handbox on a dog. But then children are always callous, or perhaps she had not heard the news. What astonished me most, however, was to find in the railway carriage a respectable-looking man reading a comic journal. Drew he did not laugh much. He had got decency enough for that. But what was a grief-stricken citizen doing with the comic journal, anyhow? Before I had been in London an hour, I had come to the conclusion that we English must be people of wonderful self-control. The day before, according to the newspapers, the whole country was in serious danger of pining away and dying of a broken heart. In one day the nation had pulled itself together. We have cried all day, they had said to themselves. We have cried all night. It does not seem to have done much good. Now let us once again take up the burden of life. Some of them, I noticed it, in the hotel dining-room that evening, were taking quite kindly to their food again. We make believe about quite serious things. In war each country soldiers are always the most courageous in the world. The other country soldiers are always treacherous and tricky. That is why they sometimes win. Literature is the art of make-believe. Now all of you sit round and throw your pennies in the cap, says the author, and I will pretend that there lives in Bayswater a young lady named Angelina, who is the most beautiful young lady that ever existed. And in Notting Hill we will pretend there resides a young man named Edwin, who is in love with Angelina. And then, there being sufficient pennies in the cap, the author starts away and pretends that Angelina thought this and said that, and that Edwin did all sorts of wonderful things. We know he is making it all up as it goes along. We know he is making up just what he thinks will please us. We, on the other hand, has to make believe that he is doing it because he cannot help it, he being an artist. But we know well enough that, where we to stop throwing the pennies into the cap, he would find out precious soon that he could. The theatrical manager bangs his drum. Walk up, walk up, he cries. We are going to pretend that Mrs. Johnson is a princess and old man Johnson is going to pretend to be a parrot. Walk up, walk up, and be in time. So Mrs. Johnson pretending to be a princess comes out of a wobbly thing that we agree to pretend as a castle, and old man Johnson pretending to be a pirate is pushed up and down on another wobbly thing that we agree to pretend as the ocean. Mrs. Johnson pretends to be in love with him, which you know she is not, and Johnson pretends to be a very terrible person, and Mrs. Johnson pretends till eleven o'clock to believe it. And we pay prices, varying from a shilling to half a sovereign, to sit for two hours and listen to them. But as I explained at the beginning, my friend is a mad sort of person. End of section 12. Section 13 of Idol Ideas 1905. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Shaleefa Malchem. Idol Ideas 1905 by Jerome K. Jerome. Is the American husband made entirely of stained glass? I am glad I am not an American husband. At first sight, this may appear a remark uncomplementary to the American wife. It is nothing of the sort. It is the other way about. We in Europe have plenty of opportunity of judging the American wife. In America, you hear of the American wife. You're told stories about the American wife. You see her portrait in the illustrated journals. By searching under the heading Foreign Intelligence, you can find out what she is doing. But here in Europe, we know her, meet her face to face, talk to her, flirt with her. She is charming, delightful. That is why I say, I am glad I am not an American husband. If the American husband only knew how nice was the American wife, he would sell his business and come over here, where now and then he could see her. Years ago, when I first began to travel about Europe, I argued to myself that America must be a deadly place to live in. How sad it is, I thought to myself, to me thus, wherever one goes, American widows bind a thousand. In one narrow by-street of Dresden, I calculated fourteen American mothers possessing nine and twenty American children, and not a father among them, not a single husband among the whole fourteen. I pictured fourteen lonely graves scattered over the United States. I saw, as in a vision, those fourteen headstones of best material, hand-carved, recording the verges of those fourteen dead and buried husbands. Odd, thought I to myself, decidedly odd. These American husbands, they must be a delicate type of humanity. The wonder is, their mothers ever read them. They marry fine girls, the majority of them. Two or three sweet children are born to them, and after that, there appears to be no further use for them, as far as this world is concerned. Can nothing be done to strengthen their constitutions? Would a tonic be of any help to them? Not a customary tonic, I don't mean the sort of tonic merely intended to make gouty old gentlemen feel they want to buy a hoop, but a sort of tonic for which it was claimed that three drops poured upon a ham sandwich, and a thing would begin to squeak. It struck me as pathetic, the picture of these American widows leaving their native land, coming over in ship-loads to spend the rest of their blighted lives in exile. The mere thought of America, I took it, had forever become to them distasteful. The ground that once his feet had breasted, the old familiar places once lighted by his smile. Everything in America would remind them of him. Snatching their babes to their heaving bosoms, they would leave the country where they buried all the joy of their lives, seek and the retirement of Paris, Florence or Vienna, oblivion of the past. Also, it struck me as beautiful, the noble resignation with which they bore their grief, hiding their sorrow from the indifferent stranger. Some widows make a fuss, go about for weeks, looking gloomy and depressed, making not the slightest effort to be merry. These fourteen widows, I knew them personally, all of them, I lived in the same street. What a brave show of cheerfulness they put on! What a lesson to the common or European widow, the Humby type of widow! One could spend all days in their company, I had done it, commencing quite early in the morning with a slaying excursion, finishing up quite late in the evening with a little supper-party, followed by an impromptu dance, and never detect from their outward manner that they were not thoroughly enjoying themselves. From the mothers I turned my admiring eyes towards the children. This is the secret of American success, said I to myself. This high-spirited courage, this spartan contempt for suffering, look at them! The gallant little men and women, who would think that they had lost a father? Why, I have seen a British child more upset at losing six pence. Talking to a little girl one day, I inquired of her concerning the health of her father. The next moment I could have bit my tongue out, remembering that there wasn't such a thing as a father, not an American father, and a whole street. She did not burst into tears, as they do in the storybooks. She said, he is quite well, thank you. Simply, pathetically, just like that. I am sure of it, I replied with fervour, well and happy as he deserves to be, and one day you will find him again, you will go to him. Ah, yes, she answered. A shining light it seemed to me upon a fair young face. Mama said she is getting just a bit tired of this one horse sort of place. She is quite looking forward to seeing him again. It touched me very deeply. This weary woman, tired of her long bereavement, actually looking forward to the fierce passage leading to where her love done waited for her in a better land. For one bright breezy creature, I grew to feel a real regard. All the months that I had known her, seen her almost daily, never once had I heard a single cry of pain escape ellipse, never once had I heard her cursing fate. Of the many who called upon her in her charming flat, not one had ever, to my knowledge, offered her consolation or condolence. It seemed to me cruel, callous. The overburdened heart, finding no outlet for its imprisoned grief, finding no sympathetic ear into which to pour its tale of row, breaks, we are told. Anyhow, it isn't good for it. I decided, no one else seeming keen, that I would supply that sympathetic ear. The very next time I found myself alone with her, I introduced the subject. You have been living here in Dries in a long time, have you not? I asked. About five years, she answered, on and off. And all alone, I commented, with a sigh intended to invite a confidence. Well, hardly alone. She corrected me while a look of patient resignation added dignity to her pecan features. You see, there are the dear children always round about me during the holidays. Besides, she added, the people here are real kind to me. They hardly ever let me feel myself alone. We make up little parties, you know, picnics and discursions. And then, of course, there is the opera, and the symphony concerts, and the subscription dances. The dear old king has been doing a good deal this winter, too, and I must say the embassy folks have been most thoughtful so far as I am concerned. No, it would not be right for me to complain of loneliness, not now that I have got to know a few people as it were. But don't you miss your husband? I suggested. A cloud passed over her usually sunny face. No, please, don't talk of him, she said. It makes me feel real sad thinking about him. But having commenced, I was determined that my sympathy should not be left to waste. What did he die of? I asked. She gave me a look of the pithers of which I shall never forget. Say, young man! she cried. Are you trying to break it to me gently? Because if so, I'd rather you told me straight out, what did he die of? Then, isn't he dead? I asked. I mean, so far as you know. Never heard a word about his being dead till you started the idea. She retorted. So far as I know, he's alive and well. Well, I said that I was sorry. I went on to explain that I did not mean I was sorry to hear that in all probability it was alive and well. What I meant was, I was sorry I had introduced a painful subject. What's a painful subject? Why your husband? I replied. But why should you call him a painful subject? I had an idea she was getting angry with me. She did not say so. I gathered it. But I had to explain myself somehow. Well, I answered. I take it. You didn't go on well together. And I'm sure it must have been his fault. Now, look here, she said. Don't you breathe a word against my husband, or we shall quarrel. A nicer dearer fellow never lived. Then what did you divorce him for? I asked. It wasn't pertinent. It was unjustifiable. My excuse is that the mystery surrounding the American husband had been worrying me for months. Here had I stumbled upon the opportunity of solving it. Instinctively I clung to my advantage. There hasn't been any divorce, she said. There isn't going to be any divorce. You'll make me cross in another minute. But I was becoming reckless. He's not dead. You are not divorced from him. Where is he? I demanded with some heat. Where is he? She replied astonished. Where should he be? At home, of course. I looked around the luxuriously furnished room with its air of cozy comfort of substantial restfulness. What home? I asked. What home? Why, our home in Detroit. What is he doing there? I had become so much an earnest that my voice had assumed an unconsciously an authoritative tone. Presumably it hypnotized her, for she answered my questions as though she had been in the witness box. How do I know? How can I possibly tell you what he is doing? What do people usually do at home? Answer the questions, madam. Don't ask them. What are you doing here? Quite truthfully, if you please. My eyes were fixed upon her. Enjoying myself? He likes me to enjoy myself, besides I'm educating the children. You mean they are here at boarding school, while you are getting about. What is wrong with American education? When did you see your husband last? Last? Let me see. No, last Christmas I was in Berlin. It must have been the Christmas before, I think. If he is the dear kind fellow you say he is, how is it you haven't seen him for two years? Because, as I tell you, he is at home in Detroit. How can I see him when I am here in Dresden and he is in Detroit? You do ask foolish questions. Do you mean to try and come over in the summer, if you can spare the time? And then, of course, answer my questions, please. I've spoken to you once about it. Do you think you are performing your duty as a wife, enjoying yourself in Dresden and Berlin, while your husband is working hard in Detroit? He was quite willing for me to come. The American husband is a good fellow who likes his wife to enjoy herself. I am not asking for your views on the American husband. I am asking your views on the American wife, on yourself. The American husband appears to be sort of stained glass and your American wives are imposing upon him. It is doing you no good, and it won't go on forever. There will come a day when the American husband will wake up to the fact he is making a fool of himself, and by overindulgence, over devotion, turning the American woman into a heartless, selfless creature. What sort of a home do you think it is in Detroit, with you and the children over here? Tell me, is the American husband made entirely of driven snow, with blood distilled from moonbeams, or is he composed of the ordinary ingredients? Because of the letter, you take my advice and get back home. I take it that in America, proper, there are millions of real homes where the woman does her duty and plays a game, but also, it is quite clear, there are thousands of homes in America, mere echoing rooms where the man walks by himself, his wife and children scattered over Europe. It isn't going to work, it isn't right that it should work. You take the advice of a sincere friend, pack up, you and the children, and get home. I left. It was growing late. I felt it was time to leave. Whether she took my cancel, I cannot say. I only know that there still remain in Europe a goodly number of American wives to whom it is applicable. And of, is the American husband made entirely of stained glass. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. I am told that American professors are mourning the lack of ideals at Columbia University, possibly also at other universities scattered throughout the United States. If it be any consolation to these mourning American professors, I can assure them that they do not mourn alone. I live not far from Oxford and enjoy the advantage of occasionally listening to the Jeremiahs of English university professors. More than once a German professor has done me the honor to employ me as an object on which to sharpen his English. He also has mourned similar lack of ideals at Heidelberg at Baum. Youth is youth all the world over. It has its own ideals. They are not those of the university professor. The explanation is tolerably simple. Youth is young, and the university professor, generally speaking, is middle-aged. I can sympathize with the mourning professor. I in my time have suffered like despair. I remember the days so well. It was my twelfth birthday. I recall the unholy joy with which I reflected that for the future my unfortunate parents would be called upon to pay for me full railway fare. It marked a decided step towards manhood. I was now in my teens. That very afternoon there came to visit us a relative of ours. She brought with her three small children, a girl aged six, a precious golden-haired thing in a lace collar that called itself a boy, aged five, and a third, still smaller creature. It might have been male. It might have been female. I could not have told you at the time. I cannot tell you now. This collection of atoms was handed over to me. Now show yourself a man, said my dear mother. Remember, you're in your teens. Take them out for a walk and amuse them, and mind nothing happens to them. To the children themselves, their own mother gave instructions that they were to do everything that I told them and not to tear their clothes or make themselves untidy. These directions even to myself at the time appeared contradictory, but I said nothing, and out into the wilds the four of us departed. I was an only child. My own infancy had passed from my memory. To me at twelve the ideas of six were as incomprehensible as are those of twenty to the university professor of forty. I wanted to be a pirate. Round the corner and across the road building operations were in progress. Planks and poles led ready to one's hand. Nature in the neighborhood had placed conveniently a shallow pond. It was Saturday afternoon. The nearest public house was a mile away. Immunity from interference by the British workman was thus assured. It occurred to me that by placing my three depressed-looking relatives on one raft, attacking them myself from another, taking the eldest girl six pence away from her, disabling their raft and leaving them to drift without a rudder, innocent amusement would be provided for half an hour at least. They did not want to play at pirates. At first sight of the pond the thing that called itself a boy began to cry. The six-year-old lady said she did not like the smell of it. Not even after I had explained the game to them were they any more enthusiastic for it. So I proposed red Indians. They could go to sleep in the unfinished building upon a sack of lime. I would creep up through the grass, set fire to the house and dance around it, whooping and waving my tomahawk, watching with fiendish delight the frantic but futile efforts of the palefaces to escape their doom. It did not catch on. Not even that. The precious thing in the lace collar began to cry again. The creature concerning whom I could not have told you whether it was male or female made no attempted argument but started to run. It seemed to have taken a dislike to this particular field. It stumbled over a scaffolding pole and then it also began to cry. What could one do to amuse such people? I left it to them to propose something. They thought they would like to play at mothers, not in this field but in some other field. The eldest girl would be mother. The other two would represent her children. They had been taken suddenly ill. Waterworks, as I had christened him, was to hold his hands to his middle and groan. His face brightened up at the suggestion. The nondescript had the toothache. It took up its part without a moment's hesitation and set to work to scream. I could be the doctor and look at their tongues. That was their ideal game. As I have said, remembering that afternoon, I can sympathize with the university professor mourning the absence of university ideals in youth. Possibly it sakes my own ideal game may have been mothers, looking back from the pile of birthdays upon which I now stand. It occurs to me that very probably it was. But from the perspective of 12, the reflection that they were beings in the world who could find recreation in such fooling saddened me. Eight years later, his father not being able to afford the time, I conducted master Waterworks, now a healthy, uninteresting, gawky lad to a school in Switzerland. It was my first continental trip. I should have enjoyed it better had he not been with me. He thought Paris a beastly whole. He did not share my admiration for the French woman. He even thought her badly dressed. Why is she so tied up? She can't walk straight. Was the only impression she left upon him. We changed the subject. It irritated me to hear him talk. The beautiful Juno-like creatures we came across further on in Germany, he said, were too fat. He wanted to see them run. I found him utterly soulless. To expect a boy to love learning and culture is like expecting him to prefer old vintage claret to gooseberry wine. Culture for the majority is an acquired taste. Speaking personally, I am entirely in agreement with the university professor. I find knowledge prompting to observation and leading to reflection, the most satisfactory luggage with which a traveler through life can provide himself. I would that I had more of it. To be able to enjoy a picture is of more advantage than to be able to buy it. All that the university professor can urge in favour of idealism I am prepared to endorse, but then I am, let us say, thirty-nine. At fourteen my candid opinion was that he was talking rot. I looked at the old gentleman himself, a narrow-chested, spectacled old gentleman who lived up a by-street. He did not seem to have much fun of any sort. It was not my ideal. He told me things had been written in a language called Greek that I should enjoy reading, but I had not even read all Captain Marriott. There were tales by Sir Walter Scott and Jack Harkaway's school days. I felt I could wait a while. There was a chap called Aristophanes who had written comedies satirizing the political institutions of a country that had disappeared two thousand years ago. I say without shame, Drury Lane, Pantomime, and Barnum Circus called to me more strongly. Wishing to give the old gentleman a chance, I dipped into translations. Some of these old fellows were not as bad as I had imagined them. A party named Homer had written some really interesting stuff. Here and there maybe he was a bit long-winded, but taking him as a whole, there was go in him. There was another of them, Ovid was his name. He could tell a story of it could. He had imagination. He was almost as good as Robinson Crusoe. I thought it would please my professor telling him that I was reading these, his favourite authors. Reading them, he cried, but you don't know Greek or Latin. But I know English, I answered. They have all been translated into English. He never told me that. It appeared it was not the same thing. There were subtle delicacies of diction bound to escape even the best translator. These subtle delicacies of diction I could enjoy only by devoting the next seven or eight years of my life to the study of Greek and Latin. It will grieve their university professor to hear it, but the enjoyment of those subtle delicacies of diction did not appear to me. I was only fourteen at the time, please remember, to be worth the time and trouble. The boy is materially inclined. The morning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as I ever liked. I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, to have my name in the newspaper, and to know that everyone was envying me. Morn over it, my dear professor, as you will, that is the ideal of youth, and so long as human nature remains what it is, will continue to be so. It is a materialistic ideal, a sorted ideal. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe the world would not move much if the young men started thinking too early. They want to be rich, so they fling themselves frenziedly into the struggle. They build the towns and make the railway tracks, hue down the forest, dig the ore out of the ground. There comes a day when it is borne in upon them that trying to get rich is a poor sort of game, that there is only one thing more tiresome than being a millionaire, and that is trying to be a millionaire. But meanwhile, the world has got its work done. The American professor fears that the artistic development of America leaves much to be desired. I fear the artistic development of most countries leaves much to be desired. Why the Athenians themselves sandwiched their drama between wrestling competitions and boxing bouts. The plays of Sophocles or Euripides were given as sideshows. The chief items of the fair were the games and races. Besides, America is still a young man. It has been busy getting on in the world. It has not yet quite finished. Yet there are signs that young America is approaching the 39s. He is finding a little time, a little money to spare for art. One can almost hear young America, not quite so young as he was, saying to Mrs. Europe as he enters and closes the shop door, well ma'am, here I am, and maybe you'll be glad to hear I have a little money to spend. Yes ma'am, I fixed things all right across the water. We shan't starve. So now ma'am, you and I can have a chat concerning this art I've been hearing so much about. Let's have a look at it ma'am, trot it out, and don't you be afraid of putting a fair price upon it. I am inclined to think that Mrs. Europe has not hesitated to put a good price upon the art she has sold to Uncle Sam. I'm afraid Mrs. Europe has occasionally unloaded on Uncle Sam. I talked to a certain dealer one afternoon now many years ago at the You Wanted Club. What is the next picture likely to be missing? I asked him in the course of general conversation. Thirm little thing of Harpner's, if it must be, he replied with confidence. Harpner, I murmured, I seem to have heard the name. Yes, you'll hear it a bit often during the next 18 months or so. You take care, you don't get tired of hearing it, that's all, he laughed. Yes, he continued thoughtfully. Reynolds has played out. Nothing much to be made of gains, bro, either. Dealing in that lot now, it's like keeping a post office. Harpner, the coming man. You've been buying Harpner's up cheap, I suggested. Between us, he answered. Yes, I think we've got them all, maybe a few more. I don't think we've missed any. You'll sell them for more than you gave for them, I hinted. You're all smart, he answered regarding me admiringly. You see through everything you do. How do you work it? I asked him. There's a time in the day when he is confidential. Here is this man, Harpner. I take it that you have bought him up at an average of £100 a picture, and that at that price most owners were fairly glad to sell. A few folks outside the art schools have ever heard of him. I bet that at the present moment there isn't one art critic who would spell his name without reference to a dictionary. In 18 months you'll be selling him for anything from £1000 to £10,000. How is it done? How is everything done well? he answered. By Ernest Effort. He hitched his chair nearer to me. I get a chap, one of your thought of chaps. He writes an article about Harpner. I get another to answer him. Before I've done, there'll be a hundred articles about Harpner. His life, his earliest struggle, and updates about his wife. Then a Harpner will be sold at a public auction for a thousand guineas. But how can you be certain it will fetch a thousand guineas? I interrupted. I happen to know the man who's going to buy it. He winked and I understood. A fortnight later there will be a sale of half a dozen, and the price will be gone up by that time. And after that, I said. After that, he replied, rising, the American millionaire, though just to be waiting on the doorstep for the sale room to open. If by any chance I come across a Harpner, I said, laughing as I turned to go. Don't you hold on to it too long, that's all, was his advice. This is the end of Does the Young Man Know Everything Worth Knowing, read by Eric Leach, Pittsburgh.