For Cromer may be the garden of sleep, but you shall find sleepier gardens and more papaverous poppies-Somewhere Else. The mountain-pines of Switzerland may be tall, and the skies of Italy blue, but there are taller pines and bluer skies-Somewhere Else. The bay of San Francisco may be beautiful, and the landscapes of Provence lovely, and the crags of Norway sublime, but Somewhere Else there are fairer visions and scenes more majestical-
An ampler setter, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.
It never palls upon you-Somewhere Else. Every loved landmark grows dearer to you year by year, and year by year apartments are cheaper-Somewhere Else. The facilities for getting to it are enormous. All roads lead to it, far more truly than to Rome. There can be no accidents on the journey. How often do we read of people setting forth on their holidays full of life and hope-yea, sometimes even on their honeymoon-and lo! a signalman nods, or a bridge breaks, and they are left mangled on the rails or washed into the river. And to think that they would have escaped if they had only gone to Somewhere Else! Too late the weeping relatives wring their hands and moan the remark. Henceforth, among the ten million pleasure-pilgrims, who will be guided by me, there will be no more tragedies by flood or field. Railway assurance will become a thing of the past, and a fatal blow will be struck at modern hebdomadal journalism. To turn to minor matters, your friends can never utter the irritating "I told you not to go there!" if you have been to Somewhere Else. And you need not label your luggage; that always goes to Somewhere Else of itself. Last advantage of Somewhere Else, you may show your face in it, though you departed last year without paying your bill. There are no creditors in this blessed haven. Earth's load drops off your shoulders when you go to Somewhere Else.
I give this counsel in a disinterested spirit. I have not made speculative purchases of land, I am not booming a generous jerry-builder. And yet I cannot help reflecting apprehensively on the consequences of my recommendation. Already I see my sweet retreat the prey of the howling mob; I hear the German band playing on the stone parade, and catch the sad strains of the comic singer. Sacrilegious feet tramp the solitudes, and sandwich papers become common objects of the sea-shore. Shilling yachts will ply where I watched the skimming curlew, and new villas will totter on the edge of the ocean and beguile the innocent billows to be house-breakers. Nay, the place will become the Alsatia of humanity, the refuge for all those men and women people would rather see Somewhere Else, and whose travelling expenses they will perchance defray. Imagination reels before the horror of such an agglomeration of the unamiable. And the terrible thing about my terrestrial paradise is that there is no escaping from it. Everything has the defects of its qualities, and this is the reverse of the dazzling medal-the drawback which annuls all the advantages of Somewhere Else in the event of its becoming popular. In vain shall I then endeavour to flee from it. Though I projected myself from the giant cannon that sent Jules Verne's hero to the moon, I should inevitably arrive-boomerang-like-at Somewhere Else.
PART III. AFTER-THOUGHTS: A BUNDLE OF BREVITIES.
[Sidenote: Moonshine]
Certainly the Moon was very charming that soft summer's night, as I watched its full golden orb gliding nonchalantly in the serene, starry heaven, and keeping me company as I strode across the silent gorse. But-to be indiscreet-I had grown aweary of the Moon, and of the stars also, as of beautiful pictures hung-or should one say, skied?-in a perpetual Academy. Caelum non animum mutant is only tolerably true. A derangement of stars is all the change you get by travelling-everywhere the same golden-headed nails, as Hugo, hard-driven, called them, are sticking in the firmament. This particular moon was hanging, not over a church steeple, like De Musset's moon,
Comme un point sur un i,
but like the big yellow dial of the clock in a church tower. An illuminated clock-face-but blank, featureless, expressionless, useless; in a word, without hands. Now I could not help thinking that if there had really been a Providence it would have put hands to the Moon-a big and a little-and made it the chronometer of the world-nay, of the cosmos-the universal time-piece, to which all eyes, in every place and planet, could be raised for information; by which all clocks could be set-moon time-an infallible monitor and measurer of the flight of the hours; divinely right, not to be argued with; though I warrant there be some would still swear by their watches. This were the true cosmopolitanism, destroying those distressful variations which make your clock vary with your climate, and which throw the shadow of pyrrhonism over truths which should be clear as daylight. For if, when it is five o'clock here, it may be two o'clock there and supper-time yonder, if it is night and day at the same moment, then is black white, and Pilate right-and Heraclitus,-and the nonconformist conscience a vain thing.
In supporting correct moral principles, the Moon would be of some use, instead of staring at us with an idiot face, signifying nothing. The stars, too, could be better employed than in winking at what goes on here below. Like ladies' gold watches by the side of Big Ben, they could repeat the same great eternal truth-that it was half-past nine, or five minutes to eleven.
Soon as the evening shades prevail The moon takes up the wondrous tale, While all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the TIME from pole to pole.
An obvious result of a synchronised universe would be the federation of mankind, Peace on Earth, and all those other beatitudes at present vainly sought by World Fairs, and pig-sticking prophets.
Till we have hands to the Moon I shall not look for the Millennium.
[Sidenote: Capital]
Suddenly the Moon went behind a cloud, as if to demonstrate that even then there would be difficulties. Besides, I remembered it had its quarter-days. Here my thoughts made a transition to money matters, and, after the manner of Richard Carstone in "Bleak House," I fell to reckoning up the sums I had saved of late. It is a calculation I make almost every week nowadays. I have lost nothing by any of the Jerry-Building Societies, nothing by any of the great Bank Failures. By not having any money one saves thousands a year in these unsettled times. Mr. Hamerton cites with amusement the remark of a wealthy Englishman, who could not understand "why men are so imprudent as to allow themselves to sink into money embarrassments." "There is a simple rule that I follow myself," said he, "and that I have always found a great safeguard: it is, never to let one's balance at the banker's fall below five thousand pounds." The rich Englishman's rule was quite wrong: the only safeguard is to have no balance at all. High and dry on the Lucretian tower of poverty, you may watch with complacency the struggles of the sinking funds. What a burden capital must be to those anxious to find safe investments at high rates of interest! It looks as if interest will sink to freezing point, and capital will have to flow to other planets if that comical claim for "wages of abstinence" is to be met any longer. Perhaps it will flow to Mars, the home in exile of the old political economy. Already a beginning has been made by investments in mines which are not upon this earth.
[Sidenote: Credit]
Every day makes clearer the evils of our complex credit system-that Frankenstein creation we have lost control over, that ampulaceous growth of capital, most of which is merely figures in a book, and which only exists in virtue of not being asked for, much as the tit-bits on a restaurant menu are "off" when ordered. The real meaning of National Debts is that every civilised country is bankrupt, and only goes on trading because its creditors give it time. To the uncertainties of the weather, and the chances of cholera, war, and earthquake, we have added an artificial uncertainty worse than any of these-we have invented a series of financial cyclones, which sweep round the globe, devastating all lands, and no more to be predicted-despite theories of sun-spots, cyclones and financial crises-than wrecks at sea; indeed, far less predictable, for I believe with the ex-mayor quoted by Bonamy Price, that finance is a subject which no man can understand in this world, or even in the next. The infinite ramificatio
ns, the endless actions and reactions, are beyond the grasp of any one but an impostor. The Professor just mentioned thought he had found the right thread of theory in the labyrinth of "Currency and Banking," and really did make a most sensible analysis of what actually went on in financial operations. Only he left out one great factor-the immense influence on the market of other people's wrong theories. No, if there is a right thread of theory, it must be so tangled as to be worse than useless. My friend the business man tells me that for success in business one requires four things: a large capital, industry, insight, and caution-and then it's a toss-up. I am fain to believe this whole system of modern commerce was devised to please the amateurs of the aleatory.
[Sidenote: The Small Boy]
A plague on both your Houses of Parliament! They legislate day and night, yet leave our lives unmodified. For our lives revolve on the pivot of custom, and our everyday movements are not political. The real ruler of England is the small boy of the streets! And, in truth, is it not so? By the unphilosophic regarded as akin to vermin, existing for the greater confusion of theologians, the small boy looms large to the man of insight, as the true conservator of custom-the one efficient custos morum. He it is who regulates the lengths to which we may go in eccentricity, and, above all, in hair:
Get your hair cut!
He is particular to a shade about clothes, and has a nice taste in hats. One wonders how he acquired it. His patriotic proclivity, his hostility to national costumes other than English, his preference for uncoloured complexions-this one may understand; but his aesthetic instinct is a problem for Weismann. As the interpreter of the conventions, he is of a cast-iron rigidity, for is he not a child of Mrs. Grundy-his mother's own boy? He has no exceptions-it is "one law and one measure." He is the scavenger of manners, as the Constantinople street-dog is of gutters; a natural police des moeurs , infinitely more efficient than any artificial organisation; an all-ramifying association created to keep the bounds of social order, on duty at every street corner, alert to check every outbreak of individuality. Do ladies aspire to ride bicycles? Or wear bloomers? There is the small boy to face. It is a question for him. Conciliate him, and you may laugh at the pragmatic. His, too, is a healthy barbarism, beneficent in its action, that thinks scorn of eyeglasses and spectacles, and leads him to denounce quadruple vision, as, indeed, all departure from the simplicities of physical perfection. A human scarecrow he abhors, and will follow such an one through six streets to express his disapprobation. Extremes of size? whether of tallness or shortness? offend him equally. Whitman was not kinder to "the average man." Nor is the small boy's influence limited to sumptuary and corporeal censorship: by taking up certain songs he "makes" the nation's ballads, and every one knows what that means. Let me train a nation's small boys, I care not who makes its laws. O small boy, true soverign of England, I take off my hat to thee!-to show thee the maker's name in the lining, and satify thy anxious inquiries as to where I got it.
[Sidenote: A Day in Town]
I have often wondered what country children do for a holiday. Do good people go round collecting to give them a day in London or Liverpool or Manchester, so that their stunted lives that stretch on from year to year with never a whiff of town fog, never a glimpse of green 'buses, or dangerous crossings, or furnace-smoke, may be expanded and elevated? If not, I beg to move the starting of a Town Fund at once. Nothing can be more narrowing than rustic existence-there are old yokels whose lives have always moved within a four-mile radius, women who have grown gray without ever knowing what lay beyond the blue hills that girdled their native village. I once knew a chawbacon who came to town and was barked at by a street-dog. He stooped down to pick up one of the rough stones lying in the roadway to ward it off withal, but to his astonishment the stone refused to budge, for it was an integral part of the road. "Danged if that baint queer!" he exclaimed. "At home the dogs be tied and the stones be loose. Here the dogs be loose and the stones be tied." Now, if that man had enjoyed a school excursion to the town when a boy, he would have deprived me of a good story. A glimpse of the town in youth might also do good in checking the perpetual urban immigration, which, alas! removes so many of the rustic population from the soil, and places them under it. To this end all school excursions to London should take place in November. Yes, there is a vast future before that fund, and I shall be happy to start it with five thousand pounds, if two hundred and sixty-three one-armed Scotchmen of good moral character will bind themselves to do the same.
[Sidenote: The Profession of Charity]
Mr. Labouchere is singularly unfair to a new profession. Beggary has long been a recognised profession, with its traditions, customs, and past-masters, and it is time that philanthropy should now be admitted to an equal status. There is no reason in the world why it should be left in the hands of amateurs, who muddle away funds by their lack of science and experience. Supposing a man sees his way to doing good-founding a home for incurables, or drunkards, or establishing a dispensary, or anything you please-why should he not make a living by it? What if he does get five hundred a year, is he not worth it, provided always the institution fulfils a useful function and is not a sham? Surely he does more for Society in return for his money than a Treasury clerk! Probably but for him-but for his wish to earn an income-the charitable institution would never have come into existence. Political economy already shows us how the individual's desire for profit brings humanity all its blessings, opens up new countries for it, and supplies them with wars and railways. If men did not buy shares with a view to a percentage on their savings, the march of civilisation would come to a halt. Since the philanthropy of percentage is so obvious, why should we not recognise the percentage of philanthropy? Charity has gone into business. Why not?
[Sidenote: The Privileges of Poverty]
The only people who seem to escape the malady of the century are the poor. The Weltschmerz touches them not; however great their suffering, it is always individual. The privileges of poverty are, I fear, insufficiently appreciated in these grasping times. It is not only income-tax that the poor man is exempt from. There is a much more painful tax on income than the pecuniary-it is the thought of those who are worsted in the struggle for bare existence. Voe victis! Yet those who achieve the bare existence, who starve not, neither shiver, have surely enviable compensations. Not theirs the distressful, wearying problems of sociology. Far from feeling any responsibility for their fellow-beings, they do not even fulfil their own personal duty to society,-witness the breeding of babies in back streets. They have no sympathy with the troubles of any other class-they eat their hard crust and they drink their bitter beer without a thought of the dyspepsia of the diner-out, and their appetite is not dulled by any suspicion of heart-sickness in good society. Starvation other than physical they do not understand, and spiritual struggles are caviare. The state of the rich does not give them sleepless nights-they have no yearnings to reform them or amend their condition. The terrible overcrowding of the upper classes on Belgravian staircases wakes not a pang; they are untouched by the sufferings of insufficiently-clad ladies in draughty stalls and royal antechambers; and the grievances of old army men move them not. Not theirs to ponder sorrowfully over the lost souls of politicians or the degeneration of public manners. They live their own lives-and, whatsoever the burden, they do not bear any one's bat their own.
[Sidenote: Salvation for the Seraphim]
Herbert Spencer says he knew a retired naval officer in whose mind God figured as a transcendently powerful sea-captain; and we have all heard the story of the English admiral who, when fighting the Dutch, felt sure God wouldn't desert a fellow-countryman. But this ingenuous identification of earthly and divine interests has been carried to the point of imbecility by General Booth in his claim to
"THE LARGEST CIRCULATION."
The War Cry, so the General states, Among the angels circulates, To Heaven having gone; but, oh, That it had first expired below!
Which is uglier-the crude spi
ritualism of the Salvationist or the crude materialism of the scientist? I receive the same sort of shock when I peruse Mrs. Spurgeon's fond picture of her departed husband waylaying the angels at the shining street-corners to preach the gospel to them, as when I read that woman's poetry is inferior to man's because she exhales less carbonic acid.
[Sidenote: Truth-Local and Temporal]
The other day I listened to some green-room persiflage between an actress and an eminent actor-manager. The lady said she had loved him years ago, and thrown herself at his head, but had never been able to bring him to a proposal. I asked if she would have been satisfied with the provincial rights. I am not at all sure that the introduction of this principle of legal partition would not promote domestic harmony, especially in theatrical circles, where the practice already prevails in the matter of plays. Indeed, this principle of partition has already been carried beyond its original sphere. Do I not remember a theatrical lawsuit four or five years ago in which the plaintiff sought to restrain the defendant from styling himself part-author of a piece, on the ground that he (the defendant) had not done a stroke of the work, and had been paid ten pounds for it; while the defendant claimed that he had only parted with his rights as regards London, and that in the provinces he was still entitled to claim a share of the authorship? Pascal long ago pointed out, in his "Pensees," that virtue and vice were largely dependent on distance from the equator (a latitudinarianism in morals that does not seem to have shocked his Port Royal friends). But even he failed to reach this daring conception of "local fame." The marvel is that when once reached it should have been let slip again. It seems to me an invaluable remedy for disputes: absolutely infallible. When Mr. Stuart Cumberland wrote from India to claim the plot of "The Charlatan," how simple to accord him the authorship-in India! At once we perceive a modus vivendi for the followers of Donnelly and the adherents of common-sense. In America Bacon shall be the author of "Hamlet," but the English rights in the piece shall go to Shakespeare. In the same spirit of compromise Cruikshank might have been content to be the author of "Oliver Twist" in the Hebrides and the second-class saloons of Atlantic steamers. Herman should be sole author of "The Silver King" in Pall Mall, and Jones in Piccadilly. Some metropolitan streets belong by one pavement to one parish, and by the other to another; so that in the case of parochial celebrities it would be possible for the rival great men to glare at each other across the road-not, however, daring to cross it, for fear of losing their reputation. The Frenchman's long-standing assumption of Parisian rights in the victory of Waterloo would be put upon a legitimate basis.
Without Prejudice Page 36
