THE SAVOY

AS a modern man, concerned with matters of fine art and living in
London by the sweat of my brain, I dwell in a world which, unable
to live by bread alone, lives spiritually on alcohol and morphia. Young and
excessively sentimental people live on love, and delight in poetry or fine
writing which declares that love is Alpha and Omega ; but an attentive
examination will generally establish the fact that this kind of love, ethereal
as it seems, is merely a symptom of the drugs I have mentioned, and
does not occur independently except in those persons whose normal state
is similar to that induced in healthy persons by narcotic stimulants. If
from the fine art of to-day we set aside feelingless or prosaic art, which
is, properly, not fine art at all, we may safely refer most of the rest to
feeling produced by the teapot, the bottle, or the hypodermic syringe. An
exhibition of the cleverest men and women in London at five p.m., with
their afternoon tea cut off, would shatter many illusions. Tea and coffee
and cigarettes produce conversation ; lager beer and pipes produce routine
journalism ; wine and gallantry produce brilliant journalism, essays and
novels ; brandy and cigars produce violently devotional or erotic poetry;
morphia produces tragic exaltation (useful on the stage) ; and sobriety
produces an average curate’s sermon. Again, strychnine and arsenic may
be taken as pick-me-ups ; doctors quite understand that “tonics” mean
drams of ether; chlorodyne is a universal medicine ; chloral, sulphonal
and the like call up Nature’s great destroyer, artificial sleep ; bromide
of potassium will reduce the over-sensitive man of genius to a con-
dition in which the alighting of a wasp on his naked eyeball will not
make him wink ; haschisch tempts the dreamer by the Oriental glamour of
its reputation ; and gin is a cheap substitute for all these anodynes.
Most of the activity of the Press, the Pulpit, the Platform and the Theatre

14                              THE SAVOY

is only a symptom of the activity of the drug trade, the tea trade, the
tobacco trade and the liquor trade. The world is not going from bad to
worse, it is true ; but the increased facilities which constitute the advance
of civilisation include facilities for drugging oneself. These facilities wipe
whole races of black men off the face of the earth ; and every extension
and refinement of them picks a stratum out of white society and devotes
it to destruction. Such traditions of the gross old habits as have reached
me seem to be based on the idea of first doing your day’s work and then
enjoying yourself by getting drunk. Nowadays you get drunk to enable
you to begin work. Shakespere’s opportunities of meddling with his nerves
were much more limited than Dante Rossetti’s ; but it is not clear that
the advantage of the change lay with Rossetti. Besides, though Shakespere
may, as tradition asserts, have died of drink in a ditch, he at all events
conceived alcohol as an enemy put by a man into his own mouth to steal
away his brains ; whereas the modern man conceives it as an indispensable
means of setting his brains going. We drink and drug, not for the pleasure
of it, but for Dutch inspiration and by the advice of our doctors, as duellists
drink for Dutch courage by the advice of their seconds. Obviously this
systematic, utilitarian drugging and stimulating, though necessarily “moderate”
(so as not to defeat its own object), is more dangerous than the old boozing
if we are to regard the use of stimulants as an evil.

As for me, I do not clearly see where a scientific line can be drawn
between food and stimulants. I cannot say, like Ninon de l’Enclos, that a
bowl of soup intoxicates me ; but it stimulates me as much as I want to be
stimulated, which is, perhaps, all that Ninon meant. Still, I have not failed
to observe that all the drugs, from tea to morphia, and all the drams, from
lager beer to brandy, dull the edge of self-criticism and make a man content
with something less than the best work of which he is soberly capable. He
thinks his work better, when he is really only more easily satisfied with him-
self. Those whose daily task is only a routine, for the sufficient discharge of
which a man need hardly be more than half alive, may seek this fool’s
paradise without detriment to their work; but to those professional men whose

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         15

art affords practically boundless scope for skill of execution and elevation
of thought, to take drug or dram is to sacrifice the keenest, most precious
part of life to a dollop of lazy and vulgar comfort for which no true man of
genius should have any greater stomach than the lady of the manor has for
her ploughman’s lump of fat bacon. To the creative artist stimulants are
especially dangerous, since they produce that terrible dream-glamour in which
the ugly, the grotesque, the wicked, the morbific begin to fascinate and
obsess instead of disgusting. This effect, however faint it may be, is always
produced in some degree by drugs. The mark left on a novel in the Leisure
Hour by a cup of tea may be imperceptible to a bishop’s wife who has
just had two cups ; but the effect is there as certainly as if De Quincey’s
eight thousand drops of laudanum had been substituted.

A very little experience of the world of art and letters will convince
any open-minded person that abstinence, pure and simple, is not a practicable
remedy for this state of things. There is a considerable commercial demand
for maudlin or nightmarish art and literature which no sober person would
produce, the manufacture of which must accordingly be frankly classed
industrially with the unhealthy trades, and morally with the manufacture
of unwholesome sweets for children or the distilling of gin. What the victims
of this industry call imagination and artistic faculty is nothing but attenuated
delirium tremens, like Pasteur’s attenuated hydrophobia. It is useless to
encumber an argument with these predestined children of perdition. The
only profitable cases are those to consider of people engaged in the
healthy pursuit of those arts which afford scope for the greatest mental
and physical energy, the clearest and acutest reason and the most elevated
perception. Work of this kind requires an intensity of energy of which no
ordinary labourer or routine official can form any conception. If the dreams
of Keeleyism could be so far realised as to transmute human brain energy
into vulgar explosive force, the head of Shakespere, used as a bombshell,
might conceivably blow England out of the sea. At all events, the succession
of efforts by which a Shaksperean play, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner
music-drama is produced, though it may not overtax Shakespere, Beethoven

16                              THE SAVOY

or Wagner, must certainly tax even them to the utmost, and would be as
prodigiously impossible to the average professional man as the writing of an
ordinary leading article to a ploughman. What is called professional work
is, in point of severity, just what you choose to make it, either commonplace,
easy and requiring only extensive industry to be lucrative, or else dis-
tinguished, difficult and exacting the fiercest intensive industry in return,
after a probation of twenty years or so, for authority, reputation and an
income only sufficient for simple habits and plain living. The whole
professional world lies between these two extremes. At the one, you
have the man to whom his profession is only a means of making himself
and his family comfortable and prosperous : at the other, you have the man
who sacrifices everything and everybody, himself included, to the perfection
of his work—to the passion for efficiency which is the true master-
passion of the artist. At the one, work is a necessary evil and
moneymaking a pleasure : at the other, work is the objective realisation of
life and moneymaking a nuisance. At the one, men drink and drug
to make themselves comfortable : at the other, to stimulate their working
faculty. Preach mere abstinence at the one, and you are preaching nothing
but diminution of happiness. Preach it at the other, and you are proposing
a reduction of efficiency. If you are to prevail, you must propose a sub-
stitute. And the only one I have yet been able to hit on is—going to
church.

It will not be disputed, I presume, that an unstimulated saint
can work as hard, as long, as finely and, on occasion, as fiercely, as
a stimulated sinner. Recuperation, recreation, inspiration seem to come to
the saint far more surely than to the man who grows coarser and fatter
with every additional hundred a year, and who calls the saint an ascetic.
A comparison of the works of our carnivorous drunkard poets with those
of Shelley, or of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary with that of the vegetarian Littré,
is sufficient to show that the secret of attaining the highest eminence either
in poetry or in dictionary compiling (and all fine literature lies between the
two), is to be found neither in alcohol nor in our monstrous habit of bringing

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         17

millions of useless and disagreeable animals into existence for the express
purpose of barbarously slaughtering them, roasting their corpses and eating
them. I have myself tried the experiment of not eating meat or drinking tea,
coffee or spirits for more than a dozen years past, without, as far I can
discover, placing myself at more than my natural disadvantages relatively to
those colleagues of mine who patronise the slaughter-house and the distillery.
But then I go to church. If you should chance to see, in a country church-
yard, a bicycle leaning against a tombstone, you are not unlikely to find me
inside the church if it is old enough or new enough to be fit for its
purpose. There I find rest without languor and recreation without excitement,
both of a quality unknown to the traveller who turns from the village church
to the village inn and seeks to renew himself with shandygaff. Any place
where men dwell, village or city, is a reflection of the consciousness of every
single man. In my consciousness there is a market, a garden, a dwelling, a
workshop, a lover’s walk—above all, a cathedral. My appeal to the master-
builder is: Mirror this cathedral for me in enduring stone; make it with
hands; let it direct its sure and clear appeal to my senses, so that when my
spirit is vaguely groping after an elusive mood my eye shall be caught by the
skyward tower, showing me where, within the cathedral, I may find my way
to the cathedral within me. With a right knowledge of this great function
of the cathedral builder, and craft enough to set an arch on a couple of pillars,
make doors and windows in a good wall and put a roof over them, any
modern man might, it seems to me, build churches as they built them in the
middle ages, if only the pious founders and the parson would let him. For
want of that knowledge, gentlemen of Mr. Pecksniff’s profession make
fashionable pencil-drawings, presenting what Mr. Pecksniff’s creator elsewhere
calls an architectooralooral appearance, with which, having delighted the
darkened eyes of the committee and the clerics, they have them translated into
bricks and masonry and take a shilling in the pound on the bill, with the
result that the bishop may consecrate the finished building until he is black
in the face without making a real church of it. Can it be doubted by the
pious that babies baptised in such places go to limbo if they die before

18                              THE SAVOY

qualifying themselves for other regions ; that prayers said there do not count ;
nay, that such purposeless, respectable-looking interiors are irreconcilable with
the doctrine of Omnipresence, since the bishop’s blessing is no spell of black
magic to imprison Omnipotence in a place that must needs be intolerable to
Omniscience? At all events, the godhead in me, certified by the tenth
chapter of St. John’s Gospel to those who will admit no other authority,
refuses to enter these barren places. This is perhaps fortunate, since they
are generally kept locked ; and even when they are open, they are jealously-
guarded in the spirit of that Westminster Abbey verger who, not long ago,
had a stranger arrested for kneeling down, and explained, when remonstrated
with, that if that sort of thing were tolerated, they would soon have people
praying all over the place. Happily it is not so everywhere. You may now
ride or tramp into a village with a fair chance of finding the church-door open
and a manuscript placard in the porch, whereby the parson, speaking no less
as a man and a brother than as the porter of the House Beautiful, gives you
to understand that the church is open always for those who have any use for
it. Inside such churches you will often find not only carefully-cherished work
from the ages of faith, which you expect to find noble and lovely, but
sometimes a quite modern furnishing of the interior and draping of the altar,
evidently done, not by contract with a firm celebrated for its illustrated
catalogues, but by someone who loved and understood the church, and who,
when baffled in the search for beautiful things, had at least succeeded in
avoiding indecently commercial and incongruous ones. And then the search
for beauty is not always baffled. When the dean and chapter of a cathedral
want not merely an ugly but a positively beastly pulpit to preach from—
something like the Albert Memorial canopy, only much worse—they always
get it, improbable and unnatural as the enterprise is. Similarly, when an
enlightened country parson wants an unpretending tub to thump, with a few
pretty panels in it and a pleasant shape generally, he will, with a little
perseverance, soon enough find a craftsman who has picked up the thread
of the tradition of his craft from the time when that craft was a fine art—
as may be done nowadays more easily than was possible before we had

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         19

cheap trips and cheap photographs*—and who is only too glad to be allowed
to try his hand at something in the line of that tradition. Some months ago,
bicycling in the west country, I came upon a little church, built long before
the sense of beauty and devotion had been supplanted by the sense of
respectability and talent, in which some neat panels left by a modern carver
had been painted with a few saints on gold backgrounds, evidently by some
woman who had tried to learn what she could from the early Florentine
masters and had done the work in the true votive spirit, without any taint of
the amateur exhibiting his irritating and futile imitations of the celebrated-artist
business. From such humble but quite acceptable efforts, up to the master-
piece in stained glass by William Morris and Burne-Jones which occasionally
astonishes you in places far more remote and unlikely than Birmingham or
Oxford, convincing evidence may be picked up here and there that the decay of
religious art from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth was not caused by any
atrophy of the artistic faculty, but was an eclipse of religion by science and com-
merce. It is an odd period to look back on from the churchgoer’s point of view
—those eclipsed centuries calling their predecessors “the dark ages,” and trying
to prove their own piety by raising, at huge expense, gigantic monuments in
enduring stone (not very enduring, though, sometimes) of their infidelity.
Go to Milan, and join the rush of tourists to its petrified christening-cake
of a cathedral. The projectors of that costly ornament spared no expense to
prove that their devotion was ten times greater than that of the builders of
San Ambrogio. But every pound they spent only recorded in marble that
their devotion was a hundred times less. Go on to Florence and try San
Lorenzo, a really noble church (which the Milan Cathedral is not),

______________________________________________________________

* At the bookstall in the South Kensington Museum, any young craftsman, or other person,
can turn over hundreds of photographs taken by Alinari, of Florence, from the finest work in the
churches and palaces of Italy. He will not be importuned to buy, or grudged access to the port-
folios, which are, fortunately, in charge of a lady who is a first-rate public servant. He can,
however, purchase as many of the photographs as he wants for sixpence each. This invaluable
arrangement, having been made at the public expense, is carefully kept from the public knowledge,
because, if it were properly advertised, complaints might be made by English shopkeepers who
object to our buying Alinari’s cheap photographs instead of their own dear photographs of the
Great Wheel at Earl’s Court.

20                              THE SAVOY

Brunelleschi’s masterpiece. You cannot but admire its intellectual command
of form, its unaffected dignity, its power and accomplishment, its masterly
combination of simplicity and homogeneity of plan with elegance and
variety of detail : you are even touched by the retention of that part of the
beauty of the older time which was perceptible to the Renascent intellect before
its weaning from heavenly food had been followed by starvation. You under-
stand the deep and serious respect which Michael Angelo had for Brunelleschi
—why he said “I can do different work, but not better.” But a few minutes’
walk to Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce, or a turn in the steam-tram
to San Miniato, will bring you to churches built a century or two earlier;
and you have only to cross their thresholds to feel, almost before you have
smelt the incense, the difference between a church built to the pride and
glory of God (not to mention the Medici) and one built as a sanctuary
shielded by God’s presence from pride and glory and all the other burdens
of life. In San Lorenzo up goes your head—every isolating advantage you
have of talent, power or rank asserts itself with thrilling poignancy. In the
older churches you forget yourself, and are the equal of the beggar at
the door, standing on ground made holy by that labour in which we
have discovered the reality of prayer. You may also hit on a church
like the Santissima Annunziata, carefully and expensively brought up
to date, quite in our modern church-restoring manner, by generations
of princes chewing the cud of the Renascence ; and there you will
see the worship of glory and the self-sufficiency of intellect giving way
to the display of wealth and elegance as a guarantee of social
importance—in another word, snobbery. In later edifices you see how
intellect, finding its worshippers growing colder, had to abandon its dignity
and cut capers to attract attention, giving the grotesque, the eccentric, the
baroque, even the profane and blasphemous, until, finally, it is thoroughly
snubbed out of its vulgar attempts at self-assertion, and mopes conventionally
in our modern churches of St. Nicholas Without and St. Walker Within,
locked up, except at service-time, from week’s end to week’s end without ever
provoking the smallest protest from a public only too glad to have an

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         21

excuse for not going into them. You may read the same history of the
human soul in any art you like to select ; but he who runs may read it in
the streets by looking at the churches.

Now, consider for a moment the prodigious increase of the population of
Christendom since the church of San Zeno Maggiore was built at Verona,
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Let a man go and renew himself
for half an hour occasionally in San Zeno, and he need eat no corpses, nor
drink any drugs or drams to sustain him. Yet not even all Verona, much
less all Europe, could resort to San Zeno in the thirteenth century ; whereas,
in the nineteenth, a thousand perfect churches would be but as a thousand
drops of rain on Sahara. Yet in London, with four millions and a quarter of
people in it, how many perfect or usable churches are there? And of the
few we have, how many are apparent to the wayfarer? Who, for instance,
would guess from the repulsive exterior of Westminster Abbey that there are
beautiful chapels and a noble nave within, or cloisters without, on the
hidden side?

I remember, a dozen years ago, Parson Shuttleworth, of St. Nicholas
Cole Abbey in the city, tried to persuade the city man to spend his mid-day
hour of rest in church ; guaranteeing him immunity from sermons, prayers
and collections, and even making the organ discourse Bach and Wagner,
instead of Goss and Jackson. This singular appeal to a people walking in
darkness was quite successful: the mid-day hour is kept to this day; but
Parson Shuttleworth has to speak for five minutes—by general and insistent
request—as Housekeeper, though he has placed a shelf of books in the
church for those who would rather read than listen to him or the organ.
This was a good thought ; for all inspired books should be read either in
church or on the eternal hills. St. Nicholas Cole Abbey makes you feel, the
moment you enter it, that you are in a rather dingy rococo banqueting-room,
built for a city company. Corpulence and comfort are written on every stone
of it. Considering that money is dirt cheap now in the city, it is strange that
Mr. Shuttleworth cannot get twenty thousand pounds to build a real church.
He would, soon enough, if the city knew what a church was. The twenty

22                              THE SAVOY

thousand pounds need not be wasted, either, on an “architect.” I was
lately walking in a polite suburb of Newcastle, when I saw a church— a
    new church—with, of all things, a detached campanile ; at sight of which
I could not help exclaiming profanely : “How the deuce did you find your
way to Newcastle?” So I went in and, after examining the place with
much astonishment, addressed myself to the sexton, who happened to be
about. I asked him who built the church, and he gave me the name of
Mr. Mitchell, who turned out, however, to be the pious founder—a ship-
builder prince, with some just notion of his princely function. But this
was not what I wanted to know ; so I asked who was the—the word stuck
in my throat a little—the architect. He, it appeared, was one Spence. “Was
that marble carving in the altar and that mosaic decoration round the chancel
part of his design?” said I. “Yes,” said the sexton, with a certain surliness
as if he suspected me of disapproving. “The ironwork is good,” I remarked,
to appease him ; “who did that?” “Mr. Spence did.” “Who carved that
wooden figure of St. George?” (the patron saint of the edifice). “Mr.
Spence did.” “Who painted those four panels in the dado with figures in
oil?” “Mr. Spence did : he meant them to be at intervals round the
church, but we put them all together by mistake.” “Then, perhaps, he
designed the stained windows, too?” “Yes, most of em.” I got so irritated
at this—feeling that Spence was going too far—that I remarked sarcas-
tically that no doubt Mr. Spence designed Mr. Mitchell’s ships as
well, which turned out to be the case as far as the cabins were
concerned. Clearly, this Mr. Spence is an artist-craftsman with a
vengeance. Many people, I learnt, came to see the church, especially in
the first eighteen months; but some of the congregation thought it too
ornamental. (At St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, by the way, some of the
parishioners objected at first to Mr. Shuttleworth as being too religious.)
Now, as a matter of fact, this Newcastle church of St. George’s is not
ornamental enough. Under modern commercial conditions, it is impossible
to get from the labour in the building-trade that artistic quality in the
actual masonry which makes a good mediæval building independent of

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         23

applied ornament. Wherever Mr. Spence’s artist’s hand has passed over
the interior surface, the church is beautiful. Why should his hand not pass
over every inch of it? It is true, the complete finishing of a large church
of the right kind has hardly ever been carried through by one man. Some-
times the man has died: more often the money has failed. But in this
instance the man is not dead ; and surely money cannot fail in the most
fashionable suburb of Newcastle. The chancel with its wonderful mosaics, the
baptistry with its ornamented stones, the four painted panels of the dado, are
only samples of what the whole interior should and might be. All that cold
contract masonry must be redeemed, stone by stone, by the travail of the
artist-churchmaker. Nobody, not even an average respectable Sabbath-
keeper, will dare to say then that it is over-decorated, however out of place
in it he may feel his ugly Sunday clothes and his wife’s best bonnet.
Howbeit, this church of St. George’s in Newcastle proves my point, namely,
that churches fit for their proper use can still be built by men who follow
the craft of Orcagna instead of the profession of Mr. Pecksniff, and built
cheaply, too ; for I took the pains to ascertain what this large church
cost, and found that ￡30,000 was well over the mark. For aught
I know, there may be dozens of such churches rising in the country ; for
Mr. Spence’s talent, though evidently a rare and delicate one, cannot be
unique, and what he has done in his own style other men can do in theirs,
if they want to, and are given the means by those who can make money,
and are capable of the same want.

There is still one serious obstacle to the use of churches on the very
day when most people are best able and most disposed to visit them. I
mean, of course, the services. When I was a little boy, I was compelled
to go to church on Sunday ; and though I escaped from that intolerable
bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so violently against churchgoing
that twenty years elapsed before, in foreign lands and in pursuit of works
of art, I became once more a churchgoer. To this day. my flesh creeps
when I recall that genteel suburban Irish Protestant church, built by
Roman Catholic workmen who would have considered themselves damned

24                              THE SAVOY

had they crossed its threshold afterwards. Every separate stone, every pane
of glass, every fillet of ornamental ironwork— half-dog-collar, half-coronet— in
that building must have sowed a separate evil passion in my young heart.
Yes ; all the vulgarity, savagery, and bad blood which has marred my literary
work, was certainly laid upon me in that house of Satan! The mere nullity
of the building could make no positive impression on me : but what could,
and did, were the unnaturally motionless figures of the congregation in their
Sunday clothes and bonnets, and their set faces, pale with the malignant
rigidity produced by the suppression of all expression. And yet these people
were always moving and watching one another by stealth, as convicts com-
municate with one another. So was I. I had been told to keep my restless
little limbs still all through those interminable hours ; not to talk ; and, above
all, to be happy and holy there and glad that I was not a wicked little boy
playing in the fields instead of worshipping God. I hypocritically acquiesced ;
but the state of my conscience may be imagined, especially as I implicitly
believed that all the rest of the congregation were perfectly sincere and good.
I remember at that time dreaming one night that I was dead and had gone
to heaven. The picture of heaven which the efforts of the then Established
Church of Ireland had conveyed to my childish imagination, was a waiting
room with walls of pale sky-coloured tabbinet, and a pew-like bench running all
round, except at one corner, where there was a door. I was, somehow, aware
that God was in the next room, accessible through that door. I was seated
on the bench with my ankles tightly interlaced to prevent my legs dangling,
behaving myself with all my might before the grown-up people, who all
belonged to the Sunday congregation, and were either sitting on the bench
as if at church or else moving solemnly in and out as if there were
a dead person in the house. A grimly-handsome lady who usually sat in a
corner seat near me in church, and whom I believed to be thoroughly con-
versant with the arrangements of the Almighty, was to introduce me presently
into the next room—a moment which I was supposed to await with joy and
enthusiasm. Really, of course, my heart sank like lead within me at the
thought ; for I felt that my feeble affectation of piety could not impose on

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         25

Omniscience, and that one glance of that all-searching eye would discover
that I had been allowed to come to heaven by mistake. Unfortunately for
the interest of this narrative, I awoke, or wandered off into another dream,
before the critical moment arrived. But it goes far enough to show that
I was by no means an insusceptible subject : indeed, I am sure, from other
early experiences of mine, that if I had been turned loose in a real church,
and allowed to wander and stare about, or hear noble music there instead
of that most accursed Te Deum of Jackson’s and a senseless droning of
the Old Hundredth, I should never have seized the opportunity of a great
evangelical revival, which occurred when I was still in my teens, to begin
my literary career with a letter to the Press (which was duly printed),
announcing with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of
my respectable connections, that I was an atheist. When, later on, I was
led to the study of the economic basis of the respectability of that and similar
congregations, I was inexpressibly relieved to find that it represented a mere
passing phase of industrial confusion, and could never have substantiated its
claims to my respect if, as a child, I had been able to bring it to book. To
this very day, whenever there is the slightest danger of my being mistaken
for a votary of the blue tabbinet waiting-room or a supporter of that morality
in which wrong and right, base and noble, evil and good, really mean
nothing more than the kitchen and the drawing-room, I hasten to claim
honourable exemption, as atheist and socialist, from any such complicity.

When I at last took to church-going again, a kindred difficulty beset me,
especially in Roman Catholic countries. In Italy, for instance, churches are
used in such a way that priceless pictures become smeared with filthy tallow-
soot, and have sometimes to be rescued by the temporal power and placed in
national galleries. But worse than this are the innumerable daily services
which disturb the truly religious visitor. If these were decently and intelli-
gently conducted by genuine mystics to whom the Mass was no mere rite
or miracle, but a real communion, the celebrants might reasonably claim
a place in the church as their share of the common human right to its
use. But the average Italian priest, personally uncleanly, and with chronic

26                              THE SAVOY

catarrh of the nose and throat, produced and maintained by sleeping and
living in frowsy, ill-ventilated rooms, punctuating his gabbled Latin only
by expectorative hawking, and making the decent guest sicken and shiver
every time the horrible splash of spitten mucus echoes along the vaulting
from the marble steps of the altar : this unseemly wretch should be seized
and put out, bell, book, candle and all, until he learns to behave himself.
The English tourist is often lectured for his inconsiderate behaviour in
Italian churches, for walking about during service, talking loudly, thrusting
himself rudely between a worshipper and an altar to examine a painting,
even for stealing chips of stone and scrawling his name on statues. But
as far as the mere disturbance of the services is concerned, and the often
very evident disposition of the tourist—especially the experienced tourist—
to regard the priest and his congregation as troublesome intruders, a week
spent in Italy will convince any unprejudiced person that this is a perfectly
reasonable attitude. I have seen inconsiderate British behaviour often enough
both in church and out of it. The slow-witted Englishman who refuses to
get out of the way of the Host, and looks at the bellringer going before it
with “Where the devil are you shoving to?” written in every pucker of his
free-born British brow, is a familiar figure to me ; but I have never seen any
stranger behave so insufferably as the officials of the church habitually do.
It is the sacristan who teaches you, when once you are committed to tipping
him, not to waste your good manners on the kneeling worshippers who are
snatching a moment from their daily round of drudgery and starvation to be
comforted by the Blessed Virgin or one of the saints ; it is the officiating
priest who makes you understand that the congregation are past shocking by
any indecency that you would dream of committing, and that the black looks
of the congregation are directed at the foreigner and the heretic only, and
imply a denial of your right as a human being to your share of the use of
the church. That right should be unflinchingly asserted on all proper occasions.
I know no contrary right by which the great Catholic churches made for the
world by the great church-builders should be monopolised by any sect as
against any man who desires to use them. My own faith is clear : I am

                      ON GOING TO CHURCH                                         27

a resolute Protestant ; I believe in the Holy Catholic Church ; in the Holy
Trinity of Father, Son (or Mother, Daughter) and Spirit ; in the Com-
munion of Saints, the Life to Come, the Immaculate Conception, and the
everyday reality of Godhead and the Kingdom of Heaven. Also, I believe
that salvation depends on redemption from belief in miracles; and I regard
St. Athanasius as an irreligious fool—that is, in the only serious sense of
the word, a damned fool. I pity the poor neurotic who can say, “Man
that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of
misery,” as I pity a maudlin drunkard ; and I know that the real religion
of to-day was made possible only by the materialist-physicists and atheist-
critics who performed for us the indispensable preliminary operation of
purging us thoroughly of the ignorant and vicious superstitions which were
thrust down our throats as religion in our helpless childhood. How those who
assume that our churches are the private property of their sect would think
of this profession of faith of mine I need not describe. But am I, therefore,
to be denied access to the place of spiritual recreation which is my inheritance
as much as theirs? If, for example, I desire to follow a good old custom
by pledging my love to my wife in the church of our parish, why should I
be denied due record in the registers unless she submits to have a moment
of deep feeling made ridiculous by the reading aloud of the naive impertinences
of St. Peter, who, on the subject of Woman, was neither Catholic nor Christian,
but a boorish Syrian fisherman. If I want to name a child in the church, the
prescribed service may be more touched with the religious spirit—once or
twice beautifully touched—but, on the whole, it is time to dismiss our prayer-
book as quite rotten with the pessimism of the age which produced it. In
spite of the stolen jewels with which it is studded, an age of strength and
faith and noble activity can have nothing to do with it : Caliban might have
constructed such a ritual out of his own terror of the supernatural, and such
fragments of the words of the saints as he could dimly feel some sort of
glory in.

My demand will now be understood without any ceremonious formulation
of it. No nation, working at the strain we face, can live cleanly without

28                              THE SAVOY

public-houses in which to seek refreshment and recreation. To supply that
vital want we have the drinking-shop with its narcotic, stimulant poisons, the
conventicle with its brimstone-flavoured hot gospel, and the church. In the
church alone can our need be truly met, nor even there save when we leave
outside the door the materialisations that help us to believe the in-
credible, and the intellectualisations that help us to think the unthink-
able, completing the refuse-heap of “isms” and creeds with our vain lust for
truth and happiness, and going in without thought or belief or prayer or any
other vanity, so that the soul, freed from all that crushing lumber, may open
all its avenues of life to the holy air of the true Catholic Church.

TO NANCY

                                                                        Weymouth, 29th September.

    IT happens that I have seen much of you, Nancy, at an eventful
moment—eventful for yourself I mean, in your life and your career—
and here, because I like you, and like to think of and reflect on you, there
is written down, straight and full, the record of my impression : concealing
nothing, though written to yourself : a letter absolutely frank, looking all
facts in the face; for, young though you are, you are intelligent enough
to bear them. My letter you may find tedious, perhaps, but at all
events unusual ; for letters, even when detailed, generally omit much, hide
some part of a thought—put the thing in a way that pleases the writer,
or is intended to please the receiver. Here am I at the end of my first
page, Nancy, and all preface ! Well, I shall recall, to begin with, how it
was that I met you.

    Acquit me, please, of any general love of your over-praised Music Hall.
Neither it nor the Theatre counts for much in my life. I like you personally :
I imagine a Future for you ; but I am not anxious for “the status of the
profession.” Life, it is just possible, has other goals than that of being
received in smart drawing-rooms—whatever art you practice, its practice is your
reward. Society, my dear, has bestowed of late upon the stage “lover” an
attention that is misplaced. We are getting near the end of it : the cabotin,
in a frock coat, no longer dominates the situation at afternoon teas. Youths
from the green-room have, in the Past, over the luncheon-table, imparted
to me, with patronage, their views about Painting ; to me, Nancy, to your old
friend, who has painted for thirty years—a full Academician one year since, with
but few honours (as men call them) left to gain : few years, alas ! in which to
live to gain them. Child as you are, your common sense—that neatly-balanced
little mind of yours, so unusually clear—that neatly-balanced mind assures

32                              THE SAVOY

you that it is not the profession you follow, but what you have been able to
do in it, and what you really are, that gives you—I mean, of course, gives
any one—legitimate claim to be in privileged places, to be motioned to
the velvet of the social sward. “Artist,” indeed ! As well expect to be received
with welcome for having had sufficient capital to buy a camp stool and a few
feet of German moulding with which to frame a canvas sent to the Dudley
Gallery, as to be suffered to dictate and to dogmatise in virtue of a well-worn
coat and an appearance at a London theatre !

    You have read so far, and yet I have not reminded you how it was
that you and I came to know each other. It was just two years ago, in
this same town from which I write to you. I saw a photograph that
struck me, at the door of your place of entertainment—at the door of the
“People’s Delight.” The face was young—but I have known youth. Pretty,
it was— but a fashionable portrait-painter lives with prettiness. It was so
monstrously refined !

    At three o’clock, they said, there would be an entertainment— Miss
Nancy Nanson would certainly be seen. And in I went, with a companion—
old Sir James Purchas, of Came Manor— my host more than once in these
parts. Sir James, you know, is not a prey to the exactions of conventionality,
and there was no reason why the humble entertainment your lounge and
shelter offered to the tripper should not afford us half an hour’s amusement.

    The blazing September afternoon you recollect— September with the
glare of the dog days. The “people,” it seemed, were not profiting that day
by the “People’s Delight,” for the place was all but empty—everyone out of
doors—and we wandered, not aimlessly indeed, but not successfully, among
those cavernous, half-darkened regions, among the stalls for fruits and sweets
and cheap jewelry, in search of a show. A turn, and we came suddenly on
rows of empty chairs placed in front of a small stage, with drawn curtain ;
and, at a money-taker’s box (for reserved seats, as I supposed)—leaning over
the money-taker’s counter, in talk with someone who came, it may be, from
a selling-stall—there was a child, a little girl. Sir James touched my arm,
directing my attention to her, and I took the initiative—said to the little girl :

                                TO NANCY                                                     33

“We came to see Miss Nancy Nanson. You can tell us, perhaps, when is the
show going to begin?” “There won’t be any entertainment this afternoon,”
the girl answered; “because, you see, there isn’t any audience. I am Miss
Nancy Nanson.” The dignity of the child !

    The fact was, you remember, that photograph at the entrance gave the
impression of a girl of seventeen ; and I did not at all connect it with the
figure of the well-spoken, silver-voiced, elegant child, who proved to be your-
self—since then my model and my youthful friend. But the moment you
spoke, and when my eyes, still not quite used to the obscurity, took in your real
face and those refined expressions, the identity was established, though the
photograph, with its dexterous concealment, showed more the Nancy Nanson
you were going to be, than the Nancy Nanson you were. I was pleased,
nevertheless ; and we talked about yourself for a few minutes ; and when you
said (because I asked you) that there would be an entertainment next day, I
told you we would come to see it, certainly. And Sir James was indulgent.
And I am a man of my word.

    And now there is a bit we can afford to hurry over ; for the next
stage of our acquaintance does not advance, appreciably, the action of your
story. We came ; we saw your entertainment : your three turns : singing,
dancing: and pretty enough it was ; but yet, so-so. You were such a pleasant
child, of course we applauded you—so refined, yet singing, tolerably, such
nonsense. Even then, it was your charming little personality, you know—it
was not your performance that had in it attractiveness. Next day, I left the
neighbourhood.

    For two years after that, I never saw Miss Nancy Nanson, “vocalist and
dancer” ; only once heard of and read of you—only once, perhaps, thought of
you. The once was last Christmas—your name I saw was advertised in a
pantomime played by “juveniles.” I might, it is just possible, have gone to see it.
But the average “juvenile !”—think !—and then, the influenza and the weather !

    Well ! this present glowing September, Nancy—glowing and golden as
it was two years ago—brought me again, and very differently, into touch
with you. The Past is over. Now I fix your attention—for you are still

34                              THE SAVOY

patient with me—I fix your attention on the Present, and I point out
to you, in detail—I realise to myself—how the time is critical, eventful ;
how you stand, Nancy, upon a certain brink. I am not going to prophecy
what you may be ; but I tell you what you are. The real You, you know :
something better and deeper than that which those seven pastels, any or all of
them together, show you—my delighted notes of your external beauty ; touched,
I think, with some charm of grace that answers well to your own ; and
mimicking, not badly, the colours and contours of your stage presence.
Nothing more. Chance gleams—an artist’s “snap-shots” at Miss Nancy
Nanson, vocalist and dancer, at sixteen. (Sixteen yesterday.) But you—No!

    This present September—a fortnight since—I came again to Weymouth ;
this time alone ; putting up at the old “Gloucester” (it was George the Third’s
house) from which I write to you ; and not at Came Manor in the neighbour-
hood. In the Weymouth of to-day one is obliged, in nearly every walk, to
pass the “People’s Delight”—your cheap vulgarity, my dear, that the great
Georgian time would have resented. I passed it soon, and the two names
biggest upon the bills were, “Achilles, the Strong Man”—there are things in
which even a decayed watering place cannot afford to be behind the
fashion—”Achilles, the Strong Man,” then, and “Miss Nancy Nanson.”
Again did I go in ; took the seat, exactly, that I had taken two years since,
in the third row of chairs ; and while a band of three made casual, lifeless,
introductory music, I waited for the show.

    The curtain rose presently on a great, living, breathing, over-energetic
statue—a late Renaissance bronze, by John of Bologna, he seemed—that
muscular piece of colour and firm form, that nigger, posed effectively,
and of prodigious force. “John of Bologna”—but you never heard of him!
Then he began his operations—Achilles, the Strong Man—holding, and
only by his teeth, enormous weights ; and rushing round with one, two,
hundredweight, as if it were a feather ; lifting, with that jaw of his, masses
of iron ; crashing them on the stage again, and standing afterwards with
quivering muscles, heaving chest. Applause—I joined in it myself in
common courtesy—and then the curtain fell.

                                TO NANCY                                                     35

    A wait. The band struck up again—it was your first turn. A slim
and dainty figure, so very slight, so very young, in a lad’s evening dress,
advanced with swiftness towards the footlights, and bowed in a wide
sweep that embraced everyone. Then you began to sing—and not too well,
you know—a song of pretty-enough sentiment ; the song of a stripling whose
sweetheart was his mother. His mother, she sufficed for him. It suited
your young years. A tender touch or two, and with a boy’s manliness.
Applause! You vanished.

    You vanished to return. In a girl’s dress this time, with movements
now more swift and now more graceful. Another song, and this time dancing
with it. It was dancing you were born for. “She has grown another being—
and yet with the old pleasantness—in these two years,” I thought. “A child
no longer.” In colour and agility you were a brilliant show. I have told you
since, in talking, what I thought of you. You were not a Sylvia Grey, my dear ;
still less that other Sylvia Voltaire praised, contrasting her with the Camargo.
The Graces danced like Sylvia, Voltaire said—like the Camargo, the wild
nymphs. No ! you were not Voltaire’s Sylvia, any more than you were
Sylvia Grey. Sylvia Grey’s dance is perfect, from the waist upwards—as
an observant actress pointed out to me, with whom I saw it. Swan-like in
the holding and slow movement of the head and neck ; exquisite in the
undulations of the torso. Where Sylvia Grey ends—I mean where her
remarkableness ends (for she has legs like another, I take it)—you, my dear,
begin. But you want an Ingres to do you justice. The slimness of the
girl, and what a fineness, as of race ; and then, the agility of infinite practice,
and sixteen young years !

    A third turn—then it was that you were agile most of all. The flying
feet went skyward. Black shoes rushed, comet-like, so far above your head,
and clattered on the floor again ; whilst against the sober crimson of the
background curtain—a dull, thin stuff, stretched straightly—gleamed the white
of moving skirts, and blazed the boss of brightest scarlet that nestled some-
where in the brown gold of your head. Then, flushed and panting, it
was over.

36                              THE SAVOY

    Next day, in a gaunt ante-room, or extra chamber, its wooden floor
quite bare, and the place furnished only with a couple of benches and a
half-voiceless semi-grand piano—the wreck of an Erard that was great once
—in that big, bare room, Nancy, where my pastels since have caught
your pose in lilac, rose and orange, but never your grave character, I came
upon, and closely noted, and, for a quarter of an hour, talked to, a sedate
young girl in black—a lady who, in all her bearing, ways, gesture, silver
voice, was as refined as any, young or old, that I have been in contact
with in my long life—and I have lived abundantly amongst great ladies, from
stately, restful Quakeress to the descendant of the “hundred Earls.” No one
is more refined than you. This thing may not last with you. Whether it
lasts depends, in great measure, upon the life you lead, in the strange world
opening to you. Your little craft, Nancy, your slender skiff, will have some
day to labour over voluminous seas.

    You remember what you told me, in the great ante-room, standing
by the wreck of the Erard, that your fingers touched. All your life
to that time. You were frankness absolutely ; standing there in your
dull, black frock that became you to perfection ; standing with hat of
broad, black straw—the clear-cut nose, the faultless mouth, the bright-brown
hair curled short about your head, and the limpid look of your serene eyes,
steadily grey. It was interesting, and amusing too, your story. I told you,
you remember, how much you had got on, how changed you were, what
progress I had noticed. And you said a pretty “Thank you.” It was clear
that you meant it. We were friends. I asked who taught you—so far
as anything can be taught in this world, where, at bottom, one’s way is,
after all, one’s own. You said, your mother. And I told you I’d seen your
name in some London Christmas play-bill. “I had a big success,” you said.
What a theatrical moment it was !—the one occasion in all my little dealings
with you in which I found the traditions of “the profession” stronger with you
than your own personal character. Now, your own personal instinct is to be
modest and natural; the traditions of “the profession” are to boast. You did
boast, Nancy! You had a big success, had you? Perhaps, for yourself ;

                                TO NANCY                                                     37

I do not say you failed. But the piece—my dear, you know it was a frost.
Did it run three weeks? Come now! And someone, out of jealousy, paid
four guineas—she or her friends did—to get you a bad notice somewhere
in back-stairs journalism. And they got it, and then repented of it. You
were friends with them afterwards. But what a world, Nancy !—a world
in which, for four guineas, a scoundrel contributes his part towards damning
your career !

    You remember, before I asked if I might make some sketches of you,
you were turning over a song that had been sent you by “a gentleman at
Birmingham.” He had had it “ruled” for you, and wanted you to buy it
for three pounds. It was “rather a silly song,” you thought. I settled
myself quietly to master the sense, or, as was more probable, the nonsense, of
it. My dear, it was blank rubbish ! But you were not going to have it,
you said. “Mamma would never buy a song I didn’t like and take to.”
That was well, I thought. And then you slowly closed the ruined Erard, and
were going away. But on the road down-stairs, remember, I persuaded you to
ask your mother that you might give me sittings. I told you who I was. And
in the gaunt ante-room, lit well from above, I had a sitting next day. It
was the first of several. And your mother trusted me, and trusted you, as
you deserve to be trusted. And we worked hard together, didn’t we ?—you
posing, and I drawing. And there are seven pastels which record— tant bien
que mal, my dear— the delightful outside of you, the side the public might itself
see, if it had eyes to really see—the flash of you in the dance, snow-white or
carmine ; and I got all that with alacrity—”swift means” I took, to “radiant
ends”—the poise of the slim figure, the white frock slashed with gold, the
lifted foot, and that gleam of vivid scarlet in your hair against the background
of most sober crimson.

    This tranquil Sunday I devote to writing to you, is the day after
your last appearance at the “People’s Delight.” You and your mother,
very soon, you tell me, leave Weymouth and your old associations—it is your
home, you know—and you leave it for ever. The country, you admit, is
beautiful, but you are tired of the place. I don’t much wonder. And you

38                              THE SAVOY

leave it—the great bay, the noble chalk downs, the peace of Dorset and
its gleaming quiet—you leave it for lodgings in the Waterloo Road. For
you must be among the agents for the Halls. Though you have been
upon the Stage since you were very little, you have but lately, so you
say, put your heart into it. Well! it is not unnatural. But no more
Sunday drives into the lovely country, recollect, with your brother, who is
twenty-one and has his trade ; and your uncle, who is in a good way of
business here, you said—your uncle, the plumber.

    And so, last night being your last night, Nancy, it was almost like
a Benefit. As for your dancing, you meant, I knew, to give us the cup
filled—yes, filled and running over. I had noticed that, on some earlier
evening, when Little Lily Somebody—a dumpling child, light of foot, but with
not one “line” in all her meaningless, fat form—when Little Lily Somebody
had capered her infantile foolishness, to the satisfaction of those who rejoice
in mere babyhood, someone presented her with a bouquet. And you
danced, excellently, just after her—you, height and grace, slimness and
soul—and someone, with much effusion, handed you up a box of chocolates.
And you smiled pleasantly. I saw there was a little conflict in your mind,
however, between the gracious recognition of what was well-enough meant, and
the resentment—well, the resentment we can hardly call it : the regret, at all
events—at being treated so very visibly as a child—and yesterday you were to
be sixteen ! So I myself—who, if this small indignity had not been offered
you, might conceivably have given you, in private, at all events, a basket
of fine fruit—I meant to offer you flowers. It might have been fruit, I say,
if smuggled into the ante-room where I had done my pastels ; for I had seen
you once there, crunching, quite happily, imperfect apples between perfect
teeth—your perfect teeth, almost the only perfect things, Nancy, in an
imperfect world.

    But it had to be flowers. So I sent round to the dressing-room, just
as you were getting ready, two button-holes merely—wired button-holes—
of striped carnations, red or wine-coloured. They were not worn in your
first turn. They were not worn in your second. In your third turn, I

                                TO NANCY                                                     39

espied them at your neck’s side, in the fury of your dance. Already there are
people, I suppose, who would have thought those striped carnations happy—
tossed, tossed to pieces, in the warmth of your throat.

    Your second turn, last night, you know, was in flowing white, slashed
with gold—old-gold velvet—with pale stockings. The third—when the
Bowers died happy in your riot—in pure white alone, with stockings
black. You remember the foot held in your hand, as you swing round upon
the other toe—and one uplifted leg seen horizontal, in its straight and modelled
slimness.

    My dear—what were my little flowers? Who could have known—
when you had finished—the great things still to come? When the applause
seemed over, and the enthusiasm of some lieutenant from Dorchester was,
as I take it, abated and suppressed—when the applause was over, a certain
elocutionist (Mr. Paris Brown, wasn’t it?) brought you again upon the stage,
and saying it was your last appearance, made you some presentation:
a brooch from himself, “of no intrinsic value” he informed us— I willingly
believed him—a bracelet from I don’t know who—that had an “intrinsic
value,” I surmise—and a bouquet, exquisite. It was “From an admirer,”
Mr. Paris Brown, the elocutionist, read out, from an accompanying card.
Then he congratulated you upon your Past ; prophesied as to your Future ; and,
in regard to the presents to you, he said, in words that were quite happily
chosen—because, Nancy, they were reticent while they were expressive—
“She is but a— girl ; and she has done her duty by the management. Long
may she be a credit to her father and mother !” Your mother I was well
aware of—your mother I respect ; and you, you love her. But your father
—he was invented, I think, for the occasion, as an additional protection,
should the designs upon you of the admirer from Dorchester prove to be not
altogether such as they ought to be. The precaution was unnecessary ; it
was taking Time by the forelock. Our young friend looked ingenuous,
and smitten grievously—you seem so big upon the stage, Nancy—so grown
up, I mean. I could, I think, have toned down his emotions, had I told
him you were a bare sixteen.

40                              THE SAVOY

    Nancy, there is—for me—a certain pathos in this passage of yours
from childhood into ripening girlhood; a book closed, as it were ; a phase
completed ; an ending of the way. “What chapter is to open? Nancy Nanson
—what phase or facet of her life,” I ask myself, “is now so soon to be
presented? What other way, what unfamiliar one, is to follow her blameless
and dutiful childhood?” I had a restless night, Nancy. Thinking of this,
one saw—ridiculously perhaps—a presage in the first bouquet, a threat in
the first bracelet—in the admirer’s card. Would she be like the rest?
—at least, too many. Besmirched, too?

    Remember, Nancy, I am no Puritan at all. I recognise Humanity’s
instincts. There is little I do not tolerate. I recognise the gulf that
separates the accidentally impolitic from the essentially wrong. But we
owe things to other people—to the World’s laws. We have responsi-
bilities. Noblesse oblige ; and all superiority is Noblesse. “She must not be like
the rest,” I said, last night, in broken dreams ; “dining, winking, leering even,
since sold at last and made common.” In broken dreams, last night—or in
wakeful hours—your feet tossed higher ; your gay blood passed into the place
—electrical, overpowering. You can be so grave and sweet, you know ; and
you can be so mad.

    Have you ever lain awake, in the great, long darkness, and watched in
the darkness a procession—the people of your Past and all your Future?
But you have no Past. For myself, I have watched them. My mother, who
is long gone ; those who were good to me, and whom I slighted ; the relations
who failed me ; the friend I lost. And the uncertain figures of the Future !
But the line of the Future is short enough for me—for you, it is all
yours. Last night, it seemed to me, the dark was peopled with your
enemies ; with your false friends, who were coming—always coming—the
unavoidable crowd of the egotistic destroyers of youth. Their dark hearts,
I thought, look upon her as a prey : some of them cruel, some of them
cynical, yet some of them only careless. And I wished that last night
had not come—your sixteenth birthday—with the applause and gifts and
menacing triumph.

                                TO NANCY                                                     41

    There are women, perhaps, men cannot wrong—since they have
wronged themselves too much. “This is a good girl,” I said ; and my
over-anxious mind—in real affection for her—cries out to all the horrid
forces of the world : “Leave Nancy!”

    Nancy, when you read this, you smile—and naturally—at your most
sombre friend. You think, of course, with all the reckless trust, courageous
confidence, of girlhood, “So superfluous! So unnecessary!”

    Go the straight way !   .   .   . Whatever way you go, I shall always
be your friend.

                                                                        FREDERICK WEDMORE.

MANDOLINE

A GOOD PRINCE

    I FIRST saw him one morning of last summer, in the Green Park.
Though short, even insignificant, in stature and with an obvious
tendency to be obese, he had that unruffled, Olympian air, which is so
sure a sign of the Blood Royal.  In a suit of white linen he looked
serenely cool, despite the heat.  Perhaps I should have thought him, had
I not been versed in the Almanach de Gotha, a trifle older than he is.
He did not raise his hat in answer to my salute, but smiled most
graciously and made as though he would extend his hand to me, mistaking
me, I doubt not, for one of his friends.  A member of his suite, however,
said something to him in an undertone, whereat he smiled again and took
no further notice of me.

    I do not wonder the people idolise him.  His almost blameless life has
been passed among them, nothing in it hidden from their knowledge.  When
they look upon his dear presentment in the photographer’s window— the
shrewd, kindly eyes under the high forehead, the sparse locks so carefully
distributed— words of loyalty only and of admiration rise to their lips.
For of all princes in modern days he seems to fulfil, most perfectly, the
obligation of princely rank.  Nήπɩος he might have been called in the heroic
age, when princes were judged according to their mastery of the sword or
of the bow, or have seemed, to those mediaeval eyes that loved to see a
scholar’s pate under the crown, an ignoramus.  We are less exigent now.
We do but ask of our princes that they should live among us, be often
manifest to our eyes, set a perpetual example of a right life. We bid
them be the ornaments of our State.  Too often they do not attain to
our ideal.  They give, it may be, a half-hearted devotion to soldiering, or
pursue pleasure merely— tales of their frivolity raising now and again the
anger of a public swift to envy them their temptations.  But against this

46                              THE SAVOY

admirable Prince no such charges can be made.  Never (as yet, at least) has
he cared to “play at soldiers.”  By no means has he shocked the Puritans.
Though it is no secret that he prefers the society of ladies, not one breath of
scandal has ever touched his name.  Of how many English princes could
this be said, in days when Figaro, quill in hand, inclines his ear to every
key-hole?

    Upon the one action that were well obliterated from his record
I need not long insist.  The wife of an aged ex-Premier came to have an
audience and pay her respects.  Hardly had she spoken, when His Royal
Highness, in a fit of unreasoning displeasure, struck her a violent blow
with his clenched fist.  The incident is deplorable, but belongs, after all,
to an earlier period of his life ; and, were it not that no appreciation
must rest upon the suppression of any scandal, I should not have referred
to it. For the rest, I find no stain, soever faint, upon his life.  The
simplicity of his tastes is the more admirable for that he is known to
care not at all for what may be reported in the newspapers.  He has
never touched a card, never entered a play-house.  In no stud of racers
has he indulged, preferring to the finest blood – horse ever bred a certain
white and woolly lamb with a blue riband at its neck. This he is never
tired of fondling.  It is with him, like the roebuck of Henri Quatre,
wherever he goes.

     Suave and simple his life is ! Narrow in range, it may be, but
with every royal appurtenance of delight !  Round the flower-garden at
Sandringham runs an old wall of red brick, streaked with ivy and topped
infrequently with balls of stone.  By the iron gates, that open to a vista of
flowers, stand two kind policemen, guarding the Prince’s procedure along that
bright vista.  As his perambulator rolls out of the gate of St. James’s Palace,
he stretches out his tiny hands to the scarlet sentinels.  An obsequious retinue
follows him over the lawns of the White Lodge, cooing and laughing, blowing
kisses and praising him.  Yet his life has not been all happy. The afflictions
that befall royal personages always touch very poignantly the heart of the
people and it is not too much to say that all England watched by the

                                 A GOOD PRINCE                                    47

cradle-side of Prince Edward in those hours of pain, when first the little
battlements rose about the rose-red roof of his mouth.  Irreiterate be the
horror of that epoch !

     As yet, when we know not even what his first words will be, it is
too early to predict what verdict posterity will pass upon him.  Already he
has won the hearts of the people; but, in the years which, it is to be hoped,
still await him, he may accomplish more.  Attendons ! He stands alone
among European princes— but, as yet, only with the aid of a chair.

                                                                               MAX BEERBOHM.

REGENT STREET, LONDON