SELECTED PROSE OF OSCAR WILDE

Contents:

Preface by Robert RossHow They Struck a ContemporaryThe Quality of George MeredithLife in the Fallacious ModelLife the DiscipleLife the PlagiaristThe Indispensable EastThe Influence of the Impressionists on ClimateAn Exposure to NaturalismThomas Griffiths WainewrightWainewright at Hobart TownCardinal Newman and the AutobiographersRobert BrowningThe Two Supreme and Highest ArtsThe Secrets of ImmortalityThe Critic and his MaterialDante the Living GuideThe Limitations of GeniusWanted A New BackgroundWithout FrontiersThe Poetry of ArchaeologyThe Art of ArchaeologyHerod SuppliantThe Tetrarch's RemorseThe Tetrarch's TreasureSalome anticipates Dr. StraussThe Young KingA CoronationThe King of SpainA Bull FightThe Throne RoomA Protected CountryThe Blackmailing of the EmperorCovent GardenA Letter from Miss Jane Percy to her AuntThe Triumph of American 'Humor'The Garden of DeathAn Eton Kit-catMrs. Erlynne Exercises the Prerogative of a GrandmotherMotherhood more than MarriageThe Damnable IdealFrom a Rejected Prize-essayThe Possibilities of the UsefulThe ArtistThe Doer of GoodThe DiscipleThe MasterThe House of JudgmentThe Teacher of WisdomWilde gives directions about 'De Profundis'Carey StreetSorrow wears no maskVita NuovaThe Grand RomanticClapham JunctionThe Broken ResolutionDomesticity at BernevalA visit to the Pope

DEDICATION

This anthology is dedicated to Michael Lykiardopulos as a little token ofhis services to English Literature in the great Russian Empire. 

PREFACE

With the possible exceptions of the Greek Anthology, the "GoldenTreasury" and those which bear the name of E. V. Lucas, no selections ofpoetry or prose have ever given complete satisfaction to anyone exceptthe compiler. But critics derive great satisfaction from pointing outerrors of omission and inclusion on the part of the anthologist, and allof us have putatively re-arranged and re-edited even the "GoldenTreasury" in our leisure moments. In an age when "Art for Art's sake" isan exploded doctrine, anthologies, like everything else, must have apurpose. The purpose or object of the present volume is to affordadmirers of Wilde's work the same innocent pleasure obtainable fromsimilar compilations, namely that of reconstructing a selection of theirown in their mind's eye--for copyright considerations would interferewith the materialisation of their dream. 

A stray observation in an esteemed weekly periodical determined the planof this anthology and the choice of particular passages. The writer, whose name has escaped me, opined that the reason the works of Pater andWilde were no longer read was owing to both authors having treatedEnglish as a dead language. By a singular coincidence I had purchasedsimultaneously with the newspaper a shilling copy of Pater's"Renaissance, " published by Messrs. Macmillan; and a few days afterwardsMessrs. Methuen issued at a shilling the twenty-eighth edition of "DeProfundis. " Obviously either Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Methuen orthe authority on dead languages must have been suffering fromhallucinations. It occurred to me that a selection of Wilde's prosemight at least rehabilitate the notorious reputation for common senseenjoyed by all publishers, who rarely issue shilling editions of deceasedauthors for mere aesthetic considerations. And I confess to a hope thatthis volume may reach the eye or ear of those who have not read Wilde'sbooks, or of those, such as Mr. Sydney Grundy, who are irritated by therevival of his plays and the praise accorded to his works throughout theContinent. 

Wilde's prose is distinguished by its extraordinary ease and clarity, andby the absence--very singular in his case--of the preciosity which headmired too much in other writers, and advocated with over-emphasis. Perhaps that is why many of his stories and essays and plays are used asEnglish text-books in Russian and Scandinavian and Hungarian schools. Artifice and affectation, often assumed to be recurrent defects in hiswritings by those unacquainted with them, are comparatively rare. Wildeonce boasted in an interview that only Flaubert, Pater, Keats, andMaeterlinck had influenced him, and then added in a characteristic way:"But I had already gone more than half-way to meet them. " Anyone curiousas to the origin of Wilde's style and development should consult thelearned treatise {1} of Dr. Ernst Bendz, whose comprehensive treatment ofthe subject renders any elucidation of mine superfluous; while nothingcan be added to Mr. Holbrook Jackson's masterly criticism {2} of Wildeand his position in literature. 

In making this selection, with the valuable assistance of Mr. StuartMason, I have endeavoured to illustrate and to justify the criticalappreciations of both Dr. Bendz and Mr. Holbrook Jackson, as well as toafford the general reader a fair idea of Wilde's variety as a prosewriter. He is more various than almost any author of the last century, though the act of writing was always a burden to him. Some criticacutely pointed out that poetry and prose were almost side-issues forhim. The resulting faults and weakness of what he left are obvious. Except in the plays he has no sustained scheme of thought. Even "DeProfundis" is too desultory. 

For the purpose of convenient reference I have exercised the prerogativeof a literary executor and editor by endowing with special titles some ofthe pieces quoted in these pages. Though unlike one of Wilde's otherfriends I cannot claim to have collaborated with him or to have assistedhim in any of his plays, I was sometimes permitted, as Wilde acknowledgesin different letters, to act in the capacity of godfather by suggestingthe actual titles by which some of his books are known to the world. Imention the circumstance only as a precedent for my present temerity. Tocompensate those who disapprove of my choice, I have included twounpublished letters. The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, publishedsince his death, have been generally associated with disagreeablesubjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast. 

ROBERT ROSS

HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to makeit too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so inartistic as not to contain asingle anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyllreads dangerously like an experiment out of the _Lancet_. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectlymagnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius thatwhen he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent apersonal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind ofcowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes uponmean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, itis true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of hisvoice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Paynis an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He huntsdown the obvious with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. Asone turns over the pages, the suspense of the author becomes almostunbearable. The horses of Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soartowards the sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into violentchromolithographic effects. On seeing them approach, the peasants takerefuge in dialect. Mrs. Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn-tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome things. Mr. MarionCrawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour. He islike the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau cield'Italie. " Besides, he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moralplatitudes. He is always telling us that to be good is to be good, andthat to be bad is to be wicked. At times he is almost edifying. _RobertElsmere_ is of course a masterpiece--a masterpiece of the "genreennuyeux, " the one form of literature that the English people seemsthoroughly to enjoy. A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us thatit reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea inthe house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced. Englandis the home of lost ideas. As for that great and daily increasing schoolof novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the onlything that can be said about them is that they find life crude, and leaveit raw. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

THE QUALITY OF GEORGE MEREDITH

Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined byflashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything exceptlanguage: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as anartist he is everything except articulate. Somebody inShakespeare--Touchstone, I think--talks about a man who is alwaysbreaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this mightserve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever heis, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child ofrealism who is not on speaking terms with his father. By deliberatechoice he has made himself a romanticist. He has refused to bow the kneeto Baal, and after all, even if the man's fine spirit did not revoltagainst the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quitesufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its meanshe has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red withwonderful roses. As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination ofthe artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter hebequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. Thedifference between such a book as M. Zola's _L'Assommoir_ and Balzac's_Illusions Perdues_ is the difference between unimaginative realism andimaginative reality. 'All Balzac's characters;' said Baudelaire, 'aregifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All hisfictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loadedto the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius. ' A steadycourse of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and ouracquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind offervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien deRubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely torid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it whenI laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He createdlife, he did not copy it. I admit, however, that he set far too high avalue on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book ofhis that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with _Salammbo_ or_Esmond_, or _The Cloister and the Hearth_, or the _Vicomte deBragelonne_. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

LIFE THE FALLACIOUS MODEL

Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative andpleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This isthe first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, andasks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part ofher rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, isabsolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keepsbetween herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets theupper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the truedecadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering. 

Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monksDramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then sheenlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were moreterrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener thanlover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a languagefull of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, andenriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raimentand gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from itsmarble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, andwith purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the riverto Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of thedramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simpletruth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itselfis really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spiritof art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis. 

But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespearewe can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradualbreaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the predominancegiven to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare--and they are many--where the language isuncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely dueto Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting theintervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life besuffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawlessartist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life'snatural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginativemedium she surrenders everything. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

LIFE THE DISCIPLE

We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious andfascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginativepainters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private viewor to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti'sdream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosenedshadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of'The Golden Stair, ' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the'Laus Amoris, ' the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands andlithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream. ' And it has always beenso. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, toreproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. NeitherHolbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. Theybrought their types with them, and Life with her keen imitative facultyset herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with theirquick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamberthe statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovelyas the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. Theyknew that Life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thoughtand feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself onthe very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity ofPheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objectionto realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt thatit inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We tryto improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, freesunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the betterhousing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the truedisciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those whobecome like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, orpictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's onlypupil. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

LIFE THE PLAGIARIST

I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had hadany model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, butthat the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governesswho lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was thecompanion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what becameof the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years afterthe appearance of _Vanity Fair_, she ran away with the nephew of the ladywith whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash insociety, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared tothe Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and othergambling places. The noble gentleman from whom the same greatsentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a few months after _TheNewcomer_ had reached a fourth edition, with the word 'Adsum' on hislips. Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious psychologicalstory of transformation, a friend of mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in thenorth of London, and being anxious to get to a railway station, took whathe thought would be a short cut, lost his way, and found himself in anetwork of mean, evil-looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he beganto walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an archway ran a child rightbetween his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it, andtrampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and a littlehurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds the whole street was fullof rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants. Theysurrounded him, and asked him his name. He was just about to give itwhen he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stevenson'sstory. He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own personthat terrible and well-written scene, and at having done accidentally, though in fact, what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberateintent, that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was, however, veryclosely followed, and finally he took refuge in a surgery, the door ofwhich happened to be open, where he explained to a young assistant, whohappened to be there, exactly what had occurred. The humanitarian crowdwere induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money, and assoon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out, the name on thebrass door-plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was 'Jekyll. ' Atleast it should have been. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

THE INDISPENSABLE EAST

What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about thosearts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these artsin Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with itsfrank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, itsdislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our ownimitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as inByzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europeby the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginativework in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artisticconventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashionedfor her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, ourwork has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Moderntapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broadexpanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beautywhatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. Weare beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because wehave returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpetsof twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inaneworship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, havebecome, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A culturedMahomedan once remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied inmisinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought ofmaking an artistic application of the second. " He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn artin is not Life but Art. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS ON CLIMATE

Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brownfogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps andchanging the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them andtheir master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over ourriver, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swayingbarge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate ofLondon during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular schoolof Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or ametaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For whatis Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is ourcreation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things arebecause we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on theArts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different fromseeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people seefogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters havetaught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may havebeen fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no onesaw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not existtill Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carriedto excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and theexaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Wherethe cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so, let usbe humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She hasdone so already, indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees nowin France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violetshadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, Nature reproduces itquite admirably. Where she used to give us Corots and Daubignys, shegives us now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pissaros. Indeed there aremoments, rare, it is true, but still to be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to berelied upon. The fact is that she is in this unfortunate position. Artcreates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes onto other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitationcan be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effectuntil we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody of any realculture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner wasthe last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialismof temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

AN EXPOSURE OF NATURALISM

After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the variousstyles of particular artists, or of certain schools of artists. Surelyyou don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblanceat all to the figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stoneand wood carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, orilluminated MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, withnothing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. TheMiddle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not beproduced in the nineteenth century. No great artist ever sees things asthey really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take anexample from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they arepresented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have neverunderstood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberateself-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set apicture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is notthe slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live inJapan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinaryabout them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is nosuch country, there are no such people. One of our most charmingpainters {3} went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in thefoolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chanceof painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable todiscover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that theJapanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisitefancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you willnot behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you willstay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caughttheir imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit inthe Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutelyJapanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or, to return againto the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you thinkthat Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do youbelieve that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figuresof the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat inthe triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from theart, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, worehigh-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged theirfaces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature ofour own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely throughthe medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us thetruth. --_The Decay of Lying_. 

THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his removal to the colonies. In a fanciful passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself'lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death' for having beenunable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from theBritish Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence nowpassed on him was to a man of his culture a form of death. He complainedbitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal ofreason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to him from his mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a _circonstance attenuante_. The permanence of personalityis a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English lawsolves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment wasinflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on theprose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins. 

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came acrosshim by chance. They had been going over the prisons of London, searchingfor artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight ofWainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, butMacready was 'horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him informer years, and at whose table he had dined. '

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind offashionable lounge. Many men of letters went down to visit their oldliterary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whomCharles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical. 

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, afterall, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: 'Sir, you City men enter onyour speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of yourspeculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yourshappen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between myvisitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I havesucceeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold theposition of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It isthe custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall takehis morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayerand a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friendreproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged hisshoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had verythick ankles. '--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_. 

WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN

His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he starteda studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and hisconversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did hegive up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record inwhich he tried to make away with people who had offended him. But hishand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were completefailures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmaniansociety, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, SirJohn Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks ofhimself as being 'tormented by ideas struggling for outward form andrealisation, barred up from increase of knowledge, and deprived of theexercise of profitable or even of decorous speech. ' His request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge consoled himself bymaking those marvellous _Paradis Artificiels_ whose secret is only knownto the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole livingcompanion being a cat, for which he had evinced at extraordinaryaffection. 

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gavea strong personality to his style, a quality that his early workcertainly lacked. In a note to the _Life of Dickens_, Forster mentionsthat in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother, Major Power, whoheld a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a younglady from his clever brush; and it is said that 'he had contrived to putthe expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl. ' M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells us of a young manwho, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenishimpressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of whichbear a curious resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright's style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One canfancy an intense personality being created out of sin. --_Pen, Pencil andPoison_. 

CARDINAL NEWMAN AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHERS

In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us inthe letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubertand Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, anddo not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for havingconfessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchantnymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, thegreen and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence showsthe moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not givenit more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supremescoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and hisshame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, mattervery little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, ora saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his ownsecrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips tosilence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented--if thatcan be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectualproblems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect--may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching thattroubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonelychurch at Littlemore, where 'the breath of the morning is damp, andworshippers are few, ' will always be dear to it, and whenever men see theyellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think ofthat gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower's sure recurrence aprophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of hisdays--a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not tobe fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. --_The Critic asArtist_. 

ROBERT BROWNING

Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and itwas but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but fromthought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinkingaloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather theprocesses by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not whatthe machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly wasas dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, didthe subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, orlooked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, thatexquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers itsown voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes notmerely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element ofthought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring afresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion ofsound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked invain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in RobertBrowning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made himmasquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often withhis tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us bymonstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking thestrings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and noAthenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivoryhorn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, hewas great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made fromit men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature sinceShakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning couldstammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, andspeaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room thepageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeksstill burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul withthe lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham isthere, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and BenEzra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The spawn of Setebos gibbers inthe corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggardface, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the whitesatin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherouseyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders ashe hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife godown. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As apoet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could notanswer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and whatmore should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creatorof character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he beenarticulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch thehem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, andso is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose. --_TheCritic as Artist_. 

THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS

Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. Theprinciples of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realisein an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of thelatter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we canhardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is thatwhich most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaboratedthe criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere materialof that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system ofreasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as amodern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as theywere right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and thefatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lowerclasses of this country, there has been a tendency in literature toappeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which isreally the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seekto please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Eventhe work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master ofEnglish prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece ofmosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack thetrue rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effectthat such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing adefinite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaboratedesign. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as amethod of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in itsmusical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the earthe critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindnessmight be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and servingto remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeingless with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught thesecret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are wingedwith light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to hisblindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poetowed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his laterverse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. --_The Criticas Artist_. 

THE SECRETS OF IMMORTALITY

On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of greenbronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over theempty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, onthe wine-surfaced, oily sea, [Greek text], as Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of theDanaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits inhis little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet, everymorning the doors of the city are thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go forth to battle, and mock their enemiesfrom behind their iron masks. All day long the fight rages, and whennight comes the torches gleam by the tents, and the cresset burns in thehall. Those who live in marble or on painted panel, know of life but asingle exquisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but limited toone note of passion or one mood of calm. Those whom the poet makes livehave their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, ofpleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and go in glad or saddeningpageant, and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them. They have their youth and their manhood, they are children, and they growold. It is always dawn for St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at thewindow. Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol ofGod's pain. The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads fromher brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence, where the loversof Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, of noon madeso languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip intothe marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers ofthe lute-player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for thedancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. Ineternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whosetremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they treadon. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through thelabouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night fromevening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note theshifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, theflowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess asColeridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statueis concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon thecanvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they knownothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secretsof life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence oftime affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, andcan rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, thatproblem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul inits unrest. --_The Critic as Artist_. 

THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? Whatdoes it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and sofiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonicmusic, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word andepithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderfulsunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England'sGallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely becauseits equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller varietyof its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, notthrough form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completelyand without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, withlofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, andwith poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is thegreater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into theportrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? Thepainter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some havefancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of theLouvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair inthat cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea, ' Imurmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; likethe vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of thegrave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen dayabout her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother ofMary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changinglineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. ' And I say to myfriend, 'The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters isexpressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come todesire'; and he answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends ofthe world are come, " and the eyelids are a little weary. '

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, andreveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and themusic of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle andpoisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had anyone told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of theworld had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power torefine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, thelust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambitionand imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of theBorgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated noneof these things, but had concerned himself simply with certainarrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curiouscolour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason thatthe criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. Ittreats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. Itdoes not confine itself--let us at least suppose so for the moment--todiscovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thingis, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was inhis soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to thebeautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, andsets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vitalportion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps ofwhat, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. --_The Critic asArtist_. 

DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE

There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us whohave discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences aregoing to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say toourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil throughthe valley of the shadow of death, ' and lo! the dawn finds us in theobscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through thegate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold thehorror of another world. The hypocrites go by, with their painted facesand their cowls of gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drivethem, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. We break the withered branches fromthe tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twigbleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries. Outof a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre offlame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over thetorture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purpleair fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of bodyinto the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coinerof false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dryand gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks ofclear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentinehills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him. He smites him inthe face, and they wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, andloiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted bygiants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in storefor us, and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boatthrough the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When wehear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for thebitterness of our scorn. We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, inwhich traitors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes against thehead of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair inhandfuls from the screaming skull. Alberigo prays us to break the iceupon his face that he may weep a little. We pledge our word to him, andwhen he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we havespoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for whomore base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God? In the jaws ofLucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer themen who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come forth to re-behold thestars. --_The Critic as Artist_. 

THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

The appeal of all Art is simply to the artistic temperament. Art doesnot address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she isuniversal, and that in all her manifestations she is one. Indeed, so farfrom its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a reallygreat artist can never judge of other people's work at all, and canhardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of visionthat makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty offine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to hisown goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud aroundhim. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognise theirworshippers. That is all . . . Wordsworth saw in _Endymion_ merely apretty piece of Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, wasdeaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled by its form, and Byron, thatgreat passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither thepoet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats washidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with hissense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artistsalways admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded andfree from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of lifebeing shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than thosethat he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty withinits own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others. It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judgeof it. --_The Critic as Artist_. 

WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND

He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely newbackground, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings. The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Asone turns over the pages of his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feelsas if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes ofvulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. Thejaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with theirsurroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an oddjournalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view ofliterature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From thepoint of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better thanany one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authorityon the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, andhis backgrounds are real works of art. As for the second condition, wehave had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much tobe done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say thatfiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it hasnever been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of thesoul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there arestored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they havedreamed of, who, like the author of _Le Rouge et le Noir_, have sought totrack the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess itsdearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untriedbackgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habitof introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which itseeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think thatcreation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural animpulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter atthe disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matterof criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for themind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos doesnot grow less as the world advances. There was never a time whenCriticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means thatHumanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived. --_TheCritic as Artist_. 

WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Goethe--you will not misunderstand what I say--was a German of theGermans. He loved his country--no man more so. Its people were dear tohim; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled uponvineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. 'How can one write songsof hatred without hating?' he said to Eckermann, 'and how could I, towhom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation whichis among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great apart of my own cultivation?' This note, sounded in the modern world byGoethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for thecosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilaterace-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in thevariety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our ownculture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war isregarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it islooked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change will ofcourse be slow, and people will not be conscious of it. They will notsay 'We will not war against France because her prose is perfect, ' butbecause the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land. Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer thanthose that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give usthe peace that springs from understanding. --_The Critic as Artist_. 

THE POETRY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Waycame across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia, daughter of Claudius. ' On opening the coffer they found within itsmarble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time. Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curlinggold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yetdeparted. Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of anew cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship atthe wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found thesecret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea's roughand rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night, and in secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the story is none theless valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards theantique world. Archaeology to them was not a mere science for theantiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust ofantiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the newwine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn. From thepulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna's 'Triumph of Caesar, ' and theservice Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spiritcan be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts--the artsof arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in the greatGraeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courtsof the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which thecitizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes thatchanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered soimportant that large prints were made of them and published--a fact whichis a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of suchkind. --_The Truth of Masks_. 

THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into someform of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laboriousscholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary isof far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the samemythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemicamong adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory ofPiranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeologybeautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and mostvividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion ofactual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenthcentury was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellioalso. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dressof its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and theamount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. Atthe beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its twothousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the centurywas over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_. Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, ofHans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them wellillustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from thehand of Titian. 

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired theirknowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increasedcommercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomaticmissions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the variousforms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, forinstance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince ofMorocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in thestrange attire of their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps toooften, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth cameenvoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had animportant influence on English costume. --_The Truth of Masks_. 

HEROD SUPPLIANT

Non, non, vous ne voulez pas cela. Vous me dites cela seulement pour mefaire de la peine, parce que je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree. Eh! bien, oui. Je vous ai regardee pendant toute la soiree. Votrebeaute m'a trouble. Votre beaute m'a terriblement trouble, et je vous aitrop regardee. Mais je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut regarder ni leschoses ni les personnes. Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Carles miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques . . . Oh! Oh! du vin! j'aisoif . . . Salome, Salome, soyons amis. Enfin, voyez . . . Qu'est-ce queje voulais dire? Qu'est-ce que c'etait? Ah! je m'en souviens! . . . Salome! Non, venez plus pres de moi. J'ai peur que vous ne m'entendiezpas . . . Salome, vous connaissez mes paons blancs, mes beaux paonsblancs, qui se promenent dans le jardin entre les myrtes et les grandscypres. Leurs becs sont dores, et les grains qu'ils mangent sont doresaussi, et leurs pieds sont teints de pourpre. La pluie vient quand ilscrient, et quand ils se pavanent la lune se montre au ciel. Ils vontdeux a deux entre les cypres et les myrtes noirs et chacun a son esclavepour le soigner. Quelquefois ils volent a travers les arbres, etquelquefois ils couchent sur le gazon et autour de l'etang. Il n'y a pasdans le monde d'oiseaux si merveilleux. Il n'y a aucun roi du monde quipossede des oiseaux aussi merveilleux. Je suis sur que meme Cesar nepossede pas d'oiseaux aussi beaux. Eh bien! je vous donnerai cinquantede mes paons. Ils vous suivront partout, et au milieu d'eux vous serezcomme la lune dans un grand nuage blanc . . . Je vous les donnerai tous. Je n'en ai que cent, et il n'y a aucun roi du monde qui possede des paonscomme les miens, mais je vous les donnerai tous. Seulement, il faut medelier de ma parole et ne pas me demander ce que vous m'avezdemande. --_Salome_. 

THE TETRARCH'S REMORSE

Salome, pensez a ce que vous faites. Cet homme vient peut-etre de Dieu. Je suis sur qu'il vient de Dieu. C'est un saint homme. Le doigt de Dieul'a touche. Dieu a mis dans sa bouche des mots terribles. Dans lepalais, comme dans le desert, Dieu est toujours avec lui . . . Au moins, c'est possible. On ne sait pas, mais il est possible que Dieu soit pourlui et avec lui. Aussi peut-etre que s'il mourrait, il m'arriverait unmalheur. Enfin, il a dit que le jour ou il mourrait il arriverait unmalheur a quelqu'un. Ce ne peut etre qu'a moi. Souvenez-vous, j'aiglisse dans le sang quand je suis entre ici. Aussi j'ai entendu unbattement d'ailes dans l'air, un battement d'ailes gigantesques. Ce sontde tres mauvais presages. Et il y en avait d'autres. Je suis sur qu'ily en avait d'autres, quoique je ne les aie pas vus. Eh bien! Salome, vous ne voulez pas qu'un malheur m'arrive? Vous ne voulez pascela. --_Salome_. 

THE TETRARCH'S TREASURE

Moi, je suis tres calme. Je suis tout a fait calme. Ecoutez. J'ai desbijoux caches ici que meme votre mere n'a jamais vus, des bijoux tout afait extraordinaires. J'ai un collier de perles a quatre rangs. Ondirait des lunes enchainees de rayons d'argent. On dirait cinquantelunes captives dans un filet d'or. Une reine l'a porte sur l'ivoire deses seins. Toi, quand tu le porteras, tu seras aussi belle qu'une reine. J'ai des amethystes de deux especes. Une qui est noire comme le vin. L'autre qui est rouge comme du vin qu'on a colore avec de l'eau. J'aides topazes jaunes comme les yeux des tigres, et des topazes roses commeles yeux des pigeons, et des topazes vertes comme les yeux des chats. J'ai des opales qui brulent toujours avec une flamme qui est tres froide, des opales qui attristent les esprits et ont peur des tenebres. J'ai desonyx semblables aux prunelles d'une morte. J'ai des selenites quichangent quand la lune change et deviennent pales quand elles voient lesoleil. J'ai des saphirs grands comme des oeufs et bleus comme desfleurs bleues. La mer erre dedans, et la lune ne vient jamais troublerle bleu de ses flots. J'ai des chrysolithes et des beryls, j'ai deschrysoprases et des rubis, j'ai des sardonyx et des hyacinthes, et descalcedoines et je vous les donnerai tous, mais tous, et j'ajouteraid'autres choses. Le roi des Indes vient justement de m'envoyer quatreeventails faits de plumes de perroquets, et le roi de Numidie une robefaite de plumes d'autruche. J'ai un cristal qu'il n'est pas permis auxfemmes de voir et que meme les jeunes hommes ne doivent regarder qu'apresavoir ete flagelles de verges. Dans un coffret de nacre j'ai troisturquoises merveilleuses. Quand on les porte sur le front on peutimaginer des choses qui n'existent pas, et quand on les porte dans lamain on peut rendre les femmes steriles. Ce sont des tresors de grandevaleur. Ce sont des tresors sans prix. Et ce n'est pas tout. Dans uncoffret d'ebene j'ai deux coupes d'ambre qui ressemblent a des pommesd'or. Si un ennemi verse du poison dans ces coupes elles deviennentcomme des pommes d'argent. Dans un coffret incruste d'ambre j'ai dessandales incrustees de verre. J'ai des manteaux qui viennent du pays desSeres et des bracelets garnis d'escarboucles et de jade qui viennent dela ville d'Euphrate. . . Enfin, que veux-tu, Salome? Dis-moi ce que tudesires et je te le donnerai. Je te donnerai tout ce que tu demanderas, sauf une chose. Je te donnerai tout ce que je possede, sauf une vie. Jete donnerai le manteau du grand pretre. Je te donnerai le voile dusanctuaire. --_Salome_. 

SALOME ANTICIPATES DR. STRAUSS

Ah! tu n'as pas voulu me laisser baiser ta bouche, Iokanaan. Eh bien! jela baiserai maintenant. Je la mordrai avec mes dents comme on mord unfruit mur. Oui, je baiserai ta bouche, Iokanaan. Je te l'ai dit, n'est-ce pas? je te l'ai dit. Eh bien! je la baiserai maintenant . . . Maispourquoi ne me regardes-tu pas, Iokanaan? Tes yeux qui etaient siterribles, qui etaient si pleins de colere et de mepris, ils sont fermesmaintenant. Pourquoi sont-ils fermes? Ouvre tes yeux! Souleve tespaupieres, Iokanaan. Pourquoi ne me regardes-tu pas? As-tu peur de moi, Iokanaan, que tu ne veux pas me regarder? . . . Et ta langue qui etaitcomme un serpent rouge dardant des poisons, elle ne remue plus, elle nedit rien maintenant, Iokanaan, cette vipere rouge qui a vomi son veninsur moi. C'est etrange, n'est-ce pas? Comment se fait-il que la vipererouge ne remue plus? . . . Tu n'as pas voulu de moi, Iokanaan. Tu m'asrejetee. Tu m'as dit des choses infames. Tu m'as traitee comme unecourtisane, comme une prostituee, moi, Salome, fille d'Herodias, Princesse de Judee! Eh bien, Iokanaan, moi je vis encore, mais toi tu esmort et ta tete m'appartient. Je puis en faire ce que je veux. Je puisla jeter aux chiens et aux oiseaux de l'air. Ce que laisseront leschiens, les oiseaux de l'air le mangeront . . . Ah! Iokanaan, Iokanaan, tu as ete le seul homme que j'ai aime. Tous les autres hommesm'inspirent du degout. Mais, toi, tu etais beau. Ton corps etait unecolonne d'ivoire sur un socle d'argent. C'etait un jardin plein decolombes et de lis d'argent. C'etait une tour d'argent ornee deboucliers d'ivoire. Il n'y avait rien au monde d'aussi blanc que toncorps. Il n'y avait rien au monde d'aussi noir que tes cheveux. Dans lemonde tout entier il n'y avait rien d'aussi rouge que ta bouche. Ta voixetait un encensoir qui repandait d'etranges parfums, et quand je teregardais j'entendais une musique etrange! Ah! pourquoi ne m'as-tu pasregardee, Iokanaan? Derriere tes mains et tes blasphemes tu as cache tonvisage. Tu as mis sur tes yeux le bandeau de celui qui veut voir sonDieu. Eh bien, tu l'as vu, ton Dieu, Iokanaan, mais moi, moi . . . Tu nem'as jamais vue. Si tu m'avais vue, tu m'aurais aimee. Moi, je t'ai vu, Iokanaan, et je t'ai aime. Oh! comme je t'ai aime. Je t'aime encore, Iokanaan. Je n'aime que toi . . . J'ai soif de ta beaute. J'ai faim deton corps. Et ni le vin, ni les fruits ne peuvent apaiser mon desir. Queferai-je, Iokanaan, maintenant? Ni les fleuves ni les grandes eaux, nepourraient eteindre ma passion. J'etais une Princesse, tu m'asdedaignee. J'etais une vierge, tu m'as defloree. J'etais chaste, tu asrempli mes veines de feu . . . Ah! Ah! pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas regardee, Iokanaan? Si tu m'avais regardee tu m'aurais aimee. Je sais bien que tum'aurais aimee, et le mystere de l'amour est plus grand que le mystere dela mort. Il ne faut regarder que l'amour. --_Salome_. 

THE YOUNG KING

All rare and costly materials had certainly a great fascination for him, and in his eagerness to procure them he had sent away many merchants, some to traffic for amber with the rough fisher-folk of the north seas, some to Egypt to look for that curious green turquoise which is foundonly in the tombs of kings, and is said to possess magical properties, some to Persia for silken carpets and painted pottery, and others toIndia to buy gauze and stained ivory, moonstones and bracelets of jade, sandal-wood and blue enamel and shawls of fine wool. 

But what had occupied him most was the robe he was to wear at hiscoronation, the robe of tissued gold, and the ruby-studded crown, and thesceptre with its rows and rings of pearls. Indeed, it was of this thathe was thinking to-night, as he lay back on his luxurious couch, watchingthe great pinewood log that was burning itself out on the open hearth. The designs, which were from the hands of the most famous artists of thetime, had been submitted to him many months before, and he had givenorders that the artificers were to toil night and day to carry them out, and that the whole world was to be searched for jewels that would beworthy of their work. He saw himself in fancy standing at the high altarof the cathedral in the fair raiment of a King, and a smile played andlingered about his boyish lips, and lit up with a bright lustre his darkwoodland eyes. 

After some time he rose from his seat, and leaning against the carvedpenthouse of the chimney, looked round at the dimly-lit room. The wallswere hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. Alarge press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, andfacing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panelsof powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate gobletsof Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies werebroidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen fromthe tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up thevelvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, likewhite foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughingNarcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On thetable stood a flat bowl of amethyst. 

Outside he could see the huge dome of the cathedral, looming like abubble over the shadowy houses, and the weary sentinels pacing up anddown on the misty terrace by the river. Far away, in an orchard, anightingale was singing. A faint perfume of jasmine came through theopen window. He brushed his brown curls back from his forehead, andtaking up a lute, let his fingers stray across the cords. His heavyeyelids drooped, and a strange languor came over him. Never before hadhe felt so keenly, or with such exquisite joy, the magic and the mysteryof beautiful things. 

When midnight sounded from the clock-tower he touched a bell, and hispages entered and disrobed him with much ceremony, pouring rose-waterover his hands, and strewing flowers on his pillow. A few moments afterthat they had left the room, he fell asleep. --_The Young King_. 

A CORONATION

And when the Bishop had heard them he knit his brows, and said, 'My son, I am an old man, and in the winter of my days, and I know that many evilthings are done in the wide world. The fierce robbers come down from themountains, and carry off the little children, and sell them to the Moors. The lions lie in wait for the caravans, and leap upon the camels. Thewild boar roots up the corn in the valley, and the foxes gnaw the vinesupon the hill. The pirates lay waste the sea-coast and burn the ships ofthe fishermen, and take their nets from them. In the salt-marshes livethe lepers; they have houses of wattled reeds, and none may come nighthem. The beggars wander through the cities, and eat their food with thedogs. Canst thou make these things not to be? Wilt thou take the leperfor thy bedfellow, and set the beggar at thy board? Shall the lion dothy bidding, and the wild boar obey thee? Is not He who made miserywiser than thou art? Wherefore I praise thee not for this that thou hastdone, but I bid thee ride back to the Palace and make thy face glad, andput on the raiment that beseemeth a king, and with the crown of gold Iwill crown thee, and the sceptre of pearl will I place in thy hand. Andas for thy dreams, think no more of them. The burden of this world istoo great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for oneheart to suffer. '

'Sayest thou that in this house?' said the young King, and he strode pastthe Bishop, and climbed up the steps of the altar, and stood before theimage of Christ. 

He stood before the image of Christ, and on his right hand and on hisleft were the marvellous vessels of gold, the chalice with the yellowwine, and the vial with the holy oil. He knelt before the image ofChrist, and the great candles burned brightly by the jewelled shrine, andthe smoke of the incense curled in thin blue wreaths through the dome. Hebowed his head in prayer, and the priests in their stiff copes crept awayfrom the altar. 

And suddenly a wild tumult came from the street outside, and in enteredthe nobles with drawn swords and nodding plumes, and shields of polishedsteel. 'Where is this dreamer of dreams?' they cried. 'Where is thisKing who is apparelled like a beggar--this boy who brings shame upon ourstate? Surely we will slay him, for he is unworthy to rule over us. '

And the young King bowed his head again, and prayed, and when he hadfinished his prayer he rose up, and turning round he looked at themsadly. 

And lo! through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sun-beams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than therobe that had been fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed, and bare roses that were redder than rubies. Whiter than fine pearlswere the lilies, and their stems were of bright silver. Redder than malerubies were the roses, and their leaves were of beaten gold. 

He stood there in the raiment of a king, and the gates of the jewelledshrine flew open, and from the crystal of the many-rayed monstrance shonea marvellous and mystical light. He stood there in a king's raiment, andthe Glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their carven nichesseemed to move. In the fair raiment of a king he stood before them, andthe organ pealed out its music, and the trumpeters blew upon theirtrumpets, and the singing boys sang. 

And the people fell upon their knees in awe, and the nobles sheathedtheir swords and did homage, and the Bishop's face grew pale, and hishands trembled. 'A greater than I hath crowned thee, ' he cried, and heknelt before him. 

And the young King came down from the high altar, and passed home throughthe midst of the people. But no man dared look upon his face, for it waslike the face of an angel. --_The Young King_. 

THE KING OF SPAIN

From a window in the palace the sad melancholy King watched them. Behindhim stood his brother, Don Pedro of Aragon, whom he hated, and hisconfessor, the Grand Inquisitor of Granada, sat by his side. Sadder eventhan usual was the King, for as he looked at the Infanta bowing withchildish gravity to the assembling counters, or laughing behind her fanat the grim Duchess of Albuquerque who always accompanied her, he thoughtof the young Queen, her mother, who but a short time before--so it seemedto him--had come from the gay country of France, and had withered away inthe sombre splendour of the Spanish court, dying just six months afterthe birth of her child, and before she had seen the almonds blossom twicein the orchard, or plucked the second year's fruit from the old gnarledfig-tree that stood in the centre of the now grass-grown courtyard. Sogreat had been his love for her that he had not suffered even the graveto hide her from him. She had been embalmed by a Moorish physician, whoin return for this service had been granted his life, which for heresyand suspicion of magical practices had been already forfeited, men said, to the Holy Office, and her body was still lying on its tapestried bierin the black marble chapel of the Palace, just as the monks had borne herin on that windy March day nearly twelve years before. Once every monththe King, wrapped in a dark cloak and with a muffled lantern in his hand, went in and knelt by her side calling out, '_Mi reina_! _Mi reina_!' andsometimes breaking through the formal etiquette that in Spain governsevery separate action of life, and sets limits even to the sorrow of aKing, he would clutch at the pale jewelled hands in a wild agony ofgrief, and try to wake by his mad kisses the cold painted face. 

To-day he seemed to see her again, as he had seen her first at the Castleof Fontainebleau, when he was but fifteen years of age, and she stillyounger. They had been formally betrothed on that occasion by the PapalNuncio in the presence of the French King and all the Court, and he hadreturned to the Escurial bearing with him a little ringlet of yellowhair, and the memory of two childish lips bending down to kiss his handas he stepped into his carriage. Later on had followed the marriage, hastily performed at Burgos, a small town on the frontier between the twocountries, and the grand public entry into Madrid with the customarycelebration of high mass at the Church of La Atocha, and a more thanusually solemn _auto-da-fe_, in which nearly three hundred heretics, amongst whom were many Englishmen, had been delivered over to the seculararm to be burned. 

Certainly he had loved her madly, and to the ruin, many thought, of hiscountry, then at war with England for the possession of the empire of theNew World. He had hardly ever permitted her to be out of his sight; forher, he had forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten, all grave affairs ofState; and, with that terrible blindness that passion brings upon itsservants, he had failed to notice that the elaborate ceremonies by whichhe sought to please her did but aggravate the strange malady from whichshe suffered. When she died he was, for a time, like one bereft ofreason. Indeed, there is no doubt but that he would have formallyabdicated and retired to the great Trappist monastery at Granada, ofwhich he was already titular Prior, had he not been afraid to leave thelittle Infanta at the mercy of his brother, whose cruelty, even in Spain, was notorious, and who was suspected by many of having caused the Queen'sdeath by means of a pair of poisoned gloves that he had presented to heron the occasion of her visiting his castle in Aragon. Even after theexpiration of the three years of public mourning that he had ordainedthroughout his whole dominions by royal edict, he would never suffer hisministers to speak about any new alliance, and when the Emperor himselfsent to him, and offered him the hand of the lovely Archduchess ofBohemia, his niece, in marriage, he bade the ambassadors tell theirmaster that the King of Spain was already wedded to Sorrow, and thatthough she was but a barren bride he loved her better than Beauty; ananswer that cost his crown the rich provinces of the Netherlands, whichsoon after, at the Emperor's instigation, revolted against him under theleadership of some fanatics of the Reformed Church. --_The Birthday of theInfranta_. 

A BULL FIGHT

A procession of noble boys, fantastically dressed as _toreadors_, cameout to meet her, and the young Count of Tierra-Nueva, a wonderfullyhandsome lad of about fourteen years of age, uncovering his head with allthe grace of a born hidalgo and grandee of Spain, led her solemnly in toa little gilt and ivory chair that was placed on a raised dais above thearena. The children grouped themselves all round, fluttering their bigfans and whispering to each other, and Don Pedro and the Grand Inquisitorstood laughing at the entrance. Even the Duchess--the Camerera-Mayor asshe was called--a thin, hard-featured woman with a yellow ruff, did notlook quite so bad-tempered as usual, and something like a chill smileflitted across her wrinkled face and twitched her thin bloodless lips. 

It certainly was a marvellous bull-fight, and much nicer, the Infantathought, than the real bull-fight that she had been brought to see atSeville, on the occasion of the visit of the Duke of Parma to her father. Some of the boys pranced about on richly-caparisoned hobby-horsesbrandishing long javelins with gay streamers of bright ribands attachedto them; others went on foot waving their scarlet cloaks before the bull, and vaulting lightly over the barrier when he charged them; and as forthe bull himself, he was just like a live bull, though he was only madeof wicker-work and stretched hide, and sometimes insisted on runninground the arena on his hind legs, which no live bull ever dreams ofdoing. He made a splendid fight of it too, and the children got soexcited that they stood up upon the benches, and waved their lacehandkerchiefs and cried out: _Bravo toro_! _Bravo toro_! just assensibly as if they had been grown-up people. At last, however, after aprolonged combat, during which several of the hobby-horses were goredthrough and through, and, their riders dismounted, the young Count ofTierra-Nueva brought the bull to his knees, and having obtainedpermission from the Infanta to give the _coup de grace_, he plunged hiswooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the headcame right off, and disclosed the laughing face of little Monsieur deLorraine, the son of the French Ambassador at Madrid. 

The arena was then cleared amidst much applause, and the deadhobby-horses dragged solemnly away by two Moorish pages in yellow andblack liveries, and after a short interlude, during which a Frenchposture-master performed upon the tightrope, some Italian puppetsappeared in the semi-classical tragedy of _Sophonisba_ on the stage of asmall theatre that had been built up for the purpose. They acted sowell, and their gestures were so extremely natural, that at the close ofthe play the eyes of the Infanta were quite dim with tears. Indeed someof the children really cried, and had to be comforted with sweetmeats, and the Grand Inquisitor himself was so affected that he could not helpsaying to Don Pedro that it seemed to him intolerable that things madesimply out of wood and coloured wax, and worked mechanically by wires, should be so unhappy and meet with such terrible misfortunes. --_TheBirthday of the Infanta_. 

THE THRONE ROOM

It was a throne-room, used for the reception of foreign ambassadors, whenthe King, which of late had not been often, consented to give them apersonal audience; the same room in which, many years before, envoys hadappeared from England to make arrangements for the marriage of theirQueen, then one of the Catholic sovereigns of Europe, with the Emperor'seldest son. The hangings were of gilt Cordovan leather, and a heavy giltchandelier with branches for three hundred wax lights hung down from theblack and white ceiling. Underneath a great canopy of gold cloth, onwhich the lions and towers of Castile were broidered in seed pearls, stood the throne itself, covered with a rich pall of black velvet studdedwith silver tulips and elaborately fringed with silver and pearls. Onthe second step of the throne was placed the kneeling-stool of theInfanta, with its cushion of cloth of silver tissue, and below thatagain, and beyond the limit of the canopy, stood the chair for the PapalNuncio, who alone had the right to be seated in the King's presence onthe occasion of any public ceremonial, and whose Cardinal's hat, with itstangled scarlet tassels, lay on a purple _tabouret_ in front. On thewall, facing the throne, hung a life-sized portrait of Charles V. Inhunting dress, with a great mastiff by his side, and a picture of PhilipII. Receiving the homage of the Netherlands occupied the centre of theother wall. Between the windows stood a black ebony cabinet, inlaid withplates of ivory, on which the figures from Holbein's Dance of Death hadbeen graved--by the hand, some said, of that famous master himself. 

But the little Dwarf cared nothing for all this magnificence. He wouldnot have given his rose for all the pearls on the canopy, nor one whitepetal of his rose for the throne itself. What he wanted was to see theInfanta before she went down to the pavilion, and to ask her to come awaywith him when he had finished his dance. Here, in the Palace, the airwas close and heavy, but in the forest the wind blew free, and thesunlight with wandering hands of gold moved the tremulous leaves aside. There were flowers, too, in the forest, not so splendid, perhaps, as theflowers in the garden, but more sweetly scented for all that; hyacinthsin early spring that flooded with waving purple the cool glens, andgrassy knolls; yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round thegnarled roots of the oak-trees; bright celandine, and blue speedwell, andirises lilac and gold. There were grey catkins on the hazels, and thefoxgloves drooped with the weight of their dappled bee-haunted cells. Thechestnut had its spires of white stars, and the hawthorn its pallid moonsof beauty. Yes: surely she would come if he could only find her! Shewould come with him to the fair forest, and all day long he would dancefor her delight. A smile lit up his eyes at the thought, and he passedinto the next room. 

Of all the rooms this was the brightest and the most beautiful. Thewalls were covered with a pink-flowered Lucca damask, patterned withbirds and dotted with dainty blossoms of silver; the furniture was ofmassive silver, festooned with florid wreaths, and swinging Cupids; infront of the two large fire-places stood great screens broidered withparrots and peacocks, and the floor, which was of sea-green onyx, seemedto stretch far away into the distance. Nor was he alone. Standing underthe shadow of the doorway, at the extreme end of the room, he saw alittle figure watching him. His heart trembled, a cry of joy broke fromhis lips, and he moved out into the sunlight. As he did so, the figuremoved out also, and he saw it plainly. --_The Birthday of the Infanta_. 

A PROTECTED COUNTRY

'The kings of each city levied tolls on us, but would not suffer us toenter their gates. They threw us bread over the walls, littlemaize-cakes baked in honey and cakes of fine flour filled with dates. Forevery hundred baskets we gave them a bead of amber. 

'When the dwellers in the villages saw us coming, they poisoned the wellsand fled to the hill-summits. We fought with the Magadae who are bornold, and grow younger and younger every year, and die when they arelittle children; and with the Laktroi who say that they are the sons oftigers, and paint themselves yellow and black; and with the Aurantes whobury their dead on the tops of trees, and themselves live in dark cavernslest the Sun, who is their god, should slay them; and with the Krimnianswho worship a crocodile, and give it earrings of green glass, and feed itwith butter and fresh fowls; and with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced;and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly thanhorses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want. The rest murmured against me, and said that I had brought them an evilfortune. I took a horned adder from beneath a stone and let it sting me. When they saw that I did not sicken they grew afraid. 

'In the fourth month we reached the city of Illel. It was night-timewhen we came to the grove that is outside the walls, and the air wassultry, for the Moon was travelling in Scorpion. We took the ripepomegranates from the trees, and brake them, and drank their sweetjuices. Then we lay down on our carpets, and waited for the dawn. 

'And at dawn we rose and knocked at the gate of the city. It was wroughtout of red bronze, and carved with sea-dragons and dragons that havewings. The guards looked down from the battlements and asked us ourbusiness. The interpreter of the caravan answered that we had come fromthe island of Syria with much merchandise. They took hostages, and toldus that they would open the gate to us at noon, and bade us tarry tillthen. 

'When it was noon they opened the gate, and as we entered in the peoplecame crowding out of the houses to look at us, and a crier went round thecity crying through a shell. We stood in the market-place, and thenegroes uncorded the bales of figured cloths and opened the carved chestsof sycamore. And when they had ended their task, the merchants set forththeir strange wares, the waxed linen from Egypt and the painted linenfrom the country of the Ethiops, the purple sponges from Tyre and theblue hangings from Sidon, the cups of cold amber and the fine vessels ofglass and the curious vessels of burnt clay. From the roof of a house acompany of women watched us. One of them wore a mask of gilded leather. 

'And on the first day the priests came and bartered with us, and on thesecond day came the nobles, and on the third day came the craftsmen andthe slaves. And this is their custom with all merchants as long as theytarry in the city. 

'And we tarried for a moon, and when the moon was waning, I wearied andwandered away through the streets of the city and came to the garden ofits god. The priests in their yellow robes moved silently through thegreen trees, and on a pavement of black marble stood the rose-red housein which the god had his dwelling. Its doors were of powdered lacquer, and bulls and peacocks were wrought on them in raised and polished gold. The tilted roof was of sea-green porcelain, and the jutting eaves werefestooned with little bells. When the white doves flew past, they struckthe bells with their wings and made them tinkle. 

'In front of the temple was a pool of clear water paved with veined onyx. I lay down beside it, and with my pale fingers I touched the broadleaves. One of the priests came towards me and stood behind me. He hadsandals on his feet, one of soft serpent-skin and the other of birds'plumage. On his head was a mitre of black felt decorated with silvercrescents. Seven yellows were woven into his robe, and his frizzed hairwas stained with antimony. 

'After a little while he spake to me, and asked me my desire. 

'I told him that my desire was to see the god. '--_The Fisherman and HisSoul_. 

THE BLACKMAILING OF THE EMPEROR

'As soon as the man was dead the Emperor turned to me, and when he hadwiped away the bright sweat from his brow with a little napkin of purfledand purple silk, he said to me, "Art thou a prophet, that I may not harmthee, or the son of a prophet, that I can do thee no hurt? I pray theeleave my city to-night, for while thou art in it I am no longer itslord. "

'And I answered him, "I will go for half of thy treasure. Give me halfof thy treasure, and I will go away. "

'He took me by the hand, and led me out into the garden. When thecaptain of the guard saw me, he wondered. When the eunuchs saw me, theirknees shook and they fell upon the ground in fear. 

'There is a chamber in the palace that has eight walls of red porphyry, and a brass-sealed ceiling hung with lamps. The Emperor touched one ofthe walls and it opened, and we passed down a corridor that was lit withmany torches. In niches upon each side stood great wine-jars filled tothe brim with silver pieces. When we reached the centre of the corridorthe Emperor spake the word that may not be spoken, and a granite doorswung back on a secret spring, and he put his hands before his face lesthis eyes should be dazzled. 

'Thou couldst not believe how marvellous a place it was. There were hugetortoise-shells full of pearls, and hollowed moonstones of great sizepiled up with red rubies. The gold was stored in coffers of elephant-hide, and the gold-dust in leather bottles. There were opals andsapphires, the former in cups of crystal, and the latter in cups of jade. Round green emeralds were ranged in order upon thin plates of ivory, andin one corner were silk bags filled, some with turquoise-stones, andothers with beryls. The ivory horns were heaped with purple amethysts, and the horns of brass with chalcedonies and sards. The pillars, whichwere of cedar, were hung with strings of yellow lynx-stones. In the flatoval shields there were carbuncles, both wine-coloured and coloured likegrass. And yet I have told thee but a tithe of what was there. 

'And when the Emperor had taken away his hands from before his face hesaid to me: "This is my house of treasure, and half that is in it isthine, even as I promised to thee. And I will give thee camels and cameldrivers, and they shall do thy bidding and take thy share of the treasureto whatever part of the world thou desirest to go. And the thing shallbe done to-night, for I would not that the Sun, who is my father, shouldsee that there is in my city a man whom I cannot slay. "

'But I answered him, "The gold that is here is thine, and the silver alsois thine, and thine are the precious jewels and the things of price. Asfor me, I have no need of these. Nor shall I take aught from thee butthat little ring that thou wearest on the finger of thy hand. "

'And the Emperor frowned. "It is but a ring of lead, " he cried, "nor hasit any value. Therefore take thy half of the treasure and go from mycity. "

'"Nay, " I answered, "but I will take nought but that leaden ring, for Iknow what is written within it, and for what purpose. "

'And the Emperor trembled, and besought me and said, "Take all thetreasure and go from my city. The half that is mine shall be thinealso. "

'And I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not, for in a cavethat is but a day's journey from this place have, I hidden the Ring ofRiches. It is but a day's journey from this place, and it waits for thycoming. He who has this Ring is richer than all the kings of the world. Come therefore and take it, and the world's riches shall be thine. '--_TheFisherman and His Soul_. 

COVENT GARDEN

Where he went he hardly knew. He had a dim memory of wandering through alabyrinth of sordid houses, of being lost in a giant web of sombrestreets, and it was bright dawn when he found himself at last inPiccadilly Circus. As he strolled home towards Belgrave Square, he metthe great waggons on their way to Covent Garden. The white-smockedcarters, with their pleasant sunburnt faces and coarse curly hair, strodesturdily on, cracking their whips, and calling out now and then to eachother; on the back of a huge grey horse, the leader of a jangling team, sat a chubby boy, with a bunch of primroses in his battered hat, keepingtight hold of the mane with his little hands, and laughing; and the greatpiles of vegetables looked like masses of jade against the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellousrose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. Therewas something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to himinexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break inbeauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough, good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange Londonthey saw! A London free from the sin of night and the smoke of day, apallid, ghost-like city, a desolate town of tombs! He wondered what theythought of it, and whether they knew anything of its splendour and itsshame, of its fierce, fiery-coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, ofall it makes and mars from morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely amart where they brought their fruits to sell, and where they tarried fora few hours at most, leaving the streets still silent, the houses stillasleep. It gave him pleasure to watch them as they went by. Rude asthey were, with their heavy, hob-nailed shoes, and their awkward gait, they brought a little of a ready with them. He felt that they had livedwith Nature, and that she had taught them peace. He envied them all thatthey did not know. 

By the time he had reached Belgrave Square the sky was a faint blue, andthe birds were beginning to twitter in the gardens. --_Lord ArthurSavile's Crime_. 

A LETTER FROM MISS JANE PERCY TO HER AUNT

THE DEANERY, CHICHESTER, 27_th May_. 

My Dearest Aunt, Thank you so much for the flannel for the Dorcas Society, and also forthe gingham. I quite agree with you that it is nonsense their wanting towear pretty things, but everybody is so Radical and irreligious nowadays, that it is difficult to make them see that they should not try and dresslike the upper classes. I am sure I don't know what we are coming to. Aspapa has often said in his sermons, we live in an age of unbelief. 

We have had great fun over a clock that an unknown admirer sent papa lastThursday. It arrived in a wooden box from London, carriage paid, andpapa feels it must have been sent by some one who had read his remarkablesermon, 'Is Licence Liberty?' for on the top of the clock was a figure ofa woman, with what papa said was the cap of Liberty on her head. Ididn't think it very becoming myself, but papa said it was historical, soI suppose it is all right. Parker unpacked it, and papa put it on themantelpiece in the library, and we were all sitting there on Fridaymorning, when just as the clock struck twelve, we heard a whirring noise, a little puff of smoke came from the pedestal of the figure, and thegoddess of Liberty fell off, and broke her nose on the fender! Maria wasquite alarmed, but it looked so ridiculous, that James and I went offinto fits of laughter, and even papa was amused. When we examined it, wefound it was a sort of alarum clock, and that, if you set it to aparticular hour, and put some gunpowder and a cap under a little hammer, it went off whenever you wanted. Papa said it must not remain in thelibrary, as it made a noise, so Reggie carried it away to the schoolroom, and does nothing but have small explosions all day long. Do you thinkArthur would like one for a wedding present? I suppose they are quitefashionable in London. Papa says they should do a great deal of good, asthey show that Liberty can't last, but must fall down. Papa says Libertywas invented at the time of the French Revolution. How awful it seems!

I have now to go to the Dorcas, where I will read them your mostinstructive letter. How true, dear aunt, your idea is, that in theirrank of life they should wear what is unbecoming. I must say it isabsurd, their anxiety about dress, when there are so many more importantthings in this world, and in the next. I am so glad your flowered poplinturned out so well, and that your lace was not torn. I am wearing myyellow satin, that you so kindly gave me, at the Bishop's on Wednesday, and think it will look all right. Would you have bows or not? Jenningssays that every one wears bows now, and that the underskirt should befrilled. Reggie has just had another explosion, and papa has ordered theclock to be sent to the stables. I don't think papa likes it so much ashe did at first, though he is very flattered at being sent such a prettyand ingenious toy. It shows that people read his sermons, and profit bythem. 

Papa sends his love, in which James, and Reggie, and Maria all unite, and, hoping that Uncle Cecil's gout is better, believe me, dear aunt, ever your affectionate niece, JANE PERCY. 

PS. --Do tell me about the bows. Jennings insists they are thefashion. --_Lord Arthur Savile's Crime_. 

THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN 'HUMOR'

At half-past ten he heard the family going to bed. For some time he wasdisturbed by wild shrieks of laughter from the twins, who, with the light-hearted gaiety of schoolboys, were evidently amusing themselves beforethey retired to rest, but at a quarter past eleven all was still, and, asmidnight sounded, he sallied forth. The owl beat against the windowpanes, the raven croaked from the old yew-tree, and the wind wanderedmoaning round the house like a lost soul; but the Otis family sleptunconscious of their doom, and high above the rain and storm he couldhear the steady snoring of the Minister for the United States. Hestepped stealthily out of the wainscoting, with an evil smile on hiscruel, wrinkled mouth, and the moon hid her face in a cloud as he stolepast the great oriel window, where his own arms and those of his murderedwife were blazoned in azure and gold. On and on he glided, like an evilshadow, the very darkness seeming to loathe him as he passed. Once hethought he heard something call, and stopped; but it was only the bayingof a dog from the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange sixteenth-century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty dagger in themidnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage that led toluckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the windblowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesqueand fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Thenthe clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chuckledto himself, and turned the corner; but no sooner had he done so, than, with a piteous wail of terror, he fell back, and hid his blanched face inhis long, bony hands. Right in front of him was standing a horriblespectre, motionless as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream!Its head was bald and burnished; its face round, and fat, and white; andhideous laughter seemed to have writhed its features into an eternalgrin. From the eyes streamed rays of scarlet light, the mouth was a widewell of fire, and a hideous garment, like to his own, swathed with itssilent snows the Titan form. On its breast was a placard with strangewriting in antique characters, some scroll of shame it seemed, somerecord of wild sins, some awful calendar of crime, and, with its righthand, it bore aloft a falchion of gleaming steel. 

Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly frightened, and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom, he fled back tohis room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as he sped down thecorridor, and finally dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack-boots, where it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in theprivacy of his own apartment, he flung himself down on a small pallet-bed, and hid his face under the clothes. After a time, however, thebrave old Canterville spirit asserted itself, and he determined to go andspeak to the other ghost as soon as it was daylight. Accordingly, justas the dawn was touching the hills with silver, he returned towards thespot where he had first laid eyes on the grisly phantom, feeling that, after all, two ghosts were better than one, and that, by the aid of hisnew friend, he might safely grapple with the twins. On reaching thespot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze. Something had evidentlyhappened to the spectre, for the light had entirely faded from its holloweyes, the gleaming falchion had fallen from its hand, and it was leaningup against the wall in a strained and uncomfortable attitude. He rushedforward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror, the head slippedoff and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recumbent posture, and hefound himself clasping a white dimity bed-curtain, with a sweeping-brush, a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip lying at his feet!--_TheCanterville Ghost_. 

THE GARDEN OF DEATH

'Far away beyond the pine-woods, ' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, thereare the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingalesings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystalmoon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over thesleepers. '

Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face in her hands. 

'You mean the Garden of Death, ' she whispered. 

'Yes, Death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brownearth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals ofDeath's house, for Love is always with you, and Love is stronger thanDeath is. '

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for a few momentsthere was silence. She felt as if she was in a terrible dream. 

Then the Ghost spoke again, and his voice sounded like the sighing of thewind. 

'Have you ever read the old prophecy on the library window?'

'Oh, often, ' cried the little girl, looking up; 'I know it quite well. Itis painted in curious black letters, and it is difficult to read. Thereare only six lines:

 When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville. 

But I don't know what they mean. '

'They mean, ' he said sadly, 'that you must weep for me for my sins, because I have no tears, and pray with me for my soul, because I have nofaith, and then, if you have always been sweet, and good, and gentle, theAngel of Death will have mercy on me. You will see fearful shapes indarkness, and wicked voices will whisper in your ear, but they will notharm you, for against the purity of a little child the powers of Hellcannot prevail. '

Virginia made no answer, and the Ghost wrung his hands in wild despair ashe looked down at her bowed golden head. Suddenly she stood up, verypale, and with a strange light in her eyes. 'I am not afraid, ' she saidfirmly, 'and I will ask the Angel to have mercy on you. '

He rose from his seat with a faint cry of joy, and taking her hand bentover it with old-fashioned grace and kissed it. His fingers were as coldas ice, and his lips burned like fire, but Virginia did not falter, as heled her across the dusky room. On the faded green tapestry werebroidered little huntsmen. They blew their tasselled horns and withtheir tiny hands waved to her to go back. 'Go back! little Virginia, 'they cried, 'go back!' but the Ghost clutched her hand more tightly, andshe shut her eyes against them. Horrible animals with lizard tails, andgoggle eyes, blinked at her from the carven chimney-piece, and murmured'Beware! little Virginia, beware! we may never see you again, ' but theGhost glided on more swiftly, and Virginia did not listen. When theyreached the end of the room he stopped, and muttered some words she couldnot understand. She opened her eyes, and saw the wall slowly fading awaylike a mist, and a great black cavern in front of her. A bitter coldwind swept round them, and she felt something pulling at her dress. 'Quick, quick, ' cried the Ghost, 'or it will be too late, ' and, in amoment, the wainscoting had closed behind them, and the Tapestry Chamberwas empty. --_The Canterville Ghost_. 

AN ETON KIT-CAT

"Well, " said Erskine, lighting a cigarette, "I must begin by telling youabout Cyril Graham himself. He and I were at the same house at Eton. Iwas a year or two older than he was, but we were immense friends, and didall our work and all our play together. There was, of course, a gooddeal more play than work, but I cannot say that I am sorry for that. Itis always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education, and what I learned in the playing fields at Eton has been quite as usefulto me as anything I was taught at Cambridge. I should tell you thatCyril's father and mother were both dead. They had been drowned in ahorrible yachting accident off the Isle of Wight. His father had been inthe diplomatic service, and had married a daughter, the only daughter, infact, of old Lord Crediton, who became Cyril's guardian after the deathof his parents. I don't think that Lord Crediton cared very much forCyril. He had never really forgiven his daughter for marrying a man whohad not a title. He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore likea costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer. I remember seeing himonce on Speech-day. He growled at me, gave me a sovereign, and told menot to grow up 'a damned Radical' like my father. Cyril had very littleaffection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidayswith us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyrilthought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capitalfencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was verylanguid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had astrong objection to football. The two things that really gave himpleasure were poetry and acting. At Eton he was always dressing up andreciting Shakespeare, and when he went up to Trinity he became a memberof the A. D. C. His first term. I remember I was always very jealous ofhis acting. I was absurdly devoted to him; I suppose because we were sodifferent in some things. I was a rather awkward, weakly lad, with hugefeet, and horribly freckled. Freckles run in Scotch families just asgout does in English families. Cyril used to say that of the two hepreferred the gout; but he always set an absurdly high value on personalappearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to provethat it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly waswonderfully handsome. People who did not like him, Philistines andcollege tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that hewas merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mereprettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, andnothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great manypeople who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used tothink him dreadfully insincere. It was due, I think, chiefly to hisinordinate desire to please. Poor Cyril! I told him once that he wascontented with very cheap triumphs, but he only laughed. He was horriblyspoiled. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret oftheir attraction. 

"However, I must tell you about Cyril's acting. You know that noactresses are allowed to play at the A. D. C. At least they were not in mytime. I don't know how it is now. Well, of course, Cyril was alwayscast for the girls' parts, and when _As You Like It_ was produced heplayed Rosalind. It was a marvellous performance. In fact, Cyril Grahamwas the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossibleto describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the wholething. It made an immense sensation, and the horrid little theatre, asit was then, was crowded every night. Even when I read the play now Ican't help thinking of Cyril. It might have been written for him. Thenext term he took his degree, and came to London to read for thediplomatic. But he never did any work. He spent his days in readingShakespeare's Sonnets, and his evenings at the theatre. He was, ofcourse, wild to go on the stage. It was all that I and Lord Creditoncould do to prevent him. Perhaps if he had gone on the stage he would bealive now. It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give goodadvice is absolutely fatal. I hope you will never fall into that error. If you do, you will be sorry for it. "--_The Portrait of Mr. W. H_. 

MRS. ERLYNNE EXERCISES THE PREROGATIVE OF A GRANDMOTHER

Lady Windermere, before Heaven your husband is guiltless of all offencetowards you! And I--I tell you that had it ever occurred to me that sucha monstrous suspicion would have entered your mind, I would have diedrather than have crossed your life or his--oh! died, gladly died! Believewhat you choose about me. I am not worth a moment's sorrow. But don'tspoil your beautiful young life on my account! You don't know what maybe in store for you, unless you leave this house at once. You don't knowwhat it is to fall into the pit, to be despised, mocked, abandoned, sneered at--to be an outcast! to find the door shut against one, to haveto creep in by hideous byways, afraid every moment lest the mask shouldbe stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter, thehorrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all the tearsthe world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One pays for one'ssin, and then one pays again, and all one's life one pays. You mustnever know that. --As for me, if suffering be an expiation, then at thismoment I have expiated all my faults, whatever they have been; for to-night you have made a heart in one who had it not, made it and brokenit. --But let that pass. I may have wrecked my own life, but I will notlet you wreck yours. You--why, you are a mere girl, you would be lost. You haven't got the kind of brains that enables a woman to get back. Youhave neither the wit nor the courage. You couldn't stand dishonour! No!Go back, Lady Windermere, to the husband who loves you, whom you love. You have a child, Lady Windermere. Go back to that child who even now, in pain or in joy, may be calling to you. God gave you that child. Hewill require from you that you make his life fine, that you watch overhim. What answer will you make to God if his life is ruined through you?Back to your house, Lady Windermere--your husband loves you! He hasnever swerved for a moment from the love he bears you. But even if hehad a thousand loves, you must stay with your child. If he was harsh toyou, you must stay with your child. If he ill-treated you, you must staywith your child. If he abandoned you, your place is with yourchild. --_Lady Windermere's Fan_. 

MOTHERHOOD MORE THAN MARRIAGE

Men don't understand what mothers are. I am no different from otherwomen except in the wrong done me and the wrong I did, and my very heavypunishments and great disgrace. And yet, to bear you I had to look ondeath. To nurture you I had to wrestle with it. Death fought with mefor you. All women have to fight with death to keep their children. Death, being childless, wants our children from us. Gerald, when youwere naked I clothed you, when you were hungry I gave you food. Nightand day all that long winter I tended you. No office is too mean, nocare too lowly for the thing we women love--and oh! how _I_ loved _you_. Not Hannah, Samuel more. And you needed love, for you were weakly, andonly love could have kept you alive. Only love can keep any one alive. And boys are careless often and without thinking give pain, and we alwaysfancy that when they come to man's estate and know us better they willrepay us. But it is not so. The world draws them from our side, andthey make friends with whom they are happier than they are with us, andhave amusements from which we are barred, and interests that are notours: and they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitterthey blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste itssweetness with them . . . You made many friends and went into theirhouses and were glad with them, and I, knowing my secret, did not dare tofollow, but stayed at home and closed the door, shut out the sun and satin darkness. What should I have done in honest households? My past wasever with me. . . . And you thought I didn't care for the pleasant thingsof life. I tell you I longed for them, but did not dare to touch them, feeling I had no right. You thought I was happier working amongst thepoor. That was my mission, you imagined. It was not, but where else wasI to go? The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow ispure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known thekiss of sin. It was you I thought of all the time; I gave to them thelove you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . . And you thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and inChurch duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the onlyhouse where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in my heart, Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day, at morn orevensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never repented of my sin. How could I repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit! Even nowthat you are bitter to me I cannot repent. I do not. You are more to methan innocence. I would rather be your mother--oh! much rather!--thanhave been always pure . . . Oh, don't you see? don't you understand? Itis my dishonour that has made you so dear to me. It is my disgrace thathas bound you so closely to me. It is the price I paid for you--theprice of soul and body--that makes me love you as I do. Oh, don't ask meto do this horrible thing. Child of my shame, be still the child of myshame!--_A Woman of No Importance_. 

THE DAMNABLE IDEAL

Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us onmonstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; butwhen we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, theirfollies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for thatreason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us--else what use is love at all? Allsins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, saveloveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. Itis wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they aremaking ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I mightlose your love, as I have lost it now. And so, last night you ruined mylife for me--yes, ruined it! What this woman asked of me was nothingcompared to what she offered to me. She offered security, peace, stability. The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose upin front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat. I couldhave killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed itsrecord, burned the one witness against me. You prevented me. No one butyou, you know it. And now what is there before me but public disgrace, ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonouredlife, a lonely dishonoured death, it may be, some day? Let women make nomore ideals of men! let them not put them on alters and bow before them, or they may ruin other lives as completely as you--you whom I have sowildly loved--have ruined mine!--_An Ideal Husband_. 

FROM A REJECTED PRIZE-ESSAY

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions. And thefunction of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is statical inour institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elementalcreed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite. Italy was not apioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution ofthought. The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole landand found nowhere a resting-place. The dove, which is the bird ofChrist, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. Itwas the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaevalcostume the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, whichwas the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve to usas an allegory. For it was in vain that the Middle Ages strove to guardthe buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes laid aside. Humanity hadrisen from the dead. 

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth ofcriticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that education ofmodern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the wordsof Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while afragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that trainof reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet inthe universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is areturn to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured thepages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a newmethod were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea ofmediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of gladadolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality, when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends whatwas beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenthcentury, from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the greatauthors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words [Greektext]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous presciencePolybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the material sovereigntyof Roman institutions and exemplified in himself the intellectual empireof Greece. 

The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has notbeen a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought nowantiquated and of no account. The only spirit which is entirely removedfrom us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is essentially modern. Theintroduction of the comparative method of research which has forcedhistory to disclose its secrets belongs in a measure to us. Ours, too, is a more scientific knowledge of philology and the method of survival. Nor did the ancients know anything of the doctrine of averages or ofcrucial instances, both of which methods have proved of such importancein modern criticism, the one adding a most important proof of thestatical elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of allphysical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the singleinstance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole newscience of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back to a time whenman was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. But, except these, we have added no new canon or method to the science ofhistorical criticism. Across the drear waste of a thousand years theGreek and the modern spirit join hands. 

In the torch race which the Greek boys ran from the Cerameician field ofdeath to the home of the goddess of Wisdom, not merely he who firstreached the goal but he also who first started with the torch aflamereceived a prize. In the Lampadephoria of civilisation and free thoughtlet us not forget to render due meed of honour to those who first litthat sacred flame, the increasing splendour of which lights our footstepsto the far-off divine event of the attainment of perfect truth. --_TheRise of Historical Criticism_. 

THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE USEFUL

There are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two differentforms of natures: men to whom the end of life is action, and men to whomthe end of life is thought. As regards the latter, who seek forexperience itself and not for the fruits of experience, who must burnalways with one of the passions of this fiery-coloured world, who findlife interesting not for its secret but for its situations, for itspulsations and not for its purpose; the passion for beauty engendered bythe decorative arts will be to them more satisfying than any political orreligious enthusiasm, any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrowfor love. For art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing butthe highest quality to one's moments, and for those moments' sake. Sofar for those to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the others, who hold that life is inseparable from labour, to them should thismovement be specially dear: for, if our days are barren without industry, industry without art is barbarism. 

Hewers of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed among us. Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour of man after all:but at least let the pitcher that stands by the well be beautiful andsurely the labour of the day will be lightened: let the wood be madereceptive of some lovely form, some gracious design, and there will comeno longer discontent but joy to the toiler. For what is decoration butthe worker's expression of joy in his work? And not joy merely--that isa great thing yet not enough--but that opportunity of expressing his ownindividuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the source ofall art. 'I have tried, ' I remember William Morris saying to me once, 'Ihave tried to make each of my workers an artist, and when I say an artistI mean a man. ' For the worker then, handicraftsman of whatever kind heis, art is no longer to be a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown overthe whitened body of a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of hisluxury, but rather the beautiful and noble expression of a life that hasin it something beautiful and noble. --_The English Renaissance of Art_. 

THE ARTIST

ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of_The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment_. And he went forth into theworld to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze. 

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere inthe whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze ofthe image of _The Sorrow that endureth for Ever_. 

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and hadset it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb ofthe dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his ownfashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that diethnot, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And inthe whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image. 

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire. 

And out of the bronze of the image of _The Sorrow that endureth for Ever_he fashioned an image of _The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment_. --_Poemsin Prose_. 

THE DOER OF GOOD

It was night-time and He was alone. 

And He saw afar-off the walls of a round city and went towards the city. 

And when He came near He heard within the city the tread of the feet ofjoy, and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud noise of manylutes. And He knocked at the gate and certain of the gate-keepers openedto Him. 

And He beheld a house that was of marble and had fair pillars of marblebefore it. The pillars were hung with garlands, and within and withoutthere were torches of cedar. And He entered the house. 

And when He had passed through the hall of chalcedony and the hall ofjasper, and reached the long hall of feasting, He saw lying on a couch ofsea-purple one whose hair was crowned with red roses and whose lips werered with wine. 

And He went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to him, 'Why do you live like this?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him, and made answer andsaid, 'But I was a leper once, and you healed me. How else should Ilive?'

And He passed out of the house and went again into the street. 

And after a little while He saw one whose face and raiment were paintedand whose feet were shod with pearls. And behind her came, slowly as ahunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours. Now the face of thewoman was as the fair face of an idol, and the eyes of the young man werebright with lust. 

And He followed swiftly and touched the hand of the young man and said tohim, 'Why do you look at this woman and in such wise?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him and said, 'But I wasblind once, and you gave me sight. At what else should I look?'

And He ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and saidto her, 'Is there no other way in which to walk save the way of sin?'

And the woman turned round and recognised Him, and laughed and said, 'Butyou forgave me my sins, and the way is a pleasant way. '

And He passed out of the city. 

And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the roadside ayoung man who was weeping. 

And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and saidto him, 'Why are you weeping?'

And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer, 'But Iwas dead once, and you raised me from the dead. What else should I dobut weep?'--_Poems in Prose_. 

THE DISCIPLE

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweetwaters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through thewoodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort. 

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet watersinto a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hairand cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that you should mournin this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he. '

'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool. 

'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did heever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and lookdown at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his ownbeauty. '

And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on mybanks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my ownbeauty mirrored. '--_Poems in Prose_. 

THE MASTER

Now when the darkness came over the earth Joseph of Arimathea, havinglighted a torch of pinewood, passed down from the hill into the valley. For he had business in his own home. 

And kneeling on the flint stones of the Valley of Desolation he saw ayoung man who was naked and weeping. His hair was the colour of honey, and his body was as a white flower, but he had wounded his body withthorns and on his hair had he set ashes as a crown. 

And he who had great possessions said to the young man who was naked andweeping, 'I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great, for surely He wasa just man. '

And the young man answered, 'It is not for Him that I am weeping, but formyself. I too have changed water into wine, and I have healed the leperand given sight to the blind. I have walked upon the waters, and fromthe dwellers in the tombs I have cast out devils. I have fed the hungryin the desert where there was no food, and I have raised the dead fromtheir narrow houses, and at my bidding, and before a great multitude, ofpeople, a barren fig-tree withered away. All things that this man hasdone I have done also. And yet they have not crucified me. '--_Poems inProse_. 

THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT

And there was silence in the House of Judgment, and the Man came nakedbefore God. 

And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man. 

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast showncruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those who lackedhelp thou hast been bitter and hard of heart. The poor called to theeand thou didst not hearken, and thine ears were closed to the cry of Myafflicted. The inheritance of the fatherless thou didst take untothyself, and thou didst send the foxes into the vineyard of thyneighbour's field. Thou didst take the bread of the children and give itto the dogs to eat, and My lepers who lived in the marshes, and were atpeace and praised Me, thou didst drive forth on to the highways, and onMine earth out of which I made thee thou didst spill innocent blood. '

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I. '

And again God opened the Book of the Life of the Man. 

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and the Beauty I haveshown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou didst passby. The walls of thy chamber were painted with images, and from the bedof thine abominations thou didst rise up to the sound of flutes. Thoudidst build seven altars to the sins I have suffered, and didst eat ofthe thing that may not be eaten, and the purple of thy raiment wasbroidered with the three signs of shame. Thine idols were neither ofgold nor of silver that endure, but of flesh that dieth. Thou didststain their hair with perfumes and put pomegranates in their hands. Thoudidst stain their feet with saffron and spread carpets before them. Withantimony thou didst stain their eyelids and their bodies thou didst smearwith myrrh. Thou didst bow thyself to the ground before them, and thethrones of thine idols were set in the sun. Thou didst show to the sunthy shame and to the moon thy madness. '

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I. '

And a third time God opened the Book of the Life of the Man. 

And God said to the Man, 'Evil hath been thy life, and with evil didstthou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness. The hands that fed theethou didst wound, and the breasts that gave thee suck thou didst despise. He who came to thee with water went away thirsting, and the outlawed menwho hid thee in their tents at night thou didst betray before dawn. Thineenemy who spared thee thou didst snare in an ambush, and the friend whowalked with thee thou didst sell for a price, and to those who broughtthee Love thou didst ever give Lust in thy turn. '

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I. '

And God closed the Book of the Life of the Man, and said, 'Surely I willsend thee into Hell. Even into Hell will I send thee. '

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not. '

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and forwhat reason?'

'Because in Hell have I always lived, ' answered the Man. 

And there was silence in the House of Judgment. 

And after a space God spake, and said to the Man, 'Seeing that I may notsend thee into Hell, surely I will send thee unto Heaven. Even untoHeaven will I send thee. '

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not. '

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee unto Heaven, andfor what reason?'

'Because never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it, 'answered the Man. 

And there was silence in the House of Judgment. --_Poems in Prose_. 

THE TEACHER OF WISDOM

From his childhood he had been as one filled with the perfect knowledgeof God, and even while he was yet but a lad many of the saints, as wellas certain holy women who dwelt in the free city of his birth, had beenstirred to much wonder by the grave wisdom of his answers. 

And when his parents had given him the robe and the ring of manhood hekissed them, and left them and went out into the world, that he mightspeak to the world about God. For there were at that time many in theworld who either knew not God at all, or had but an incomplete knowledgeof Him, or worshipped the false gods who dwell in groves and have no careof their worshippers. 

And he set his face to the sun and journeyed, walking without sandals, ashe had seen the saints walk, and carrying at his girdle a leathern walletand a little water-bottle of burnt clay. 

And as he walked along the highway he was full of the joy that comes fromthe perfect knowledge of God, and he sang praises unto God withoutceasing; and after a time he reached a strange land in which there weremany cities. 

And he passed through eleven cities. And some of these cities were invalleys, and others were by the banks of great rivers, and others wereset on hills. And in each city he found a disciple who loved him andfollowed him, and a great multitude also of people followed him from eachcity, and the knowledge of God spread in the whole land, and many of therulers were converted, and the priests of the temples in which there wereidols found that half of their gain was gone, and when they beat upontheir drums at noon none, or but a few, came with peacocks and withofferings of flesh as had been the custom of the land before his coming. 

Yet the more the people followed him, and the greater the number of hisdisciples, the greater became his sorrow. And he knew not why his sorrowwas so great. For he spake ever about God, and out of the fulness ofthat perfect knowledge of God which God had Himself given to him. 

And one evening he passed out of the eleventh city, which was a city ofArmenia, and his disciples and a great crowd of people followed afterhim; and he went up on to a mountain and sat down on a rock that was onthe mountain, and his disciples stood round him, and the multitude kneltin the valley. 

And he bowed his head on his hands and wept, and said to his Soul, 'Whyis it that I am full of sorrow and fear, and that each of my disciples isan enemy that walks in the noonday?' And his Soul answered him and said, 'God filled thee with the perfect knowledge of Himself, and thou hastgiven this knowledge away to others. The pearl of great price thou hastdivided, and the vesture without seam thou hast parted asunder. He whogiveth away wisdom robbeth himself. He is as one who giveth his treasureto a robber. Is not God wiser than thou art? Who art thou to give awaythe secret that God hath told thee? I was rich once, and thou hast mademe poor. Once I saw God, and now thou hast hidden Him from me. '

And he wept again, for he knew that his Soul spake truth to him, and thathe had given to others the perfect knowledge of God, and that he was asone clinging to the skirts of God, and that his faith was leaving him byreason of the number of those who believed in him. 

And he said to himself, 'I will talk no more about God. He who givethaway wisdom robbeth himself. '

And after the space of some hours his disciples came near him and bowedthemselves to the ground and said, 'Master, talk to us about God, forthou hast the perfect knowledge of God, and no man save thee hath thisknowledge. '

And he answered them and said, 'I will talk to you about all other thingsthat are in heaven and on earth, but about God I will not talk to you. Neither now, nor at any time, will I talk to you about God. '

And they were wroth with him and said to him, 'Thou hast led us into thedesert that we might hearken to thee. Wilt thou send us away hungry, andthe great multitude that thou hast made to follow thee?'

And he answered them and said, 'I will not talk to you about God. '

And the multitude murmured against him and said to him, 'Thou hast led usinto the desert, and hast given us no food to eat. Talk to us about Godand it will suffice us. '

But he answered them not a word. For he knew that if he spake to themabout God he would give away his treasure. 

And his disciples went away sadly, and the multitude of people returnedto their own homes. And many died on the way. 

And when he was alone he rose up and set his face to the moon, andjourneyed for seven moons, speaking to no man nor making any answer. Andwhen the seventh moon had waned he reached that desert which is thedesert of the Great River. And having found a cavern in which a Centaurhad once dwelt, he took it for his place of dwelling, and made himself amat of reeds on which to lie, and became a hermit. And every hour theHermit praised God that He had suffered him to keep some knowledge of Himand of His wonderful greatness. 

Now, one evening, as the Hermit was seated before the cavern in which hehad made his place of dwelling, he beheld a young man of evil andbeautiful face who passed by in mean apparel and with empty hands. Everyevening with empty hands the young man passed by, and every morning hereturned with his hands full of purple and pearls. For he was a Robberand robbed the caravans of the merchants. 

And the Hermit looked at him and pitied him. But he spake not a word. For he knew that he who speaks a word loses his faith. 

And one morning, as the young man returned with his hands full of purpleand pearls, he stopped and frowned and stamped his foot upon the sand, and said to the Hermit: 'Why do you look at me ever in this manner as Ipass by? What is it that I see in your eyes? For no man has looked atme before in this manner. And the thing is a thorn and a trouble to me. '

And the Hermit answered him and said, 'What you see in my eyes is pity. Pity is what looks out at you from my eyes. '

And the young man laughed with scorn, and cried to the Hermit in a bittervoice, and said to him, 'I have purple and pearls in my hands, and youhave but a mat of reeds on which to lie. What pity should you have forme? And for what reason have you this pity?'

'I have pity for you, ' said the Hermit, 'because you have no knowledge ofGod. '

'Is this knowledge of God a precious thing?' asked the young man, and hecame close to the mouth of the cavern. 

'It is more precious than all the purple and the pearls of the world, 'answered the Hermit. 

'And have you got it?' said the young Robber, and he came closer still. 

'Once, indeed, ' answered the Hermit, 'I possessed the perfect knowledgeof God. But in my foolishness I parted with it, and divided it amongstothers. Yet even now is such knowledge as remains to me more preciousthan purple or pearls. '

And when the young Robber heard this he threw away the purple and thepearls that he was bearing in his hands, and drawing a sharp sword ofcurved steel he said to the Hermit, 'Give me, forthwith this knowledge ofGod that you possess, or I will surely slay you. Wherefore should I notslay him who has a treasure greater than my treasure?'

And the Hermit spread out his arms and said, 'Were it not better for meto go unto the uttermost courts of God and praise Him, than to live inthe world and have no knowledge of Him? Slay me if that be your desire. But I will not give away my knowledge of God. '

And the young Robber knelt down and besought him, but the Hermit wouldnot talk to him about God, nor give him his Treasure, and the youngRobber rose up and said to the Hermit, 'Be it as you will. As formyself, I will go to the City of the Seven Sins, that is but three days'journey from this place, and for my purple they will give me pleasure, and for my pearls they will sell me joy. ' And he took up the purple andthe pearls and went swiftly away. 

And the Hermit cried out and followed him and besought him. For thespace of three days he followed the young Robber on the road andentreated him to return, nor to enter into the City of the Seven Sins. 

And ever and anon the young Robber looked back at the Hermit and calledto him, and said, 'Will you give me this knowledge of God which is moreprecious than purple and pearls? If you will give me that, I will notenter the city. '

And ever did the Hermit answer, 'All things that I have I will give thee, save that one thing only. For that thing it is not lawful for me to giveaway. '

And in the twilight of the third day they came nigh to the great scarletgates of the City of the Seven Sins. And from the city there came thesound of much laughter. 

And the young Robber laughed in answer, and sought to knock at the gate. And as he did so the Hermit ran forward and caught him by the skirts ofhis raiment, and said to him: 'Stretch forth your hands, and set yourarms around my neck, and put your ear close to my lips, and I will giveyou what remains to me of the knowledge of God. ' And the young Robberstopped. 

And when the Hermit had given away his knowledge of God, he fell upon theground and wept, and a great darkness hid from him the city and the youngRobber, so that he saw them no more. 

And as he lay there weeping he was ware of One who was standing besidehim; and He who was standing beside him had feet of brass and hair likefine wool. And He raised the Hermit up, and said to him: 'Before thistime thou hadst the perfect knowledge of God. Now thou shalt have theperfect love of God. Wherefore art thou weeping?' And he kissedhim. --_Poems in Prose_. 

WILDE GIVES DIRECTIONS ABOUT 'DE PROFUNDIS'

H. M. PRISON, READING. 

April 1st, 1897. 

My Dear Robbie, --I send you a MS. Separate from this, which I hope willarrive safely. As soon as you have read it, I want you to have itcarefully copied for me. There are many causes why I wish this to bedone. One will suffice. I want you to be my literary executor in caseof my death, and to have complete control of my plays, books, and papers. As soon as I find I have a legal right to make a will, I will do so. Mywife does not understand my art, nor could be expected to have anyinterest in it, and Cyril is only a child. So I turn naturally to you, as indeed I do for everything, and would like you to have all my works. The deficit that their sale will produce may be lodged to the credit ofCyril and Vivian. Well, if you are my literary executor, you must be inpossession of the only document that gives any explanation of myextraordinary behaviour . . . When you have read the letter, you will seethe psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from theoutside seems a combination of absolute idiotcy with vulgar bravado. Someday the truth will have to be known--not necessarily in my lifetime . . . But I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time; for the simple reason that I inherited from my father andmother a name of high distinction in literature and art, and I cannot foreternity allow that name to be degraded. I don't defend my conduct. Iexplain it. Also there are in my letter certain passages which deal withmy mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of mycharacter and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place:and I want you and others who still stand by me and have affection for meto know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world. Ofcourse from one point of view I know that on the day of my release Ishall be merely passing from one prison into another, and there are timeswhen the whole world seems to me no larger than my cell and as full ofterror for me. Still I believe that at the beginning God made a worldfor each separate man, and in that world which is within us we shouldseek to live. At any rate you will read those parts of my letter withless pain than the others. Of course I need not remind you how fluid athing thought is with me--with us all--and of what an evanescentsubstance are our emotions made. Still I do see a sort of possible goaltowards which, through art, I may progress. It is not unlikely that youmay help me. 

As regards the mode of copying: of course it is too long for anyamanuensis to attempt: and your own handwriting, dear Robbie, in yourlast letter seems specially designed to remind me that the task is not tobe yours. I think that the only thing to do is to be thoroughly modernand to have it typewritten. Of course the MS. Should not pass out ofyour control, but could you not get Mrs. Marshall to send down one of hertype-writing girls--women are the most reliable as they have no memoryfor the important--to Hornton Street or Phillimore Gardens, to do itunder your supervision? I assure you that the typewriting machine, whenplayed with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when playedby a sister or near relation. Indeed many among those most devoted todomesticity prefer it. I wish the copy to be done not on tissue paperbut on good paper such as is used for plays, and a wide rubricated marginshould be left for corrections . . . If the copy is done at HorntonStreet the lady typewriter might be fed through a lattice in the door, like the Cardinals when they elect a Pope; till she comes out on thebalcony and can say to the world: "Habet Mundus Epistolam"; for indeed itis an Encyclical letter, and as the Bulls of the Holy Father are namedfrom their opening words, it may be spoken of as the "_Epistola_: _inCarcere et Vinculis_. " . . . In point of fact, Robbie, prison life makesone see people and things as they really are. That is why it turns oneto stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions ofa life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to itsunreality. We who are immobile both see and know. Whether or not theletter does good to narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has donegood. I have "cleansed my bosom of much perilous stuff"; to borrow aphrase from the poet whom you and I once thought of rescuing from thePhilistines. I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artistthe supreme and only mode of life. It is by utterance that we live. Ofthe many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor there isnone for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write fullyand at as great a length as I desire. For nearly two years I had withina growing burden of bitterness, of much of which I have now got rid. Onthe other side of the prison wall there are some poor blacksoot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almostshrill green. I know quite well what they are going through. They arefinding expression. 

Ever yours, OSCAR. 

--_Letter from Reading Prison to Robert Ross_. 

CAREY STREET

Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will realisewhat that means. They will know nothing of life till they do, --andnatures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prisonto the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, --waited in the longdreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet andsimple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heavenfor smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this modeof love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, orstooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one singleword to him about what he did. I do not know to the present momentwhether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not athing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store itin the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt thatI am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and keptsweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has beenprofitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases ofthose who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in mymouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealedfor me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, andbrought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with thewounded, broken, and great heart of the world. When people are able tounderstand, not merely how beautiful ---'s action was, but why it meantso much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they willrealise how and in what spirit they should approach me. . . . 

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than weare. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, acasuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak ofone who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is thephrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of lovein it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prisonmakes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to airand sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcomewhen we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Ourvery children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity arebroken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We aredenied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bringbalm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. --_DeProfundis_. 

SORROW WEARS NO MASK

Sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once thetype and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for isthe mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: inwhich the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Ofsuch modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the artspreoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: atanother we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness ofimpression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things andmaking its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in itsmorbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscapeart is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plasticperfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed inexpression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and aflower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is theultimate type both in life and art. 

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard andcallous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlikepleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence betweenthe essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not theresemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal tothe form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more thanit is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to themoon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thingwith itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul madeincarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is notruth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me tobe the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or theappetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrowhave the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star thereis pain. 

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinaryreality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolicrelations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a singlewretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand insymbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life issuffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin tolive, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, thatwe inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek notmerely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb, ' but for all our yearsto taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really bestarving the soul. --_De Profundis_. 

VITA NUOVA

Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is sowonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. Onecan realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the longhours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heightsthat the soul is competent to gain. ' We think in eternity, but we moveslowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison Ineed not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep backinto one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strangeinsistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house fortheir coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slavewhose slave it is one's chance or choice to be. 

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, itis true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness andcomfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is forme, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor ofmy cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictionsmakes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that itbreaks one's heart--hearts are made to be broken--but that it turns one'sheart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front ofbrass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And hewho is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase ofwhich the Church is so fond--so rightly fond, I dare say--for in life asin art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, andshuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these lessons here, if Iam to learn them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if my feet are onthe right road and my face set towards 'the gate which is calledbeautiful, ' though I may fall many times in the mire and often in themist go astray. 

This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means ofdevelopment, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was atOxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen'snarrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took mydegree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the gardenof the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passionin my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistakewas that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed tome the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for itsshadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, theanguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drinkputs gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I haddetermined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them inturn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food atall. 

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did itto the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was nopleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cupof wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I livedon honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrongbecause it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other halfof the garden had its secrets for me also. --_De Profundis_. 

THE GRAND ROMANTIC

It is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in thesense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being thenearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through somedivine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as beingthe nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primarydesire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was toa relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honestman was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' AidSociety and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of apublican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a greatachievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regardedsin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modesof perfection. 

It seems a very dangerous idea. It is--all great ideas are dangerous. That it was Christ's creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true creedI don't doubt myself. 

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise hewould be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance isthe moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which onealters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often sayin their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past. ' Christshowed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thinghe could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said--I feel quitecertain about it--that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees andwept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy momentsin his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I daresay one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worthwhile going to prison. 

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there arefalse dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of suddensunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its goldbefore its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build onbarren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that weshould be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been nonesince. I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God hadgiven him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite younghad in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul ofa poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection notdifficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do notrequire the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Franciswas the true _Imitatio Christi_, a poem compared to which the book ofthat name is merely prose. 

Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just likea work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by beingbrought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody ispredestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walkswith Christ to Emmaus. --_De Profundis_. 

CLAPHAM JUNCTION

My lot has been one of public infamy, of long imprisonment, of misery, ofruin, of disgrace, but I am not worthy of it--not yet, at any rate. Iremember that I used to say that I thought I could bear a real tragedy ifit came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that thedreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raimentof comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque orlacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probablyalways been true about actual life. It is said that all martyrdomsseemed mean to the looker on. The nineteenth century is no exception tothe rule. 

Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking instyle; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed toappeal to the sense of humour. On November 13th, 1895, I was broughtdown here from London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day Ihad to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at. I had been taken out of thehospital ward without a moment's notice being given to me. Of allpossible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me theylaughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing couldexceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half anhour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeeringmob. --_De Profundis_. 

THE BROKEN RESOLUTION

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any singlething. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, andthat the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of themoon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and dealsdirectly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there ispurification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence. 

Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle, ' merely tolook at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when Ithink that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and thelilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stirinto restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other tossthe pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia forme. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for thefirst time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with thetawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, towhom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals ofsome rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is nota single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of ashell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, mynature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those'pour qui le monde visible existe. '

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying thoughit may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms andshapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that Idesire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulateutterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutelynecessary for me to find it somewhere. 

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentencesof death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left thebox to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house ofdetention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer;but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will haveclefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silenceI may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I maywalk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over myfootprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me ingreat waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. --_De Profundis_. 

DOMESTICITY AT BERNEVAL

DIEPPE, June 1st, 1897. 

My Dear Robbie, --I propose to live at Berneval. I will _not_ live inParis, nor in Algiers, nor in Southern Italy. Surely a house for a year, if I choose to continue there, at 32 pounds is absurdly cheap. I couldnot live cheaper at a hotel. You are penny foolish, and pound foolish--adreadful state for my financier to be in. I told M. Bonnet that mybankers were MM. Ross et Cie, banquiers celebres de Londres--and now yousuddenly show me that you have no place among the great financial people, and are afraid of any investment over 31 pounds, 10s. It is merely theextra ten shillings that baffles you. As regards people living on me, and the extra bedrooms: dear boy, there is no one who would stay with mebut you, and you will pay your own bill at the hotel for meals; and asfor your room, the charge will be nominally 2 francs 50 centimes a night, but there will be lots of extras such as _bougie, bain_ and hot water, and all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms are charged extra. And if anyone does not take the extras, of course he is charged more:--

 Bain, 25 C. 

 Pas de bain, 50 C. 

 Cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 10 C. Pour chaque cigarette. 

 Pas de cigarette dans la chambre a coucher, 20 C. Pour chaque cigarette. 

This is the system at all good hotels. If Reggie comes, of course hewill pay a little more: I cannot forget that he gave me a dressing-case. Sphinxes pay a hundred per cent more than any one else--they always didin Ancient Egypt. 

But seriously, Robbie, if people stayed with me, of course they would paytheir _pension_ at the hotel. They would have to: except architects. Amodern architect, like modern architecture, doesn't pay. But then I knowonly one architect and you are hiding him somewhere from me. I believethat he is as extinct as the dado, of which now only fossil remains arefound, chiefly in the vicinity of Brompton, where they are sometimesdiscovered by workmen excavating. They are usually embedded in the oldLincrusta Walton strata, and are rare consequently. 

I visited M. Le Cure {4} to-day. He has a charming house and a _jardinpotager_. He showed me over the church. To-morrow I sit in the choir byhis special invitation. He showed me all his vestments. To-morrow hereally will be charming in red. He knows I am a heretic, and believesPusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on accountof England's kindness to _les pretres exiles_ at the time of theRevolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island. 

Stained glass windows are wanted in the church; he has only six; fourteenmore are needed. He gets them at 300 francs--12 pounds--a window inParis. I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and soonly gave him something _pour les pauvres_. You had a narrow escape, Robbie. You should be thankful. 

I hope the 40 pounds is on its way, and that the 60 pounds will follow. Iam going to hire a boat. It will save walking and so be an economy inthe end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St. Francis ofAssissi awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen. 

Yours, OSCAR. 

--_Letter to Robert Ross_. 

A VISIT TO THE POPE

c/o COOK & SON, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME, April 16th, 1900. 

My dear Robbie, --I simply cannot write. It is too horrid, not of me, butto me. It is a mode of paralysis--a _cacoethes tacendi_--the one formthat malady takes in me. 

Well, all passed over very successfully. Palermo, where we stayed eightdays, was lovely. The most beautifully situated town in the world--itdreams away its life in the _concha d'oro_, the exquisite valley thatlies between two seas. The lemon groves and the orange gardens were soentirely perfect that I became quite a Pre-Raphaelite, and loathed theordinary impressionists whose muddly souls and blurred intelligenceswould have rendered, but by mud and blur, those "golden lamps hung in agreen night" that filled me with such joy. The elaborate and exquisitedetail of the true Pre-Raphaelite is the compensation they offer us forthe absence of motion; literature and motion being the only arts that arenot immobile. 

Then nowhere, not even at Ravenna, have I seen such mosaics as in theCapella Palatine, which from pavement to domed ceiling is all gold: onereally feels as if one was sitting in the heart of a great honey-comblooking at angels singing: and _looking_ at angels, or indeed at people, singing, is much nicer than listening to them, for this reason: the greatartists always give to their angels lutes without strings, pipes withoutvent-holes, and reeds through which no wind can wander or makewhistlings. 

Monreale you have heard of--with its cloisters and cathedral: we oftendrove there. 

I also made great friends with a young seminarist, who lived in thecathedral of Palermo--he and eleven others, in little rooms beneath theroof, like birds. 

Every day he showed me all over the cathedral, I knelt before the hugeporphyry sarcophagus in which Frederick the Second lies: it is a sublimebare monstrous thing--blood-coloured, and held up by lions who havecaught some of the rage of the great Emperor's restless soul. At firstmy young friend, Giuseppe Loverdi, gave me information; but on the thirdday I gave information to him, and re-wrote history as usual, and toldhim all about the supreme King and his Court of Poets, and the terriblebook that he never wrote. His reason for entering the church wassingularly mediaeval. I asked him why he thought of becoming a_clerico_, and how. He answered: "My father is a cook and most poor; andwe are many at home, so it seemed to me a good thing that there should bein so small a house as ours, one mouth less to feed; for though I amslim, I eat much, too much, alas! I fear. "

I told him to be comforted, because God used poverty often as a means ofbringing people to Him, and used riches never, or rarely; so Giuseppe wascomforted, and I gave him a little book of devotion, very pretty, andwith far more pictures than prayers in it--so of great service toGiuseppe whose eyes are beautiful. I also gave him many _lire_, andprophesied for him a Cardinal's hat, if he remained very good and neverforgot me. 

At Naples we stopped three days: most of my friends are, as you know, inprison, but I met some of nice memory. 

We came to Rome on Holy Thursday. H--- left on Saturday for Gland--andyesterday, to the terror of Grissell {5} and all the Papal Court, Iappeared in the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got theblessing of the Holy Father--a blessing they would have denied me. 

He was wonderful as he was carried past me on his throne--not of fleshand blood, but a white soul robed in white and an artist as well as asaint--the only instance in history, if the newspapers are to bebelieved. I have seen nothing like the extraordinary grace of hisgestures as he rose, from moment to moment, to bless--possibly thepilgrims, but certainly me. 

Tree should see him. It is his only chance. 

I was deeply impressed, and my walking-stick showed signs of budding, would have budded, indeed, only at the door of the Chapel it was takenfrom me by the Knave of Spades. This strange prohibition is, of course, in honour of Tannhauser. 

How did I get the ticket? By a miracle, of course. I thought it washopeless and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at fiveo'clock H--- and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l'Europe. Suddenly, as I was eating buttered toast, a man--or what seemed to be one--dressedlike a hotel porter entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope onEaster Day. I bowed my head humbly and said "Non sum dignus, " or wordsto that effect. He at once produced a ticket!

When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, andthat the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say nomore. 

An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I doconstantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon anobsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better. 

On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: musicquite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--suchas Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony andshowed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. Asinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carvedon stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked atstained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. Thesight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with thegreat sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor inGothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by badportrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, andhe has gone on posing ever since. 

I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send mesome of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter. 

Kindest regards to your dear mother. 

Always, OSCAR. 

--_Letter to Robert Ross_. 

FOOTNOTES

{1} "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings ofOscar Wilde, " by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co. , 1914. 

{2} "The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of theNineteenth Century, " by Holbrook Jackson. London: Grant Richards Ltd. , 1913. 

{3} Mortimer Menpes. 

{4} M. Constant Trop-Hardy, died at Berneval, March 2, 1898. 

{5} Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, a Papal Chamberlain.