hundred and ten affect but little as yet either the outer shape or the informing spirit of English letters. Our literature is still of London, Londony. From "the great heart of the empire," to quote for once our apostle of the English-speaking race, most English thinking, most English art as expressed in words, still proceeds, as point of origin. New York, Chicago, Montreal, Melbourne, are at best receptive; from London springs the thought that moves the English-speaking world, as far as the English-speaking world is moved at all by thought or by language.

ter.

And there comes the rub. C'est là le diable! This purely English milieu, in which and for which our literature is produced, is a milieu utterly alien and inimical to the whole literary or artistic spirit. When the English writer says so, the gentleman in the street thinks the English writer means merely that he isn't allowed to use ugly words and describe risky situations of a peculiar characWhat a grotesque misunderstanding! As well might he suppose that Puritanism militated against literature and art only in so far as it insisted on cutting out the name of the deity and all profane oaths from dramatic pieces, and on eschewing the nude in mythological painting. The effect of the Philistinism of the English public upon the English artist, in words or in colors, is something infinitely deeper, more cramping, more pervasive, more souldestroying in every way, than that. It is an effect due to a resolutely inartistic attitude of mind, an utter absence of sympathy with or interest in whatever most moves the true artist or the true literary worker. Art in France and in many other countries can count upon intelligent reception from an immense public. Art in England can expect little but chilly neglect, or even open hostility, from the vast mass of the unreceptive or actively hostile crowd that passes it by in contempt or throws mud from the gutter at it.

The British public is, in one word, stodgy. Stodginess is the salient characteristic of the bourgeois class that gives tone to the whole, including society; and whatever is produced for its palate must be stodgy also. But it doesn't follow that who drives fat oxen should himself be fat. Nay, more, for the most part, I believe, the producers of stodgy literature and stodgy art turn out their solidly insipid

wares, contre cœur, to suit the taste of the British public, and would far rather try their hand at something airy, light, true, sympathetic, artistic. Only they can't. Supply and Demand govern the market in literature as they govern the market in Manchester piece goods. The manyheaded beast, says publisher or editor to his "hands," the authors, requires for the moment such and such mental pabulum. Very well, responds the obedient hack, with the cheerful alacrity born of long disregard of one's own tastes and feelings; then the many-headed beast shall be humored to the top of his bent. We will tickle his thick ribs. We will suit him to his fancy.

Hence it has come about that English producers of popular literature are mostly hack-workers. The Sons of the Prophets inhabit a new and better-paid Grubb Street. In so far as a larger and more clamorous public demands their wares, to be sure, they are immensely better off than the wretched immortals who toiled at starvation wages for Tonson and Lintott. Current quotations of literary labor rule now almost a quarter as high as the earnings of doctors, lawyers, dentists, clergymen ; they frequently reach to perhaps as much as a twentieth part of the average stockbroker's.

On the purely material side, therefore, divine genius cannot reasonably complain it is recompensed in some cases quite as highly as many commercial travellers. But the material side doesn't altogether close the question. Genius has tastes-likes and dislikes of its own. Authors, in the lump, are men above the average in intellect and ability. They tend, as a rule, to have opinions and ideas. They would usually prefer to consult those opinions and ideas in writing their books or journalistic utterances. Most often, indeed, in their callow apprenticeship, they begin by doing so. But, schooled by experience, they soon learn better. Editors. return their immortal blank verse, unread : publishers decline (with thanks) their psychological novel. Then gradually they grow wise. They acquiesce in the inevitable. They bow down their heads meekly before Demand and Supply, those economic Demogorgons of a commercial age, and obediently produce what their public requires of them. It is Samson and the Philistines. Divine genius must needs make sport for the daughters of the enemy.

See here, then, this paradox. The public are stodgy and crave for stodginess. But no stodgy person is fitted by nature to supply what they want to them. For why? the public likes its stodgy material served up to it piping hot, with delicate sauce which may titillate its dull nerves, and make the old food seem new to its jaded palate. It says, in effect, to the wouldbe author-"You're a clever fellow. Come now, then, dress me up a nice tale to my fancy. Let it be stodgy, of course; let it be flat as I am; let it tell of my own commonplace uninteresting loves and hates; let it flatter my base prejudices; let it carefully avoid treading on my favorite corns but let it also be amusing, cunningly wrought, deftly worded. Make it bloody, if you like; make it sensational, exciting; but don't for a moment intrude upon ine your own singular tastes and ideas. They're not the same as mine, and therefore I don't like them. I don't understand them. They either shock me, or hurt me, or annoy me, or bore me; or else they strike me (who am confessedly less clever than you) as simply ridiculous. So absurd that any fellow should think otherwise than as I do! He can have no common-sense; he must be a wild sort of harum-scarum idiot! At the same time, I must get you and your likes to write for me, perforce—not others like myself, because you only, you other phrasemongers, know how to dress up these meagre and commonplace and threadbare ideas of mine in such a way as tickles my mirth and excites my sluggish liver. Go to, therefore; you have brains; exercise them to please Trim you my tale as the tailor trims my coat, to satisfy the customer."

ine.

And most men of letters have to submit to this hateful drudgery. They have to write things which perpetually offend their own philosophic creed, their own artistic sensibilities. They have to please the hundred-handed bourgeois Briareus, on pain of starvation. Some few of them, to be sure-some very, very few, are men of means, and can afford to write as they will, regardless of their public. Ruskin did that, from the first, very much to his advantage. So, in another way, more heroic, did Herbert Spencer. So too did George Meredith; so also did Swinburne. And they each in the end, by dint of studious interpretation at the hands of admiring disciples, succeeded at last in bringing the

public round to them. But such exceptions are rare. For the most part, our men of letters have to bend themselves from the first to the public will. Bohemians by birth, unsuited to crook the supple knee before vile conventions, and endowed with wide and comprehensive views of men and nature, they have to narrow their scope and confine their ideas, for hire, till they suit the limited purview of their Philistine paymasters.

Come out and be a leader !" says the seer to the man who thinks. But what is the good of being a leader where no man follows? "Obey the finest intuitions of your own genius," says the critic to the neophyte. But what is the good of the intuitions of genius if the publisher returns genius its manuscript by parcel post, with a polite intimation that Mr. Mudie would refuse to circulate such stuff, and that the Right Honorable Goliath of the railway bookstalls would exercise his moral censorship to suppress it sternly?

It is on the modern novel, above all things, that this Philistine supervision weighs hardest and worst. We have no Maupassants over here, no Tolstois, no Lotis. And why? Do you really suppose all the intelligent and experienced men who dish up serial stories, hot and hot, for our periodical press-able statesmen, some of them; brilliant poets; deep thinkers-do you really suppose those tried hands of the craft like to write the conventional little variations upon familiar themes, the criss-cross love of two worthy young men and two amiable young women, on which they ring the changes, sans cesse, in magazine and newspaper? Do you really suppose none of them is capable of originating anything profounder or wiser, of revealing the abysmal depths of complex personality, of dissecting into its prime elements some genuine tragedy of the human heart? I for one will never believe it. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. There are as many great souls in England as ever. only the latter-day dominance of the stodgy bourgeois spirit which warps them from their true bent, and sends them off on the bias to produce, against their will, insipid cakes and mild ale for the British Philistine.

It's

Mr. W. E. Henley, that acute and clever critic, once did a minor writer (in point of fact, the present humble scribe) the

honor to describe him, in blushing print, as "the man who isn't allowed." With sharp prods of his keen pen, Mr. Henley made much fun of his temporary victim, for complaining of these artificial limits imposed on modern English literature by the respectable classes. But he missed that insignificant unit's point. It isn't that I am not allowed: it is that we are not allowed. Letters as a whole in Britain have a great injustice done them by their inartistic environment. Men can't write as they would (unless they are rich and can afford to publish, like "Orion" Horne, at a farthing a copy), because the public and its distributing agents dictate to them so absolutely how and what they are to produce that they can't escape from it. The definiteness of the demand, indeed, has become almost ludicrous. Rigid contracts are nowadays signed beforehand for the production of such and such a piece of work, consisting, let us say, of three volumes, divided into twenty-six weekly parts; each part comprising two chapters, to average two thousand five hundred words apiece. Often enough, a clause is even inserted in the agreement that the work shall contain nothing that may not be read aloud in any family circle. Consider what, in the existing condition of English bourgeois opinion, that restriction means! It means that you are to follow in every particular the dissenting grocer's view of life that you are carefully to avoid introducing anything which might, remotely or indirectly, lead man or woman to reflect about any problem whatsoever of earth or heaven, of morals, religion, cosmology, politics, philosophy, human life, or social relations. "You are an agile man," says in effect the middleman who conducts the bargain; come, dance for us in fetters! You have wings that can fly over sea or land; come, bind them round with this stout hemp rope, and proceed to frisk like a sucking lamb on some convenient hillock. You are a man; come, write like a bread-and-butter miss. Our people object very much to flight; but it amuses my clients to see you dance in clogs like a mountebank."

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English literature started fair on its path with a noble chance. The cosmopolitanization of the world, which is going on apace before our very eyes, has increased its possible field of action a thousand-fold in every direction. Regions Shakespeare

And

never dreamt of, our posterity may sway with pen and pencil. But at the present moment, English literature, the Cinderella of Europe, is the least cosmopolitan, the most provincial literature on the face of the earth. It stops at home, and cowers over the fire of the family circle. why? Because it appeals to an exclusive and narrow-minded English Philistine audience. That is not the fault of the authors, but the fault of the Philistines. These narrow creatures, whether they sit under Benson or Spurgeon, will hear no gospel preached but the precise stodgy gospel that meets their own views and mirrors their own vacuity. They have been the dispensers of patronage so long, that all works of literature in Britain have been written to suit them. Of course, the exact opposite ought to be the case. The more a man's ideas and beliefs and feelings and sentiments differ from other heople's the more unusual, and singular, and personal, and revolutionary they are

the more unique and disturbing-the more ought he to be encouraged to proclaim them openly, and to work them out in full to their legitimate conclusions. Original ideas, novel ideas, startling ideas, odd ideas-these are the good seed the intelligent fraction is always looking out for. But the Philistine cares for none of these things. In the simply touching words of Mr. Peter Magnus, he hates originality. What he wants is just the same old hash as ever, dished up in fresh sauce under a new-found name; nothing to shock his stodgy middle-class morals; nothing to stimulate thought in his torpid mercantile brain. Ten thousand Mr. Bultitudes, with wives and daughters to match, have given laws up till now to the distracted producer of British fiction.

A paradox is always a precious leaven in the world. Every good cause that ever flourished on earth always began as somebody's fad and somebody's paradox. No new and true thing you could possibly say can fail, at first hearing, to sound paradoxical to nine-tenths of your audience. Therefore the wise man is very tender to fads, to eccentricities, to novel ideas, even when he is least disposed himself at the outset to accept them. germinal energy. He knows how dangerous it is to crush new thoughts; he knows how, by befriending them in their evil days, many have entertained angels un

They have

66

awares. But the Philistine goes upon the exact opposite tack. He says, Here's a stranger in the world of ideas. Heave half a brick at it."

And why should Mr. Bultitude so overawe our pens? Do we want obscenity? Do we want adultery? Do we want Zolaism in its ugliest developments? Not at all; but we want liberty to paint the picture we know we can paint best-to depict human life as it really is, not as the giggling schoolgirl of seventeen conceives it ought to be. We want to see English literature so written in our midst that it may spread over the earth, as smaller and newer Continental literatures are spreading at this moment. Can anybody pretend that any English work of imagination of the last thirty years has ever produced anything like the immediate sensation produced over Europe by the Kreuzer Sonata, by Thermidor, by Les Rois en Exil, by Hedda Gabler? More people on the Continent are reading Frédéric Mistral's Mireio in Provençal at the present moment than are reading any book in the English language, spoken by a larger number of human beings than any other civilized tongue. What a national disgrace! What a painful confession!

And English literature doesn't so spread, just because the people who produce it are compelled against their own will, and in spite of their own taste, artistic impulse, and judgment, to grovel before the dictation of the cheesemonger's wife-sometimes the glorified cheesemonger in Belgrave Square, but a cheesemonger still in heart beneath his ducal coronet. Respectability is a peculiarly British vice. It means an utter lack of moral and intellectual courage. Nowhere else in the world, save in this Britain of ours, has that odious form of low ethical sense and pig-headed stupidity succeeded in imposing itself as pure law upon the terrorized community. In Britain it has. A gentleman who wrote hymns was long the arbiter of the circulating libraries; and the First Lord of the Treasury, that decorous embodiment of the bourgeois soul, still exercises through puny subordinates a disciplinary supervision over the ethics of the bookstall.

Is there any hope that in the near future this odious tyranny of the stupid over the clever, of the dense over the enlightened, of the thick-headed over the wise, will ever be broken down? Are authors in

England to go on to all time suppressing what they really think and feel and believe, in order to accommodate the jejune social and political views of collective Podsnapdom? Or is there some loophole of escape, some chance of release in the days to come? I believe there is; and things will work it out in this way.

Podsnap, and Bultitude, and Mrs. Grundy, and the rest, are moribund relics of the state of things which came in some half century since, with the reign of capital. In the Elizabethan age they didn't exist; plays and poems were flung straight at the big heart of the people. Nobody could accuse Shakespeare and Spenser of mawkishness. In the eighteenth century they still didn't exist; novels and essays were directed point-blank at the ears of a cultivated and appreciative aristocracy. That aristocracy had many faults-heaven knows, nobody wishes to condone them less than myself; but at any rate it wasn't narrow-minded, stolid, hypocritical, squint-eyed. The gay world one gets glimpses of in Walpole's letters was neither Puritanical nor stupid, neither prejudiced nor dull. Indeed, a certain reckless, devil-may-care daring, as of Tom Jones in one direction or Dick Turpin in another, rather took that pre-revolutionary world by storm than otherwise. So long as it was amused, pricked, titillated, distracted, it asked little of the opinions or ethics of its entertainer. It concerned itself no more with Roderick Random's morals than with Polly Peacham's private life or Lucy Locket's lovers. As Fox said truly, the French Revolution spoiled conversation, for it checked this free spirit; it made men afraid to push their most pregnant ideas to legitimate conclusions.

With the rise of the British mercantile middle class, the Philistine in our midst began to assert his personality blatantly. John Bull thought himself identical with England. For I take it, the Philistine is the most purely Teutonic element in our mixed nationality; and he gets his stodginess in the main from his Saxon ancestry. Our aristocracy is largely Norman, even to the present day; and mixing freely as it has done with the noble Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and Highland Scotch families, it has infused at last a considerable mixture of good Celtic blood into its own blue veins

much to its spiritual advantage. Our laboring classes, I believe, have every

where a notable proportion of the ancient British strain, and are still in many places much the same in race as in the days of Cæsar. But the Respectable Middle Classes, from the farmer to the financier, from the Methodist grocer to the manufacturing M.P., are mainly Saxon or Anglian, perverse narrow brains, thick skulls inflated with the conceit of their own stability, pig-headed in their devotion to a false standard of morals, and a studiously limited intellectual outlook. It is people like these who form the tribunal of public opinion in Britain at present, for the little knot of cultivated and wide minded men who have to cut blocks with a razor through life at their bidding.

Still, the reign of the bourgeoisie, thank God is nearly over. Their epoch was short-lived; and Macaulay was their prophet. They came in about 1820; they obtained supreme political power in 1832; they reached their apotheosis in 1851, in a suitable Walhalla of glass and iron. Then the decline began. Reform bills despoiled the trading classes bit by bit of their oligarchical importance; the Education Act sapped or is sapping by degrees their social position. New Pharaohs are rising from below who know not that Joseph. New social strata are surging up in yeasty waves into unexpected importance. And here again I am wholly with Mr. Stead, the apostle of the English speaking race, the apostle, though he know it not, of Celticism in England. Till very lately, the only thing that counted, were it in politics, in social affairs, in art, in literature, was the bourgeois or his betters, the thick-headed, potbellied, self-satisfied, smirking, respectable Teuton. Nowadays all that is changing fast. The School Board has educated our masses apace; and the masses are everywhere beginning to think for themselves, and are craving visibly for knowledge, for culture, for letters and art of a very high order. London and England no longer compose our whole British world. Connemara and Donegal, Caithness and the Lewis, Glamorgan and Merioneth, have taken heart of grace to assert their right to a hearing in the counsels of our complex nation. The bourgeoisie is falling, and falling fast. I don't say it isn't still very powerful, very formidable. It can kick a fellow even now, when he's down, most effectively. It gave sinister evidence of

its power the other day, when it managed almost to overthrow the strongest man in Ireland for a breach of etiquette-if I remember aright, he'd broken an egg at the little end, or got out of a house without the aid of a footman. But it's falling for all that. Its power to harm will be great, far too great, for many years to come; but it begins even now to mumble toothless at the mouth of its cave, like Bunyan's Giant Pope, and it will soon be able to grasp at few victims save those who allow themselves too readily and imprudently to fall into its clutches.

The masses, I said just now, are craving for knowledge, for culture, for letters and art of a very high order. They have none of the shallowness or the narrowness of the bourgeoisie. They love bold treatment; audacity, one of the most valuable and essential components of genius, always delights and takes them. That is the secret of their liking for men like Mr. Labouchere and Lord Randolph Churchill; that is why they swear by John Burns, by Stewart Headlam, by Bernard Shaw, by Cuninghame Graham. And in literature the same tastes are making themselves slowly felt. Periodicals like the New Review, Short Cuts, Great Thoughts, Treasure Trove, all suggest how the people are beginning to wake up to a desire for real thinking and plain speaking in science, politics, social life, religion. In some of these new penny journals, bold fresh thought is allowed to air itself far more freely than in any old-established sixpenny weekly, and readers are not disgusted; on the contrary, they admire the larger and more open utterance. Few people who read The Fortnightly, no doubt, ever take up these cheap sheets that lie broadcast on the bookstalls; but if they did, they would probably be astonished to find how high a level of thinking and of artistic workmanship is often attained in them. It is a real sign of the times that Tit Bits should have carried Mr. Newnes into Parliament; that Short Cuts should be now in a fair way to waft Mr. Archibald Grove into the same august assembly; that the Strand Magazine should be sold for sixpence ; that even Mr. Frederick Greenwood, in his hopeless crusade against the rising ocean of socialism with a Partington broom, should choose a twopenny AntiJacobin as the best implement for his purpose.