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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 43303
   :PG.Title: Lures of Life
   :PG.Released: 2013-07-25
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Joseph Lucas
   :DC.Title: Lures of Life
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1919
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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LURES OF LIFE
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      LURES OF LIFE

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      BY

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      JOSEPH LUCAS

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      AUTHOR OF "OUR VILLA IN ITALY"

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      \T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
      ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON 

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      First published . . . . January, 1919.
      Second Impression . . . . June, 1919.

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   CONTENTS

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CHAPTER

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I.  `THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW`_
II.  `THE LURE OF HAPPINESS`_
III.  `THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL`_
IV.  `THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS`_
V.  `THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN`_
VI.  `THE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATE`_
VII.  `THE LURE OF PLUCK`_
VIII.  `THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE`_
IX.  `THE LURE OF PERSONALITY`_
X.  `THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE`_
XI.  `THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY`_
XII.  `JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES`_
XIII.  `THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD`_
XIV.  `THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST`_

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.. _`THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW`:

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   LURES OF LIFE

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   I

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   THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW

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A friend put me in remembrance that I
had a birthday recently.  Birthday emotion
with an old man is an extinct crater.  When
I was young a coming birthday set my pulse
throbbing to mad music weeks beforehand;
it filled me with delightful anticipations.
Romance gathered round the happy event.
Our thoughts tripped capriciously along the
primrose paths of the future.  I felt
myself preordained to greatness.  The hoarded
treasure held in bond for me was surely there
awaiting delivery, and Time the magician's
wand would wave its largesse into my
outstretched eager hands, and, clothed in honour,
I should ride prosperously all the days of my life.

To the youngster starting on the grand
tour of life, the journey is a splendid venture.
The cup held to the lips overflows with rich,
ripe, sparkling liquor; every draught of it is
nectar, exhilarating the spirits, expanding
the experience, and discoursing music on
every chord of the harp of a thousand strings.
It is superb doing, riding life on a flowing
tide when the warm south wind blows, and
the air is redolent with aromatic spices, when
driftwood floats from distant climes, and
shore-birds sail in the central blue signalling
that the Land of Heart's Desire will soon be
reached.  Truly youth takes life with a zest
of its own.

Yes, the birthday is a happy day to the
young.  You rejoice that you are a year
older and of added consequence and stature
in the world of men, and a step nearer
realizing the daydreams sweetly dreamed in school,
when the magic of life filled you with wonder
and awe.  Birthday joy increases immensely
until the period of ecstatic joy crowns all,
when you score twenty-one years and write
yourself down a man.  You are no longer
a flower in the bud worn in anybody's
buttonhole, but a well-developed plant on
your own root growing in the open.  When
you get twice twenty-one birthday joy cloys
on your palate, and you begin to resent
the intrusion of the natal day as an
unwelcome guest that you have seen too often.
He reminds you that you are growing old
and growing older.  Your friends may crown
the day with roses and toast you at the
evening dinner in your best champagne
let loose for the occasion, but the obvious
remains, and your response to their
unblushing flattery is not gushing as of yore.
You tire of birthday greetings and birthday
festivities; your vivacity flags; your digestion
suffers.  The thoughts that adorn the
occasion are chiefly reminiscent, for the horizon
of the future is narrowing down and leaves
less space for Fancy in which to fly her kite.

When I had covered my half-century a
curious feeling like an electric shock chased
along every fibre of my being on facing the
cold, hard fact for the first time; I had grown
old, and done it surreptitiously.  Time glides
smoothly, silently, swiftly, and startled as
from a deep sleep, one marvels at the hot
haste of the rolling years.  You dread nearing
the vortex of the great unknown to which we
all inevitably steer, and finally sink beneath
its swirling surface.  The outlook is
disturbing.  Can't you put down the brake and
gentle the pace?  Will no opiate drug Time
into forgetfulness?  You try the rejuvenating
influences of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer, but
nothing happens.  The bald spot on the
crown of your head increases in baldness and
shining splendour.  The longer you watch it,
the larger it grows.  Time baffles your artful
devices, smiles at your wild alarms, and
drives from you the crimson days of youth,
with their vigour and vivacity, leaving in
your possession a feeling of comfortable
lethargy which solidifies into pacific
blissfulness.  Insensibly a change has passed over
you with the mounting years.  How the
change wrought you do not know.  Where
you crossed the frontier which in the twinkling
of an eye ranked you amongst the elders you
cannot say.  Who can tell the moment when
summer ends and autumn commences?  Who
can cut a clean cleavage between afternoon
and evening hours?

However, you settle down to an old man's
pleasures.  You dislike being hustled after
dinner.  You prefer a quiet rubber at Bridge
in a cosy room, with shaded lights, and a
silent cigar with cronies of a choice, familiar
brand as playmates.  You prefer it to strenuously
dancing in a stuffy, glaring ball-room
till morning hours chase the stale and weary
dancers to their homes.  It is too fatiguing
an amusement to make pleasure for you, as
there is no new romance to be looked for after
fifty.  Anticipation at your ripe age is wasted
stimulant.  Boys dream of the future, old
men live in the present.  Youth, once upon
a time, was an asset held in hand, a rich
inheritance to be proud of, but now the
treasury of youth is spent to the last coin
and only the empty coffer remains, a memento
of the vanished wealth of early days.  You
are a middle-aged man aged fifty, and you
settle down to it solidly and squarely and
comfortably.  You will never be young and
flippant again this side the harbour-bar.

As we steer cautiously into the sixties and
face the grand climacteric, life grows pensive.
Sober reflections automatically cast their
lengthening shadows over us.  We have
drunk copiously of the wine of life, and are
now coming to the dregs of the bottle.  We
get moody.  Meridian sunshine has not
fructified the promise of youth as we appointed
it.  Lean years have eaten up years of
plenty.  We have gathered tares with the
wheat which brought disappointment into
the storehouse.  Varied experiences have
chequered life with cross lights and shadows.
The grand ideals of sanguine youth have
dissolved like dreams at daybreak, and instead
of the great achievement ours is the common
lot.  Rates and taxes are hardy annuals that
flourish undisturbed amidst the ruins.  Are
we downhearted because the romance of life
has fizzled out like spent fireworks and left
us in darkness?  We did not expect to
finish up in obscurity.  Are we downhearted?
No; after the struggle and stress of conflict
we get our second breath; and the calm of
age overtakes us.  The halcyon hours set in
to cheer us.  I now move airily along the
line of least resistance, and this brings
tranquillity of mind in my advancing years.  We
are no longer broody.  Experience breaks
one in gently to the monotony of daily
routine, and the collar neither frets nor rubs
the shoulder, for the velvet lining of
contentment softens the friction and we trudge along
serenely going West.

Everything contributes to make an old
man's lot happy if the salt of life has not
lost its savour.  We have played the game,
and now we watch others take their innings.
It is good fun to watch.  I tell you it is
music to the eye watching the gay young
world go its own way.  The swagger, the
*bravoure*, the buoyancy of its manners, stagger
the dull parental mind.  There is rhythm in
its movements, there is character in its
gaiety.  It tops the record of the far-off
days of splendour when we, their portly
ancestors, were down in the arena beating
up the dust of conflict, and considered
ourselves the cream of modernity and the finest
goods in the market.  The youth of to-day
has its hand on the wheel and the joy-car
pads merrily, heedless of speed limits, for
time has no limit and life sings a pleasant
song to boys of the new régime.

Life's afterglow is the period when the past
is viewed through the golden haze of memory
and we live over again the days of our youth,
the splendid days of hope and promise.
Pleasant things and pleasant people are
remembered, and disagreeable events that
vexed us are forgotten.  We wipe clean from
the slate memories that are unwelcome.
From the mellowy distance we admire the
picture in its broad outlines; its uninteresting
details drop out of sight.  It is the vivid
patches of colour upon the canvas where the
eye lingers lovingly and long.  It is the happy
past that enchants the memory to-day.

An old man glances over his shoulder
adown the long pathway of receding years
hungrily, and muses to himself, "Oh, to be
out in the world again as I knew it fifty years
ago, with the same sunny people about me;
to meet them on the old familiar footing.
We had capacious times together; we
understood one another and loved one another
with kindred hearts and flowing speech.  I
talk with people nowadays, but these new
friends of mine are not responsive.  There
is a glass screen between us as we talk
together; we sit near one another, but we are
far apart.  I catch a far-off glint in their eye
which holds me at arm's-length.  Our lips
are restrained, our thoughts are bottled up.
It seems like sitting together in a room with
blinds drawn, talking in the dark.  Yes; new
friends at best are but amiable strangers, for
we met one another only when the flower of life
had wilted and the leaf was sere and yellow on
the tree.  The full, unrestrained days when
the sap was rising, the blossoming days of
youth, were lived apart.  I do not know
these good people intimately, and I never
can, and they can never know me.  We each
have a buried past which is sacred ground
where the other never treads."

I met recently a grey-haired man who was
a schoolboy friend of mine.  A wide sundering
gap of years lies between us since our previous
meeting, but at once we grasped hands and
knew each other intimately, although
mid-life with each had been filled with a fulness
the other knew nothing of.  As boys we
chummed together, and now we renewed our
ancient friendship on olden lines.  We had
studied the same lessons, slept in the same
dormitory, sculled in the same boat, fought
in the same playground scrimmages, and,
having met again after long intervening years,
we had endless youthful reminiscences in
common to discuss and life-histories to relate.
There was no need to sit on the safety-valve
to throttle down the conversation.  Talk
came, a flowing stream bubbling up from the
hot springs of the heart.  Our meeting had
the perfume of romance clinging to it, which
made golden the precious hours in the
spending.  Two grey-haired men chattering with
their heads together for the nonce were
merry schoolboys.  The present was
forgotten; the past was everything to them
while the old enthusiasms flared up brightly
and shot a warm rosy afterglow athwart
life's pleasant evening hour.

Loafing is a privilege of one's declining
years.  It is an agreeable form of laziness
which sits well upon old shoulders.  It is that
mellow state of stagnant content which
pervades the mind when the natural force
abates.  I do not extol it as a virtue, I claim
it as a privilege.  It helps to fill gaps in the
daily round when business no longer engages
your attention and office hours are a dread
ordeal done with for ever.  Having dropped
out of the marching line and become a
spectator of the passing show, what more
natural than that you manifest a livelier
curiosity in other people's activities than in
your own sluggish movements.  I love to
spend a sunny morning lingering on the old
garden seat, chatting to a friend, or watching
the energetic youngsters at play amongst the
roses.  I find it enjoyable to take my pitch
on the pierhead with the gay summer crowd
ambling along, passing and repassing my
post of observation, and watch the pretty
and well-accoutred girls angling for admiration,
and the budding men in spotless flannels
flashing answering glances to catch the lasses'
eyes; an endless conversation going on without
voices whispering a word; they look at
each other and laugh, and the incipient
mystery of the thing slips into their blood.

I was once reluctant to relinquish youth.
Its passions and pleasure made my life
intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way.  I
resented the horrid fact that with encroaching
years I was no longer able to wake the old
thrill of existence by any of the old methods.
The call came to me, but nature responded
not to its alluring voice.  The spent fires
could not be rekindled; and in a tragic
moment the truth stood uncovered in its
stark nakedness: "I am growing old!"  I
had to readjust my bearings in life to meet
the new situation.  I found it better to walk
in step with the years and melt into middle
life with all the gentle conciliations of an
easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the
garment of departing youth and hold on
frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass
youth, with its frank, jovial, devil-may-care
lightheartedness, was surrendered ground,
and I put on a splendid face, taking up a
new position in the rear as an old fogy, a
little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy,
happy, and hearty.





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.. _`THE LURE OF HAPPINESS`:

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   II


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   THE LURE OF HAPPINESS

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The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness
just as it comes to us clean and sweet from
the hand of God; to eat the grapes that
grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the
honey captured from our own hives; and to
bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden
plot.  Some people cannot do this.  They
were born sour and fail to ripen.  They
remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at
Florence, built but never finished, and
showing a dejected mien to the passer-by.  They
hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy
hands, and smile with glum visage and call
it all vanity and vexation of spirit.
Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested
pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want
to throw it off and be at ease in their misery.
They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to
wallow in sunshine.  They say we ought
to content ourselves with bare commodities
needful for existence.  The primitive man
was happy.  He had no shirt to wash, no
taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty.
We must be primitive to be happy.  Deplete
the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to
a common ground-level (allow us boots to
wear in this muddy climate, if you please),
and then everyone will be healthy, happy,
and poor.  Stepping out of his well-appointed
motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the
primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy
servant a dog that he should house in a
kennel?"  Surely civilization means creature
comfort; everyone wants something larger
than bare necessities to embellish life.  The
Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises
cattle on the marshes.  Year by year He
lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal
store of ornament.  Every yard of hedgerow,
"those liberal homes of unmarketable
beauty," contradict the crank who would
confine us to the needful.

The dusty utilitarian sees the world only
as a crowded granary, a chattering
marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain.
The Divine Artist enriches the picture by
painting in exquisitely the flowering
hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning
the throat of the skylark to rarest melody;
and concurrently He attunes the soul of man,
which thrills appreciation, and delights in
these manifestations of Sovereign goodness.
He not merely appeases the hunger of the
human body, but feeds the rarer appetites
of the human mind with radiant viands;
and the more godlike in stature man grows,
the more fully he appreciates God-given art
and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.

Everybody is happy in his own order.
The history of many a man's life is the story
of a soul's wandering in search of happiness.
Some people are happy in their misery.
Even when nursing their spleen they do it
comfortably.  They dilate on their grief with
real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings
a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey
lives.  It sets them purring with sweet
content when an auditor listens to their woeful
outpourings.  This is the cheapest form of
happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind
thrown back upon itself.

Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these
crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says,
"Pure pleasures are in their judgment
cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth
a pound of sweet."  Farquhar, the lively
dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying
the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding
the miniature of her absent lover lying on
the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I
am fitted out for sorrow.  With this I'll
sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image
till I grow blind with weeping.  It is the
only thing could give me joy, because it will
increase my grief."

Happiness is a gift of temperament.  The
occupation that makes one man happy the
day long would be capital punishment to
another man.  I have known people to
possess everything and enjoy nothing; others,
who possess little, dwell in paradise.  It is a
braver thing to extract honey from the hive
of life than to leave it rotting in the comb.
Alas! these weak-kneed, nervous mortals
who are afraid of being too happy: they
tremble as they sit at the banquet.  They
toy with a lean and hungry fate and dare
not clasp a full-bosomed blessing.  They
prefer misery as a diet, with a spice of religion
thrown in to flavour it.  They fancy
self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated,
and a grace to be counted for righteousness.
We shrewdly detect in such conduct a pose.
It lacks the grace of sincerity.  Such people,
overfed on misery, fatten on it incontinently.
It is the diet of a low, melancholy temperament.

There is no standard-pattern happiness
planned to suit the temperament of everybody
like the map of a city which all travellers
follow to find their bearings.  Happiness is a
city that each person maps out for himself;
its highways and byways are of his own
engineering and grow to match his own
requirements.  Happiness is not a sloppy
garment like a ready-made coat that you
buy in a store.  Happiness must be made to
fit.  In fact, every man makes his own
happiness.

We all distil pleasure out of life in our
peculiar way.  Only our ways differ as the
poles asunder.  One man cannot understand
where the other man's relish for life comes
in.  What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one
mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto
on another palate.  A famous American
millionaire found greater satisfaction in the
simple pleasure of attending funerals than
in all the superb luxuries which his millions
brought him.  We do not envy his simple
pleasure.  It was an innocent method of
enjoyment peculiarly his own.

I knew a man who made an income of over
£10,000 a year by hard work, and his pleasure
was immense in doing it.  One half of his
relaxation in life was making more income,
and the other half his amusement consisted
in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance
if they spent "tuppence" on a bus fare
instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather
off the soles of their boots.  He never spent
"tuppence" himself if he could save it.  He
drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the
sensations of a quick run.  People called him
a money-making machine devoid of fine
feeling.  People made a mistake.  His nature
was highly strung.  He was keenly sensitive
to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making.
It was the poetry, the luxury, the fine art
of life all rolled into one, and it quickened
the gay emotions within him that seeing a
good play, hearing an eloquent sermon or
driving a spanking four-in-hand to Ascot on
a fine June morning, excites in other people.
There are various buttons to press, but they
all send the same thrill of earthly pleasure
tingling through the human frame.  Different
hands strike the same chords on the harp of
life, and they tremble into song.

Some heroically minded people assert there
are only two things in life: duty and
happiness.  It is not everybody who wants to do
his duty--that is a special gift of Providence
few enjoy.  But everyone wants to be happy,
and happiness is the greatest thing of all:
other people's happiness as well as our own.
We are not all sagacious to discern the angel
of duty when she comes mixed in a
promiscuous assembly of spirits less honourable
than she.  They all dress becomingly and
smile bewitchingly that you cannot mark her
down; her radiance shines no brighter than
other luminous spirits that accompany her.
We should try the spirits whether they be
good or evil ones.  However, they move first,
and try us with their beauty, their flattery,
and their gilded promises.  According to the
gospel of St. Robert Louis Stevenson, there
is no duty we so much underrate as the duty
of being happy.

A third thing some people suggest makes
life worth living is experience.  Experience,
they maintain, is a more valuable treasure
than happiness; experience is a pearl of great
price, and we must sell all we have to possess
it.  The world is spacious; range it widely,
breathe its bracing airs, sail its deep seas in
search of experience.  Pursue it, and if in
the pursuit you are blown about by the
fickle winds of fate, the buffeting may be
disagreeable, but it is most exhilarating and
healthy to the earnest seeker after
experience.  Provided you are blown, and blown
violently, the direction of the gale matters
not; the north-easter and the zephyr both
teach.  Experience builds up character and
increases knowledge, though during building
operations your wisdom may remain a
stationary virtue.  If you come out of the
conflict with only experience to your credit
at the other end of the struggle be thankful.
Life is very good.  Its chief spoils may be
anguish and sorrow, yet experience makes it
full and rich.

The logic of this cold philosophy needs
consideration before adopting it as gospel.
If a dinted shield and a broken sword are the
only spoils you bring home from the wars
and hang up in the family parlour as trophies
of victory, it is not an adequate recompense
for the rich and vital experience gained in the
fight.  Experience was what Don Quixote in
the slippered comfort of his home hungered
after.  It was what he found on his travels,
and after passing through much tribulation
it was the one prize he brought home with
him at the journey's end.  Experience many
an ambitious man has found to be as an
empty goblet to his thirsty lips.

When the Creator was busy in the minting-house
He did not cast his creatures all in the
same mould, or coin them of the same metal.
Some people are of fine temperament, cram
full of emotion; they are all feeling, and
express their feeling vigorously.  Other people
are of baser metal.  They are stolid, and
pass through life neither contented nor
discontented with their lot; they are neither
happy nor miserable.  They are well-regulated
clocks running slowly down to the
last tick, and then ceasing to tick at all.
Monotony is the bane of their existence,
blighting it with double dulness.  They feel
little and say nothing about it.  One never
knows what hidden compensations life
provides for its multitudinous offspring.  These
torpid people must have a secret well of
satisfaction from which they dip refreshing
draughts in thirsty moments.

The child of emotion is more vivacious;
he has colour, romance, movement.  He is
of a rarer vintage; there is sparkle in the
wine of life.  Occasionally the wine turns
sour and drops flavour.  Disagreeable people
do exist for some veiled purpose of
Providence, as the species never becomes extinct
in the land.  In infancy they were rocked in
the cradle of discontent, and they have
seldom slept out of it since.  They have
grown up in a nursery of their own.  They
are highly strung, and have a genius for
living in the moment--irritably.  Their wit
is brilliant, it scintillates like running water
in the sunshine, but it cuts like a razor.
Everybody within reach of their tongue, even
innocent people, feel the whip of their
capricious temper.  I suppose some grim pleasure
feeds their fiery nature when they subdue
friend and enemy under them.  It is an
unenviable pleasure which they enjoy; nobody
shares with them, and when their ill-humour
dies down it must leave a nasty taste in their
mouth.

If you want to be happy, do not expect
too much from life.  Do not ask more from
friendship than you give, for eventually the
balance is sure to adjust itself.  Do not ask
more than your share of good things; if you
do exceed the limit, disappointment will dog
your footsteps all the day.  You cannot
expect to be always happy.  Trouble and
sorrow come to all of us, with a difference.
Some people extract comfort out of trouble,
and it assuages their grief; others add worry
to their woe, and it aggravates their vexation
of spirit.

Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board
and generate their own electric current as
they travel, and after dark, with the great
headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly
and safe.  A contented mind is a dynamo
we can carry with us, and it generates its own
happiness as we travel.  It illumines the
journey of life and makes it pleasant to
ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling
in our company.

Do not grizzle over chances missed in life
and "might have beens" which sprinkle your
past like gravestones dotting a churchyard,
inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished
griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept
over."  Convert the mossy tombstones into
wayside shrines which loving hands garland
with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly
linger there, recalling pleasant things and
sweet companionship which gladdened your
pilgrim way.  Do not erect mural tablets to
dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your
memory; build altars there instead whereon
you can offer acceptable oblations of praise
for evils escaped and for the crown of
loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms
encircle you.

If we only had the gift of humour on us
it would make "life more amusing than we
thought."  Our eyes would open to a new
world wherein kinder people dwell and where
brighter sunshine warms the heart's red
blood and chases down the gloom we
anticipate to-morrow that may never come.





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.. _`THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL`:

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   III


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   THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL

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Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue,
nor is it a permanent condition of life for
man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws
men to martyrdoms as the flame collects
moths to the burning.  Man was not
predestinated to a life of self-abnegation.
Self-denial is a compromise between misery and
happiness.  Human nature does not thrive
on compromise; it does not develop in
austerities.  Self-denial has its value in the
scheme of moral education.  Training is good
for man if he does not carry it too far.  You
can overtrain.  The scholar trains; he
discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts
on himself long hours of lonely study that
he may rank in the list of University honours.
The jockey trains, and punishes himself in
so doing that he may ride to win.  It is the
same the world over: pain is joy in the
making.  Where self-denial is the driving
power in religious life it leads, not to
happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of
the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of
St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the
Indian fakir.  Deluded people these, who
build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle
virtue to which man can soar while on earth.
None of these people set self-denial in its
proper place in the human economy--viz., a
means to an end.  It is the end-all in their
vision of life, and so their life is dismal in
the living and disappointing in its purpose.

Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy
purpose.  It is necessary to man's spiritual
welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife
may be necessary to his physical health.

Man is of twofold nature: the animal and
the spiritual, the good and the bad, the
superior and the inferior--label it as you
please.  Self-denial is putting the inferior
quality under the superior one; self-denial is
following the higher inspiration at the expense
of the lower instincts.  "Self-denial": the
very word implies, repressing desires,
renouncing pleasures, suffering pain.  It means
living from choice on the shady, dank side
of the street rather than basking in the open
sunny piazza when only a few steps place
you there, where the children play and the
old men foregather deep in the hallowed
sunshine.  Self-denial is not the crowning
virtue--it is just the market price we pay
that we may garner a harvest of happiness
in the recompensing days of autumn.

The Divine purpose in man is growth, not
repression of growth; it is to expand, to
unfold, to develop character.  To pass from
bud to flower in moral and spiritual
excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest
features are arrested in growth, and moral
atrophy sets up a canker in the bud, and
ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's
character.  Ugliness everywhere may be left
to the devil as his monopoly.  Self-denial is
the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden
butterfly on the wing.

Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the
highest good and the truest test of character.
Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to
delight us in this our earthly life--this is a
finer attainment than self-denial.  Enjoyment
means a full life, living upon our whole
nature, and well-balanced withal in the
living.  It seems an attractive and sinless
programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult
to draw a boundary-line between enjoyment
and excess.  This is where the crux comes
in.  This is verily the fire that tries every
man's work of what sort it is.  It is cruel
punishment to crush your passions and
pleasures out of existence--that is self-denial.
It is splendid discipline to give them play
and at the same time hold them in control--that
is enjoyment.  Success in this great
endeavour brings the victor into marching-line
with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation
and a larger recompense than trampling
on the lilies.

It is more difficult to hold steadily a full
cup than to carry an empty flagon.  It is a
doleful religion that uproots every flower in
the garden as a noxious weed until only the
naked brown earth remains to gaze upon in
the blessed sunshine.  It is a scurvy trick of
virtue to spill the heady liquor on the ground
and then with a flourish place the empty
chalice an offering on the altar.  Abstinence
is the morality of the weak, temperance is
the morality of the strong.

A deep enjoying nature is one of God's
best gifts to man.  The happy man is
generally the best of his breed.  The good
are usually happy, and the happy are usually
good.  There are no short cuts to being
happy, you must be really good to win
through.  If our daily occupation is
congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind
dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the
sunshine of agreeable surroundings.  Our
sense of contentment radiates good humour
and makes us kindly and benevolent to
others.  We are not chafed and fretted by
duties irksome to us, because uncongenial.
We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with
completeness of purpose.  Those around us
feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our
hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic
touch of the sun.  It is for this reason that
happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for
out of it spring the virtues which robe life in
beauty and gladness.  One of the most precious
of human faculties is the power to enjoy.

Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue,
and should be praised with circumspection.
Many feverishly religious people debase its
moral currency.  They hinder their own
happiness and thwart the happiness of others
as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing
they keep the whole ten commandments of God.

Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a
pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile.  Renunciation
and suffering prove nothing.  Men have
renounced and suffered for the greed of gold,
for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a
blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina
in so doing.  The experience of ages brands
deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice
must be valued according to the object for
which the sacrifice is made.  Sacrifice for its
own sake weaves no crown of glory for the
martyr's brow.  It is a form of amiable
suicide.  If you starve yourself for the sake
of showing mastery over self, what thank
have ye?  The heathen do even the same--and
do it better.  It is an act of self-torture,
and ministers to your pride of purpose.
But to give up a meal when hungry that
one you love may have it puts a better
complexion on the deed.  To bear pain for
the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward.
Do not even the Stoics the same?  But to
bear pain rather than surrender truth or to
cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic
act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours
are distributed.

The old painters pictured in glowing
witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering
as the master-key that opened the gates of
paradise to macerated mortals.  The old
writers drove home the same insidious error
with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen,
and thus men became fascinated with the
doctrine of self-immolation as the highest
good.  In mediæval times the *via dolorosa*
was the well-trodden public way travelled
by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.

Meritorious misery won through, for it was
aureoled with the Church's benediction and
rendered attractive by her promise of eternal
rewards.  Surely this daily human life of
ours was not ordained to be a pageant of
austerity reaching from the cradle to the
grave.  The Creator, having given this
beautiful world as a temporary home for His
children to dwell in, expects agreeable people
to occupy its furnished splendours for a space
of three score years and ten, more or less.
If not, then the Creator's gift is wasted
bounty flung to dull and unappreciative
mortals.

Brighter and healthier views of life emerge
out of the crude misconceptions which
enveloped the past in religious gloom, although
there yet remain amongst us people who
revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a
feast of fat things, while the genial side
of their nature remains dormant, starved,
stunted.  I have seen such-like in the flesh,
spoken with them and touched their cold
hands.  They are unattractive people to
know, and not companionable to travel with.
They are faultless, methodical, patient, but
they have no endearing friendships, no
entwining intimacies by which you can fasten
on them and love them.  They are isolated
and self-contained, lacking the charm of some
little human weakness which makes us all
akin.  They may have a warm heart, but
chilled blood circulates round it.  Their eyes
glitter like glaciers at the call of duty.  They
hurry from committee meeting to committee
meeting, and forget to lunch between
engagements.  They shine in the performance of
self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by
rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health,
or reputation.  They minister to the sick
and poor assiduously, and mother a class of
poor factory girls in the evening, but their
home is shivery to enter as a cold storage.
A cold storage is a curious place to visit,
but an impossible place to dwell in, except
for frozen goods.

It is possible to make the best of both
worlds without an uncomfortable sense of
sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible
to work for others and yet tend your own
vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered
from the wonder and beauty and sunshine
of this our earthly home.  The man is not
a miscreant who laughs heartily and often:
the person is not a saint who starves his body
to save his soul.

The harassing question is, How can we
make the best of life as it comes to us a day
at a time, and yet sail on an even keel?  It
is the problem that prophets, savants, and
theologians have hammered at through the
ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the
key that unlocks the mystery; thus there
is an opening for us to cut in before the final
word is uttered and the discussion battens
down under a unanimous show of hands,
which crowning mercy will be the last far-off
result of time.  The question agitating the
moment is, What shall we do with the fair
flower of our earthly life?  Shall we enjoy
it as we would the beauty and fragrance of
a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so
sweet and precious, or shall we with peevish
fingers pick the rose to pieces petal by petal
and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty
may seduce our virtue and its perfume poison
our soul?

Let us preserve the rose inviolate.  Its
role is to be joy-giver on the earth.  I would
sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage
feast in Cana of Galilee and drink with Him
wine of the best vintage that ever flowed on
festive board than sup with John Baptist in
the wilderness on his menu of locusts and
wild honey.  The exquisite scene my
imagination quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ
and John the Baptist sitting together at the
banquet, and each enjoying the meal with
equal zest.

The Renaissance which fascinated half
Europe in the fifteenth century, like a
carillon of joy-bells ringing through the land,
stirring the dull pulses of the people and
reviving generous and graceful ideals of life,
was just open rebellion against the crabbed
austerities of the Church, practised in the
name of religion falsely so called.  The people
threw off the galling yoke of forced asceticism
and found liberty of spirit and peace of mind
in literature and art, and in the spontaneous
and natural flow of healthy human life.
Unfortunately, there was a fly in the amber;
the people borrowed most of their new
pleasures from pagan Greece, and the old
Greek gods came tripping back from fairyland
hand in glove with Greek culture, which was
embarrassing.

The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers
in England, flinging colour and warmth and
gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from
the drab severity of Puritan rule.  The
Puritans were men of strong personality:
half soldiers and half preachers.  They were
honest without charm; strong-minded without
pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in
heart qualities.  They were clean livers, but
as they aged their visage grew hard and sour
as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper
withered like a winter apple.  They forgot
to smile; the solemnities of life crushed them.
They were grave and sagacious citizens
lacking vivacity and humour, with plenty of
flavour, but no sweetness.  They dreamed of
invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal
verities.  They command our admiration,
but do not win our love.  Their God was of
the best theology mechanically constructed
at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts
composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness.
Beauty was barred as a Divine attribute.
The dismal meeting-house where they
worshipped was the whitewashed prison in which
the captured Deity dwelt.  The burning light
of this dread Presence enraptured the elect
souls and intimidated the uncovenanted and
graceless sinners, while the vast multitude
of the nation held aloof, dreading contact with
a religion so fierce and yet so gloomy, and
they waited patiently through the shivering
night of Roundhead rule, like watchmen on
the city walls, for the coming of the king to
set English homes once again humming with joy.

These two strong currents of life--Self-denial
and Enjoyment--are flowing side by
side in our midst to-day, dividing men in
thought and purpose, driving men into open
collision, only to relax their strangle-hold on
one another to get firmer grip and fight
again another day.  These two different
ideals of life represent two antagonistic sides
of a man's nature that clash with each other,
and the man has a stand-up fight with
himself, which is an experience fiery
temperaments often plunge into.  Each side carries
a half-truth and half an error.  Blend the
two half-truths into an intimate and
harmonious whole and sink the errors into the
bottomless pit from whence they came, and
you discover human nature touching its
highest and ripest form, approaching the
Christlike in character, which combines the
two elements in true and everlasting union.

Jesus of Nazareth, whose knightly character
embodied all that the sweet romancists
of the Middle Ages dreamed of and pictured
in the faultless knight-errant of their day
which won their hearts' devotion and
consent (*preux chevalier sans peur et sans
reproche*), and all that our own age typifies
and holds dear in modern character of good
repute when in a single phrase it proclaims
the man a perfect gentleman--Jesus Christ
means all that and more to us.  Christ is not
a withered flower on a broken stem torn
from the Tree of Life; He is not a damaged
idol of an effete civilization which modern
progress sweeps aside in its forward march;
He is not the Lord of an ancient faith whom
the fires of scientific criticism have burnt up
and left only His ashes in a cinerary urn
reposing on the altar of our heart.  He is
the world's one fulfilment of the faultless
and the ideal in human nature, blending all
that is beautiful and enjoyable with all that
is holy and vigorous.





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.. _`THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS`:

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   IV


.. class:: center large bold

   THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS

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Beautiful language is the flower of poetry.
The magic of diction, of enchanted words
transformed into radiant, marvellous sentient
things pulsing with life and passion, capture
our attention, and deep within us something
vibrates in answer to their mastering call.

A writer with perfect felicity of expression
voices thoughts and emotions of our own
heart that we cannot give utterance to, yet
of which we are dimly conscious.  These
ghostly creatures of our mind, half a memory
and half a thing, peep and mutter within us;
we try to hold them, but they are illusive as
shadows on the wall.  From the well-written
words there leaps out something that has
life and form and comeliness in it, and
instantly we recognize an intimate returning
from a far country laden with spoil.  Words
liberate the imprisoned thought that fretted
within us and set it free: gloriously free for
you and me and all the world to make
familiar with.

There are words--spectacular words that
print indelibly pleasant pictures on the mind,
reveal in a sabre-flash thoughts that burn
and things that were hidden.  There are
words--vivid, striking, portentous words that
unfold noble vistas of truth in which happy,
emancipated people walk freely in sunlight and
song.  There are melodious, aromatic words
that ring tunefully through corridors of the
mind like a carillon of merry bells charming
the heart with far-reaching joy.  There are
strong, fiery, tempestuous words that crash
and rattle and reverberate like rolling thunder
through your being, and kindle the spirit of
man into blazing passion and heroic fervour.
There are dull, prosy, somnolent words that
baffle like a London fog, envelop the writer's
meaning in dense obscurity, and lure the
reader's mentality into quagmires of
perplexity and doubt.

There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words
that regale us with fair visions of life, and
steep the mind in dreams of romance and
intoxicate with amorous delight.  There are
treacherous, lying words that distil murder
in the air as they wing their evil flight.
They strike deadly as a keen stiletto, or spit
poison like a venomous adder in the grass.

There are discordant words that harrow up
the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety,
caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds
us in their thrall, and that flow on and on
harmoniously like the rippling of many waters
that never fall out of tune.

Words cannot be measured with the
measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual
forces; "they are angels of blessing or
cursing.  Unuttered we control them, uttered
they control us."  A man may have much
wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but
to unfold it attractively so that it glitters
in the public eye and arrests attention is
where the master art of handling words
comes in.

One secret of successful writing is to
express your thoughts in as few words as
possible.  Be frugal in your expenditure of
words as a miser over the outlay of his
hoarded gold.  Write clearly, tersely,
compactly, for words, like coins of the realm,
are most esteemed when they contain large
value in little space.  The more briefly a
thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put.
The rarest of all qualities in a writer
is--measure, saying exactly as much as you
mean to say and not a word more or less.
If a picture is complete, everything added
is something taken away.

The "command of language" is often a
snare of the devil into which men fall and
do themselves grievous hurt.  A redundancy
of flowery words and empty fluency of speech
confuse the thought and confound the
meaning; skip half the telling and you know more
of the tale.  Oh the dreariness of some solid
reading I have done in my time!--very
learned and logical dissertations, but dulness
crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific
matter clogged with technicalities can be
made to live by a touch of style.  Cartloads
of words rumbling along the rutty road of
argument slowly to their destination are not
half so forceful as an apt image which flies
straight to the point on wings of inspiration,
and gets there first.

No subject is uninteresting if discoursed
with an engaging pen, for words throw
colour-magic on things that are common-place
and give charm to them.  I have
watched Italian sunlight playing on the
crumbling plaster walls of a peasant's cottage
on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal
and rose-carmine splendours, changing them
into the image of a fairy palace.  Words cast
sunlight on commonplace, familiar things,
flushing them with a radiance all their own,
and so awaking our mind to see new beauties,
or old beauties made manifest in a new light
which had been staled by the lethargy of
custom.  Miss Mitford's village was an
ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals
of English history, but it was surprised into
fame by the romantic pen of its lady
historian.  A splendid accident of literary
achievement adorned it with immortality,
for it unfolds vividly before our wondering
eyes the beauty of petty things and plain
people in village life.  The world owes to her
genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has
won our sympathies, and in reading her book
we can read our own village with interest
instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the
beauty and pathos and comedy of common
people and homely things around us.

Art is the gift of God to man.  It is
impossible to buy or barter for the possession
of it.  You may cultivate, improve, perfect
the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed
is sown mysteriously in the life of the child
when brought to birth.  In whom the secret
power lies dormant none know until the
appointed hour reveals its budding graces.
Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can
tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.
It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is
not an entailed honour which accompanies
the family title.  Genius seldom, like an
heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct
succession.

A man may possess the advantages that
education, training, culture give, yet all
these excellent acquirements combined
cannot manufacture an artist.  It needs the live
coal taken from off the altar to kindle the
sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.

The painter's art is subject to this very
mysterious law.  Philip Gilbert Hamerton
describes the working of the artistic spirit in
man.  He says: "Painting is a pursuit in
which thought, scholarship, information, go
for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable
talent working in obscure ways achieves the
only results worth having.  Here is a field
in which neither birth nor condition is of
any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little;
here faculty alone avails, and a kind of
faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to
estimate before years have been spent in
developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt
to develop where it does not exist."

There are pictures you and I dearly love,
and they are priceless treasures in the market;
yet there is no deep thought or display of
learning in them to win our admiration.
They violate facts of history, they outrage
the grammar of academic art, and even their
drawing may be inaccurate.  Why, then, are
such works cherished and treasured?
Because, with all their faults, they have power,
they have feeling; they speak to the heart.
The men who painted them were unlearned
and ignorant, but they were artists to the
finger-tips.  There is a spiritual something
breathing beneath the surface of the true
painter's work which leaps to the eye and
draws upon us and bestirs our emotions.
Other pictures--laboured, scholastic,
monumental, they leave us cold and passionless,
and we pass them by on the other side.

A good architect also is to the manner born.
The principles of proportion in designing a
building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure
to the eye.  Now, the sense of proportion
is a gift which some men possess and
others lack; although they are architects
by profession, they are amateurs in
construction.  Without that subtle sense of
proportion a man blunders through his designs,
and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the
finished structure which is the work of his
hands.  Ruskin says: "It is just as rational
an attempt to teach a young architect how
to proportion truly and well by calculating
for him the proportions of fine works as it
would be to teach him to compare melodies
by calculating the mathematical relations of
the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or
Mozart's 'Requiem.'  The man who has
eye and intellect will invent beautiful
proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no
more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth
could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than
Scott could have told us how to plan a
romance."

What the faculty of feeling is to the artist,
what the sense of proportion is to the
architect, the gift of style is to the writer.  Style
is the witchery of words; style is clothing
thought in captivating language.  Style is
the setting of the gem.  The gem may be
rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's
art to make the most of it.  It is the skilful
setting that holds up the sparkling gem to
our admiration.  Style is everything in
writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle.
Niceties of style you cannot explain by
rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the
drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash
the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless
knife.  You can unravel a piece of rare old
Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful
design and harmonious colouring of it.  In
fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap
of valueless threads of worsted fit only for
burning; but style in literature you cannot
pick to pieces.  You cannot find the
master-thread on which the secret of the pattern
runs, and which reveals the cunning of the
workman's craft.  By some mysterious
process the writer weaves words together that
the chambers of our imagination may be
hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to
behold.  No explanation of the gift of
penmanship is possible.  Moulding words into
forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is
a gift of the gods, and no handbook of
literature, however diligently pursued, can
turn an artisan into an artist cunning in
gold-minted phrases.

When Castiglione sent the manuscript of
his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria
Colonna for her approval, she replied in a
flattering letter thanking the author, saying:
"The subject is new and beautiful, but the
excellence of the style is such that, with a
sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most
pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually
ascend without perceiving that we are no
longer on the level ground from which we
started; and the way is so well cultivated and
adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art
or Nature has done most to make it fair."

It is expression that counts, and the writer
who expresses himself simply, vividly,
concisely, boldly, and plays upon our
heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted"
man.  He not only sees in clear, full vision
himself, but he brings his vision home to our
cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that
is the wonder of it.  It needs all the art and
magic and persuasion of language to
accomplish this difficult task.  We *see* the subject
presented as a picture when he writes with
a graphic pen; we *feel* poignantly when his
sharp and polished periods pierce like a
rapier our understanding; we are *fascinated*
when his impassioned eloquence flows,
glittering like running water in the sunlight,
dazzling our bewildered brains.  And when
he scores by his native wit and writes in his
trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a
smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.

How mysteriously beauty steals into
language and warms up the radiant face of
poetry with glowing vitality.  There is no
beauty in stale prosaic sentences like
"Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish
may be shot here," because they say exactly
and completely all that they have to say
and nothing more can be squeezed out of
them.  There is beauty in a sentence like
"The bright day is done.  And we are for
the night," or "He shall come down like
rain upon the mown grass," because in them,
although they seem quite simple, the poet
is trying to say infinitely more than he can
pack into words.  It is the effort to do
something beyond the power of words; it is the
effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with
a mind closely fettered within the cramped and
narrow finite that can only stretch forth a
hand here and there between prison bars and
touch the azure of infinitude which is the
dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out
that brings beauty into language: it enflames
the imagination; it ruffles the emotions;
unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail
to break away.  There is a greatness in
these winged words feathered with beauty
because they mean a thousand times more
than speaks on the surface.

When I was young the magic of words
took possession of my virgin mind.  The first
master of language that I served under was
John Ruskin.  The aim of good writing is
to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this
intensely.  The indefinable richness and
power of words as they flowed from his pen,
the musical and measured cadence of his
prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts
when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell
upon me.  When reading one of his books,
I dwelt in dreamland.  Another reading that
I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and
eighties of the last century was the long
literary leaders, never too long for me, in
the *Daily Telegraph*.  The best literary talent
of the day wrote them.  Many of them I cut
out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to
be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see
them now.  Lord Burnham, the proprietor
of the *Daily Telegraph*, put himself into these
leaders, although other pens wrote them.
They were his special hobby, and grew under
his inspiration.  His biographer tells us:
"He had the rhetorical sense strongly
developed.  He liked full-blooded writing,
and had a tenderness for big words and
big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs.
He revelled in the warmth and colour of
certain words, and the more resonant they
were, the better he liked them."  Words
carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with
them.  Sometimes a single word well chosen
and well placed in a sentence gives feeling,
and lights it up with a glow of beauty.
J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used
in the right place constitutes the perfection
of style."  In my youth a literary friend
was pruning a crude essay I had written;
he paused in his reading on the word
"fallacious," and he said: "That's a good
word and well chosen; it's the right word."  It
was a revelation to me at the time that
one word was better than another if they
both meant the same thing.  On thinking it
over, I saw that no two words do mean
exactly the same thing, and that there is
only one right word in a hundred to express
exactly your meaning and to give life to it.
The other ninety-and-nine words are but
poor relations--nay! they are all dead
corpses.

Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully
popular picture called "Cinderella."  A
beautiful healthy English child, with deep
dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits
on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her
hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen
toil.  It is a fascinating picture.  At home
I look on a coloured print of it nearly every
day of the week.  The most brilliant thing
on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the
dainty cap the child wears.  That single dab
of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole
colour-scheme of the picture.  It is the
keynote.  Now a single word in a sentence
sometimes gives a startling effect.  It strikes a
strong, clear, ringing note which keys the
writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its
vividness, and sticks in the memory ever
after.  It is a colour-patch in literary art
which dominates the picture and arrests
attention, as in Shakespeare's

   |  "Every yesterday hath lighted fools
   |  The way to *dusty* death!"

Or,

   |  "The *primrose* path to the eternal bonfire."

Or Pope's

   |  "Quick effluvia darting through the brain
   |  Die of a rose in *aromatic* pain."

Also

   |  "Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
   |  And let me *languish* into life."

And Gray's inimitable couplet:

   |  "There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark there
   |  Scatters his *loose* notes in the waste of air."
   |

It is the height of literary skill to gather
up your thought into a single word and fling
it flaming on canvas.  It is more convincing
than a long chapter of dull argument which
drugs the senses.  Tennyson knew the magic
of a single epithet in the thought scheme of
the moment when he sang: "All the charm
of all the muses often flowering in a lonely
word."  It is not as easily done as eating
hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word
that comes sailing into a man's head that
is the right word.  "The comely phrase, the
well-born word," is a prince of high degree,
and you may wait in his anteroom days
before an audience is granted.  The elect
word does not sit on the tip of the tongue
and drop into its place at call.  You may
search diligently and not find it, and presently
of its own free will it comes to you, a happy
thought flashed from the void where
whispering spirits dwell.  Gray's Elegy is the
most perfect poem in the English language.
It was not thrown together carelessly in an
idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon.
Every word and every line of it cost thought,
was written and rewritten, and patiently
polished over again.  For eight years the
author held the poem between the hammer
and the anvil, beating it into shape before
he passed it into print.  He damaged reams
of paper developing a fair copy of those
immortal verses.





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.. _`THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN`:

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   V


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   THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN

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A delightful French writer says "to grow
old in a garden in sight of softly undulating
hills, beneath a sky variable as the human
soul, is very sweet, very consoling, very easy.
One becomes more of a child and for the first
time a philosopher.  Poetry and wisdom on
every hand permeate the close of life, just
as the oblique rays of the setting sun
penetrate into the heart of the densest foliage,
which is impervious to the vertical beams
of noonday."  This charming writer touches
the spot; experience, tenderness, and
sympathy flow from mellowed lips well rounding
to the autumn of life.  Old age does reflect
more discerningly than impatient youth, and
in a garden, too, surrounded by a heavenly
host of flowers whose blossom is as laughter
and whose perfume is a song.  Romance
sketches wonderful pictures with such a
beatific background to inspire it, and
imagination wanders into a carnival of dreams.
How many pleasant thoughts and noble
thoughts have been brought to birth in a
garden which afterward grew into brave
deeds and gentle lives contributing generously
to enrich the sum of human happiness!

I sit under an ilex-tree in an old Tuscan
garden which in course of many generations
has belonged to many owners.  A haunting
beauty fills the ancient place, which one
can feel, but cannot understand.  A friendly
atmosphere that pervades old gardens
saturates the solitude.  It is more than
atmosphere, it is influence--a caressing influence
almost human that holds us up and tantalizes.
Vague ancestral memories of old families flash
upon the mind; for more than four hundred
years men and women have walked and talked
and thought in this Tuscan garden of mine, and
tended its flowers and enjoyed its tranquillity.
Children have played in it, often going to
bed tired and happy after romping in it the
livelong day, and so generation after
generation mankind repeats itself in the life-story
of the old garden on a Tuscan hillside.
The spirit of the past haunts it in shadow
and in sunshine, because wherever men have
been they leave a little of themselves behind
in ghostly exhalations.

When one is in a contemplative humour
a garden is full of object-lessons interesting
to study.  By dint of watching leaf replace
leaf, insects come into life and die, blossoms
change into fruit, fruit ripen and fall, the
swallows come with the daffodils and depart
when the hunter's moon frightens them
away--by watching these things methodically
and silently accomplishing their allotted
tasks, I have come to think about myself
with brave resolution and resigned conformity
to natural laws.  I grieve less over myself
when I regard the change which is universal;
the setting sun and the dying summer
help me also to decline gently.  Life is a
splendid heritage to hold in fee, but we
quit and deliver up possession when our
lease expires.  The light must be kept
burning if our own little taper flickers into
darkness.

A young girl visited us in Florence one
spring-time.  She lived in the garden among
the flowers, caressed them, talked to them,
and gathered them by the handful, the
armful, the basketful.  She decorated the rooms
with flowers, filled glass bowls and bronze
vases with flowers, and her art touched its
zenith in glorifying the dinner-table every
evening with the choicest of them all.  She
chatted, smiled, and sang whilst doing it,
for she dearly loved the flowers that she fondled.

We took her to the Uffizi to see the
world-renowned Old Masters there; but she yawned
in front of masterpieces of art, and her eyes
wandered round searching the smart costumes
of the ladies in the room.  We took her to
Rome and showed her the sights of the Eternal
City, but Bond Street and Regent Street
interested her more than St. Peter's and the
Coliseum.  We visited the Forum with its
ruined temples and triumphal arches, and
trod the Via Sacra; but the place was only
an old stoneyard to her, devoid of interest,
so we left her to herself, and she wandered
over the Forum on other pleasure bent, and
we found her afterwards picking violets
amongst the ruins.

When at home again a friend asked how
she enjoyed her visit to Rome, and had she
seen the Forum?  In blank despair she
appealed to me to help her out of it.  "Yes,"
I replied, "you saw the Forum; that is
where you picked the violets."  The Forum
to her was deadly dull and forgotten even
by name, but a bunch of wild violets lived
vividly in her memory as the crown and
flower of her heart's desire, more excellent
than all the ruins of Rome.

Dulness comes to us in uncongenial
company and occupation.  You may be
surrounded by objects of interest and beauty
which amuse other people, but if these
worthy objects do not fit your taste, for you
they contain no element of delight, and you
are bored utterly with them whoever may
sing their praise.  It is a question of
temperament.  The heart is not dull if the head
is *triste*.  Every eye makes its own beauty
and every heart forms its own kinships.
Put me in front of a post-impressionist
picture and dulness covers me like a funeral
pall.  The beauties of the glowing picture
composed of significant form and bunkum
are lost on me completely.  Here is
something tremendously original that makes
demands on my intelligence that I cannot
meet.  I am mentally bankrupt in front of
this maddening art.

Looking at a post-impressionist picture,
you see only shapes and forms tangled
together within the limited area of a gilt
frame; you see relations and quantities of
colour splashed on canvas meaning anything
you choose to label it, but in the likeness
of nothing God made or man ever saw.
It distorts nature and scoffs at portraiture.
"Creating a work of art," trumpets the
evangelist of post-impressionism, "is so
tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure
for catching a likeness."  "You look at
a landscape, and you are not to see it as
fields and cottages; instead you are to see it
as lines and colours."  Yet up against this
lucid statement I observe no reason why the
portrait of a man should be drawn like a
peculiarly shaped market-garden divided into
plots for growing vegetables.  Nor can I
explain why the picture of a village street
should look like a fortnight's wash suspended
in a cherry orchard, and the policeman
standing in front of the village inn at the
corner should look like a laundry-maid
hanging out the clothes.  It requires uncommon
genius to work the illusion successfully, and
to start an indolent British public frivolling
with the captivating puzzle.  But it leaves
me cold and passionless, for I am slow of
understanding these things.  They say an
impressionist picture of top-note character is
a painfully exciting object for the spectator
to worship.  To do it justice, he must squirm
in front of it, for it is a picture that creates
a thunderstorm of rhapsody, a deluge of
delight, a roaring cataract of æsthetic
emotion in the soul of the man who understands
its cryptic language.  The artist who limned
the picture suffers agonies whilst working up
significant form, being pricked with pins and
needles of excitement, and is continually
dancing on the hot-plate of rapture.  The
spectator's duty when viewing a work of art
is to come into touch with the mind of the
artist.  To do this no wonder the spectator
has a bad time when digesting a whole gallery
of post-impressionist pictures.

Their religion is as bewildering as their art.
For their moral vision is out of kilter, as
their eyesight is out of focus.  The aforesaid
evangelist of the cult says: "I doubt whether
the good artist bothers much more about the
future than about the past.  Why should
artists bother about the fate of humanity?
If art does not justify itself, æsthetic rapture
does....  Rapture suffices.  The artist has
no more call to look forward than the lover
in the arms of his mistress.  There are
moments in life that are ends to which the
whole history of humanity would not be an
extravagant means; of such are the moments
of æsthetic ecstasy."

We return to the garden, for the lure of
a garden relaxes not.  The joy of it entangles
you in its toils.  Each successive season of the
year unfolds new developments which lead
you on to the next season.  So you are handed
on from one month to another throughout
the gardener's calendar by endless
enticements which keep the interest gently
simmering.  The procession of gay flowers that
promenade the sheltered borders and disport
themselves with flagrant pride on open beds
during spring and summer days, tricked in
rainbow colours, dazzle the eye with
splendour, win the heart's endearment, and pay
in noblest coin full recompense for the chill,
dull toil given in grey winter hours.

A lady friend who lived to a ripe old age
said to me jocosely, "To be a good gardener
you need a wooden back with an iron hinge
to it, for you are bending and stooping all
day long in the garden."  Only by constant
labour spent on the good brown earth can
you become candidate for possession of this
useful garden requisite, a wooden back with
an iron hinge to it, or the neatest imitation
offered on the market.  In the garden you
get in touch with Nature, breathe fresh air,
cultivate a contented mind, and never
stagnate in idleness or degenerate into ennui.
Your body, inured to all weathers, escapes
many little ills of the flesh, and gradually
you harden into an iron constitution, which
is the nearest earthly substitute to a wooden
back hung on iron hinges.

You never need remain indoors to smoke
or sew or yawn because there is nothing
doing in the garden: you can weed there the
livelong day in the open.  This lowly service
offers immediate reward; it begets a healthy
appetite at meal-times, and develops a night's
sound sleep, which is some pleasure no
millionaire can buy with his millions.
Weeding puzzles my blind gardener Emilio.

I have two brothers gardeners, Enrico and
Emilio.  Enrico has sight only of one eye,
Emilio is blind both eyes.  The two brothers
work together in brotherly love, and have
only one working eye between them, yet it
is wonderful how much good work the one
eye accomplishes per day.  Emilio sees with
his hands.  It is weeding that puzzles him
most.  He never pulls a flower instead of
a weed--he feels the difference between
them.  It is the weeds that elude his fingers
as he works along the border that grieve
him.  Weeding is a fascinating occupation
to me.  Nice people won't profane their
hands grubbing in common garden soil, but,
being a groundling myself, I enjoy the fun
of coming into contact with my native
element.  Clean, sweet, caressing earth, it is
the last flowery coverlet all of us will sleep
under; why shun thy friendly touch to-day?
There is always an abundant crop of weeds
to practise on in an Italian garden, and your
fingers itch to uproot them to the very last
offender.  I suppose it is the ruthlessness
and slaughter of the deed, the close
handgrip on the enemy, that compels you on;
and when the skirmish is over, surveying the
ground cleared of the foe and the heaps of
the slain withering at your feet gives a
pleasurable thrill of excitement in the hour
of victory.  You exult, for there is something
done, and well done, to show for your backache.

The gardener's lure is irresistible.  The
devotee walks in flowerland of his own
creation.  In dreary winter hours he dreams
splendid dreams of himself surrounded by
summer harmonies, summer fragrance, and
summer flowers, for which he has planned
and planted and patiently tended along the
covering months of winter and spring.  The
hour of full realization approaches when the
roses mass their rival glories and spread their
coloured raptures in the garden that he loves.
This puts the crown on the brow of summer.
This is the gardener's festival of the year.
He invites his horticultural cronies to tea on
the lawn, and they all talk rose jargon
together.  He takes them on a tour of
inspection round the garden, and they
congratulate the founder of the feast of flowers.
They are happy as a band of Sunday-school
children spending the afternoon out.  They
sit on the lawn under the spreading ilex-tree,
which casts ample shadow for their comfort,
and the summer sunshine lays ardent on the
green-sward around them.  It is a genial
gathering, but the man who understands not
roses would be speechless in their midst and
not a little bored.  Conversation cools off,
the evening shadows lengthen, and in an
interlude of silence there is a sort of
whispering stillness in the warm evening air, as if
the flowers and grass and trees are all saying
kind words to one another, for having done
their best to please.  The lure of the garden
is never so poignant as at this great moment,
for your heart is brimming of sweet content,
and you say to yourself: "Can it be true?
Can anything in the world be more beautiful?"

There is another lure that lays hands on
a man like grappling-irons tackling a Spanish
galleon laden with treasure, with a grip which
cannot be shaken off: I mean the writer's
lure.  I am fond of reading.  The enticements
of a good book are hard to resist,
especially if you have no inclination to resist,
but tumble a ready victim to the writer's charm.

What is the writer's lure?  How does it
cast its spell?  You can talk round the
subject by metaphor and symbol and figure
of speech, but cannot solve it like a problem
in Euclid and add Q.E.D. at the end.  The
writer's lure is the vividest way of saying
things.  It is a bolt shot from the mind that
hits the penman's mark.  The writer's lure
fixes you even as a beautiful sympathetic
picture holds you up by its witchery of art.
In the picture warmth of colour, grace of
line, melting tints, dreamy distance, and an
added mystic charm brooding over all, voice
lovingly your taste in art, and, like a haunted
man, you carry the landscape about with
you all day long.  It intrudes on your mind
midst pressing business affairs; the sunlight
sleeping on the hills creates a pleasant
interlude of thought when engrossed in life's little
worries.  Turner's "Crossing the Brook" in
the Tate Gallery is a picture that bewitches
me when I see it.  It stimulates my
imagination and sets my thoughts sailing over the
country carried on the breezes which blow
across the Turner landscape.

A book haunts you in the selfsame way
as a picture.  You read a book, and it stirs
your emotions and captivates your fancy,
and for a time it possesses you like a living
spirit.  The writer's lure holds you in its
grip.  The book soaks into you.  A sentence
here and there leaps to memory during odd
moments of the day; the rhythm of the
language ripples musically as a chime of
bells, and you repeat the sentence to yourself
again and again.  The aptness of an image
is lifelike, and a vision floats across your
mind; the happy turn of a sentence sticks.
The fresh, clear-cut thought shot out boldly
from the writer's brain conveys a new idea;
you recall the touch of humour resembling
a patch of warm sunshine twinkling on the
landscape, and your lips curve into a smile.
There are passages of tenderness also that
you treasure, because they find your heart
like shafts of love feathered with joy.  All
these things in the book come back to you
vividly, and whisper their fond message over
again.

One cannot explain the writer's lure.  You
may name it, but you cannot catch it in the
reviewer's trap of criticism.  It is illusive as
the angel who visited Manoah and his wife,
wrought wondrously, and vanished leaving
no trace.  It is a secret of pencraft which
defies definitions and eludes analysis, yet it
is the vital element in composition.  It is
not a question of conforming to correct
standards of good writing by which literary
excellence is judged, the writer being blessed
or cursed by the censors according to the
measure of his allegiance to their literary
creed.  Some writers violate every literary
canon set up to guide their pen in the way
of righteousness, but they are alive with
literary fire; the vital element is fecund within
them, and they riot in the power of it.  There
are no rules in art that great writers have
not shown us how to break with advantage.
You cannot resolve the writer's lure into its
component parts as you can a potato.  Like
electricity, it defies analysis, but, like the
electric current, you feel it in your bones.

Blind Emilio does not work by rules taught
in popular garden manuals; he gathers
inspiration for his craft direct from the heavens.
He is an oracle of occult information and
prevision almost uncanny, concerning things
in the garden and out of it.  However, he
is a cheerful soul and a born optimist, so we
consult him often and rely on his wisdom,
because, like honey, its flavour is pleasant
to the taste.

The moon is the guiding providence
regulating some of Emilio's important duties.
He observes the phases of the moon with
the reverence of an astrologer of legendary
days.  He awaits the waning moon in
February to prune the rose-trees.  A potent
mystic virtue dwells in a waning moon
according to his garden lore, which is old
as his pagan ancestors.  If you prune
rose-trees in a waxing moon the new growths will
be long, weak shoots, and the crop of roses
in the summer poor, puny things.  Prune in
the waning moon and the new growths will
be short, sturdy rods bearing large flowers,
and an abundance of them.  Garden seed
must be sown under the auspices of the
waning moon if you want your flower-beds
in the summer-time to be renowned for
beauty, to make your friends envious of your
success and yourself just swaggeringly happy.

What applies to roses and seed applies
equally to pruning vines and grafting
fruit-trees.  Bulbs and potatoes may be planted
any time.  They move in the spring when
Nature signals whether they are in the
ground or out of it.  They are outside the
ritual of the moon.

We had a heavy crop of diospyros last
autumn, drawn from four trees in the
kitchen-garden.  These fruits are fat, round, rosy
fellows, plump as overgrown tomatoes.  The
flesh of the ripe diospyros is Nature's jam,
soft and mushy, delicious in flavour, and
eaten politely with a spoon.  Our neighbour
who hails from Cincinnati grew a crop of
small, sickly-looking fruit.  "Ah!" said
Emilio, "now that you see the difference in
the two crops, you must believe me.  Their
diospyros were gathered in the growing moon,
and they shrivel and lose colour and flavour;
ours were gathered in the waning moon, and
keep beautiful and sound to the end of the
season."  There is good luck under the
waning moon.  Another explanation of the
difference in the crops has merit, which
Emilio considers treason to the honourable
tradition of his fathers.  Our fruit was grown
in the kitchen-garden on manured soil; our
American neighbour's trees stand on a rocky
bank in the wild garden which is never
dressed with manure.  The blessing of the
moon falls on the crop that is best nourished
in the days of its youth.

In the garden is an avenue of lime-trees
about one hundred and sixty feet long.  In
the summer it forms a deliciously shady
walk; in rainy weather it is a clean and
pleasant promenade, for it has a paved
pathway in it.  The north end of the avenue
terminates in a large semicircular stone seat
mounted on a stone base one step higher
than the pathway.  The seat has no florid
decorative carving on it to arouse hostility
or provoke criticism.  It is just a plain seat
of simple Roman type, roomy and comfortable
to sit on.  Behind the seat curves a
semicircle of thirteen cypress-trees screening
the north winds.  Again, behind the cypress-trees
is an interesting old stone wall about
twenty feet high, forming the boundary of the
garden.  Above the wall, rising in gentle
slope, is the south shoulder of the hill, on
the hill-top sits Fiesole, the famous Etruscan
city of history and legend.  The slope is
covered with olives and vines, forming a
mantle grey and green with its leafy fringe
dropping on our garden wall.

This great retaining wall is old as the villa
which was purchased by Domenico Mori in
1475.  The history of the house earlier than
this date is lost in the mist of antiquity.
The ancient wall is a feature in the garden,
for on two sides it towers like a cliff, forming
a charming background to the scene.  It has
weathered beautifully with the ages, and is
an immense stretch of canvas for the display
of masses of colour.  In places it is bleached
silvery-grey, and elsewhere the tinted lichen
mottle it with saffron and orange and brown,
and every delectable shade and tone which
Time, the great decorator, with loving hand,
imparts to old stone.  It looks warm and
gay and friendly, and grows a rock-garden
of its own, for wild flowers bloom in its cracks
and crannies and red valerian flames upon
its heights, side by side with golden broom.
Ivy clothes it in parts, and most mysteriously
so, for years back the plants were cut off
their roots, and the ivy now exists only on
nourishment drawn from the wall, and it
exists vigorously on the meagre diet the wall
supplies.  When the sunshine pours down
upon its hoary time-worn face, the old wall is
transfigured into a thing of triple splendour,
for its colours glow and blaze with spiritual
fervour imparting that artistic touch of nature
which is the happy gift of garden plaisance.

Deeply set in the wall is the ruin of a small
shrine.  Once upon a time this shrine was the
home of the Madonna, but now no Madonna
occupies the niche.  Some pious ancestor of
the house implored gracious protection of the
Mother of Jesus on behalf of his vines and
olives, fruits and flowers, and he set up her
Ladyship's sheltered image in the little
vaulted temple on the wall as guardian of
the crops, hoping that fat harvest would
follow his devotion to Our Lady of Plenty.
The vacant shrine is desolate and crumbling
and mossy now, and so is the sentimental
faith of those ancient days.  It was a
hallowed sentiment in its way, this worship of
the Madonna.  Men lived up to it, and felt
happy in their prayers to the Lady of Heaven.
Nowadays men win good harvests on more
scientific lines.  They put trust in deep
ploughing and artificial manure rather than
in prayers and oblations to the Mother of God.

The personal intervention of the Deity in
the affairs of men strikes a homely note in
the world's domestic management, and brings
the Heavenly Father in close touch with His
earthly family; but the dear God's blessing
is level-handed, and favours His children,
bad or good, who work the hardest, and add
intelligence to their toil.





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.. _`THE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATE`:

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   VI


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   THE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATE

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My friend Federico wandering through
Tuscany on one of those delightful
excursions that he loves, passing from town to
town and village to village picking up "old
things" *en route*, called at a dealer's shop
in Bagni di Lucca.  In the miscellaneous
collection of antiquities there offered for sale
he found nothing to please him.  To console
him in the hour of disappointment, the little
dealer, named Grosso, said: "I know of a
beautiful Montelupo plate that will take
your fancy.  Come with me; it is away up
the hills, a pleasant ride for us.  Give me a
few francs for my trouble, and you can buy
the plate."  So they took a vettura and
rode up the mountains in quest of the
Montelupo plate.  After an hour's delightful
drive they stopped at a contadino's cottage
on the roadside, and there, boldly on view to
the passer-by and stuck on the weather-beaten
front of the cottage over the
doorway, was the Montelupo plate, the very
heart's desire of the two adventurers.  It
was a brave plate, round as the sun and
about thirteen inches in diameter.  In the
centre of it, painted in flaming colours,
trotted a soldier on horseback with drawn
sword in hand, but no painted foeman visible
into which to bury the thirsty blade.  The
interior of the plate surrounding the warrior
was a mass of rich deep orange ground; the
colour much esteemed by collectors of this
rural pottery.  The contadinos in Tuscany
once owned numerous specimens of these
rustic dishes, which were used daily by them
in their homes as common household crockery.
They were nothing thought of in those
far-off days of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.  They were made for the peasants'
service, and if a plate was broken another
was bought for half a franc in the next
market town.  The day came when the
supply stopped and the plates could not be
replaced.  Some other novelty in kitchenware
had the run of the market, and nobody
wanted Montelupo plates.

Fashion set in about twenty years ago to
collect this crude, curious, neglected pottery,
so grotesque and humorous in design and
coarse in workmanship, but when reposing
against the wall of a well-lit room certainly
showy and decorative for all time.  They
carry amusing and picturesque subjects,
comical or satirical in treatment.  Not very
artistic, but cleverly and freely drawn with
a few bold lines to catch the peasant's sense
of humour, which was easily tickled.  The
plates revel in brightness and colour.  Colour
holds the eye and courts our admiration,
and fancy prices rule the market.

The rarest plates to find are those burlesquing
the Churchman.  The soldier, the farmer,
and the serving-maid took the joke kindly,
but the plates in which the monk was
caricatured offended the Church dignitaries, and
these specimens were bought up mysteriously,
quickly destroyed, and now cannot be found.

When the fashion set in, wandering dealers
and touring collectors made haste to buy.
They spread themselves over the country;
knocked at cottage doors in out-of-the-way
places in Tuscany, begged a glass of milk,
admired the plates on the kitchen dresser,
and offered to buy at a few francs apiece.
The contadino soon found he had something
good, and the price rose to ten francs each.
Still the plates were admired by tired travellers
resting in out-of-the-way cottages drinking
a glass of milk.  The price rose incontinently
to twenty, thirty, fifty francs, until the
peasants discovered a gold-mine in their old
kitchen crockery, and now their stock is sold
out.  To-day the plates are found only in the
hands of dealers, and good specimens
command prices anywhere between a hundred
and two hundred and fifty francs each.

The owner of the Montelupo plate over the
cottage door asked sixty francs for his family
treasure.  My friend borrowed a ladder, that
he might have it down to examine.  "No,"
said the owner; "you must buy it where it
is, and pay for it first."  Federico's fancy
was caught with the pretty toy; he submitted
to the hard terms, and paid the sixty francs.
Little Grosso now mounted the ladder to
bring down the plate.  "I can't move it;
it is cemented into the wall," he called to
the new comer, standing below.  So he
borrowed a hammer and chisel, and ran
nimbly up the ladder again and began
chipping round the plate.

Immediately the whole village was on the
spot, standing round, excited, chattering,
watching the job.  A noisy man, the cock of
the village, slung himself forward and shouted
strenuously.  He demanded to know what
they were doing: "That plate has been there
for over a hundred years.  It is a very
important piece, and is worth much money.
It is of great value.  Who has bought it?
What have you paid for it?"

"I have bought it," said my friend; "I
have given sixty francs for it, and as you
think it so valuable, I will sell it to you for
sixty francs.  Will you have it at the price
I gave for it?"

Federico has a lovable disposition.  He
takes life placidly.  He takes taxes placidly,
he takes bad trade placidly, he takes the
war placidly, he takes a human tornado
placidly.  The noisy man exploded--shouted
louder and louder, and scattered his arms
about in the air, gesticulating like the sails
of a windmill racing in a stiff breeze, but he
did not buy the village treasure.  Grosso on
the ladder kept on chipping round the plate,
the crowd watching him critically.

Presently he called out, "Signore, the
plate is in two pieces!" My friend said to
the noisy man: "Do you want to buy the
plate?  It is in two pieces--you can have
it for fifty francs."  He did not take on,
but continued talking, gesticulating, and
exciting the onlookers.  Grosso continued
chipping round the plate.  He called out
again, "Signore, the plate is even in three
pieces."  So my friend said to the village
bully, "You can have the plate for thirty
francs."  But he did not buy at the price.
Grosso resumed his work, hacking round the
plate.  He called out again, "Signore, the
plate is in many pieces!"  So Federico
shouted to the troublesome man: "Now is
your chance; you can have the plate for
twenty francs.  I paid sixty for it; will you
give me twenty?"

The man folded himself up and slunk off;
the crowd also melted away, and Grosso
went on chipping, and put fragment after
fragment of the plate in his pocket as he
released them from their cement setting.
He came down the ladder with the broken
plate in his pocket in ten pieces.  They rode
home to Bagni di Lucca, feeling a bit miserable
on the journey.  At Bagni di Lucca my
friend comforted Grosso with a good dinner
in the restaurant and gave him seven francs
for his trouble.  "And what about the
plate?" said Grosso, when my friend bid
him good-bye.  "You keep it, Grosso.
I don't want it."  "No," said Grosso; "the
plate is yours.  You have treated me well
and given me seven francs.  I am more than
satisfied."  "Keep it," was the reply; and
away Federico went home, just a little
disappointed with the result of his expedition
up the mountains.  The lure of the Montelupo
dish had proved a failure.

Next year he visited Bagni di Lucca in
quest of antiques, and called upon Grosso
the dealer.  On entering the shop he saw the
Montelupo plate hanging against the wall,
looking gay as ever without visible crack or
cleavage on it.  The dealer had cunningly
dove-tailed the plate together, and it looked
faultless to the eye.  "It is yours," said
Grosso; "I have kept it for you.  Customers
wanted to buy it.  I knew you would come
again to see me."  After much persuasion
and a consideration, Federico took the plate
home and hung it in his studio amongst a
collection of treasured antiques which he has
gathered round him there and are the joy
of his heart.  It was much admired, and
the romance of its history, often related,
was as often listened to with amusement and
laughter.

One day a Florentine dealer visited the
studio and fell in love with the Montelupo
plate, and bought it for ninety francs.





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.. _`THE LURE OF PLUCK`:

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   VII


.. class:: center large bold

   THE LURE OF PLUCK

.. vspace:: 2

It happened in Rome; in our apartment on
the Piazza di Spagna.  We had a visit from
a Countess.  She was heralded by her
visiting-card, on which blazed a coronet--an
awe-inspiring visiting-card, imposing enough to
reduce to the ground the most blatant
democrat.  What did the unknown Countess
want? we asked each other with palpitating hearts.
Had she come to invite us to visit her
ancestral castle in the Sabine Hills?  Was
she a messenger from the Queen of Italy
summoning us to an audience in the Quirinal
Palace?  What did this high-toned lady want?
My wife faced the music alone.  She entered
the room, and saw a shabbily dressed old lady
rambling about amongst the furniture.

"Ah!" exclaimed the Countess; "please
excuse me the liberty of admiring your old
Italian furniture; it is very fine indeed.  I
am so fond of it.  I used to have my rooms
full of it, but we sold it all to dealers.  They
gave us a good price for it.  We are reduced
in circumstances now, and I have called to ask
if you would buy some jam from me.  I make
it myself, and have good clients among the
English and American residents.  I charge
3.50 lire for a jar, and allow 50 centimes for
the empty jar if returned when I call again."

She produced some glass jars of jam
and honey from a basket she carried under
her cloak.  Refined-looking jars; artistically
labelled jars, assuring the purchaser that the
jam within was made under perfect hygienic
conditions.  The wording of the labels was
printed in accurate English; but the Countess
could not speak English, not a broken
sentence of it could she utter.  The
conversation was carried on in French.  We
bought a jar of jam and a jar of honey, and
are looking hopefully for the return of the
50 centimes on the empty jars when next
she calls on business intent.

It is no hedgerow jam, no common cottage
mixture of blackberry and apple she offered
us, but highly aristocratic peach jam from
choicest fruits grown in coroneted orchards.
And the honey she offered was superior
honey; not the produce of old-fashioned
garden flowers and wild heather from the
hills--anybody breeds that plebeian honey.
Her bees were classic to the core, lived in
the garden of Hesperides, and fed only on
orange-blossoms and acacia.  No honey had
an aroma equal to hers.

Dear, good old soul!  There was lots of
fine metal in her character; she was a piece
of rare old silver plate with hall-mark clearly
impressed on it, but in somewhat battered
and bruised condition.  She had been roughly
handled in the hard-hammering world.  She
had lost everything but manners and breeding.
She could sell jam with the grace and
dignity of a Queen bestowing royal favours
on a subject.  She was striving to maintain
herself honourably in the sight of all men,
and she would die in the last ditch rather
than beg.  Her pluck lured her on to the
winning-post.

There are sensitive people who, when hard-hit
by Fortune, mope like moulting fowls and
creep into dark corners of the earth; they do
not strut in the market-place and shout
loud-throated their woes to the crowd; they lower
their flag and surrender themselves to fate.
Their vanity supports their poverty, and their
poverty breaks their heart.  Really, these
people are victims of false shame.  False
shame deludes their common sense.  It
discolours their imagination, enfeebles their
will-power, and drives them on to the rocks to
feed with the goats.  Their misfortune assumes
an exaggerated character in their own minds.
They fancy that the world stares coldly on
them in their adversity and whispers
contemptuously against them behind their backs,
and they collapse in the frigid atmosphere
with which they surround themselves.

Their vanity betrays them into surmising
unwholesome things.  They fidget about
themselves in their supersensitiveness.  They adore
public opinion, and fancy themselves filling
a large place in its consideration, and they
dread the smiting lash of its hostile criticism.
The truth is humiliating but very refreshing
to our morbid disposition, and the truth is
that people are not thinking much about us,
however conspicuously we imagine ourselves
to be painted in the picture.  We are only one
of a crowd of common people, nor even the
most interesting figure in it.  It is unwise to
esteem ourselves to be of immeasurably more
consequence than we really are.  The busy
world at best gives us only a passing thought.
Dr. Johnson bluntly said: "No man is much
regarded by the rest of the world.  The
utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear
is to fill a vacant hour with prattle and be
forgotten."  If a man thinks no more seriously
of his own misfortunes than his neighbour
thinks of them, his troubles will be lightly
borne.

However, the world is much more
good-natured than the man of morbid temper
gives it credit for.  Penetrate through its
cold reserve, and you often find within a
warm, sympathetic heart.  The good English
heart is oft-times hedged by a *chevaux de
frise* of English hauteur hard to break through,
but get within the lines and you receive a
cordial welcome.

Our sturdy Countess was not afflicted with
false shame.  She had pride, but not vanity.
Vanity is a coquette and says, "What do you
think of me?" and tremblingly awaits your
verdict.  Pride says, "I am as good as you
are, and I don't care a damn."  It is not
every decadent Countess who sells jam to keep
her end up in this see-saw world.  It requires
grit and a rare brand of pride uncommon in
the quality to rise to the occasion.  There
is a vain pride that welters into nothingness
in the dismal hour of failure, and starves
tragically like a rat in a trap rather than
help itself or accept help from others.  There
is another pride--robust, full-blooded pride--that
spurns the conventionalities of caste,
takes off its coat and fights misfortune face
to face resolutely for its daily bread, and
wins through.  This is where our heroic
Countess steps in splendour.

Why immolate oneself on the altar of
family pride?  A false goddess sits enshrined
there on a false throne.  Why live on the
reputation a forefather won in the Middle
Ages?  That reputation is now spent capital;
it is worthless scrip on the social market
to-day.  Build another reputation for
yourself, clean and sweet and new.  If ill luck
drops you in the ditch, to maintain inviolate
the family honour you must get up and with
ungloved hands work your way out of it like
a man.  Sell jam.

Perhaps you hate wearing a brand-new
reputation.  It sets on you like a misfitting
coat.  You are an heir of the glorious past,
and exult on the length in your ancient
lineage.  Remember also you are a trustee
of the splendid future; the shining days to
come demand your thoughtful consideration.
Do rare credit to your sacred trust.  It is
better to transmit honour to your descendants
than to borrow fame from your ancestors.
It is better to be lovingly remembered than
nobly born.  That grim old ancestor of yours
who built the family fortune out of nothing
and grimly fought every inch of the way up
to renown single-handed would despise you
for a poltroon lying derelict in the ditch of
despair.  If the family fall throws you to
the ground, are you going to lie there
indefinitely and rot like offal?  Sell jam.

An Italian nobleman went to America to
repair his fallen fortunes.  He refused to
soil his hands in trade; his old family title
was the magic key he carried to open the
treasure-chests of the New World.  So he
arrived in America armed with a despatch-box
full of introductions to money magnates
there.  He called upon a banker in New
York, and presented a letter of introduction.
The banker asked him what he knew about
business.  "Nothing," replied the nobleman;
"I am a cavalry officer."  "Sorry I cannot help
you," said the banker; "the circus left our
town yesterday."  The nobleman was floored.
Enraged at the magnate's laconic insolence,
he destroyed all letters of introduction
contained in his despatch-box and tackled the
world on his own.  He folded up his family
pedigree, laid it in lavender, went into the
market and sold jam.  In the market-place
a long head is a better weapon to fight with
than a long pedigree.  He worked out his
own salvation, and returned home and lived
contentedly amongst the orange-groves and
sunshine of Southern Italy.





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.. _`THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   VIII


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   THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE

.. vspace:: 2

Eight old Chippendale chairs and two settees
sold recently at Christie's for 5,600 guineas,
and report says quickly after the auctioneer's
hammer dismissed the lot they changed hands
again at £1,000 profit to the buyer.  There
must be great charm in old furniture when
people scramble for it regardless of cost.  I
suppose money is dull stuff to own heaps of
unless you can exchange it for things that
give the heart a passing thrill of pleasure
(the great sport is in the making it); and
the more money you make, the more it takes
you to work up the thrill.  A millionaire's
smile is an expensive hobby to cultivate.
Gathering a bunch of wild primroses in the
sunny April woods gladdens the heart of a
child amazingly, and he dreams the pleasure
over again in his sleep.  It costs over 5,000
guineas to tingle the feelings of a rich man.
The child's outlay is more economical, but it
fetches as much enjoyment.

Wherein lies the secret charm of old
furniture?  I love it myself, and for that reason
ask the question for the pleasure given in
answering it.  I am only a trifler in antiques,
possessing a few pieces of exquisite old oak
of the seventeenth-century period; also several
pieces of walnut furniture which are old
Italian.  The Italian pieces lie fallow in a
villa just outside the barriéra St. Domenico,
Florence, where we live with them half the
year round.  Beautiful old walnut furniture
counts much more in its own homeland,
while the alien oak of England, which we
love here, is cold and expressionless in the
rooms of an Italian villa on the sunny slopes
of Fiesole.  It loses its aura in a strange land.

Old furniture with a time-worn glossy face
on it is interesting because it is made by
the hands of man; and the man used his
brain in making it, as well as his hands;
surely man's delight is in man's work.  A
piece of old furniture reflects the mind of
its maker in every detail of its construction,
and that is a very fascinating feature to me;
for we are told on high authority that
"hand-work possesses character, almost personality,"
and we believe the high authority with all
our heart.

Modern furniture has no personality, and
so it transmits no message; it is machine-made,
and I hold no kinship with machinery
to cherish warm feeling in its favour; but
handcraft ever commands our respect, and
when well done wins our widest admiration.

Machine-made work carries a lie on the
face of it; it imitates handwork.  The machine
simulates a trouble that has not been taken.
It produces beautifully designed and
ornamented imitations of ancient handcraft at
trifling cost.  Who cares for beauty produced
by formula?  Beauty is the flowering of
noble labour linked to useful purpose.
Cheapness and showiness are the flaring
advertisements of the mechanical cabinet-maker
to-day, and he hits with precision the public
taste.

Give me to admire something a man has
laboured lovingly and honestly to produce,
not what a machine vomits out standard
pattern; something a man has put the power
of his brain into as well as the dexterity of
his hand.  William Morris quaintly remarks:
"If you have anything to say, you may as
well put it into a chair or a table."  The
cabinet-maker speaks to us with his tools in
a language of his own invention.  The
cabinet-maker has helped to make English homes
comfortable to live in, and for so doing we
owe him a debt of gratitude.  His tools are
not the sword and the cannon, but the plane,
the chisel, and the swift-moving saw.  His
art is not destructive to life, piling on misery
to man's many woes, but he enriches life
manifold by adding comfort and luxury to
the widening circle of human happiness.  His
rewards are not stars and garters and
hereditary honours conferred by princes for brave
deeds done on the field of battle, but just
the recompense that the master of the tools'
true play appreciates; the simple pleasure of
good work well and truly done sent forth to
take honourable place in the stately homes
of England, knowing that by such fine
hand-craft he will speak from his grave to people
unborn; and he even cherishes the inspiring
hope that those who are possessors of his
treasured work done in oak and walnut and
sweet satinwood will, in the hereafterward,
in the quietude of their sequestered homes,
surrounded by familiar furniture of high
lineage, bestow on the workman a passing
measure of praise; for these worthy craftsmen
put the best of their lives into the labour of
their hands.

Old furniture is delightful in your home
because it is old.  Age has an alchemy of its
own that ennobles the work of man.  A
brand-new house is deadly unromantic, even
if it is a dream of architectural excellence.
Its appearance is garish and crude.  New
stones and raw bricks are ugly in the days
of their youth, but age transforms the place,
be it manor-house or thatched cottage, until
enchantment haunts the fabric.  I dearly
love the grace of antiquity that mellows the
venerable homesteads of England and blends
the intermingling lustre of tradition with the
roll of their lengthening years.

Age likewise has a mellowing influence on
furniture.  Obliteration of exactitude of form
is essential charm in it as it is in a man or
woman.  You resent the loudness of a newly
made rich man.  His manners smell strongly
of varnish just put on; his vanity and
self-importance are unsavoury morsels to swallow
without salt.  He is a terror to his polite
neighbours and a stranger to himself.  Wait
and see; he will tone down as the mills of
life grind off the sharp angles and smooth
him into a decent fellow.

Good taste resents primness and
self-assertiveness in new furniture; its raw
outlines and sharp angles offend the eye.  When
these stubborn features are subdued by
centuries of wear and tear and the wondrous
old-time bloom of rich deep colour glorifies
the ripened oak with softness and
transparency of tone, that quality so delightful
to sight and touch which distinguishes
genuine antique furniture, then sentimental
feeling waxes strong and renders the work
attractive to us.

Vague and visionary thoughts of past
owners flit across the mind, and kindle
emotions in the presence of an ancient piece
of furniture of good repute.  It idealizes in
our minds, and becomes beautiful to us.  It
is a call of the past.  It is an unwritten
chapter in some old family history, and we
want to handle the key of the legend locked
up in it.  There may be tragedy or comedy,
or a mixture of both, recorded in the family
log-book, and the stately old carved-oak
court cupboard dozing in the banqueting-hall,
generation after generation, saw it all
through from beginning to end, but it
whispers away no family secrets to inquisitive
people.  An evil day broke the family
fortunes.  The venerable court cupboard vacated
its place of honour which it occupied for
centuries in the Yorkshire manor-house, and
has taken up quarters with us in our Sussex
home.  It is no longer mere chattel; there is
human interest in it.

I wonder if it takes kindly to its new home?
Land, they say, sometimes resents change of
owners, especially passing from a family who
had held lordship of the soil for generations.
When the old squire dies, the last of his line,
the land grieves.  It seems to know that it
is going to be sold and broken up, and it
loses heart.  It goes rotten like apples.  A
patch goes wrong here and a patch goes
wrong there, and the rottenness spreads and
runs together.  It takes the land long to get
used to a new master.

Has our old oak court cupboard sensitive
feelings like the ancestral acres?  Or is it
silently and sullenly indifferent to all the
changes of fortune that befall it?

I have an oak armchair with a unique
story to tell.  The back of it is one large
panel carved with heavy flora and foliated
decoration; on the cross-rail below the panel
is carved in bold raised letters:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center

   16 ELLIN RYLAND 94

.. vspace:: 1

The two arms are bountifully carved, and
the carving terminates in a large Tudor
rose forming a knob at the end of each arm.
The arm-tops, through constant use, are
smooth and shine like unto burnished bronze.
The supports and front legs are twisted in
good Jacobean manner, and the broad
stretcher is carved with two long feathery,
flowing acanthus-leaves curling round
gracefully at the tips as if under pressure of a
strong breeze, and crouching within their
embrace nestles a rose in ambush.  The chair
has been mothered with lifelong care, and
the bloom and beauty of age sit upon it like
a crown of glory.  So Ellin Ryland has won
for her name immortality among the roses.

We often think of Ellin and question the
chair about her, but information does not
flow freely from that quarter.  Did Ellin
order the chair from the cabinet-maker
herself?  I think not; perhaps her lover gave
it her on her birthday, or her husband on
their wedding-day.  No doubt the chair's
existence celebrates a red-letter day in the
annals of the family.  The name now is only
a legend to us, but there it is, legible after
the flight of two hundred and twenty years.
The old chair is a better monument to Ellin
Ryland's memory than a stone slab in a
damp churchyard, with her name graven on
it in crumbling letters.

I dare say Ellin had a thin slice of vanity
in her nature; we all have, and would like
our names printed somewhere imperishably.
During two hundred and twenty years the
moss and lichen, the sun and the frost,
conspire together to obliterate any lettering
in churchyard stones, but the writing in
tablet-oak on the armchair is as brave as
ever.  The name is only a legend, but it
keeps her memory green.

I do not turn my house into a museum
of antiques, but certainly I choose interesting
old furniture to live with where choice is
possible; it has a cheery influence on your
temper.  I love to walk amongst my treasures
and touch them with my hand and admire
their cloistered beauty.  I started housekeeping
in Victorian days, after the orthodox
manner of Englishmen about to marry, by
buying new furniture.  To get the genuine
article I bought it in framework and had
it upholstered and finished at home, under
my eye.  As years rolled on, piece by piece
the Victorian furniture vanished from our
rooms and old pieces supplanted them, and
the rooms grew pleasant to look upon and
cosy to sit in.  Your furniture has a subtle
influence on your disposition.  You live with
it daily all the year round as you do with
your wife, and you married her because she
was the girl you loved best in the world, and
since the wedding-day her influence has
coloured your life more than you can
measure and contributed mysteriously to
make you the manner of man you are.  Your
furniture adds much to your pleasure and
quiet enjoyment of home life if you have
the right sort.  Old furniture with quietness
of line is the best to live with--it is
suggestive of repose.

I love old furniture because its workmanship
is artistic.  Style in a chair or table is
the all-important thing.  A piece of furniture,
however simple in design, if it is wrought
artistically, stimulates the imagination,
arouses the emotions, and provokes endless
delight in the connoisseur.  We are keen
observers to-day, and curious over work
done centuries ago.  We handle a well-bred
piece of furniture with respect as we trace
the skill shown in beauty of line; the eye
travels joyously over its well-balanced
proportions and hovers with admirance over its
downright dexterity of carving.  No literal
copy of antique furniture made in the forcing
factories of to-day has feeling in it.  It is
very accurate in line and detail but it lacks
expression, and that is where the artistic
spirit enters, that is where the charm holds
us.  As old Higgery the carpenter explained
himself out of it when Lord Louis Lewis
complimented him on being the finest
carpenter of his age: "Ah, sir," he replied,
"Chippendale was the finest cabinet-maker
of his age and Sheraton of his; but they went
beyond that.  They had the Idea.  I can
use my tools as well as either of them--better,
maybe, for 'tis a subtle thing to give
a semblance of age to a new piece, but I
haven't got the Idea, and never had.  If the
imagination had gone with the craft, King
George might have seen his period of furniture
as well as any of the others."

Chippendale and Sheraton were without
doubt the cleverest cabinet-makers of their
age; but many an unnamed workman of their
period has left us the splendid legacy of his
"ideas" in furniture which is scattered over
the comfortable homes of England, with no
pedigree attached except the imprimatur of
a master craftsman's genius.

Speaking of artistic furniture, I do not
mean elaborate furniture overladen with a
heavy ornament which confuses its lines
and perverts its beauty into vulgarity.
Simplicity is the fairest form of art.
Simplicity consists not so much in plainness of
production as in singleness of purpose.  The
essence of simplicity is the absence of
self-consciousness.  A combination of simplicity
of character and great artistic power is
difficult to find, but when found it is the
most perfect combination and produces finest
work.  Art is often self-conscious, and quickly
runs to seed in superfluous ornamentation.
The Louis Quinze style is unwholesome as
poison.  It is brilliantly clever, but it is
fascinatingly demoralizing.  It reflects in art
the luxury and insincerity, the licentiousness
and effeminacy of the age that invented it.

Gaudy and overornamented furniture is
teasingly self-conscious, and conceited stuff
to live with.  Its lines are vulgar and
sensuous curves.  It is always staring at you,
grinning at you, ogling you, and saying,
"Observe me, and admire."  Just the very
character of the frivolous women, the
Pompadour and the Du Barri, who ruled the
voluptuous Court of Louis XV., and who
squandered the royal revenues in extravagance
of art and craft, so that the artist's
taste was wasted in riotous designing and
the craftsman's skill debased in excesses of
ornament.

Sumptuous furniture and splendid apparel
are closely wedded together, and cannot be
separated with success.  If I lived among
Louis Quinze furniture I should often see in
the room with me ghosts of gallant courtiers,
dressed in long silk coats, embellished with
gold braid, and vests of rainbow hue, with
cravats and ruffs of billowy lace, carrying at
their hips a long rapier, and toying with a
bejewelled snuff-box as they moved noiselessly
with an elegant devil-may-care swagger,
mixing with superbly decorated marqueterie
cabinets and tables and bronze statuettes
and Sèvres china *bleu du roi*; and shadowy
ladies of high degree would be there, wearing
capacious and flowery dresses and powdered
hair, sitting in the chequered light of evening
on seats richly upholstered in pale rose
Gobelin tapestry, smiling dreamily on the
exquisites of the old régime--all of them
fatally gifted mortals with manners polished
as the hard, shining surface of the parquet
floor they gaily tread: the whole scene a
vision glorious, composing an harmonious
blend of colour, grace, and beauty.  Modern
men lounging in tweed Norfolk jackets, or
dressed sombre in black swallow-tail coats,
with a cigarette lolling on their lips, and
ladies tailored into close-fitting costumes of
neutral tints, however beautiful in themselves,
would be completely out of the picture.

A peculiar reason why old furniture is
coveted by many people is because it is
fashionable and scarce.  The quantity that
remains in the country, drawn from the
homes of our easy-going port-wine-drinking
Georgian forefathers, is decreasing, and
buyers are increasing, so competition runs
riot for really good pieces.

There is plenty of worthless old furniture
for sale, as there are worthless "Old Masters"
asking for buyers.  Americans are the greedy
collectors who raid the market with their
unlimited dollars and pay sensational prices
for the prize pieces to adorn their town
houses in New York or Chicago.

Collecting is a fascinating hobby.  I have
found pleasure hunting for antiques far away
from the heated atmosphere of Christie's
auction-rooms.  The joy of the chase is
great, and the habit grows upon you.  I
have made many enjoyable excursions into
the country with a clear-cut object in view
which gives zest to the journey.
Rummaging through second-hand shops in the
back streets of provincial towns or in
out-of-the-way villages searching for spoil is an
alluring pastime to indulge in, and if you
love the country through which you travel
for the country's sake you will be very happy
on the trail, and want to go again whether
much or little plunder falls to your quest.
Old cathedral towns yield the best results.
There are many sleepy second-hand shops
loitering round the cathedral waiting for
customers to step in after visiting the sacred
fane.  There is much lumber and little
treasure in most of them; but if you don't
find what you want, in looking for it you
may find something that pleases you better,
like the man who was digging a hole in his
garden to bury a dead dog and unburied
a Greek statue of Venus.

Calling at the smart antique dealers'
spacious establishments in London is an
édition de luxe version of the same story.
Here choice pieces are assembled, polished
and poised adroitly to arrest attention.
Some of these elegant salons resemble
museums; the surroundings breathe order,
calm, refinement.  Prices rule high as the
aristocratic character of the place you visit.

Nothing is cheap in these sanctuaries of the
old nobility of furniture and art treasure
except courtesy and affability, which are
supplied gratis by the faultlessly accoutred
gentleman of the department, who checks
you on entering and conducts you round.
Any object you look at he explains for your
edification.  He rivals the showman at
Windsor Castle or the Tower of London for
knowing his part and throwing at you torrents
of information as he strides along.  He revels
in it, and his importance and intelligence
mesmerize you and keep most of your five
senses stirring.  You admire him as an
oracle of antique lore, and listen to him with
fear and trembling.  His beaming smile
encourages you to live, and politely you ask
another question.

Here the business of selling is practised as
a fine art.  The attendant is so well bred,
well groomed, so condescending and obliging
you feel yourself a criminal if you escape
him without making a purchase.  You say:
"I should like to go back and see that
satinwood chair again."  "Ah," he replies,
"that is a most interesting piece; King
Edward often sat in that chair.  It belonged
to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of
King Edward; it was the King's favourite
seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at
Redcote Manor.  And here is the oak table
you admired so much as we passed along.
We know the pedigree of it.  It came from
Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire.  It has been
in possession of the family since the year
1620.  We bought it at the Hall last week,
and so it has never been in the trade.  How
beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine
patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror;
surely the butler must have polished it every
week when he waxed the oak floor.  It
has never been damaged or repaired; it is
genuine all over.  It is a precious and
faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is
only...!"

There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the
buyer of old furniture.  Even in the garden
of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling
landscape.  Fraud is not unknown side by
side with honest dealing.  Not all furniture
is old as it looks.  That is where that
predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and
preys upon humanity in general and the
innocent amateur in particular.

There are sly manufactories of old furniture
busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building
up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables,
cabinets, out of oddments of oak and
mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of
broken and decayed furniture.  New wood
is added in parts where necessary to
complete the transformation, and when these
modern antiques are blended, stained to
harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina
rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a
keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed,
as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said
to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it
as antique as possible: we must sell the old
wine with the dust on the bottle."

There is no fixed market value to old
furniture as there is to postage-stamps or
War Loan stock.  The dealer sets his own
price on his goods, and the cupidity of the
public guides him how best to do it.  He is
a keen observer of human nature, and plays
up to its little weaknesses for his own
advantage, and he does it smilingly.

It is wonderful how environment works on
our feelings and baffles our judgment.  In
the twinkling of an eye it changes the value
we place on things.  Dress the same man in
two different suits of clothes, and you have
all the difference in our cursory opinion
between a lord and a tinker.  The same
article exhibited in shop-windows East or
West of London changes its value appreciably,
and we are blindly content to buy in
the dearest market if it is the most elegant,
and fancy we get full value for money.

I know a man in Florence who wanted an
old Tuscan table, and he padded round the
city looking for one.  In a small shop where
much furniture was crowded into little space
he saw the article that pleased him.  The
dealer asked twenty-four pounds for it.  He
tried to beat down the price, but the dealer
would not humour him, so he left without
buying.  Presently a large dealer in antiques
entered the shop, fancied the table, and paid
twenty-four pounds for it straightway, and
removed it to his own premises, which are
spacious and commanding.  The man in
quest of a Tuscan table visited the spacious
premises and saw the table in its grander
home, fell in love with it again, and bought
it for forty pounds.  Afterward he told the
dealer in the small shop that he had found
the table he wanted at Mr. So-and-so's, and,
quite elated, he described his purchase.
"Yes, I know about it," replied the rejected
dealer.  "You have paid forty pounds for
the table I offered to sell you for
twenty-four."  The buyer looked foolish, and said:
"But it was so much better displayed at
Mr. So-and-so's shop that I did not recognize
it being the same table; it looked worth
twenty pounds more in his place than it did
in yours."

The auction-mart frequently governs the
price of old furniture and gives it an upward
lift.  The psychology of the auction-room is
an interesting study.  The loaded atmosphere
of the place has a compelling influence that
gets the better of one's judgment.  In a
shop a man scoffs at the tall price of a piece
of furniture and haggles doggedly with the
dealer to reduce it thirty shillings; in the
auction-room if the same piece were offered he
would compete with the crowd to raise the
price of it incontinently.  It is the consistent
conduct of inconsistent human nature.  It is
that bellicose little devil who hides himself at
the bottom of every human being, impelling
him down into the danger zone to fight, who
is guilty of the rash and feckless deed.  A
man enters the auction-room in a happy,
breezy frame of mind, not to buy, just to
look on and see what things are fetching.
The serpent of the place tempts him, and
he is a lost soul.  His good resolutions
evaporate like water on a hot plate, leaving
no trace behind.  The fighting impulse in
him leaps up, and he bids and bids again,
and eventually he finds himself the possessor
of a rare old mahogany bureau hatched in
the reign of our King George, but
inadvertently described in the catalogue as a
masterpiece of the cabinet-maker's craft
composed in the times of Queen Anne!





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.. _`THE LURE OF PERSONALITY`:

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   IX


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   THE LURE OF PERSONALITY

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Personal influence is a subtle impalpable
sovereign power that man possesses; sometimes
it possesses the man, for influence often
is an unconscious element in his life which
exhales from him like the fragrance from a
flower or miasma from a swamp.  You cannot
investigate it.  It is moral force.  Some men
possess much of it, others less, the residue
of mankind none.  That is the mystery of
influence.  You cannot regulate it, calculate
it, or tabulate it in standard quantities.
Its operation is noiseless as a shadow,
dangerous as lightning, profound as eternity,
beautiful as the five wise virgins, or devilish
as Mephistopheles.

We speak here of personal influence.
There is an influence of a baser sort which
is powerful in its way--the influence of
money.  Money is extraneous matter.
Wealth magnifies a man in people's eyes,
but the man himself may be small without
the money inflation.  Strip the rich man of
his shekels, and you strip him of his
significance.  He counts no more than an empty
egg-shell after the rats have eaten the meat
out of it.  Frequently the extraordinary man
is only an ordinary man placed in
extraordinary circumstances.

There is also the influence of position.
That is not the genuine article.  It is alien
honour conferred like the odour of attar of
roses clinging to an empty earthen jar.
Position gives power.  Some people who sit
in the chair of authority use their power
to the full, but it is the power of position,
not of character or individuality.  The only
advantage of power is to be able to do more
good than other people.  All the world
knows the difference, the ghastly difference,
between Cardinal Wolsey in favour and
Cardinal Wolsey in disgrace.  Catastrophe
lies between these extremes of fortune.
The man remains the same in both states,
but the world moves with the times, and
gives no credit to an overrun banking
account.  He is a fallen star.  He drops out
of the seventh heaven of popularity into
abysmal darkness.  Banished the Royal
presence, who cares for Cardinal Wolsey?
He has no favours to transmit.  No man
is his friend, for he can befriend no man.
Position makes and unmakes a man, like
sunshine makes or unmakes a summer day.

Influence of truest and finest brand is
personal.  It emanates from the man, not
from his circumstances.  Some men handle
their fellow-creatures with dexterity and
ease, like an experienced whip controls the
horse he sits behind.  Quietness and firmness
are in the human touch, and the animal bends
submissively to every movement of the
reins; so some men command their fellow-creatures,
and they submit their wills to the
master mind that rides them, and how the
spell governs they cannot say.  Other men
are ciphers in society.  "Only Mr. So-and-so"
consigns a man to the outposts of social
extinction, and mixes him up with the
unclassified masses of limp, negligible, and
insignificant people who welter and gambol
with their kennel companions, but they
cannot head the pack on hunting days.

Influential men are not common in the
community.  Only the elect few shine; many
are reflectors of borrowed light.  Influence is
a gift.  It is caught, not taught.  It is all
decided for us when nestlings in the cradle,
and perhaps before we nestle.  The schoolboy
unconsciously wields a mystic power in
the playground, and his chums hover round
him as king of the revels.  Animal magnetism
exudes from every pore of his youthful skin.
He leads in every escapade, and others fall
in without question.  He is not taught the
trick; it comes natural for him to lead as for
the rank and file to follow.

On what principle Nature bestows her
favours it is difficult to hazard, more difficult
than to discover what principle guides the
British Government in distributing her coveted
decorations to the British public.  Nature is
romantic.  Exercising her sovereignty she
gives her honours as she pleases.  No money
can buy them.  Blue-blooded pedigrees have
no preferential tariff.  Nature mocks our
conventionality, spurns our orders of merit,
and winks at our social somebodies.  Often
she openly prefers a costermonger to a
King--stamps aristocratic grace on a gipsy, and
refuses it to a Duchess.  There are
insignificant great men who would be hustled in a
crowd if they wore no badge, while to social
nobodies Nature attaches a halo of
distinction which the crowd delights to honour as
subjects offer incense to a King.

Personality is an attribute that carries a
man far on the road to success.  Personality
is an endowment which proclaims a man one
of Nature's aristocrats.  It is Nature's
advertisement of her best, and she is proud of
her handiwork.  Personality is a fascinating
asset; it lends dignity to common clay; it
gives a man a standing outside the crowd,
which he occupies with ineffable content and
full advantage to himself.  Some people have
"an air" about them, and the atmosphere
they move in is intoxicating to those dwelling
under the spell of their presence.  You
cannot crush people who have personality.  Over
and over again it turns the scales in their
favour in the competitions of life.  Their
virtues may not be of the celestial, their
talent may lack glitter, but their personality
grips you with its pomp and splendour,
and they sit amongst the mighty, imposing
themselves on gods and men.  The envious
man admits their success, and slurringly
says: "They are commonplace: there is
nothing astonishing in them except their
success."  He consoles himself with the banal
reflection that, other things being equal, he
is quite as good as they.  But the strange
mystery of presence steps in and prevents
other things ever being equal.

Some men lack engaging personality, they
have no physical charm or force, yet they
exert strenuous influence.  They possess great
mental or moral qualities.  There is a Divine
spark in the clay that scintillates and collects
attention.  They are luminous bodies, and
emit light.  They are men with virtue in
them, and virtue flows out of them.  The
extremely fascinating character of Jesus Christ
moves in splendour adown the ages, giving
out vital energy.  It draws men to-day
irresistibly, as it constrained men nearly two
thousand years ago to follow Him homeless and
penniless through the highways and by-ways
of Palestine, without worldly honour or pay
to recompense them.  There is a strange,
silent, penetrating, perplexing, yet mighty
influence working round about us; it is the
influence of the life of Christ holding us up.
I do not mean His life as crudely reflected
to us in the modern Church.  Jesus Christ
has a larger influence outside the Church
than in it.  Christ would be a stranger in the
sanctuary to-day if He visited it as the
peasant of Galilee.

Jesus Christ never commissioned His disciples
to build up in the world such a colossal
organization as the Church has swollen itself
into with windy pride.  In every country in
Europe the Church is the biggest business
concern and the wealthiest institution, the
most aristocratic society and the most
retrogressive force.  The national Churches are
slavishly worldly and chastely genteel
concerns; they would boycott the kingdom of
Christ if they thought it were trying to enter
the world through their gilded gates.

The kingdom of Christ is democratic.  It
might interfere with tithes and endowments
and vested interests.  I fancy Christ will
establish His kingdom without calling in the
Church to help Him.  I could not picture
Christ making use of a Bishop in knee-breeches,
lawn sleeves, and with a seat in the
House of Lords, when engaging disciples to
evangelize the world.  But I can picture
Christ falling speechless when brought face
to face with a Bishop geared in full canonical
uniform; and if in His ignorance of ecclesiastical
functionaries Jesus politely inquired,
"Who is the aristocratic old gentleman
wearing knee-breeches and a broad-brimmed
hat, and to what institution does he belong?"
on being told he was speaking to one of the
leading representatives of His own spiritual
institution, I can picture Christ melting away
in anguish of heart from the venerable
presence of the great divine to solace Himself
in the company of fishermen and mechanics--men
whose hearts are warm and manners
natural, even if their creed is a bit unorthodox
from the ecclesiastical standpoint.

And there is the good St. Francesco, the
stainless and blameless saint, born of the
little Tuscan hill city, the perpetual flowering
rose of Assisi, whose godly fragrance gives
off for ever to sweeten the life of
mankind--St. Francis of Assisi, the humble child of
God, the dear brother of men, dead these
five hundred years gone by; but he is now
lying warm upon the lap of Christendom,
nursed for one of the noblest, gentlest spirits,
aglow with the fervour of an endless life.
He is a living, controlling force to-day in
the world's long battle for righteousness, and
ever pouring into our ears the sweetness of
Christ.

Men are governed more wisely by the dead
than by the living.  Interned within the
calmness of their shades, the mighty dead
speak to us, and no cross-currents of envy,
prejudice, or malice ruffle the serenity of their
counsel.  Influence is not always beneficent;
it is malignant sometimes, and contaminates
like the plague.  Evil qualities can be as
attractive as wholesome virtues.  The poets
brand the Devil with a commanding
personality.  John Wilkes, the notorious
demagogue in the reign of George III., was the
ugliest man in England, yet he impressed
himself marvellously on his generation.  He
was a popular hero; he possessed natural
gaiety of disposition and an irrepressible
fund of impudence and wit.  He was the
most brilliant controversialist of his day.
He was a charming rake with an insinuating
smile, and he wore the manners of a fine
English gentleman, which captivated his
enemies and conciliated the King.  He had
exceptional powers of fascination, and he
boasted that--ugly as he was--with the start
of a quarter of an hour he could get the better
of any man, however good-looking, in the
graces of any lady.





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.. _`THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE`:

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   X


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   THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE

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Our friend Mrs. Alinson took me sharply in
hand one day, and tendered me good advice
gratuitously over the tea-table.  Mrs. Alinson
is a lady magnificent in bulk, energetic in
action, torrential in tongue, and warm-hearted
in disposition, second to none amongst
the daughters of men.

When as a young man I first came to town
she adopted me, mothered me socially, and
manoeuvred for my success.  She did not
approve of my associates, and rated me
soundly in her loud, pushful, stridulant voice,
which commands attention: "Mr. Drake is
not a desirable acquaintance for you to
pursue, my dear.  He don't belong to our
set, and his reputation is tainted; unpleasant
rumours cloud round his name.  Take my
advice and cut him.  You only want to know
nice people."

Shrewd, disinterested, motherly advice for
Mrs. Alinson to bestow on a tenderfoot
unfamiliar with the pitfalls of society.  Surely
only a lady of sweet discerning disposition
could give it; a lady whom everybody loves
and whom nobody gainsays; a lady the final
arbiter of taste in "nice people" who opens
the door to a new-comer and no man shuts,
who shuts the door on a new-comer and no
man opens.  I accepted her dictum as good
current coin of the elect world we moved in,
to be honoured without reserve.  Its metal
rang genuine on the social counter.  Mr. Drake
henceforth is a stranger to me; it
would imperil my position in society to
know him.

After tea we parted, and I went to the
cinema.  I often go to a cinema because it
amuses me when I want amusement.  It is
light and inexpensive diversion.  Superior
people sneer at the cinema, and call it
low-grade amusement: a common glanty-show
that pleases common people.  However, as
I have no shares in music-halls or wasting
investments in theatre-land, I am impartial
in my pleasures, and can take a shilling seat
in a picture palace with clean conscience
and merry heart.  In the cinema we met
our dear friend Lady ----, who was enjoying
the moving pictures.  She invited us to her
reception on the following Saturday
afternoon; at the conclusion of the show, when
parting from her, she said: "It's very kind
of you to promise for next Saturday.  Please
don't tell Mrs. Alinson you are coming, or
she will be sure to come too, and I don't
want her.  The friends I am inviting don't
care to meet her."

This was a staggering blow struck at the
serene goddess to whom we bent the obedient
knee.  Was there another social kingdom
where she had no sovereignty, where her
passing shadow, like a malign influence, was
a thing to be shunned?  Was she a false
goddess, or no goddess at all?  She pictured
herself the controlling hand which steered
the current of gay life in our midst.  Was
she at the helm, or was it a mild illusion
that muddled her amiable brain?  Here are
people actually who will not open their doors
to receive her, nor permit her feet to tread
their dusty carpet--and she thought
omnipotence was in her nod.

These colliding facts perplexed us.  They
suggested the ridiculous, and offer food for
reflection on the comedy of human manners.
Here, on the one hand, is a portrait we draw
of ourselves, and there opposite hangs on the
wall a portrait other people draw of us.
Place these two sketches side by side and
consider, do they represent the same person?
Is there resemblance between them enough
to establish identity in a British court of
law?  How can there be?  We do not see
ourselves as others see us.  We each observe
the interesting object that engages our
attention from different points of the compass.
We see our good points of character and
make the best of them; our neighbours
detect our little sins and make the worst of
them.  So we clothe ourselves in sunlight
and paint our neighbours drab.  Mrs. Alinson,
fortunate woman, had no glimmering
idea what other people thought of her; it
was not given her to see herself as others
see her.  She lives stolidly; eats, drinks,
dresses, talks, surrounded by a shining halo
of self-complacency through which her
mentality cannot penetrate.  She is good-natured,
thinks excellently of herself, and believes
other people's feelings towards her are equally
well disposed.  You and I, happily, are
unconscious of the quaint esteem in which
our neighbours hold us, and wisely there we
ring the curtain down.  If the truth were
told, half our acquaintances are our
enemies--behind our backs.

Soon after the split in the Liberal party
on the first Home Rule Bill, which sundered
so many political friendships, Frank Holl
was painting the portrait of John Bright.
He mentioned to his sitter that he was about
to paint the portrait of Mr. Gladstone.  "It
must be a very painful thing to you, Mr. Bright,"
he hazarded, "that after all these
years of comradeship you two should sever
your connection?"  "Indeed it is," replied
Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we
have so long worked together we should be
forced apart in the evening of our lives!
And by what?  A bogy that has risen up
within him, beckoning him away from duty
and sense.  Do you know, Mr. Holl, I
seriously fear that my dear old friend's mind
is giving way."

When the artist was at Hawarden painting
Mr. Gladstone, the subject of Mr. Bright's
portrait cropped up.  "Ah!" said Mr. Gladstone,
"and how did you find him?"  "Fairly
well; and he spoke very affectionately
of you, Mr. Gladstone."  "Did he indeed?"
replied the sitter sorrowfully.  "It was a
cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear
a question, too!  Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and
here his lips quivered, for he was evidently
moved with strong emotion--"tell me, did
you notice anything in the manner of
my old friend which would lead you to
suppose that his reason was becoming unhinged?"

We cannot see another man's personality
in full rounded vision.  We get peeps at him;
broken lights and flickering shadows of his
character dance before us.  We chase the
shadow, and think we can capture the man
and rifle him of his every locked-up thought
and uncover his soul's nakedness.

The popular writer analyzes, probes,
dissects human character on paper, and we
marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into
people.  He plucks the gay plumage off the
poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the
stripped and quivering body an unpleasant
spectacle for the public to contemplate
through the glass case of a six-shilling novel.
The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman
at his trade.  His hand is too clumsy for
his tools.  He dissects his paper dolls as they
pass before him in a paper world, but the
tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being
pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door
neighbour, baffles him on the doorstep.  The
novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful
philosopher.  He works like Conan Doyle's
great detective Sherlock Holmes, who can
unravel any mystery he himself concocts
in the pages of the *Strand Magazine*, but
is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a
real murderer or laying bare an elusive crime.

If some famous men who in their day and
generation lived in cheap houses and mixed
with common people, and died unparagraphed
in daily papers, could see themselves now,
as we see them, promoted to illustrious
companionship with the mighty dead, their
heads would spin with amazement at themselves
for having arrived in splendour; they
would stagger at the worship paid them by
reverent posterity.

During life they were great artists in mufti.
They were regarded as unimportant persons
by their own contemporaries, and to-day
they are posted amongst the demi-gods of
history.  They knew themselves to be good
workmen who did a good day's work for a
fair day's pay, and then, like other honest
day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean
consciences, they laid down their tools, and their
life-story ended there.  They little knew that
they had the bud of immortality swelling in
their veins, soon to break and flower into
endless renown.

Human nature is a conundrum to itself
hard to crack, as it is to other people, even
its friends and neighbours who eat and drink
with it at table.  We do not know that
heaps of posthumous fame may presently
cover our strange next-door neighbour.  To
us he is only a negligible quantity in the
affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen
or some queer scientific hobby that absorbs
him.  In this swift age of ours Time and
Space are being brought to heel in masterly
control, but our neighbours remain mysterious
to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair
of the apple found the man out.  Even
Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not
appear a towering genius, but only one of
themselves--a common literary hack with
an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and
making it tell.  It was a trick they all tried
to catch from him, but he just went one
better than they.

Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen were
unconscious that they were entertaining an
archangel unawares.  Nothing he said or did
outside his scribbling for the playhouse is
on record.  He had no trusty Boswell at his
elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent
wisdom, sparks from the fire of his genius,
flung off impromptu in merry moments at
the Mermaid Tavern over a flagon of malmsey.
His pals thought him a jovial fellow well met,
and when he died no crumbs of biography
were swept up by loving hands to keep his
memory green.

But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think
much of himself?  He was utterly careless
of the fate of his own literary labours.  He
never published one of his own plays.  After
his death the stage copies of his plays were
carefully collected together by two prudent
men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to
business.  Seven years later the first folio
edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in
print.  The first edition is full of glaring
blunders, compiled as it was from the stage
versions--the manuscripts that the players
used in the theatres.  Those well-thumbed
dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting
documents to own if one could be placed on
the market to-day: worn and torn, scored
with erasures, interlined with emendations,
stained with spilt wine and small beer,
greasy with handling of midnight study, and
crumpled after pouching in the players'
pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous
trifles--could you expect literary finish to
adorn these fugitive children of the
playhouse?  Ever since that day learned
commentators have laboured assiduously
correcting the text of the plays and combing out
the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst
themselves over the correct word for the
place and the correct place for a word.  The
quarrel of the commentators still flourishes,
for the muddle of the text has yet to be
tidied up.





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.. _`THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY`:

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   XI


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   THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY

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Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear
and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling
empires.  Crowns are going cheap in the
market to-day, and the divine right of kings
is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the
world's scorn and picked up as a toy for
*Punch* to provoke laughter.  The old nobility
is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive
in the high places of honour, and the common
people--the new caste--are coming into
possession and power.  The working-man must
be tailored to the grand part he plays in
history.  He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing
his first new dress suit--it will worry him
like a misfit.  But clothes add splendour to
our common lot.  With the salvation of the
country dependent on his nod he must cast
the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on
bank holidays and nod heroically to the
admirers who retinue his movements.

Democracy is the unknown god it will be
fashionable to worship when the war is over.
Now we are all wasting ink and paper and
taxing our small brains prophesying what
the world will be like in the flowering-time
of peace, when everybody will become
deliriously happy, wise, and good.  We shall move
more cautiously then, like a cat stepping
circumspectly over broken glass on top of
the garden wall.  We will make no mistakes,
as we did in the feckless past, bringing us
not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts.
There must be no party politics in the land
as there used to be when politicians sold their
country to buy their party into power, and
sold themselves to keep the power which
they had bought.  Everyone will want to
do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour
will want to do good to himself, and so
social reform now and henceforth is the
compelling idea that holds the public fancy.

But no two social reformers think alike
or advance the same doctrines of reform,
although the same idea dominates the mind
of all the doctrinaires.  An idea is an abstract,
invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into
the mind of man naked and unadorned.
Before exposing this naked idea to public
observation it must be clothed and attractively
dressed.  Confusion comes in with the
clothes.  Fashions in clothes differ so that
the same idea differently dressed appears to
be a different object.  However, it is not.
Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of
them that differs.  It is when you clothe
your idea with words and deck it in literary
plumage that the mischief stalks in and
divergent opinions clash and confound us.

We all believe in Utopia, but none of us
hold the clue to the high road that gallops
straight into it.  We take trial trips over
new ground and get sloughed up on false
trails.  Plato and Socrates, Francesco
d'Assisi and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi,
have each been famous architects of Utopia
in the dim dreamland of the past, and each
propounded his own scheme as being the
very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise
ever constructed for man to dwell in.  They
all have some aims and ends in common,
considering thoughtfully the welfare of the
people bodily and morally: but the distinctive
personality of the architect slyly creeps in,
and on the rock of personal vanity they
split into rival factions and a general quarrel
ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man
ever devised for the emancipation of the
human race.  And so the egg of social
reform gets addled before it is hatched, and
alas! the glittering city of ten thousand joys
for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and
farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.

One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild
the city of Human Happiness by hand
labour.  Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal
proportions and flowering beauty.  He starts
with the individual as the foundation and
finishes with the individual as top-stone.
He works by gradual and peaceful process to
attain his splendid purpose.  His method of
work is unpopular because it is slow.

Another architect proposes to work by
machinery, and to force it to a hasty finish.
Organization and legislation are the
instruments of torture proposed for the rapid
promotion of his purpose.  Human society--social
and industrial--is stricken with fell
disease, which can be cured promptly by
Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council.
By this drastic method the "organic welfare"
of society is to be builded while you wait.
The State is to be organized, thought is to
be organized, the will is to be organized, and
happiness is to be organized, and nothing
of consequence is to be left unorganized;
while the mere individual is to be wiped
from the map as an unnecessary dot of
disfigurement upon it.  Wealth is to be
handled by a new and better process; wealth
is to be conscripted, which means one man
is to make it and another man is to take it.
Labour is not to be dealt with as a
marketable commodity.  It is an insult to the
dignity of labour to measure a man's work
and pay him exactly what his day's toil is
worth in the market.  The working-man is
a member of the universal brotherhood, and
needs elbow-room in the community to
spread himself.  He must have the wages he
hankers after, and when too weary to work
a pension granted from the State to make
comfortable his latter end.  In fact in Utopia
every man, woman, and child claims sufficient
income independent of work, and the State
must be Paymaster-General.

Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic
lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo.
It answers your call but does not come.
Socialism makes no progress in saving men;
it has eyes to see man's misery, but no hands
to lift him out of it.

The longer I live the more I am convinced
that this great and vital problem of social
regeneration is to be engineered only by
slow gradations and with infinite patience
and gentleness.  Society is composed of dense
masses and millions of frail, erring human
beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of
perfect laws on the statute-book will not
breed an improved strain of perfect citizens
who can live up to the pose of perfection.
You cannot legislate selfishness and
weakness and greediness and vice out of human
nature quickly, as you wring dirty water
out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump
purity and patience and brotherly love into
humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of
such shoddy material weave an ideal State
in one round of the clock.  Perfect laws are
scarce as perfect men.  Laws will grow
better as we grow better--gradually.  Laws
and men act and react upon one another in
mystic collusion.  The great incoming tide
of righteousness which shall fill all things
will fill them.  You cannot complete and
furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity
before you have laid the foundation solidly
and deep on the rock of righteousness.

Labour has not yet won its charter of
rights because it has neglected to perform
its role of duties.  Labour has to look the
social problem squarely in the face with both
eyes open.  At present it only opens one
eye--the eye which sees magnifically its
rights.  The other eye is shut which should
observe its duties.  The eye of Labour that
should see its duties is sealed in darkness.
The scales of Justice must balance truly
before mankind is happy ever more.

Free labour is as necessary a commodity
as free sunshine in a well-balanced State.  If
a man does his work well and does not require
so much beer and tobacco and time for
football as another man, he should be free
to dispose of his labour as he chooses,
without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd
fellows of the baser sort.  Until there
prevail an all-round correct idea of work,
legislation will be a dead letter.  God has not
made one sun to shine on wages and another
on capital, nor has He made two varieties of
justice.  He is God over all of us, and His
law is impartial justice.

Capital is not immaculate.  It sits the
great god incarnate on its high gold throne,
ruling men with sovereign power and using
men as a means to wealth.  Its vestments
are of purple and fine linen.  Costly raiment
to wear, but unseemly smirched with the
mud of gutter complots and stained red with
blood sweated from the poor.  Capital wants
washing thoroughly from its iniquity and
purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and
can discourse virtue to the working classes.

Capital and Labour must forgive each the
sins of the past, and as Brains and Hands
work together in mutual confidence and
esteem.  Brains and Hands are not hard-set
hereditary foes.  They are blood relatives,
members of the same body-politic, and must
hold together for their common good.  They
are not even business opponents with clashing
interests spoiling to cut each other's throat
and smash the opposition concern with fiery
glee of heart.  They are copartners in the
same business concern, and must combine,
each having their own department to
superintend.  The interest of one is the interest
of the other.  If one department breaks, the
other falls with it deep in disaster.  Yet
these two copartners of the same business
firm are hating one another with a hot
historical hatred that defies the flight of
ages.  They are locked together struggling
for mastery, each hoping to throw the other
and become top-dog and dictate new terms
of partnership which never would be kept,
for the articles of treaty would soon become
merely "a scrap of paper."  It is not
conquest: it is co-operation that will bring
peace and concord between Capital and Labour.

The world is ripe for a new social
programme.  The war has altered the map of
Europe, and it will alter the map of men's
minds.  The war has swept away old crusted
conventions which cobwebbed the mind, and
false foundations of social science upon which
men laboured vainly to build Utopia.  These
things must be reassessed at new values.

The working-man wanted to get in the sun
and own his patch as a free and independent
citizen.  There is no such thing in the world
as independence, complete and arrogant:
either in art, science, revolting daughters or
commerce.  Independence is a fool's word
or an anarchist's battle-cry.  The nearest
approach to it in the realm of reality is
interdependence.  Substitute this word
"interdependence" in the place of the other
insolent and erroneous one and you have a
working proposition, for you establish a sense
of justice between man and man, and you
have gathered together raw material out of
which to build a new heaven and a new earth.

A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of
unrighteousness which blight society was the
amelioration of environment--a sonorous,
windy, academic platitude having more sound
in it than sense.  It was the pet scheme for
manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones;
it began at the outward condition of
mankind and worked inward.  It started with
the barber, the schoolmaster, and the
politician.  By pursuing this method they started
with folly and ended with failure.  It is like
telling a man to polish his boots when his
heart wants cleaning.  The favourite
speculation of theorists was that perfect
circumstances create perfect character.  This is
attractive reading in cheap handbooks of
political economy for the working classes,
but in this wicked world it fails to pan out
when put to a working test.  It is more
important a man should start by mending
himself, and his circumstances will quickly
mend themselves.

To expect by flattening down inequalities,
removing temptations, and giving everybody
a living wage of £2 per week, England will
flower into a Garden of Eden where people
are all good and happy and pay no taxes,
and where angels will come and converse
with us in the cool of the day, is to expect
the impossible.  To expect by adapting the
lot to man instead of adapting man to his
lot you will create an earthly paradise out
of a world of wickedness is to expose your
ignorance of human nature and to admit
your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs.

They tell us that in the New Democracy
patriotism will be scrapped.  Love of country
is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in
the greater love of humanity which will rise
like a swelling flood and cover all.  In the
new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy
brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will
be scotched.  This doctrine is maudlin
sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour
it.  Humanity is an immense crowd to fall
in love with *en bloc*; each individual will
receive a very thin slice of your affection if
all the world is to share in it alike.  Love
will die of starvation fed on these lean
rations.  As a *padre* fresh from the Front
persuasively raps out the truth, "the
would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself
to love of country is rarely capable of any real
self-devotion to the international ideal which
he worships.  The lover of humanity is
more often than not utterly miserable
travelling in a third-class railway-carriage."

Patriotism must survive as a national
virtue, however violently the universal
brotherhood flourishes, because the love of
country is founded on the love of home and
family, and the love of home and family is
founded on the love of a man and a woman.
You can never get over this nature-logic
while men and women remain human beings
with natural instincts which draw them to
love one another and preserve the family
feeling.  I would rather be the victim of
every insular prejudice possible than have
no British prejudices to stir my British
blood.

Another hope of the ages that has failed
us in the hour of need is the Church.  If all
other saviours of society failed there remained
the Church as by law established to rely
upon as the great regenerating power in the
land.  Alas! the Church in our midst cannot
cast out evil spirits.  It has lost the gift of
healing through respectability.  It worships
an ancient creed instead of the living Christ.
Jesus of Nazareth is the great International
Democrat of history.  He was a tradesman's
son and a working carpenter Himself.  This
fact shocks respectability.  How many more
people would be Christians if Christ had
been born in a palace and not in a stable!
This is the unsavoury feature of religion, and
the exclusive dignitaries of the Church hover
round it dubiously.  They admit the historic
fact with candour, but slither away silently
from its indelicate associations as far as
decency permits.

We have been told that bishops in gaiters
and aprons harmonize daintily with the quiet
cathedral close, shadowed by immemorial
elms and the other minor glories of the
Establishment; but bishops in gaiters do seem
badly placed in a carpenter's shop, where
their Lord and Master served His 'prentice
years.  The apron is an ancient figment of
clothing bishops now wear in common with
the working carpenter at his bench.  It is
a kind of retaining badge, signalling their
humble origin and ancient descent.

Bishops, in general, are cultured and
amiable men, more renowned for their
learning than their piety.  They are appointed
by the State, and form the executive of the
ecclesiastical machine to run the traditional
piety of the land.  They sometimes quarrel
amongst themselves as to who is orthodox
and who is not on the episcopal bench--quarrelling
amongst bishops is only a human
diversion--but touching the righteousness
which is in the law they are all blameless men.
There is something faulty in the religion
they inculcate, for it does not grip the people.
It is dreamy; it is not real.  It is the vague
pursuit of an unknown god ranging through
a maze of decorative ritual and symbol, and
there remain great arid spaces in our nature
which it never fills up.

It has been said that the visible Church
stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment
of the people, just as stone idols of the
heathen stand in the way of apprehension
of God.  What the eye sees before it the
mind settles down upon, and roams no
farther searching for a fuller vision of spiritual
truth.  The savage sees his stone idol, and
never thinks beyond it religiously.  It was
his father's god, and it is god enough for him.

The good Churchman is equally content
to know nothing beyond the religious
ceremonials which the Church ordains in the
place of God, the Spiritual Father of us all.
These ceremonials, sanctified by long
observance, quenched the religious thirst of his
forefathers, and they quench his thirst and
he is satisfied.  The Church is tenacious of
her hold on men, not suffering the allegiance
of the people to be shifted back to God the
Father.  The Church is said to be the one and
only sacred aqueduct through which Divine
grace can flow.  The curse of the community
is the middleman.  He takes a heavy toll of
profit in every business that feeds the people
bodily or spiritually.

The New Democracy must return to the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to lay a solid
foundation on which to build social righteousness
and national greatness.  The secret
elements of social rectitude slumber in the
words of Christ, and the volcanic action of
the war will blast them into life and power.

Jesus Christ was not a theologian or
schoolman of the fossil type of Gamaliel or
Calvin, learned in booklore, but ignorant of
men.  He was not a stump orator inflaming
the radical passions of the masses, bating
them into red fury by pictorially describing
the wickedness of the classes.  He proposed
no easy road to riches as a trap to catch
the envious poor.  He did not sit in his study
formulating a scientific creed to mystify
people with a religion of words and phrases;
He lived in the open air a noble life that
men could see and believe in.  It is the mind,
not the soul, that asks a creed to help its
faith; the heart believes without the crutches
of theological formula to support it.  He
stood for goodness pure and simple, for rich
men and poor men alike.  His teaching is
exemplified in His life, and His life is a
beautiful and faithful commentary on His
teaching.

The careless world did not relish this
straight talk on goodness--indoor and
outdoor goodness.  It was too realistic, too
personal in its touch; but men are growing
sensible now as the world grows older, and
with reawakened conscience ask for the truth
instead of its theological counterfeit, which
does not heal the wounded spot.  Out of
the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth grow
eternal principles that build up the best
governments and the wisest laws, that train
the finest citizens, and regulate society on a
basis of righteousness and mutual honour.
The seeds of all possible national prosperity
and generous manhood lie embedded in these
teachings.  Nations may rise, flourish, and
decay, but the nation with the blood of Christ
in its veins is immortal and shall endure for
ever.  May it be the British nation!





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.. _`JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES`:

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   XII


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   JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES

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Jesus Christ is the lure of the ages.  He
is the most interesting figure in history.
History says little about Him, yet that little
means much to us.  It whets the appetite
for more knowledge.  The little is distinctly
fascinating; what would be a full record of
His sayings and doings, suppose such a
narrative displayed in faded manuscript were
unearthed from the musty archives of an old
Eastern monastery and brought to daylight
in the twentieth century?  The fragmentary
record that we hold is sufficiently vital to
have kept His memory green for nearly two
thousand years.  What a glorious find a
continuation of the wonderful story would
be to those hungering for larger knowledge
of their Lord's earthly life!

Jesus Christ is the unplaced figure in
history.  He occupies no niche in the secular
temple of Fame.  No historian of the country
in which He lived paged His name amongst
the worthies of the age or gave it mention
in a footnote of history.  Outside the covers
of the Sacred Book Jesus Christ is an
unknown quantity.  During His lifetime the
insignificance of the movement He promoted
in Galilee was unworthy of serious attention
from the authorities.  His disciples were men
of obscure origin, a mere handful of ignorant
peasants and fishermen, rated as misguided,
harmless fanatics following a crazy leader to
oblivion, the foreordained end of a madman's
escapade.  Others before Him had started
forth on the splendid expedition to set the
world in order and were interrupted in the
performance of their formidable task.  It
was towering madness to suppose permanent
results could follow a single-handed fight
against the world; to think that He could
disturb the well-founded authority of King
Herod or challenge Cæsar seated in purple
power on the seven hills of Rome: as likely
He might uproot the seven hills themselves
which cradle the imperial city on their
nursing-lap.  Yet to-day He ranks above all
competing heroes and overlords earth and
heaven in the compelling influence His solitary
life imposes on the world's activities, and
that influence is only just beginning to be
felt by us; eventually it will succeed in
refashioning the world after His own heart
and conforming it to the likeness of His own
image.

Jesus Christ is the lonely figure in history.
He launched His mission on the world
without human patronage to give it a
winning start.  Illustrious men of the age
did not do Him reverence, nor contribute
their sympathy and support to stiffen His
cause; they were frankly hostile to Him.
He had no family influence to help Him in
the great adventure; His ancestry was
illustrious, but His relatives were poor and
uninfluential folk; His father was a village
tradesman.  He was not a University man
distinguished in letters to gain the ear of
the cultured classes.  He had no well-to-do
friends to back Him either socially or
financially.  No man ever stood more remote
from the world's conventional smile than
He did.  He was a rank outsider.  He battled
onward through resisting foes, upholding the
shining truth as a sun-bright banner for
brave men to rally round and fight for the
kingdom of God and the empire of good souls
on earth.  He dwelt in spiritual isolation,
for a mighty purpose cut Him off from the
current influences of His time.  The world's
cold stare was the freezing recognition given
Him, and it chilled the finer sensibilities of
His loving nature.

There was nothing professional about Jesus
Christ.  He was not a place-seeker.  He held
no office in Church or State.  He was a plain
citizen, plainly dressed.  His manner was
simple and natural and without side.  His
speech was of the people; He was one of the
crowd.  No glittering halo aureoled His brow,
promoting Him beyond His brethren.  As
a prophet, appearances were dead against
Him.  Why should He rise above his
class-level and teach His betters and superiors
high morality and spiritual truth?  He had
no crumbs of learning Himself--how could
He feed others out of an empty basket?
He had never studied in the schools and
won academic distinction!  Surely He
overstepped Himself.  His neighbours resented
His common everyday look, easy manner,
and arrogant pretensions.  These things did
not mix well together.  They denounced His
new, strange teachings as dangerous to the
community; He was an unchartered, restless
demagogue, roaming the country, disturbing
the public weal.  They scoffed at this
common villager and His idle dream of founding
a kingdom of righteousness built on the
dregs of humanity, and derisively asked
"When shall this kingdom come?"

Now, John the Baptist, hermit of the
wilderness, was a prophet after their own
heart.  He played up to their ideal.  He
quickened their hot imagination.  He was
aglow with colour.  He was a human tornado.
His defiant attitude, eccentric apparel, and
mystic fervour, were vividly picturesque;
they caught the eye and compelled attention.
He was an untamed child of the desert; he
stood aloof from the common crowd.  Even
high-toned Pharisees were glamoured by his
romantic pose.  They listened raptly to his
fiery message, and were fascinated by his
insolent tongue and audacious words shot
bolt-straight at them.  His hearers staggered
whilst he thundered burning condemnations
on their smug sins and sordid lives; they
writhed in agony as he lifted them from
their feet and suspended them over the
bottomless pit, choking in sulphurous fumes
ascending from the fires of the damned below.
Such ghastly presentment of the truth after
the good old method of the prophets churned
up the muddy depths of their polluted
hearts.  It converted the masses quickly,
as a visitation of the plague could drop a
panicky city to its knees, and when the
excitement slowed down be as quickly
forgotten as a nine-days' wonder out of fashion.
The religious revival subsided like the froth
blown off by the welcome wind of a new
excitement.  The emotions of a day spent
down on the banks of the Jordan with John
the Baptist, the idol of the people, were
exhilarating, and something to be
remembered for a lifetime by these hard-headed
old Jews, and an interesting story to tell
their children's children in years to come.
The ministry of Jesus was not effervescent
in character.  He could have stormed men's
imaginations with flaming pomp and
splendour; He could have ridden a chariot of fire
attended by thunder and lightning as running
footmen to announce His presence, but men's
hearts would have been unmelted by such
fierce demonstrations of power.  It might
have awoke astonishment and intoxicated
them into religious frenzy, but afterward it
would have left behind a nasty chill on the
heart.

Jesus Christ had no official position in the
Church as a teacher.  He had no mandate
from the powers that be to carry on.  He
did not present Himself as a high Church
dignitary, high as an enthroned archbishop
robed in scarlet and gold; nor was He
comfortably placed as a canon in a snug cathedral
stall; nor even a meek young curate casting
longing eyes on Church preferment.  The
Church of the day would have none of Him.
They flung Him from the synagogue.  His
ideas were unproven and unpalatable to His
countrymen; He must build a new romantic
world for Himself and His followers to live
in outside the orthodox world of His day,
if they wanted liberty to breathe, and so He
began at the bottom of society and quietly
built upwards.  He was just a man walking
amongst suffering humanity, and was one of
the sufferers Himself.  He came like dew
descending on mown grass, noiseless, fragrant,
healing; silently He ministered amongst the
people, winning home to human hearts by
sympathy and gentleness and love, and
gradually the new kingdom of righteousness
grew up in the midst of the weary old world.
He gained dominion over men by their
resistible beauty and power of Divine truth
which He expounded, and made attractive
by parable and picture and by His own
blameless walk and conversation.  His
teachings were exemplified in His life, and His
life shines in undimmed beauty the
exemplification of His teaching.  He became a
living gospel to them which all men could
read, and His Divine personality was a
centre of healing power which cured men's
infirmities of body and mind.  He had no
money to pay for services rendered to Him,
and He gave no hopes of worldly honour or
possessions to His followers.  He was
homeless and at the mercy of friends for the
shelter of a roof and the hospitality of His
daily meals.  He had intense sympathy with
men, but He was no deluded optimist.  He
placed measured value on every man's pledge
of fidelity to His cause, for He knew what
was in man; with clear insight He saw into
their dishonesty, selfishness, misery, but He
knew they never had had a chance to do
better, and He meant to give them a good
chance all round.  He frankly told people
their sins, yet with all His straight speaking
He won men and women to Himself.  His
manner was gracious, and He was indulgent
to the frailties of our human nature with a
sympathy that pardons all.  The deep
longings of His heart were for their happiness
and uplifting, and the difficulty He
encountered in leading them to follow the
things that made for their peace was
heartbreaking to His sensitive nature.

He had but few friends, and of the inner
circle He gathered round Him all were not
loyal; for He was betrayed into the hands
of His enemies by one of the intimates of
the band, and was forsaken by all in the
hour of His supreme trial.  He returned good
for evil, blessing for cursing, and died in the
act of praying for His enemies.  No one
could bring any serious accusation against
Him, and he was declared innocent by the
judge who condemned Him to death.  Yet
He was sacrificed as one whose life did not
count; He was thrown as a sop to slake the
blood-thirst of a howling Jewish mob.  In
the annals of the law-court His name is not
mentioned, and there is no record of His trial
and crucifixion to be found in history.

Looked at from the standpoint of men of
His time, His life was a failure, and the
delectable vision of a kingdom of
righteousness on earth, the coming of which He
pictured in glowing, fluent colours, reads like
a dainty fairy-tale spun for children's
amusement.  Yet He himself saw through the
darkness into the white light of the future,
and beheld the crowning success of His
mission.  He saw the coming triumph of the
Conquering Cross, which should subdue all
things unto itself, and in place of the finest
legend ever planted on human credulity by
an artist in words He saw outlined through
the dissolving mists of time, solid and well
founded, the City Beautiful, with its shining
streets, its many mansions and translucent
atmosphere, peopled with white-robed citizens
redeemed and ever blest; and the verdict of
to-day is that the ministry of Jesus Christ
on earth was the turning point in the world's
destiny.  No other personality has exerted
such profound influence on the lives of men
as Jesus of Nazareth, the despised and
rejected of His day.

The ministry of Christ on earth lasted
about three years in all.  Until He was thirty
years of age He was content to rest in deep
obscurity.  Nazareth, with its quiet remote
valley, was world enough for Him to move
in, and when His hour was come He found
Himself.  He opened His mouth and taught
the people.  He passed from village to village,
a travelling storm-centre, exposing respectable
old sins, ripping up time-honoured religious
hypocrisies, vexing the Pharisees, and
confounding the vain traditions of the elders.
He laid down new laws of life and conduct
for men's observance, and unfolded the love
of God to man in its plenitude of tenderness
and pity; even to waifs and strays and
outcasts of city slums who had never received
a kind, hopeful word from the lips of their
own religious teachers.  In fact, it was God
breaking in upon history, opening a new
permanent way into heaven for lost men to
return home by, and to cull the wayside
flowers of joy and happiness whilst homeward
bound.

Thus Jesus in three short years fearlessly
and swiftly accomplished His world-wide
mission, and died triumphantly in full
achievement of His benign purpose.

Not half the story of those few full, crowded
hours of His glorious life has been collected
and cast into history.  It is a brief narrative
of a brief career; so little of His life comes
in view.  Just a few detached incidents and
a few disjointed conversations jotted down
from the mellowed memory of three or four
old men years after the events occurred
furnish us an incomplete memoir of His
earthly ministry--that is all we have.  There
was no adoring pen of a ready writer like
Boswell to fix on the spot His sayings and
doings.  We possess only stray fragments of
the life-story gathered up from memory and
hearsay, and on these gathered fragments
we found all our spiritual faith and base our
eternal hope of blessedness.  The structure
seems to have been casually and hastily put
together, but its design is the work of the
Supreme Architect, and the house was well
built and the foundation securely placed, for
it has sheltered many millions of people
through many generations of time.  The roof
is still rainproof, and the walls stand firm
in their pillared strength.  *It is the living
words of Christ that form the stronghold of the
ages*.  His words are seed-thoughts dropped
into the hearts of men which bring forth
fruit manifold.  Again they drop into other
hearts, and springing up yield fruit
abundantly unto life everlasting; and so
generation after generation men fall under His
gracious spell, and turn to His words for
guidance, for inspiration, for joy.  You never
reach the end of Christ's words.  They are
growing words.  There is always something
new springing out of them unexpectedly: new
thoughts, new laws, new problems, new
solutions, new enemies, new friends, new hopes,
new consolations.  The words of Christ are
spending and being spent, but they are never
exhausted.  They pass into new meanings,
into new currency, but they never pass away.
They are the hope of all the ages.

The early Christians lived in a state of
spiritual elation; they daily, hourly, expected
the Second Coming of Christ.  It was the
one article of their religious creed.  The end
of the world was to be the next important
festival in the Church calendar, so they held
in full near view their heavenly home, which
was already feathered for their reception.
At the sound of the Archangel's trumpet the
heavens would open, the dead rise from their
graves, and they would be caught up in
the air to meet the Lord, and float off
triumphantly into mansions of eternal rest
furnished for their home coming.  They
saw it all vividly as a drama soon to be
enacted, in which they each would play their
ordered parts.  The present was a dream-life
to them, a mirage quickly to melt away.
This hope of immortality was the first bright
ray of light the gospel of Jesus Christ shed
upon mankind.  Having minds heavily
charged with celestial visions, the common
round of daily duties became unreal to them.
They had a short creed and no theology.
They sat on the brink of eternity, and the
radiance streaming from its shining heights
bedazzled their minds with bewildering
raptures.

After long and patient waiting the heavens
did not open, no clarion voice trumpeted the
dead from their graves or welcomed saints
into paradise; the sordid, sin-stained earth
remained their polluted dwelling-place.  The
illusion of the millennium faded away and
disappointment frosted their early hopes, yet
bravely they held on and died in the faith.
The Saviour's promise did not fulfil on the
comfortable lines they planned, but it would
make good another way equally great.  The
Church learnt to take long views of the
promises, and turned its thoughts to things
terrestrial.  The affairs of the present grew
interesting to them; they commenced setting
their earthly house in order, and when the
Church settled down into the slow, steady
stride characteristic of every long march it
became clear that she was destined to rank
amongst the permanent institutions of the
world.  She formed new rules of life for her
children's guidance, and thus faith in Christ
gradually lost the fragrant aroma of
otherworldliness which first perfumed it, and in
lapse of time the plan of salvation became
more thought of than salvation itself.  A
vast ecclesiastical system was organized,
having endless intricate ramifications, and
God was appointed head of one department
of it; and to-day heavy accretions of theology
accumulate and fasten deadly tight on the
old Church like barnacles crusting the bottom
of a long floated ship, hindering its speed to
port.

Verily the time has now come that the good
ship of the Church be careened, and the foul
accretions of mediæval theology stripped off
and the solid copper bottom of truth flash clean
and bright in the sunlight, and the truth as it
is in Jesus recover its splendour and power
as in days of the early Church.  His teachings
shall yet win men to righteousness, and
the fruits of His lips bring peace and joy
to those who believe on His name.

The words of Christ have a future before
them in moulding the growing goodness of
the world and in solving the hard
problems of social reform which vex humanity.
He is the wise Reconciliator who can adjust
society and bring into harmony the classes
of men now gnashing their teeth at one
another on opposing fronts.  Jesus Christ is
the true Political Economist, but He taught
far in advance of His times--truth always
marches a bit ahead of us.  At present in
social science we are only just touching the
hem of His garment, and healing virtue
flows from it; presently we shall approach
nearer to Him, and, feeling the full throb of
His loving heart, we shall understand Him
better, and His life-blood will pour into our
veins and complete the healing of the nations.





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.. _`THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD`:

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   XIII


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   THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD

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The English State Church suffers from
excess of theology and paucity of gospel.
Our narrow Church creeds, in which the gospel
of Jesus Christ is kept under cork by
ecclesiastical cellar-men, must be broken that the
good wine of the kingdom may flow freely.
The gospel of Jesus Christ in the unwholesome
captivity of rigid creeds is a feeble,
mean, contemptible gospel, quite unable to
save mankind, which business it undertook
to achieve when coming into the world.  If
the teaching of Jesus Christ is no larger or
kindlier than these old crumbling creeds show,
it deserves to be scrapped, for there is no
room in them for Christ to have fair play.
Christianity is not a formula, it is a passion;
it is not theology, it is truth.  These dismal
dogmas have not enough spiritual nourishment
in them to keep men's souls alive; men
starve on such unleavened food.

What are these antiquated creeds of the
Church which strangle religion?  They are
ancient dismantled strongholds where the
fighting forefathers of the faith housed
themselves tightly and fought their foes
tenaciously.  The modern fathers of the Church
still inhabit these tottering towers of refuge,
although their day of usefulness is spent.
Loyal Churchmen still breathe lovingly the
chilly, stifling atmosphere of these spiritual
dungeons of traditional Christianity.

We are living in a new age since August,
1914, and a new spirit possesses the people.
With this terrific war raging new standards
of values in religion, as in politics, have come
into operation, shattering old ideals
evermore.  To encourage and strengthen them
in this era of strain and conflict men need
the larger, cleaner, diviner truth which fell
from the lips of the living Christ.  We want
these truths to win through--the spoken
words of Christ, with the free airs of heaven
blowing across them, bringing healthiness of
life, sanity of faith, and manifold charities,
to all men who dwell on earth.  The lure of
the Living Word alone can hold men firm in
this age of upheaval, when the old world
has caved in and the plans of the new world
are not yet manifest.  There is finer, simpler,
fuller spiritual teaching in the four gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, touching
our present need than in all books of
theology ever written and all Sunday sermons
weekly preached.  It is these half-forgotten
things that matter on which new emphasis
must be thrown.

Theology is the great imposture planted
on mankind as a substitute for the teachings
of Jesus Christ.  When one leaves the words
of Christ and strays amongst the words of
men, it is like a traveller switching off the
main line whereon his destination lies and
losing himself on a side-track.  It is disaster
to side-track on the journey of life.  Keep
to the words of Christ and you keep on the
main line.  The gospel as revealed in the
teachings of Jesus is entirely free from the
sacerdotal imperative which nowadays
imposes priest and ritual in the path of spiritual
worship and blocks the fair-way to God.
Priests and rituals and creeds are
non-essentials; they are only wrappings: they are
not religion, nor the best part of it.  We must
distinguish between living, breathing
Christianity and the man-made ecclesiastical
garments which clothe it fashionably, because
the difference between them is vital and
far-reaching.  True religion, however, is
seldom found stripped of all temporary
wrappings, but its spiritual vigour survives in
spite of Church-made millinery which
encumbers it and impedes its healthy growth.
Strip the religion of Jesus Christ of its
grave-clothes and put the pure gospel in her
mouth, and never tidings could be told to
weary, heavy-laden men to-day which would
be hailed as half so welcome.  The one thing
needful to make this world an earthly
paradise, delightful to dwell in, is for men
to live face to face with God, without a
screen of ritual or image or priestcraft
obstructing the view of our Heavenly Father;
it is the light of God's countenance that
cheers the heart of man, and strengthens
him to live a good life in all sincerity of
purpose.

Ecclesiastics have built up the Church into
a colossal business trust which corners the
Bread of Life and doles it to hungry mortals
on terms of its own making.  The Church is
a wealthy corporation with immense property
and privilege to safeguard and hold against
all comers, and these temporal possessions
engage its keenest thought and ceaseless
activity.  So it has important work to do
other than saving the souls of men.  To
maintain its temporal authority in the world
it has tampered with the teaching of Jesus
Christ; by cunning craftiness of man the
gospel has been twisted into theology, and
the way of salvation shrouded behind a dense
veil of ceremonial observances which the
Church imposes on people and declares
necessary to the saving of their souls.  Much
conflicting religious literature is issued
annually by free-lances of the Press to
explain the downright simplicity of the truth
as it is in Jesus; and these conflicting opinions
add other stumbling-blocks in the way, for
they baffle the brains of the gentle reader,
beating up a thick dust of doubt around him
that his faith is smothered in a cloud of
perplexity which darkens the daylight of truth.

The words of Jesus, when read and pondered
over, prove religion to be a very simple
matter.  Yet this simplicity is its standing
peril.  So little human wisdom is needed to
understand the words of Christ that we are
apt to fear they do not mean what they say
in plainest language--the language runs too
easy for the majesty and importance and
solemnity of the theme.  We think there is
an occult mystery lurking behind the honest
homely phrases.  Language so often bewilders
simple-minded people that we are hard
of belief when told we can find the way to
heaven ourselves without the aid of a bishop's
pastoral staff to point it out.  The difficulty
is to convince the plain man that he
understands the words of Jesus when he reads
them, and that he feels his spirit touch the
Spirit of the Saviour of his soul without a
priest between to make the contact.  The
Church as a commercial organization would
fall quickly into bankruptcy if the gospel
in its naked plainness was believed in
whole-heartedly.

Very superior people tell us that the
teachings of Jesus are only the beginning of
God's revelation to man; they tell us that
new revelations are constantly flowing in upon
us through the sacred channel of the Church,
and that the Church alone holds the key
which deciphers these confidential messages
despatched from mysterious sources for our
edification.  This is ecclesiastical bluff.  The
teachings of Jesus in the gospels suffice the
spiritual needs of men through all time--time
past, time present, and time to come.
When God legislates once He legislates for
aye, for truth is unchanging and cannot be
improved on as the world grows older.  No
Divine after-thoughts will be added to the
written word nor supplementary revelation
supplied to guide men through the tangling
maze of life.  The Spirit of God is equal to
all emergencies arising between now and the
sundown of time.  New-fallen light may
illumine the written word in the forward
quest of faith, for every age makes its own
theology and coins new language to express
old truths.  The words of Christ are
inexhaustible treasure locked in a deep mine,
and in that mine lies many a lode of truth
untapped by the diggers.  The old gospel
mine yields more and more treasure as the
searchers strike deeper and deeper into its
secret heart.  The last nugget of truth has
not yet been lifted from the treasure-house
of God's Word.

Back to the words of Christ: this is the
one hope of a truly good life--national or
individual.  If we forsake Christ and turn
to the teachings of the Church for our spiritual
well-being, we suffer for our folly in so
doing.  The real meaning of anything is to
be found at its beginning not in its latest
developments.  As religious systems develop
and grow old they grow corrupt, and on the
earthly journey pick up error with truth,
and the two mixed together look equally
sacrosanct to the uninitiated, simple soul,
and even the very elect are ofttimes deceived.
Water is purest at the spring-head; the
farther it flows from the fountain, the more
contaminated it becomes.  Back to Jesus
Christ and His teachings in the gospels.
His words are the very life and light of men.

Men often mistake the nature of religion
through wrong teaching received in early
years or no teaching received at all, thus
giving the well-rooted weeds of error a long
start to grow rampant in the human soil.
Some people think religion is an isolated
activity, like collecting old china, a hobby
you can pursue, drop, and pick up again at
leisure.  Other people imagine it is the
conventional badge of good society, giving tone
to a life of fashionable respectability, like a
carnation slipped into your buttonhole which
adds a finishing touch to your evening dress.
But they are not over careful, these
conventional people, to apply its tenets in the
privacy of their homes; religion is never
enthroned as a domestic virtue.  Lord
Melbourne, the early Victorian Prime Minister,
was one day coming from church in the
country in a mighty fume.  Finding a friend
on the road, he unloaded: "It's too bad.
I have always been a supporter of the
Church, and I have always upheld the
clergy.  But it is really too bad to have to
listen to a sermon like that we had this
morning.  Why, the preacher actually insisted
upon applying religion to a man's private life!"

Their interior life is neither better nor
worse for hitching on religion as a
supplementary virtue.  Such good people would
never miss an opportunity of attending a
missionary meeting at Caxton Hall or neglect
an early morning service at the parish
church, but the maid-of-all-work in the
kitchen is not benefited by the religious
fervour which perfumes her ladyship with
the odour of sanctity.

Religion is a state of mind giving purpose
and direction to the whole round of a man's
activities.  Religion is not like a red
holly-berry in a tumbler of clear water, a hard,
insoluble object, pretty enough seen through
the crystal medium, but working no change
in the water.  Religion resembles a drop of
cochineal falling into the water; it colours
with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler;
it tinges the whole character and conduct of
a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings
and actions, changing the colour of his life
for good and for ever.  Religion works a
change--a radical change--that is the point.
It is not a question of drapery; it does not
merely hang up a decoration here and there
to improve appearances, leaving the secret
chambers of the heart unclean.  It makes a
new man in Christ Jesus even out of the
coarsest raw material to be found on the
human market.

The Church as established in our midst
to-day cannot work a social regeneration in
the land, for it gives forth so little of the
teaching of Christ to the people.  The gold
of truth it circulates is mixed with the dross
of error of its own minting.  It may bear
the image and superscription of Christ on
it and pass the world's counter as genuine
metal, but it is counterfeit coin of the
kingdom.  The Church does not grip the people.
It is a fashionable institution of conventional
high-grade orthodoxy, but it is a thing apart
from the people.  Its clergy socially are a
multitude of pleasant, amiable, guileless folk
spread over the tennis-lawns and garden-parties
of England on a summer's afternoon,
mingling good-humouredly with their
neighbours, but ecclesiastically they belt
themselves in a compact phalanx of self-centred,
intolerant men with a purpose in life, or by
preference they are self-constituted "priests."  They
hold the Church as a close borough,
consume its revenues, swear by its creed, and
maintain its privileges.  They are strong
partisans; the same interest guides them
which governs the business man in upholding
his trade interests--the sacred rights of
property.  To defend their inherited rights
they will fight doggedly, and surrender only
in the last trench.

Outside the charmed enclosure of the
Church the clergy esteem their Christian
neighbours ecclesiastical inferiors, not to be
consorted with on equal footing, and they
leave the Almighty to take charge of
outsiders here and hereafter.  As a class long
years of clerical assumption has sapped the
humanness out of their nature, and only a
priest is left in their skin.

There are honourable exceptions to this
general rule.  Many individual clergymen are
thoroughly alive with the spirit of Christ.
They are men of broad sympathies and of
intense devotion to their work, but it is
surprising how tightly the Church as an
institution grips those who minister at her
altars; the Church is the idol of their hearts,
the centre of their adoration.  If the centre
of their adoration could be transferred to
Christ; if they could love Christ as devotedly
as they love the Church of England, the
result of their ministrations amongst the
people would be gloriously successful; if
instead of coddling the one respectable sheep
that never strayed away they rounded up
the ninety-and-nine lost ones and settled
them in the home pastures the work would
make their hearts ring with joy.

I have heard sermons by clergymen in
which the Church and the Prayer Book were
exalted as the chief Divine oracles before
which we all must bow in blind submission
as though Christ and the Bible existed not
in any corner of the preacher's mind; and
the result of such degenerate doctrine is that
preachers add good Churchmen to their
flock, but not good Christians to the fold of
Christ.  A good Churchman thus becomes
a superior being to a common Christian,
as though it were more important to be
a Churchman than a Christian.  "Churchman"
really is only the trade name for a
man who believes in the State Church.  To
be a Churchman is good enough for some
people.

Compare the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth
with the harsh, unsympathetic system represented
by the Anglican creed which caricatures
the Saviour in our midst.  The cruel system
which refuses to bury an unbaptized baby
with its dead mother, or would refuse to
allow a man or a woman to have a chance
of happiness in marriage because, through no
fault of their own, they have already suffered
great unhappiness; that would refuse relatives
permission to carve the word "Reverend"
on the tombstone of a Wesleyan minister
buried in a village churchyard because the
dead man was not of the Church of England.

The Kikuyu Conference is typical of our
bishops' lack of Christ-like charity and
shortage of that kindly touch of nature that makes
the whole world kin.  The question lying
before the bishops in conference was "the
promotion of a brotherly spirit and the
adoption of practical steps toward unity" in
the mission-field; or, should the Church of
England retain its old crusted conventions
as an exclusive institution and cold shoulder
all outsiders.  The bishops consulted in
Lambeth Palace over this aggravating question,
and finally decided that their first duty
was to protect the Church of England in all
its ancient sanctities, to retain the proud
boundary-walls isolating those within in strict
spiritual seclusion, and to warn trespassers
off their private ecclesiastical preserves.  Their
duty to the State Church was clear-cut and
formulated--viz., to maintain its high-cast
principles and to avoid the contagion of the
sects.  None of the beautiful roses of charity
growing in their garden-close must run over
the wall for the wayfarer to pluck.  Their
fraternal duty to native Christians won to
Christ by missionary zeal remains obscure.
However, no loose form of brotherly love or
Christian fellowship can be permitted in the
mission-field or elsewhere.  State Church
principles must be upheld.  As a sweetmeat
and as a goody-goody sample of what Jesus
Christ meant by brotherly love, an occasional
hospitality to other Christian communities
may be practised without prejudice to Church
principles; you may come and partake of
Holy Communion with us in our Church,
but we cannot partake of Holy Communion
with you in yours.  For you to come to us
is a privilege, for us to go to you would be
*infra dig*.

On these liberal lines the bishops
expound the teachings of Jesus Christ and
uphold Church principles, and if Christ's
principles clash with Church principles, so
much the worse for the principles of Jesus
Christ.  The Church is the orthodox institution,
and must hold itself inviolate even
against the heterodoxy of Jesus Christ.  The
Kikuyu Conference and its deliberations
may be summed up briefly as a study
in Church principles and how to maintain them.

Such harsh decisions bring contempt upon
the Church, and widen the gulf which divides
the rubric from the gospels and the clergyman
from Christ.  Jesus of Nazareth differs
essentially from the Church on earth which
to-day flies His banner and breaks His
commandments.  Christ declared for character
and conduct as essentials in life; the Church
favours creed and ceremony.  Christ worked
undogmatically, and the Church, overweighted
with dogma, fails hopelessly in its Christly
work.

Observe the generous, liberal, broad-minded
traits which even in the scanty records of
the gospels mark Jesus Christ as the kindliest
and most humane of men.  Where there
was a choice, He stood on the side of charity
and common sense.  He was no misanthrope;
He was of social temperament.  He knew
well the joy of life, and He did not hesitate
to participate in it.  He drank wine Himself,
and exerted miraculous power that others
might drink it.  In argument upon
Sabbatarianism He took the more liberal view.
He instantly and frankly forgave the woman
taken in adultery.  His heart went out in
gentleness to children, to the poor, and to
everybody who needed support and comfort.
It is that golden thread of kindliness running
like flashes of sunlight through His ministry
which wins the love and adherence of disciples
to His name.

A few years ago an English ship foundered
on the coast of Ushant.  Many of the crew
were drowned and the bodies washed ashore.
The villagers of Ushant showed no little
kindness to the shipwrecked strangers.  The
interment of the drowned sailors was a
memorable scene.  The deceased were all
Protestants, the villagers were all Roman
Catholics, yet the villagers performed the
ceremony with all the ritual shown to those
of their own faith.  The curé officiating had
qualms of conscience in admitting the bodies
to the church and reading the Catholic service
over them.  An Englishman standing by
remarked, "God has no creed."  The curé
waved his hand as if to dismiss the objections
which perturbed his mind, and the service
proceeded.

This is a refreshing lesson in humanity
furnished by the simple-minded,
good-natured fishermen of Ushant.  The spirit of
Jesus breathes in it victoriously over the
narrowness of creed and the hardness of
heart which separate men in much party
bitterness.





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.. _`THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST`:

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   XIV


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   THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST

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A beautiful spectacular ceremonial the
Church has wrapped around the Sacrament
of the Lord's Supper, smothering it under
the pomp of a religious service, which works
upon the nerves like a subtle, mastering
spell.  The senses of the worshipper become
drugged with incense, dazed by the glitter
of broidered vestments, charmed with the
strains of alluring music, spellbound with
the deep droning voice intoning at the altar,
and all the splendid equipments and sacred
associations of the sanctuary, which tighten
you up until a wrapt ecstasy of feeling
intoxicates you in the midst of it all, and
you are drenched in the luxury of strong,
dreamy religious emotion.

For nineteen centuries the spectacle has
been growing in significance, and it is not
finished growing yet.  Every age adds a
decorative touch to embellish its colossal
splendours.  Finality in ecclesiastical
evolution lies a long way off in the distance.  If
one of the twelve disciples who supped
with our Blessed Lord on that historic
night could slip out of paradise and for a
few minutes witness a modern high celebration
of the Holy Eucharist, he would marvel
much at the imposing function, and marvel
more at men's credulity in mistaking an
ecclesiastical pageant for a simple act of
devout obedience to Jesus Christ.  The plain
and homely meal which our Lord instituted
to be a remembrance of Himself and His
death on the Cross has flowered into an
ornate and flamboyant religious function
striking wonderment and awe in the hearts
of mankind by the glitter of its barbaric
and imposing splendours.  The Church has
worked up the Lord's Supper into a
supernatural mystic rite run on old pagan lines;
in fact, it amalgamates Christianity with
ancient magic, and so the spirit of Christ
escapes from the service, and only His
traditional dead body reposes on the altar
like the cold ashes of an extinct fire.

Recall the simple and unpretentious meal
of which our Blessed Lord partook with His
disciples on the eve of His betrayal and
death.  There in an upper room in the city
of Jerusalem is the small assembly, consisting
of the Master and His twelve disciples,
and during the meal Jesus took a piece of
bread, "and when He had given thanks, He
brake it and said: 'Take, eat: this is My
body, which is broken for you; this do
in remembrance of Me.'  After the same
manner also He took the cup, when He had
supped, saying: 'This cup is the New
Testament in My blood; this do ye as often as ye
drink in remembrance of Me; for as often as
ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do
show the Lord's death till He come.'"[*]

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[*] 1 Cor. xi. 24-26.

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On this plain foundation the amazing and
pernicious rite of Transubstantiation has been
reared--a veritable temple of divination, and
cloistered within its shadowed recesses the
priest casts his spell, dispensing religious
consolations to credulous and confiding mortals
tangled in the coils of the seductive creed.

Transubstantiation is a pagan heresy
grafted on to Christian stock.  In ancient
times, when the pagan priest muttered an
incantation over the idol of his god, the
spirit of the god was supposed to enter the
idol, and so when the Christian priest now
utters a prayer over the bread and wine it
is affirmed they become the real flesh and
the real blood of Christ.

A brief glance back on the early history
of the Church shows us the door through
which this sacerdotal error slipped into the
sacramental service, and how the Church
drifted from the words of Jesus Christ and
sought other and strange gods for counsel.
For three centuries after the Crucifixion the
disciples held closely together in little groups
or churches in the towns where they abode.
Many of them dwelt in Rome, down in the
dark subterranean city of the catacombs,
with its maze of narrow lanes, blind alleys,
and cryptic sanctuaries, hidden under the
gay, cruel city of sunlit streets and open
air.  Here they lived, striving faithfully and
patiently to attain pure, blameless, holy lives
before God in a pagan world, whose sins
they renounced and whose hatred they
courted by thrusting the new and unwelcome
society of Christ into their hostile midst.
Christians were mistaken for criminals--but
there, Christ was crucified as one.  Through
all persecutions they held fast to the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  Nothing daunted
them, nothing disheartened them.  The words
of Christ refreshed them in all the weariness
of spirit.  In teeth of deadly opposition they
grew in number until a questionable honour
was conferred upon the Church which changed
its fortunes and marred its simplicity.  The
Roman Emperor Constantine became a convert
to the new religion, and now and henceforth
the religion of Jesus Christ is honourable
in the sight of all men.  It is the fashionable
craze of Rome.  The Emperor's Court
followed the Emperor's example and joined up.
The Roman world followed the royal lead
and professed conversion.  This is the
flowering-time of Christianity.  The Christian sect,
yesterday the outcasts and scum of the earth,
are now received into polite society, dine in
the best houses, and are welcomed everywhere.
The bishops of the Church are dug
out of their deep burrows in the stuffy
underground where they practised the simple
life; they put off their poverty of pocket and
meekness of spirit, and are robed in gorgeous
raiment and rank amongst the rulers of the
earth.  They are transfigured men in mind
and in manners.  The Bishop of Rome leaps
into fame, wins for himself a palace and a
throne in the city of the Cæsars, and a court
of red-robed cardinals surge round him with
royal observances and diplomatic intrigue.
Our bishops in England become princes of
the Church, have princely palaces, and
princely revenues to maintain the dignity of
their princely estate.  These gilded grandees
of the Church are considered to be spiritually
the lineal descendants of the Peasant of
Galilee who at nightfall had not where to
lay His head.  Flattery worked the Church's
undoing, for in the hour of her worldly
triumph she gave away all that the early
Christian martyrs had died to win.

The mass of people who obsequiously
played up to Constantine and joined the
Church were not converted to the Christian
faith; they did not believe in Christ with all
their heart.  To many of them Christ was
only a new Deity added to the many gods
they already worshipped.  In heart they
remained pagan, but behaved prudently and
changed their coat at the Emperor's bidding.
They did not forsake their old religion when
they accepted the new creed; they amalgamated
the two.  They carried their pagan
superstitions with them into the Christian
Church, and, planted in new soil, there they
took root and flourished vigorously in the
garden of the Lord.  The old gods became
saints; the pagan shrines and images and
festivals were whitewashed and christianized
and given a place in the Church calendar;
the magic by which their pagan priests
trained the spirit of the gods to enter the
idol at call, the same priestly magic
transferred to the new religion brought the body
of the Lord into the bread and the wine at
the service of the Lord's Supper.

Such galloping progress did the heresy
make amongst the mixed multitudes who
mingled their devotions with the elect in the
Church that before long the bread and wine
were given to the dead.  The Sacrament, it
is supposed, was placed on the breast of dead
persons, as a charm against evil spirits.
This superstitious custom was rooted deeply
in the religion of the day, for the Church
was compelled to legislate on the subject.
The custom was forbidden in Africa by the
Council of Hippo, A.D. 393; the Council of
Carthage, A.D. 397; and in Gaul at the Council
of Auxerre, A.D. 578; yet it lingered
tenaciously in the hearts of the people as a sacred
custom to be observed regardless of hostility
to it in high places.  Again at the Council
in Trullo, A.D. 691, it was forbidden.  An
incident in the life of St. Benedict, who died
about the year 540, discloses much to us.
A boy who had been disobedient died
suddenly, and his corpse could not rest, in the
grave, so St. Benedict ordered the body of
the Lord (the Sacrament) to be placed on
the breast of the boy, and the corpse rested
immediately, and remained quietly buried.

The miraculous legend of the Lord's Supper
obtains in the Church to-day with perfumed
pomp and splendour of worship.  The magic
of the Real Presence bites deep into the core
of the Church's creed.  As the ages roll the
legend develops new forms of expression.
Its inferences are not always expressed, nor
is its significance posted on the surface, but
it is the deeply sunk tap-root of the green
bay-tree of sacerdotalism which flourishes in
the Church of Christ and binds the people
round and round with disciplinary fetters of
steel, captives to priestly power.

The consecrated bread and wine still are
worshipped as being the body of the Lord.
When the priest consecrates the bread and
wine on the altar for the Communion Service,
sometimes a part of it is reverently kept back
and is called the reserved sacrament; this
reserved sacrament is conjured with.  It is
placed in a small box of ornate workmanship
called a shrine or tabernacle, and is deposited
on an altar in the church, which is called
"God's resting-place," and is worshipped as
the body of our Lord.

In preference, a secluded and quiet place
in the church is chosen for the altar of the
reserved sacrament.  "Admirable arrangements
have been made in some English
churches.  In one church there is a
side-chapel somewhat out of sight from the main
entrance of the church.  In another there is
a crypt chapel....  In another there is a
chapel reached by steps ascending from the
church.  By such arrangements, when the
door of the chapel is kept unlocked and the
fact of reservation is known, there is at once
protection to the sacred presence of our
Lord, and accessibility to those who will
use it well."  To these lonely side-altars in
shadowy places of the sanctuary at any hour
during the day stray worshippers come and
kneel before the tabernacle and worship the
body of Christ enclosed therein.  "All that
Christ can claim of human love and
adoration is due to Him in His sacramental
presence," says an Oxford advocate of the
intruding heresy; "the worship which the
Christian soul pays to Him when the
sacrament is consecrated is paid also as it is
reserved.  It includes the utmost response
of which the soul is capable."

In past times plain-speaking people called
these worshippers of the sacrament idolaters.
That word may reveal the thoughts of many
hearts to-day.  Dr. Darwell Stone, in his
book "The Reserved Sacrament," advocates
an ample toleration widely extended in the
Church of England on behalf of these idolaters.
Facing the accusation of idolatry cast by his
opponents, he throws out a challenge.  Speaking
of those who make the charge of idolatry,
"from their own point of view," he states,
"they are perfectly right.  If the consecrated
elements are only bread and wine after
consecration as before, whatever gifts or virtues
may be attached to the profitable reception
of them, those who imagine that they are
worshipping our Lord are wholly wrong in
seeking the object of their adoration in His
presence in the Sacrament.  But if it be
true that by consecration the bread and
wine become His Body and Blood, if our
Lord Himself, eternal God, very Man, glorified,
spiritual, risen, ascended, is present in
the Sacrament, then in the adoration there
is no idolatry, but rather the worship which
is the bounden duty of a Christian."

Back to the New Testament, back to the
words of Christ, and in reading them we find
no evidence that Jesus at that farewell meal
He partook with His disciples founded an
elaborate and miraculous ordinance; we
cannot read into the words of Christ any
intention on His part to place in the hands of
Churchmen a spiritual weapon to be used
offensively and defensively in all their struggle
and strategy for the Church's temporal
aggrandizement, as it has been used to
subdue and flatten down the people under
their spiritual charge.  The miracle of the
Real Presence is of man's device.  It is
an offspring born of priestcraft and pride.
Christ has no part or lot in it.  The
impression the gospels compel in us is that
Christ was fighting the sacerdotal error in
religion throughout His whole ministry, and
for the Church to claim Him as its founder
is the greatest irony of Christianity.

But time works changes.  As the story of
the crucifixion of Christ receded with the
lapse of lengthening years and became a
distant tradition in Church history, the desire
possessed men's minds for something tangible
to nail their faith to; the desire was to bring
Christ back again somehow into touch with
living men and women.  The blank of the
long, silent ages grew intolerable.  The
chilling doubt of Thomas haunted men afresh;
the longing to see and touch the wounded
Christ gathered force.  To gratify the
religious devotion of the people, art did its
best to portray in coloured pictures Jesus
Christ the man who walked in Galilee and
died in Jewry; and the Fathers of the Church
responded promptly to the longing, and
found to hand a ready-made mystery which
answered the purpose and helped to stay the
profound religious hunger of the day--a
mystery which could be amplified to meet
every expanding need of the people, and the
people accepted with greedy faith the doctrine
of the indwelling bodily presence of Jesus
Christ in the bread and wine on the altar.
These elements, they were assured, became
changed into the real flesh and blood of
Christ when consecrated by the priest, and
the people acclaimed with reverent joy the
wonderful transformation which brought
Christ so near, and drew what religious
consolation they could from the sacred
illusion imposed upon them.  The olden gods
were returning in a new form.

The people did not know and did not want
to know the truth about their creed.  They
had neither the leisure nor the brains to
think for themselves.  The cake is baked;
it is eaten with relish.  Hungry men at table
do not analyze their food; they eat it and
are thankful.  The people did not know,
but the people had feeling.  The Church
stirred their feelings to the uttermost, played
upon the heart-strings of joy and sorrow,
hope and fear, faith and love, until their
tumultuous emotions were aroused and they
believed blindly according to priestly orders.
We would make neither more nor less
importance of the Lord's Supper, only just
what Christ made of it to His disciples and
to plain people through all time.  Let us
try and possess the ancient feeling that
possessed the disciples when they sat at
table with the Master, and, stripped of
ecclesiastical emblazonment, we touch the
Supper in its primitive simplicity as instituted
in the upper room with the shadow of death
shrouding the Founder of the Feast.  He
commanded His disciples after His death to
meet together thus and to break bread in
remembrance of Him.

It is in memory of Christ, if the New
Testament report of it is correct.  Christ
appointed the solemn rite to be an ever-living
witness to His own love to man, and
we in response make it our pledge of undying
love and devotion to Him.  It is the Sacrament
of the ages.  It never varies in purpose;
it never stales by observance.  The Lord's
Table is the prepared place on earth where
the Church Catholic should assemble to
commemorate the great Sacrifice of Golgotha,
and to commune with one another in spiritual
fellowship and brotherly unity.  It is a
commemorative act, and as such, uncorrupted
and undefiled by human inventions, it should
have come down to us, but the Church has
tampered with the holy thing.  Christ did
not intend us to idolize the bread and wine.
It is the legend of the Brazen Serpent
repeating itself in modern version.  Human folly
boasts of little originality.  It borrows its
sins from its ancestors and charges them up
to the children's children.  The Brazen
Serpent that Moses lifted on a pole in the
wilderness for the healing of the people was a
symbol of God's saving mercy to the nation.
Alas! the people turned the brass image into
an idol and in course of time worshipped it,
and so did evil in the sight of the Lord.
Christ did not intend us to idolize the
Sacrament; Christ commanded us to eat and
drink the bread and wine, not to worship it.
The Sacrament is in memory of Christ's
sacrifice: it is not a repetition of it.

To many Churchmen it is the simplicity
of the service that savours of an offence.
Human vanity dearly loves display, pomp,
emotion, with which to salt its devotion to
the Almighty and make it palatable to the
Deity and to itself.  Naaman the Syrian is
not the only man who demands splendour of
ceremony to colour a religious function in
which he engages.  His pampered soul feeds
on fulsome flattery, and if he does not get it
he is angry to the uttermost.

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   BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND.

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   OUR VILLA IN ITALY

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   BY JOSEPH LUCAS

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   *New and Revised Edition.  With 25 full-page
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