carry the exclusive and unsocial habits of "the home" with them into the wider world of their business. Although they are natural, amiable, and companionable enough, they are, by home training, so incredibly ill-mannered, that not even their business interests in welcoming a possible customer in every inquirer, can correct their habit of treating everybody who has not been "introduced" as a stranger and intruder. The women, who have not even the city to educate them, are much worse: they are positively unfit for civilized intercourse graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to a quite appalling degree. Even in public places homebred people cannot be taught to understand that the right they are themselves exercising is a common right. Whether they are in a second-class railway carriage or in a church, they receive every additional fellow-passenger or worshipper as a Chinaman receives the foreign devil" who has forced him to open his ports.

In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word "home"), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted.

GEORGE GISSING (1857-1903)

FROM THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT1

SPRING, XX

It has occurred to me that one might define Art as an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life. This is applicable to every form of Art devised by man, for, in his creative moment, whether he produce a great drama or carve a piece of foliage in wood, the artist is moved and inspired by supreme enjoyment of some aspect of the world about him; an enjoyment in itself keener than that experienced by another man, and intensified, prolonged, by the power- which comes to

him we know not how of recording in visible or audible form that emotion of rare vitality. Art, in some degree, is within the scope of every human being, were he but the ploughman who utters a few would-be melodious notes, the mere outcome of health and strength, in the field at sunrise; he sings, or tries to, prompted by an unusual gusto in being, and the rude stave is all his own. Another was he, who also at the plough, sang of the daisy, of the field-mouse, or shaped the rhythmic tale of Tam o' Shanter. Not only had life a zest for him incalculably stronger and subtler than that which stirs the soul of Hodge, but he uttered it in word and music such as go to the heart of mankind, and hold a magic power for ages.

For some years there has been a great deal of talk about Art in our country. It began, I suspect, when the veritable artistic impulse of the Victorian time had flagged, when the energy of a great time was all but exhausted. Principles always become a matter of vehement discussion when practice is at ebb. Not by taking thought does one become an artist, or grow even an inch in that direction which is not at all the same as saying that he who is an artist cannot profit by conscious effort. Goethe (the example so often urged by imitators unlike him in every feature of humanity) took thought enough about his Faust; but what of those youthtime lyrics, not the least precious of his achievements, which were scribbled as fast as pen could go, thwartwise on the paper, because he could not stop to set

'Reprinted by permission of A. C. Gissing

it straight? Dare I pen, even for my own eyes, the venerable truth that an artist is born and not made? It seems not superfluous, in times which have heard disdainful criticism of Scott, on the ground that he had no artistic conscience, that he scribbled without a thought of style, that he never elaborated his scheme before beginning as Flaubert, of course you know, invariably did. Why, after all, has one not heard that a certain William Shakespeare turned out his so-called works of art with something like criminal carelessness? Is it not a fact that a bungler named Cervantes was so little in earnest about his Art that, having in one chapter described the stealing of Sancho's donkey, he presently, in mere forgetfulness, shows us Sancho riding on Dapple, as if nothing had happened? Does not one Thackeray shamelessly avow on the last page of a grossly "subjective" novel that he had killed Lord Farintosh's mother at one page and brought her to life again at another? These sinners against Art are none the less among the world's supreme artists, for they lived, in a sense, in a degree, unintelligible to these critics of theirs, and their work is an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life.

Some one, no doubt, hit upon this definition of mine long ago. It doesn't matter; is it the less original with me? Not long since I should have fretted over the possibility, for my living depended on an avoidance of even seeming plagiarism. Now I am at one with Lord Foppington, and much disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own wit without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others. Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when some one draws attention to the book? These natural sprouts are, after all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may have no value in the world's market. One of my conscious efforts, in these days of freedom, is to live intellectually for myself. Formerly, when in reading I came upon anything that impressed or delighted me, down it went in my note-book, for "use." I could not read a striking verse, or sentence of prose, without thinking of it as an apt quotation in something I might write one of the evil results of a literary life. Now that I strive to repel this habit of thought, I find myself asking:

To what end, then, do I read and remember? Surely as foolish a question as ever man put to himself. You read for your own pleasure, for your solace and strengthening. Pleasure, then, purely selfish? Solace which endures for an hour, and strengthening for no combat? Ay, but I know, I know. With what heart should I live here in my cottage, waiting for life's end, were it not for those hours of seeming idle reading?

I think sometimes, how good it were had I some one by me to listen when I am tempted to read a passage aloud. Yes, but is there any mortal in the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic understanding? nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my appreciation. Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing. All through life we long for it: the desire drives us, like a demon, into waste places; too often ends by plunging us into mud and morass. And, after all, we learn that the vision was illusory. To every man is it decreed thou shalt live alone. Happy they who imagine that they have escaped the common lot; happy, whilst they imagine it. Those to whom no such happiness has ever been granted at least avoid the bitterest of disillusions. And is it not always good to face a truth, however discomfortable? The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm.

With glooming robes purpureal, cypresscrowned;

150 His name I know, and what his trumpet saith. Whether man's heart or life it be which yields Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

155

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea: "And is thy earth so marred. Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! Strange, piteous, futile thing, 161 Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),

"And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited-

Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,

165

170

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

176

Shade of His hand, outstretched caress

Reprinted from Poems New and Old by permission of the author, and of John Murray, London, and Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., New York, publishers

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships, Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin',

He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas,

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 10 Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease,

An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. "Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven,

15

THE BALLAD OF THE "BOLIVAR " 1

Seven men from all the world, back to Docks again, Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road drunk and raising Cain:

Give the girls another drink 'fore we sign awayWe that took the "Bolivar " out across the Bay!

1 Reprinted by permission of the author and of Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, publishers, from Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, copyright, 1892, by Macmillan & Company, New Edition with Additional Poems, copyright, 1893, by Macmillan & Company, copyright, 1899, by Rudyard Kipling; Collected Verse, copyright, 1907, by Rudyard Kipling