Critical Studies Part 11

To blast the harmless, gentle, colossal whale with the coward's tool of dynamite; to strip the fur coat off the living seal and drive her tender body over sharp rocks it was never made to cross; to castrate the lion and tear his flesh with red-hot irons that he may make the sport of fools; to rear the timid pheasant by millions, hand fed and unsuspecting, only that they may fall under the breechloaders of princes and lords and gentlemen; to penetrate into virgin forests and plunge in untroubled streams to seize the heron on her nest, and poison the lyre-bird in his haunts, and s.n.a.t.c.h his golden plumes from the bird of paradise, and his rosy wings from the flamingo, that commerce may flourish and women be adorned--all these things, and more like them, crimes of every clime and every hour, are human sins, and human sins alone; and justify in its strongest accusations the charge of Satan against Man as the most brutal murderer on earth; the same creature of destruction still, in the comedy which he calls civilisation, as when in his cave and his lake dwellings he first sharpened a stone, and then stole out to kill.

And it is herein there lie alike the courage and the value of the 'Satan Absolved.' It is by no means a perfect poem; it would have been well if it had received much more meditation and amplification, if pa.s.sages which approach the grotesque like the 'old world furniture,' the 'linen long in press' of Heaven in the first page had been altered; and the destiny and mission of Satan at the close are enwrapped in a mystery which is to me at least incomprehensible; but when the utmost has been said against it which can be urged, the poem remains a n.o.ble effort to proclaim a supreme truth, which, as all great truths have done, dawns slowly on the human mind--the solidarity of life.

The preface alone to the book should make everyone obtain and cherish it. This time the writer has penned his own presentation, and is not ushered in by Mr Henley. It is enough to say that the introduction, like the work, is worthy of the Englishman who, amidst a deafening roar of national vanity and triumph, dared to denounce the injustice and the inhumanity of Omdurman.

It must not be forgotten that this poet is also a writer of prose; prose clear, terse and strong. His letters to the leading journal of London, and his works on the present state of India and the future state of Islam are virile in thought and fearless in expression. A Suss.e.x landowner, and the possessor of a fortune sufficient to give him entire independence, he has been the nominee of no party and the slave of no prejudice. His temper is essentially _frondeur_; he has, what so few possess, absolute independence of judgment; he refuses to see through other men's spectacles, whether of smoked or of rose-coloured gla.s.s.

Again and again has he had the courage to oppose the policy of ministers who were his personal friends. He opposed Mr Gladstone's and Lord Granville's policy in Egypt, considering it alike unjust and unwise; and he appealed alike to Parliament and to the nation against it, uselessly but not the less manfully. The eloquence which he used so n.o.bly at that time must remain in the memories of many. He equally opposed the recent campaign in the Soudan of Lord Salisbury's Cabinet, and the brutal carnage commanded and excused by Kitchener. In India he was, at an interval of a few years, the guest of two Viceroys, yet he never for a moment consented to accept the views of either, although for both he had strong personal friendship and regard. He thought (and thinks) the whole system of English administration in India a cruel, costly and most perilous mistake.

'I believe,' he says, 'the natives capable of governing themselves much better than we can do, and at about a tenth part of the expense.

'I have found a vast economic disturbance, caused partly by the selfish commercial policy of the English Government, partly by the no less selfish expenditure of the English official cla.s.s.

I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts, to starvation; deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth acc.u.mulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands, the public revenues spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that India is not a poorer country, now, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that this is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural cla.s.s; probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt and foresee further financial difficulties.

'Again, I find the ancient organisation of society broken up, the interdependence of cla.s.s upon cla.s.s disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also, great centralisation of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer.

In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country and are costly and out of all proportion to the good. India has appeared to me in the light of a large estate which has been experimented on by a series of Scotch bailiffs who have all gone away rich.'

In another place he says with equal frankness:--

'India seems to me just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia.

There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money that one sees in Turkey. The result is the same; and I don't see much difference between making the starving Hindoo pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want cuts up all these great empires in their centralised governments.'

'The "natives" as they call them,' he writes farther on, 'are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British inst.i.tutions has received a severe blow.... I never could see the moral obligations Governments acknowledge of taxing people for debts which the Governments, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a despotism like India they are a swindle.'

'It is my distinct impression,' he states in another portion of his too brief work, 'from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years make the continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. The people are beginning to awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united in a common sentiment of hatred for all that is English and our rule there will _ipso facto_ cease. Let it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India's symbol, is a docile beast and may be ridden by a child.

He is sensible, docile and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will not bear forever, and when he is angered in earnest his vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the strongest to guide him.'

All who are interested in the future of England and India should read this volume, which, although written as far back as Lord Ripon's viceroyalty, applies in all its lessons and all its warnings with ten times greater force to the India of to-day, which, with the three-fold curse upon it of famine, of drought, and of plague, finds the British Government too engrossed in its aggressive and criminal war in South Africa to come to the relief of its Indian Empire, where tens of thousands of human lives, and millions of animals, are wasting in death and in despair.

VII

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

Several years ago, at the moment when Mr Chamberlain, having abandoned the Liberal Party, was adored by the party which calls itself Conservative, I looked at him one evening after a dinner in a well-known house in Belgrave Square. He was standing, surrounded by the loveliest and most fashionable women of society, who were offering him a homage which must have been delightful to him. It was an interesting, if rather comical, spectacle, and I imagine that Chamberlain, though he gave no sign of doing so, enjoyed it extremely, and laughed at it in his sleeve.

His physiognomy indicates his character; it has no distinction, but it is full of energy, intelligence, and resolution; it is the physiognomy of a tradesman, not of a statesman, of a person extremely keen and acute, obstinate and cruel, but not by any means intellectual. The eternal eyegla.s.s serves to hide such expression as his features might have, and the nose, short and _retrousse_, makes plebeian lineaments which might without this defect be sufficiently regular. In these later times he has aged more than his years perhaps justify, and it is said that he suffers from neuralgia and gout. He is always well dressed; 'too well' an ex-Viceroy murmured to me that evening; and he is never seen, as everyone knows, without an orchid in his b.u.t.ton-hole; a flower always culled in one of those famous orchid-houses at Highbury, which, before his conversion, the Tory ladies longed so pa.s.sionately to burn down, in days when he was considered odious, accursed, almost an Antichrist!--days not so very distant as the life of a nation counts.

It was always said, at the time of his apostasy, that he left the Radicals out of jealousy of Gladstone's greater powers, and of the magnetism which Gladstone exercised over all his colleagues; and also because amongst the Liberals there was Lord Rosebery, then in the fulness of promise; there was Vernon Harcourt, then extremely eloquent and much followed; and there was also in the Home Rule Party that great genius, known amongst men as Charles Stewart Parnell, in whom Chamberlain felt an irresistible superiority. If this were the reason, he must now be content, since in his present party he has no rival in the Cabinet, no one ventures to contradict him, and he is _de facto_, though not yet _de jure_, the head of the present Government. There have been many men of distinction before him in the somewhat subordinate post of Secretary of the Colonies, notably the late Lord Carnarvon, and the first Lord Lytton; but no one has ever made of this Department the throne of the Suprema Lex as Mr Chamberlain has contrived to do. The fault of whom, or the fault of what, lies at the root of this successful usurpation? Let us endeavour to discover, for the problem is interesting; and one of its most strange phenomena is to see Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury, fallen under the dominion of the Birmingham screw-maker.

In the whole of the Tory Party, Chamberlain has no one who opposes him, no one who approaches him for strength of character and for acuteness of perception, one may also add for unscrupulousness in principle and in action. The sole person of the party who could have imposed authority upon him by superiority of intellect would have been Lord Salisbury; but either through force of energy on his own part, or by lack of energy on his chief's, he has been able completely to rule and influence the master of Hatfield, as he has succeeded in ruling and influencing all others who sit round the ministerial table in Downing Street. A friend of mine speaking once to me of Lord Salisbury, whom he knew intimately, said, 'He is a fine big cannon, but he won't go off; I doubt if he will ever go off.' It is probable that Chamberlain had the same opinion, and therefore resolved himself to manoeuvre and fire the cannon. Anyhow, he has acted well for himself in leaving the Radicals to ally himself with their adversaries. If posterity blame him, and call him a turncoat, I imagine that he is a man to whom the verdict of posterity is absolutely indifferent. He is as 'hard as nails,' to use an appropriate if common phrase; he is cynical and selfish; and to a politician of this stamp, reputation in history is a matter of extreme indifference; fame must seem to him only a carnival-masquer, noisily blowing a tin trumpet.

Napoleon, after the campaign of Egypt, said once, 'If I die to-morrow I shall only have half a page in a universal dictionary.' To Chamberlain, I believe, it would be wholly indifferent to have the half page, or even a whole page. What suffices to him is to dominate and lead other men while he lives. He is called inordinately ambitious, but his ambition is essentially practical, not ideal. He wishes for the loaves and fishes; a laurel crown would be to him a useless thing, unless it represented to him solid lucre. Would he have succeeded if he had been born half a century earlier? I doubt it. In the first half of the past century, men admired in the ministers who ruled them very different qualities to those which he possesses. On the other hand, his qualities are precisely those which beget and command fortune in the actual moment; and by this I intend no compliment either to him or to his times.

In an epoch more courageous, more honest, more well-bred than the present, a great Party calling itself Conservative would have repulsed with contempt any renegade Radical, however disguised in the domino of a Unionist. Instead, this Party has received him with open arms, nay, with prostrate self-effacement, and worshipped him with enthusiasm; indeed, the victory of the so-called Tories at the urns in 1895 would not have been possible if Chamberlain had not permitted it; which he would not have done unless he had been a.s.sured that he would enter and dominate the Salisbury Cabinet. He has been equally happy in the occasions which have presented themselves to him, and in his own capability in using them; in the mediocrity of the men who combine with him, and of the men who oppose him; in his infinite ability in influencing the first, and in intimidating the last; he has been fortunate also in the fact that the English people are less bigoted in religion than of old; for in an earlier time they would have seen with horror a Unitarian entering the Government. But his greatest good fortune of all was in the rise of the Home Rule question at the very moment when he conceived the project of going over to the Tory camp, which, without such an opportune reason to give for it, would have appeared mere unworthy treachery. Without the platform of Home Rule from which to make his _saut perilleux_, the leap would have probably broken his neck; at any rate he could not have made it with the certainty of being welcomed and rewarded by his new allies, and of occupying amongst them a position far more conspicuous than he ever occupied with the Radicals.

His favouring star has also given him the marvellous good luck that in the past year the death of Lord Salisbury's consort has so depressed and preoccupied the Premier that the latter has almost entirely ceased to occupy himself with the cares of office, and the Colonial Secretary has been given more and more completely, with every month, a free hand.

To me it has always seemed, during these later months of 1899, and since, that the Sovereign should have bidden Lord Salisbury either dismiss Chamberlain from office, or surrender office himself; for since Chamberlain was allowed virtually to hold the helm of the State, he should have been forced to accept the responsibility of the State's navigation.

Chamberlain has frequently declared that he has not changed in anything; that he has not been an opportunist; that the Tory Party has come to him, and has granted all his desires, accepted all his policy; and in this statement of his there is some truth, if not an entire truth. As two negatives make an affirmative, perhaps two desertions make a fidelity! It is certain that the Tory Party has forsaken its old paths quite as much as Chamberlain has his, indeed probably far more, for there is no conservatism whatsoever in the acts of the so-called Conservative Cabinets, and in his there is a great deal of radicalism still, even of socialism, though this is oddly united to a hybrid and artificial toryism.

An eminent Conservative, a member of the Upper House, a.s.sured me the other day that he honestly believed that Chamberlain had never done anything which would prevent him at any time from being able, honourably, to become the leader of the Radical Party. If this be admitted, what are we to think of the Tory Party which can find no other guide and saviour than this consistent Radical? Either the consistent Radical, or the inconsistent Conservative Party, has 'ratted' in the most barefaced manner. One or the other has been false to primal faith; and there is only a very small band of independent thinkers who venture to declare this. For Chamberlain has had the supreme cleverness to get himself taken by the public as a patriot, and to oppose him, therefore, lays open his opponent to a charge of want of patriotism. This is extremely absurd; but it is to him enormously useful; and he knows that the nation which he 'personally conducts' is not logical or critical. He has taken its measure very accurately.

The new hysterical creed of 'Imperialism' doubtless gained an impetus, Home Rule equally certainly lost, by the change of front of 'Birmingham Joe.' But the aristocratic party was harnessed like a cab-horse to the triumphal car of the New Unionist, and has ever since then remained thus harnessed. In the history of English politics these pa.s.sages will contribute a chapter which will not edify the readers of the next generation; especially if its climax be, as it will be almost certainly, the apotheosis of Chamberlain after a campaign of aggression and conquest conceived and carried out by him and the Yellow Press which he inspires. It is he who is responsible for the financiers' war in South Africa; he might call it proudly, '_my war_,' as the Empress Eugenie called the war with Germany, '_ma guerre a moi_.' If he had never been anything higher than Mayor of Birmingham the farmers of the Transvaal would still be ploughing their lands in peace.

The war was desired, conceived, and imposed on his colleagues by the Minister of the Colonies, without any appeal to or sanction of Parliament. He denies this, but it is clearly proved by his famous speech at Highbury and by the text of his irritating and provocative despatches; and it was only when that war was begun, beyond all possibility of alteration, that the Prime Minister, after long silence, accepted the responsibility of it in his speech at the Guildhall. Lord Salisbury, in that Mansion House speech, of course, denied the allegation then made by the President of the French Chamber of Commerce as to the motives and causes of the war; but no one who has attentively followed the actions and expressions of Chamberlain before and after the Jameson Raid, and his conduct at the enquiry held upon the conduct therein of Cecil Rhodes, can for a moment doubt the intimate relations which united the Colonial Secretary and the founder of Rhodesia and the Chartered.

Chamberlain, who, at the close of the Committee of Enquiry of 1897, had, in common with other signatories, signed a statement that Rhodes was culpable, declared a few days later in the House of Commons that Rhodes was a man whose honour was untarnished! This, more than any other fact, shows to what depths it is now possible to descend in English politics.

Certainly, in the time of Peel or of the earlier Governments of Gladstone, a Minister capable of such conduct would have lost alike office and seat in Parliament. Chamberlain, living in times of more elastic morality, did not lose even a single follower.

'Joseph Chamberlain has brought into English politics the habits and criterions of a commercial traveller,' an eminent Englishman wrote to me the other day. 'And of a commercial traveller not burdened by scruples.'

Now, the man of trade may have considerable qualities, great intelligence, and great enterprise, but his mind and his acts are those of a tradesman, not those of a gentleman, or of a statesman. Chamberlain boasted in public one day that he belonged to the Party of Gentlemen; now no gentleman would ever have so expressed himself.

The tradesman inevitably brings into public life the traditions of his counting-house; those traditions are to try, invariably, _de rouler les autres_. Now public life should be something more than, and very different to, the pursuit of speculation; and its aims should be higher than the mere desire to trick a rival and send shares up or down. True, statecraft in our day is chiefly 'land-grabbing' and an effort to bridle democracy by taxation. Still it is a different art to the art of the merchant's or manufacturer's office. When Chamberlain endeavours to be diplomatic he becomes inane: a person (who must have been very _naf_) wrote to him the other day to ask if it were true that it had always been his wish and intention to make war on the Boers, he replied to this simpleton of a correspondent, 'I fear there will always be those who will attribute to me the worst motives. Tennyson has said that every man attributes to another the motives which would actuate himself'--and that was all! I imagine he thought this reply very ingenious and tactful.

He is no doubt adroit and ingenious in his management of men; but his cunning does not wear the smiling and elegant mask which a politician's should do. He does not possess the talent most necessary of all to a politician, of taking refuge in exquisitely-turned phrases which seem to reveal everything and reveal nothing. His voice is flexible and fine, his deliverance imposes, but his statements are frequently impudently cynical, and it is easy to discern that he holds men very cheap, and in no way hesitates to use, to abuse, and to deceive them. He is never really frank in his replies, though he affects candour; he often approaches brutality; he loses his temper easily; and the spectator sees by the nerves of his face and the movements of his limbs that he has not the self-control and _sang-froid_, which are natural gifts of the man of race and breeding. But despite these defects and these offences he has conquered both society and his colleagues, and one sees scholarly and refined men like Mr Arthur Balfour hopelessly and helplessly hypnotised by him. He has taken with him into Downing Street the manners and the methods with which he governed the town councillors of Birmingham; and these succeed equally well in his altered atmosphere. 'We are all horribly afraid of him,' one of his colleagues said the other day to a friend of mine; probably because he is the only man amongst them ill-bred and ill-tempered enough to be disagreeable and dangerous. In earlier days, in those of Derby, of Palmerston, of Melbourne, Westminster would not have tolerated him for a single session; in times when orators quoting Greek or Latin verse were sure to be understood by either House, when cla.s.sical allusions were caught flying, when accuracy and consistency were esteemed necessary in debate, the speeches of the present Colonial Secretary would not have been thought tolerable.

But the Great Britain of Lord Grey, of Canning, of Sydney Herbert, of the Rupert of Debate, of the first half of Gladstone's political life is dead and gone; and Disraeli has pa.s.sed over its grave, of which he was the digger. Disraeli and his influence have dominated and penetrated English political and social atmospheres, in their highest strata, as a contagious fever enters and reigns in a district. It was a strange phenomenon, the Venetian Jew leading by the leash the entire English aristocracies. To trace the manifold reasons which enabled a man so alien and antipathetic to the British nation in blood, in manner, in appearance, in opinions, to dominate that nation so completely would require many folio volumes; for there has never been anything more singular, or more due to innumerable causes, all converging to one end.

No spectacle is more extraordinary than the power which Disraeli acquired after being laughed down by everyone; acquired, and wields still, so many years after his death. I think that his most potent philtre lay in his flattery. He flattered his Sovereign, his party, and the nation itself, with all the florid eloquence and subtle suggestion of which he was so admirable a master. His famous 'Peace with Honour'

was an exact sample of his style; the peace was brittle and the honour was dubious, but his manner of presenting them was so magnificent that they were received as though they were gifts from heaven. An able writer has said that the English are deficient in the power of observation, and I believe it is true. They do not examine critically before committing themselves to embrace a cause or an idea; they can easily be led into any extravagance which humours their national humour. Disraeli played on this weakness. He had himself a pa.s.sion for advertis.e.m.e.nt, for varnish and gilding, and florid decoration; all his speeches and all his romances are spoilt by these; and he succeeded in inoculating with this taste the English character to which it was naturally alien.

The first sign of the nation having been so inoculated was given when it allowed Disraeli to call the Queen of England the Empress of India, and change an ancient monarchy into a _parvenu_ empire. The first step taken, the rest followed; the mania of what is considered aggrandis.e.m.e.nt has acquired possession of the national life, and has made of a nation, naturally n.o.ble and great, a swollen boaster, bawling of its millions, its might, and its superiority, although surely vanity is no more admirable in a country than in an individual? This alteration in the British temper, which was primarily the work of Disraeli and of the new n.o.bility (chiefly commercial and largely Jewish), which was called into being, prepared the ground for Chamberlain's Imperialism, a much coa.r.s.er and greedier thing, without any of the veil of ideality which Disraeli lent to his creeds. In the time of Disraeli, the temper of England was still largely coloured by an old aristocracy, retaining, with the prejudices, the principles of gentlemen; now, the financiers and the speculators make the old aristocracy dance to whatever music they choose, and riches are the sole thing sought.

Every Ministry in England, on going out of office, leaves its contingent of enn.o.bled tradesmen, raised to the peerage solely for their money, and for the way in which they have spent their money for the Party. In this way the so-called Conservative leaders possess a solid phalanx of supporters whose wealth makes them irresistible in the country, and who practically send up to Westminster any men they choose. These great _richards_ find Joseph Chamberlain more to their taste than Lord Salisbury, who is too scholarly, too satirical, and too great a gentleman for them; his health is failing, he speaks rarely, there is a cynical contempt in his occasional speeches which cuts the _novi homines_ like a whip. It is impossible that a man of Lord Salisbury's pride of character and acuteness of intellect should much longer consent to be the mere echo of his Colonial Secretary. There is every sign that his retirement will be followed by the accession to the premiership of Chamberlain. For months past the Imperialist Press, and notably that journal which is the property of the Chancellor of the Primrose League, has been insinuating that no one except Chamberlain is capable of rising to the height required by advanced Imperialism: and what this journal says is certain to be echoed by that party, which, with an audacity almost sublime, still calls itself Conservative.

Chamberlain has continued the work of Disraeli, but he has done so by vulgarising and brutalising it. The best qualities of the English character are, under his influence, lost in a blatant self-admiration.

Its sense of morality is blunted; its leaders accept any denial or excuse of the Minister of the Colonies, and he is applauded when, as an independent Member said a few weeks since in the House of Commons, he should be called to the bar of the House. Parliament, and the nation after it, accept the suppression of despatches and telegrams, the use and abuse of censorship, the denial and interruption of free speech, the closure of debate at the moment when its continuance would be inconvenient to ministers: all things previously intolerable to the English people. Chamberlain has educated them into the abandonment of all their ancient virtues. If, as he is almost certain to do if he live, he become before long the Premier of England, he will do immeasurable harm both to Great Britain and the world.

The reign of Queen Victoria has been a long succession of wars; few, if any, were either necessary or inevitable. But not one of these has been a war of defence at home; the English citizen and peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors of war; they have never seen its desolation and its horrors; they have never seen their little children crushed under the hoofs and wheels of a battery, their homes set on fire by a sh.e.l.l, their sons starving, their fields devastated, their towns beleaguered. They have never seen a battle, a siege, a trench full of dead; therefore they do not know the hideous suffering which they inflict when they let loose, in pride of spirit and lightness of heart and triumphant vanity, the fiends of war upon a distant people and a far-off land. This is the excuse of a large portion of the nation for the present war; but it is at the same time the strongest condemnation of those who preach war to it as a divine creed, and appeal to its most brutal instincts, and abuse its ignorance to lead it into crime. The victories now gained will be dearly bought, for they, and the national madness they produce, will certainly set Joseph Chamberlain in the seat of supreme power, and no one will have the courage to restrain his hand.

Bellona has served him so well now, she will be his chosen handmaid in the future.[9]

[Footnote 9: It is possible, though little to be hoped, that the complications in China (which any far-sighted statesman would have foreseen and provided for) may open the eyes of the British people to the terribly heavy bill which they will pay, eventually, for the luxury of the Chamberlain Cabinet.]

VIII

UNWRITTEN LITERARY LAWS

There has been some idea mooted of forming an Academy in England on the lines of the Academy of France, but it would never be the same kind of inst.i.tution, or exercise the same authority. The English temper is not academic, the Royal Academy is proof enough of that. Moreover, Englishmen are indifferent to the use or abuse of their language, and the first care of an Academy must be to keep the national language pure, and clear, and elegant. The well of English undefiled is sadly muddy, nowadays, and any roaring screamer of English or American slang is as welcome to those who call themselves critics as though he wrote like Matthew Arnold or John Morley. Lacking an Academy of Letters, and the writers who would make one, there is in London what is called a Society of Authors, which is supposed to resemble the Societe des Gens de Lettres in Paris, but the English Society appears to be chiefly an a.s.sociation for the multiplication and publication of inferior works, and its authority on literature is _nil_. In addition to these, there are persons who call themselves literary agents; but the latter have a decidedly anti-intellectual influence, and to them is probably, in part, due the enormous increase in the issue of rubbish of all kinds, which is at the present time doing so much injury to the English literary reputation.

The number of volumes which pour annually from the English press is, at the present hour, appalling. One house alone produces, in number, enough volumes for the whole trade. Why are these volumes, usually worthless, ever produced? Why do the circulating libraries accept them? Who reads them? Who buys them? Why does one see in the lists of London 'remainders' the announcement of volumes originally published at six, eight, ten, twelve shillings, to be sold second-hand, perfectly new and uncut, at the miserable prices of two shillings, eighteen-pence, one shilling, and even sixpence? Amongst these is sometimes a work of real and scholarly worth, which it is painful to see thus sacrificed, but rarely; for it is rarely that such a work is now issued in London. Where is this to end? With whom does the fault of it lie? Someone, I suppose, must gain by such an insane method of over-production, but I cannot see who it can possibly be. One well-known publisher tells me that he must issue books thus, or starve. He is not in danger of bodily starvation, but the public is mentally starved by such a system.

When the three-volume novel was abolished (a course which I urged long before it was taken) great things were expected by many from its abolition. I myself hoped that London would adopt the Paris method, and issue novels and all other works, except _editions de luxe_, at small prices and in paper covers; not the gaudy, hideous, pictorial, paper cover, but the pale smooth grey or cream-coloured paper, so easily obtainable, with the t.i.tle of the book clearly printed on its flank.

Instead of this result, some unwritten law, as violently despotic as that which used to compel the three-volume issue, has decreed that the London romance shall always appear in a cloth-bound volume at six shillings; the most foolish price that could be selected, too dear to be suitable for private purchase, too low to allow of a handsome edition being issued. There is something grotesquely ludicrous, as well as extremely painful, in seeing the lists of 'ten new six-shilling novels,'