Chapter 8

Once upon a time there was a pug dog who could speak.

I found him on a seat in Hyde Park.

"Good afternoon," he said.

Why I was not astonished to be thus addressed by a pug dog, I cannot say; but it seemed perfectly natural.

"Good afternoon," I replied.

"It's a long time," he said, "since you saw any of my kind, I expect?"

"Now I come to think of it," I replied, "it is. How is that?"

"There's a reason," he said. "Put in a nutshell it's this: Peeks." He wheezed horribly.

I asked him to be more explicit, and he amplified his epigram into: "Pekingese."

"They're all the rage now," he explained; "and we're out in the cold. If you throw your memory back a dozen years or so," he went on, "you will recall our popularity."

As he spoke I did so. In the mind's eye I saw a sumptuous carriage-and-pair. The horses bristled with mettle. The carriage was on C-springs, and a coachman and footman were on the box. They wore claret livery and cockades. The footman's arms were folded. His gloves were of a dazzling whiteness. In the carriage was an elderly commanding lady with an aristocratic nose; and in her lap was a pug dog of plethoric habit and a face as black as your hat.

All the time my new acquaintance was watching me with streaming eyes. "What do you see?" he asked.

I described my mental picture.

"There you are," he said; "and what do you see to-day? There, look!"

I glanced up at his bidding, and a costly motor was gliding smoothly by. It weighed several tons, and its tyres were like dropsical life-belts. On its shining door was a crest. The chauffeur was kept warm by costly furs. Inside was an elderly lady, and in her arms was a russet Pekingese.

"So you see what went when I went," the pug said, after a noisy pause. "It wasn't only pugs that went; it was carriages-and-pairs, and the sound of eight hoofs all at once, and footmen with folded arms. We passed out together. Exeunt pugs. Enter Peeks and Petrol. And now we are out in the cold."

I sympathized with him. "You must transfer your affection to another class, that's all," I said. "If the nobs have gone back on you, there are still a great many pug-lovers left."

"No," he said, "that's no good; we want chicken. We must have it. Without it, we had better become extinct." He wept with the sound of a number of syphons all leaking together, and waddled away.

At this moment the man who has charge of the chairs came up for my money. I gave the penny.

"I'm afraid I must charge you twopence," the man said.

I asked him why.

"For the dog," he said. "When they talks we has to make a charge for them."

"But it wasn't mine," I assured him. "It was a total stranger."

"Come now," he said; and to save trouble I paid him.

But how like a pug!

II. THE NEW BOOK OF BEAUTY

A hundred years ago the Books of Beauty had line engravings by Charles Heath, and long-necked, ringleted ladies looked wistfully or simperingly at you. I have several examples: _Caskets_, _Albums_, _Keepsakes_. The new Book of Beauty has a very different title. It is called _The Pekingese_, and is the revised edition for 1914.

The book is different in other ways too. The steel engravers having long since all died of starvation, here are photographs only, in large numbers, and (strange innovation!) there are more of gentlemen than of ladies. For this preponderance there is a good commercial reason, as any student of the work will quickly discover, for we are now entering a sphere of life where the beauty of the sterner sex (if so severe a word can be applied to such sublimation of everything that is soft and voluptuous and endearing) is more considered than that of the other. Beautiful ladies are here in some profusion, but the first place is for beautiful and guinea-earning gentlemen.

In the old Books of Beauty one could make a choice. There was always one lady supremely longer-necked, more wistful or more simpering than the others. But in this new Book of Beauty one turns the pages only to be more perplexed. The embarrassment of riches is too embarrassing. I have been through the work a score of times and am still wondering on whom my affections and admiration are most firmly fixed.

How to play the part of Paris where all the competitors have some irresistibility, as all have of either sex? Once I thought that Wee Mo of Westwood was my heart's chiefest delight, "a flame-red little dog with black mask and ear-fringes, profuse coat and featherings, flat wide skull, short flat face, short bowed legs and well-shaped body." But then I turned back to Broadoak Beetle and on to Broadoak Cirawanzi, and Young Beetle, and Nanking Fo, and Ta Fo of Greystones, and Petshé Ah Wei, and Hay Ch'ah of Toddington, and that superb Sultanic creature, King Rudolph of Ruritania, and Champion Howbury Ming, and Su Eh of Newnham, and King Beetle of Minden, and Champion Hu Hi, and Mo Sho, and that rich red dog, Buddha of Burford. And having chosen these I might just as well scratch out their names and write others, for every male face in this book is a poem.

The ladies, as I have said, are in the minority, for the obvious reason that these little disdainful distinguished gentlemen figure here as potential fathers, with their fees somewhat indelicately named: since there's husbandry on earth as well as in heaven.

Such ladies as are here are here for their beauty alone and are beyond price. Among them I note with especial joy Yiptse of Chinatown, Mandarin Marvel, who "inherits the beautiful front of her sire, Broadoak Beetle"; Lavender of Burton-on-Dee, "fawn, with black mask"; Chi-Fa of Alderbourne, "a most charming and devoted little companion"; Yeng Loo of Ipsley; Detlong Mo-li of Alderbourne, one of the "beautiful red daughters of Wong-ti of Alderbourne," Champion Chaou Chingur, of whom her owner says that "in quaintness and individuality and in loving disposition she is unequalled," and is also "quite a 'woman of the world,' very _blasée_ and also very punctilious in trifles"; Pearl of Cotehele, "bright red, with beautiful back"; E-Wo Tu T'su; Berylune Tzu Hsi Chu; Ko-ki of Radbourne and Siddington Fi-fi.

Every now and then there is an article in the papers asking and answering the question, What is the greatest benefit that has come to mankind in the past half-century? The answer is usually the camera, or matches, or the Marconi system, or the cinema, or the pianola, or the turbine, or the Röntgen rays, or the telephone, or the bicycle, or Lord Northcliffe, or the motor-car. Always something utilitarian or scientific. But why should we not say at once that it was the introduction of Pekingese spaniels into England from China? Because that is the truth.

The Listener

Once upon a time there was a man with such delicate ears that he could hear even letters speak. And, of course, letters lying in pillar-boxes have all kinds of things to say to each other.

One evening, having posted his own letter, he leaned against the pillar-box and listened.

"Here's another!" said a voice. "Who are you, pray?"

"I'm an acceptance with thanks," said the new letter.

"What do you accept?" another voice asked.

"An invitation to dinner," said the new letter, with a touch of pride.

"Pooh!" said the other. "Only that."

"It's at a house in Kensington," said the new letter.

"Well, _I'm_ an acceptance of an invitation to a dance at a duchess's," was the reply, and the new letter said no more.

Then all the others began.

"I bring news of a legacy," said one.

"I try to borrow money," said another, rather hopelessly.

"I demand the payment of a debt," said a sharp metallic voice.

"I decline an offer of marriage," said a fourth, with a wistful note.

"I've got a cheque inside," said a fifth, with a swagger.

"I convey the sack," said a sixth in triumph.

"I ask to be taken on again, at a lower salary," said another, with tears.

"What do you think I am?" one inquired. "You shall have six guesses."

"Give us a clue," said a voice.

"Very well. I'm in a foolscap envelope."

Then the guessing began.

One said a writ.

Another said an income-tax demand.

But no one could guess it.

"I'm a poem for a paper," said the foolscap letter at last.

"Are you good?" asked a voice.

"Not good enough, I'm afraid," said the poem. "In fact I've been out and back again seven times already."

"A war poem, I suppose?"

"I suppose so. I rhyme 'trench' and 'French.'"

"Guess what I am," said a sentimental murmur.

"Anyone could guess that," was the gruff reply. "You're a love-letter."

"Quite right," said the sentimental murmur. "But how clever of you!"

"Well," said another, "you're not the only love-letter here. I'm a love-letter too."

"How do you begin?" asked the first.

"I begin 'My Darling,'" said the second love-letter.

"That's nothing," said the first; "I begin 'My Ownest Own.'"

"I don't think much of either of those beginnings," said a new voice. "I begin, 'Most Beautiful.'"

"You're from a man, I suppose?" said the second love-letter.

"Yes, I am," said the new one. "Aren't you?"

"No, I'm from a woman," said the second. "I'll admit your beginning's rather good. But, how do you end?"

"I end with 'A million kisses,'" said the new one.

"Ah, I've got you there!" said the second. "I end with 'For ever and ever yours.'"

"That's not bad," said the first, "but my ending is pretty good in its way. I end like this: 'To-morrow will be Heaven once more, for then we meet again.'"

"Oh, do stop all this love talk," said the gruff voice again, "and be sensible like me. I'm a letter to an Editor putting everything right and showing up all the iniquities and ineptitudes of the Government. I shall make a stir, I can tell you. I'm It, I am. I'm signed 'Pro Bono Publico.'"

"That's funny!" said another letter. "I'm signed that too, but I stick up for the Government."

But at this moment the listener was conscious of a hand on his arm and a lantern in his face.

"Here," said the authoritative tones of a policeman, "I think you've been leaning against this pillar-box long enough. If you can't walk I'll help you home."

Thus does metallic prose invade the delicate poetical realm of supernature.

The Dark Secret

It was the most perfect September day that anyone could remember. The sun had risen in a dewy mist. The early air was pungent with yellowing bracken.

Then the mist cleared, the dew disappeared from everywhere but the shadows, and the Red Admirals again settled on the Michaelmas daisies.

A young man walked up and down the paths of the garden and drank in its sweetness; then he passed on to the orchard and picked from the wet grass a reddening apple, which he ate. Something pulled at his flannel trousers: it was a spaniel puppy, and with it he played till breakfast-time.

He was staying with some friends for a cricket match. It was the last of the season and his only game that year. As one grows older and busier, cricket becomes less and less convenient, and on the two occasions that he had arranged for a day it had been wet.

He had never been a great hand at the game. He had never made 100 or even 70, never taken any really good wickets; but he liked every minute of a match, so much so that he was always the first to volunteer to field when there was a man short, or run for some one who was lame, or even to stand as umpire.

To be in the field was the thing. Those rainy interludes in the pavilion which so develop the stoicism of the first-class cricketer had no power to make a philosopher of him. All their effect on him was detrimental: they turned him black. He fretted and raged.

But to-day there was not a cloud; nothing but the golden September sun.

It was one of the jolly matches. There was no jarring element: no bowler who was several sizes too good; no bowler who resented being taken off; no habitual country-house cricketer whose whole conversation was the jargon of the game; no batsman too superior to the rest; no acerbitous captain with a lost temper over every mistake; no champagne for lunch. Most of the players were very occasional performers: the rest were gardeners and a few schoolboys. Nice boys--boys who might have come from Winchester.

He was quickly out, but he did not mind, for he had had one glorious swipe and was caught in the deep field off another, and there is no better way of getting out than that.

In the field he himself stood deep, and the only catch that came to him he held; while in the intervals between wickets he lay on the sweet grass while the sun warmed him through and through. If ever it was good to be alive....

And suddenly the sun no longer warmed him, and he noticed that it had sunk behind a tree in whose hundred-yard-long shadow he was standing. For a second he shivered, not only at the loss of tangible heat, but at the realization that the summer was nearly gone (for it was still early in the afternoon), and this was the last cricket match, and he had missed all the others, and he was growing old, and winter was coming on, and next year he might have no chance; but most of all he regretted the loss of the incredible goodness of this day, and for the first time in his life the thought phrased itself in his mind: "No sooner do we grasp the present than it becomes the past." The haste of it all oppressed him. Nothing stands still.

"A ripping day, wasn't it?" said his host as they walked back.

"Perfect," he replied, with a sigh. "But how soon over!"

They stopped for a moment at the top of the hill to look at the sunset, and he sighed again as his thoughts flew to that print of the "Melancholia" which had hung on the stairs in his early home.

"Notice the sunset," some visitor had once said to him. "Some day you will know why Dürer put that in."

And now he knew.

That evening he heard the Winchester boys making plans for the winter sports at Pontresina in the Christmas vac.

The Scholar and the Pirate

In an old bookshop which I visit, never without making a discovery or two--not infrequently, as in the present case, assisted in my good fortune by the bookseller himself--I lately came upon an edition of Long's _Marcus Aurelius_ with an admirable prefatory note that is, I believe, peculiar to this issue--that of 1869. And since the eyes of the present generation have never been turned towards America so often and so seriously as latterly, when our Trans-Atlantic cousins have become our allies, blood once more of our blood, the passage may be reprinted with peculiar propriety. Apart, however, from its American interest, the document is valuable for its dignity and independence, and it had the effect of sending me to that rock of refuge, _The Dictionary of National Biography_, to inquire further as to its author. There I found that George Long, whose translation of the Imperial Stoic is a classic, was born in 1800; educated at Macclesfield Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge; in 1821 was bracketed Craven scholar with Macaulay and Professor Malden, but gained a fellowship over both of them; and in 1824 went to Charlotteville, Virginia, as professor of ancient languages. Returning in 1828 to profess Greek at University College, London, he was thenceforward, throughout his long life, concerned with the teaching and popularizing of the classics, finding time, however, also to be called to the Bar, to lecture on jurisprudence and civil law, and to help to found the Royal Geographical Society. His _Marcus Aurelius_ is his best-known work, but his edition of Cicero's Orations, his discourse on Roman Law, and his Epictetus also stand alone. After many years' teaching at Brighton College, Long retired to Chichester, where he died in 1879.

Late in life he brought out anonymously a book of essays, entitled _An Old Man's Thoughts about Many Things_, in which I have been dipping. I do not say it would bear reprinting now, but anyone seeing it on a friend's shelf should borrow it, or in a bookshop should buy it, because such kindly good sense, such simple directness and candour and love of the humanities are rare. It has its mischief, too. The old scholar's opinion on statue-making in general and on London's statues in particular are expressed with a dry frankness that is refreshing. I make no effort to resist quoting a little:

"It is in the nature of things that statues should be made. They were made more than two thousand years ago, and I believe the business has never stopped, for when people could not get good statues, they were content with bad, as we are now.

"If I might give advice to the men now living, who look forward to the honour, if it is an honour, of being set up in bronze in the highways, or in marble in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's; if I might advise, I would say, leave a legacy in your will for your own statue. It will save much trouble and people will think better of you when you are gone, if you cost them nothing. As to their laughing at you for looking after your own statue, be not afraid of that.

"It is very disagreeable nowadays to see a man standing for ever on his legs in public, doing nothing but stand, and seeming as if he were never going to do anything else.

"If a man shall try to persuade me that a statue should be nothing more than the effigy of a man standing on a pedestal, I shall never be convinced. I would rather see a living man standing on an inverted cask, as I have seen a slave when he was sold, not that the sale is a very pleasant thing to see, but the man produced a much better effect than many of our statues, for he expressed something and they express nothing.

"As we cannot or at least ought not to make our statues naked or blanket-dressed, and as body and legs are merely given to a statue in order to support the head, for the legs and body might be any legs and any body, would it not be wise to be satisfied with the head only? This would be a great saving, and though the sculptor would get less for a head than for a head with body and legs to it, he would have more heads to make. This is a hint, which I throw out by the way, for the consideration of committees who sit on statues, by which I mean men who sit together to talk about a thing of which most of them know nothing.

"When the negroes of Africa have been brought to the same state of civilization as the white man, they will make statues and set them up in public; and as we who are white make black statues, they who are black will of course make white statues.

"Can anybody say what sin Dr. Jenner committed for which he does perpetual penance, not in white, but in black, his face black and his hands too, seated in the most public part of London, fixed to his chair, with no hope of rising from it?

"This seated figure might be anybody. I see nothing by which I recognize Dr. Jenner; to say nothing of a cow, there is not even a calf by his side, with the benevolent physician's hand on the animal.

"I cannot approve of a seated black statue in the open air--a black man sitting, and no more.

"I sincerely pity our seated gentlemen in London, poor Cartwright, who looks like an old cobbler on his stool, and Fox, worse treated still, blanket-dressed, fat and black. No wonder some shortsighted man from the new Confederate States once took Fox for a negro woman, the emblem of British philanthropy and a memorial of the abolition of the slave trade.

"The only beasts on which we can now place our heroes are horses. I may be wrong in my opinion, but I see no beauty in a horse standing still and a man's legs dangling down from the beast's back; nor do I think that the matter is mended by the horse and rider being of colossal size, though they ought to be larger than life. Perhaps we shall not have any more of these statues; but is it impossible to remove those that we have?

"As we are a fighting people, we have been great makers of statues of fighting men. We put them even in churches. This reminds that when the time shall come for finishing and adorning the inside of St. Paul's, there will be an enormous quantity of old stone to dispose of, which is now in the shape of generals, captains, admirals, lions and other animals.

"It is singular, or it is not singular, I can't say which, that we who box, wrestle, run and in many ways work our bodies, more than any other nation, have not employed our sculptors to immortalize our athletic heroes. Some of them would make good subjects for the artist. He might strip the boxer or runner naked, if he liked, and exhibit his art in the representation of strength and beauty of form. I have some misgivings about the faces of boxers, which are not remarkable for beauty, but the artist may improve them a little without destroying the likeness; and besides, in a naked figure we look less at the face than at the body and limbs. The champion of England would certainly have had a statue by Lysippus or some artist as good, if he had been lucky enough to live in ancient times.... We shall, of course, want a place to put these statues in, for we may be sure they will not get into the churches, which are only made for statues of fighting men who have killed somebody or ordered somebody to kill somebody.

"I could go on much longer, but I don't choose. I write to amuse myself, and also to instruct, and when I am tired, I stop. I see no reason why I should exhaust the subject. I should only be giving my ideas to people who have none, who make a reputation out of other folks' brains, who pounce on anything that they find ready to their hand, and flood us with books made only to sell."

It is already, I imagine, abundantly clear that Long would not have much liked many things that we do to-day. Writing of "Place and Power," he says: "At that very distant time when all members of Parliament shall be Andrew Marvells and will live on two hundred a year, poor men may do our business for us; but for the present I prefer men who are rich enough to live without the profits of place. I wish somebody would move for a return of all the visible and invisible means of support which every member of the Commons has. I want to know how much every man in the House receives of public money, whether he is soldier, sailor, place-holder, sinecurist, or anything else; and also how much he has by the year of his own." Elsewhere he says: "There is no occasion to print any more sermons.... I have always wondered why so much is written on the doctrines and principles of Christianity and on good living, when we have it done long ago in a few books which we all refer to as our authority." And this is good: "I wish Euclid could have secured a perpetual copyright. It might have helped the finances of the Greeks."

But I am not proposing to dissect Long's essays; it is the fine rebuke to an American publisher that I want to bring to your notice, for there Long's habitual serenity takes an edge. His protest runs thus:

"I have been informed that an American publisher has printed the first edition of this translation of M. Antoninus. I do not grudge him his profit, if he has made any. There may be many men and women in the United States who will be glad to read the thoughts of the Roman Emperor. If the American politicians, as they are called, would read them also, I should be much pleased, but I do not think the emperor's morality would suit their taste.