Part 1

Note: Images of the original pages are available through HathiTrust Digital Library. See https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015063547536

THE SILVER DOMINO

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_OPINIONS OF THE PRESS._

"The 'Silver Domino' can handle words and phrases in a manner which either proves an extraordinary original gift or a good deal of practice.... The parody of Miss Olive Schreiner is one of the best and severest parodies we have seen for years.... The book is one to read and laugh over."--_Daily Chronicle, Oct. 14th._

"All unexpectedly one finds one's self in the midst of a most up-to-date literary satire.... I am bound to say the 'thwackings' [in the 'Silver Domino'] are entertaining."--_Star, Oct. 10th._

"The unknown author of the 'Silver Domino' has been good enough to send me his book, which is very bright and amusing and outspoken. He has his knife into a great many people."--_The World, Oct. 10th._

"An audacious little book called the 'Silver Domino' is causing a great deal of amusement in literary circles.... There are some delightful parodies; also a capital literary creed, which takes liberties with the _Saturday Review_, which, by the way, is again for sale."--_Western Daily Mercury, Oct. 15th._

"The 'Silver Domino' consists of truculently candid sallies at the expense of men eminent in politics, literature, and journalism."--_The Times, Oct. 15th._

"I must confess to have chuckled hugely over some of his [the 'Silver Domino's'] diatribes."--_News of the World, Oct. 23rd._

"Pungent, mordant satire went out with Grenville Murray, but his mantle has fallen upon the anonymous author of the 'Silver Domino,' who has issued some intensely amusing social and literary side-whispers.... All that he has to tell us is told with wonderful _verve_ and in an easy flowing style which has a great charm for all who can appreciate such satire.... I could dwell upon the 'Silver Domino' with great benefit to my readers and satisfaction to myself, but space forbids; so I will only say that the book is the most valuable contribution to our satirical literature that has appeared for many, many years. Our advice is: 'Get it; read it; and re-read it.'"--_Society, Oct, 19th._

"The 'Silver Domino' is a volume of essays.... There are pungency and freshness about many of the writer's observations."--_Sunday Sun, Oct. 23rd._

"The 'Silver Domino' is suggestive of the gentle Malayan exercise of running a-muck or the emancipated young person having a fling to its own obvious enjoyment."--_Saturday Review, Oct. 29th._

"If it is to Mr. Lang's generosity that we owe the hatching of this book, that gentleman must assuredly stand aghast."--_Vanity Fair, Oct. 29th._

"The literary puzzle of the hour is--Who wrote the 'Silver Domino'?... The question of authorship apart, nothing at once so bitter and so clever has appeared since the days of Lord Byron."--_The Literary World, Nov. 4th._

"'Who is the author of the "Silver Domino"?' That is the question I am asked wherever I go. Whoever it is, he is the author of an extremely clever book.... Were I to make one single quotation from the 'Silver Domino' you would be angry with me, yet there is not one of you but will read it speedily."--_The Queen, Oct. 29th._

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THE SILVER DOMINO;

Or

Side Whispers, Social and Literary.

Eighth Edition.

With Author's Note to This Issue.

London: Lamley and Co., Exhibition Road. 1893.

[All rights reserved.]

To

ANDREW LANG,

WHOSE LITERARY GENEROSITY TOWARDS ME

IS PAST ALL PRAISE,

I,

WITH THE UTMOST RECOGNITION,

DEDICATE THIS BOOK.

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

Since the first edition of this book was published, some three weeks ago, a grave event has occurred, which may be said to have closed an epoch in the history of Literature. Tennyson, Poet and Laureate, the last, perhaps, of the exponents of a pure, refined, and musical school of English poesy, has left us. I will not say he has "crossed the bar," because I consider that phrase has been overdone. He has passed away in the fulness of years and honours, amid the sorrowing regret of all those thousands to whom his melodious muse was as a part of home and country. No poet ever lived a more easy and amply rewarded life,--no poet ever died a more easy and enviable death. And I have nothing to recant in what I have said of him in my chapter entitled "Of Certain Great Poets." I am only sorry that he did not live to read my lines, as I know he would have readily understood the sincere spirit of admiration for his great qualities that moved me to my candid speech. My "reviewers" have not elected to quote any word of mine on the subject of the late Laureate, they generally preferring to save time and trouble by an all-round but rash declaration that there is no good said of any one in my book. I therefore challenge my readers to the perusal of "Certain Great Poets," for I will yield to no one in my admiration of Tennyson, no, not even to Lewis Morris, who calls him "Master," whereas I was privileged to call him "Friend." I have praised his genius with as much fervour and possibly more sincerity than any of the versifiers who have written rhymes to his memory while squabbling for his vacant post; and, as regards his Diogenes-like unsociability and distaste for the "outside vulgar," I have only said what every one admits to be true. I transcribe here the copy of a letter received from the great Poet not long before his death:--

"ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY.

"MY DEAR ----,--I thank you heartily for your kind letter and welcome gift. You do well not to care for fame. Modern fame is too often a mere crown of thorns, and brings all the vulgarity of the world upon you. I sometimes wish I had never written a line.

"Your friend, "TENNYSON."

The "vulgarity of the world" and the "outside vulgar" are phrases by which the literary folk designate the vast Public, without whose substantial appreciation, they, the inside elect, would starve. The "outside vulgar," however, with unerring good taste, have purchased Tennyson's work for the past fifty years, and in the rich harvest of thoughts they have thus gathered, they can smile with a tender indulgence at their Kingly Minstrel's shrinking aversion to the "crowd" who loved him. He was the greatest poet of the Victorian era; and, draped in the flag of England, as befits his sturdy and splendid patriotism, he sleeps the sleep of the just and pure-minded who have served their Art, as worthy subjects serve their Queen, loyally and unflinchingly to the end. It was "fitting," I suppose, that he should be laid to rest in dismal "Poet's Corner"--(beside Browning, too! the Real singer beside the Sham!)--but many would rather have seen him placed in a shrine of his own,--a warm grassy grave under the "talking" English oaks whose forest language he so well translated, than thus pent up among the crumbling ashes of inferior and almost forgotten men.

Another change has come "o'er the spirit of my dream" since, in the language of the _Daily Chronicle_, I flung back the curtain and made my bow to the public "in a breezy, not to say slap-bang, manner." The _Pall Mall Gazette_ has changed hands and politics. Once, as will be seen in the ensuing pages, I adored the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Its fads, its whimsies, its prize "booms," and above all its religious notions, were my delight. It was, as I said, a "bright particular star" in the sphere of journalism, but I doubt whether it will continue to shine on. I much fear that its days of Whimsicality and Boom are over, though it now has a serious and gentlemanly Scot for an editor, who does not find his chief amusement in levelling cheap sneers at Crown and Constitution, and advocating a dangerous and (at heart) unpopular Democracy. However, we shall see. In the interim, though I may not now "adore" the _Pall Mall_, I mournfully respect it.

I fancy I have made a slight error in that harmless, but Grundy-scaring jest of mine entitled "The Journalist's Creed." I have alluded to the excellent and brilliant Henry Labouchere, as "very Rad of very Rad." It should have been "very Tory of very Tory." This is absurd? Incongruous? Impossible? Well! Events will prove whether I am right or wrong. And I beg to assure all whom it may concern, that I consider there is no more "irreverence" in the "Journalist's Creed" than is displayed by the respectable church-goer who murmurs an address or prayer to God in the hollow of his stove-pipe hat, rather than spoil the set of his trousers by kneeling down.

I very earnestly desire to thank my critics one and all for the attention they have bestowed upon me. They have taken me very seriously; much more seriously than I have taken myself. I am so little "peculiar," that I confess to have copied the phraseology of my diatribes on certain poets and novelists from the language of the "reviews" in divers journals, and I am truly surprised to hear such phraseology termed "vulgar." When I was a "known" author (I was, once!) reviewers "reviewed" _me_ with a profuseness of vituperative force that struck me as singular; but I did not presume to call their well-rounded terms of abuse "vulgar" or "scurrilous." Now I see I might very well have done so, as they all agree in a condemnation of their own literary vernacular. One lives and learns (this is a platitude), and when an author anonymously "slates" those who anonymously "slate" him, it is curious and instructive to observe what a different view is taken of his case! It is a strange world (platitude number two).

In conclusion I would fain express my gratitude for the diverting entertainment which I have had out of the various "guesses" as to my identity. They are guesses as wild and strange and erroneous as any that ever followed the track of a "domino noir" through the mazes of Carnival. I can, however, only repeat that I am not what I seem, and that up to the present, so far as my personality has been hinted at, or even boldly asserted, such supposititious "clues" are all random shots and fall wide of the mark. With the utmost civility, I beg to inform you, dear friends and enemies alike, that in this trivial matter of "guessing," you are all, every one of you,--wrong!

THE SILVER DOMINO.

_Nov. 9th, 1892._

CONTENTS

PAGE I. OPENETH DISCOURSE 3

II. SOLILOQUISETH ON LITTLE MANNERS 23

III. PRONOUNCETH ON LESSER MORALS 43

IV. OF SAVAGES AND SKELETONS 59

V. HOW NAMES ARE SUPERIOR TO PERSONS 79

VI. CONVERSETH WITH LORD SALISBURY 91

VII. CHATTETH WITH THE GRAND OLD MAN 109

VIII. OF THE TRUE JOURNALIST AND HIS CREED 127

IX. OF WRITERS IN GROOVES 137

X. OF THE SOCIAL ELEPHANT 165

XI. THE STORY OF A SOUTH AFRICAN DREAM 183

XII. QUESTIONETH CONCERNING THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 197

XIII. DESCRIBETH THE PIOUS PUBLISHER 211

XIV. OF CERTAIN GREAT POETS 227

XV. OF MORE POETS 251

XVI. TO A MIGHTY GENIUS 267

XVII. CONCERNING A GREAT FRATERNITY 293

XVIII. EULOGISETH ANDREW 311

XIX. BYRON LOQUITUR 327

XX. MAKETH EXIT 359

I.

OPENETH DISCOURSE.

Well, old musty, dusty, time-trodden arena of Literature and Society, what now? Are your doors wide open, and may a stranger enter? A perpetual dance is going on, so your outside advertisements proclaim; and truly a dance is good so long as it is suggestive of wholesome mirth. But is yours a dance of Death or of Life? A fandango of mockery, a rigadoon of sham, or a waltzing-game at "beggar my neighbour"? Moreover, is the fun worth paying for? Let me look in and judge.

Nay, by the gods of Homer, what a dire confusion of sight and sense and sound is all this "mortal coil" and whirligig of humanity! What noise and laughter, interspersed with sundry groanings, as of fiends in Hell! Listening, I catch the echoes of many voices I know; now and again I have glimpses of faces that in their beauty or ugliness, their smiling or sneering, are perfectly familiar to me. Friends? No, not precisely. No man who has lived long enough to be wise in social wisdom can be certain that he has a friend anywhere; besides, I do not pretend to have found what Socrates himself could not discover. Enemies then? Truly that is probable! Enemies are more than luxuries: they are necessities; one cannot live strongly or self-reliantly without them. One does not forgive them (such pure Christianity has never yet been in vogue); one fights them, and fighting is excellent exercise. So, have at you all, good braggarts of work done and undone! I am as ready to give and take the "passado" as any Mercutio on a hot Italian day. Note or disregard me, I care naught; it is solely for my own diversion, not for yours, that I come amongst you. I want my amusement as others want theirs, and nothing amuses me quite so much as the strange customs and behaviour of the men and women of my time. I love them--in a way; but I cannot, help laughing at them--occasionally. Sentiment would be wasted on them; one does not "grieve" over folly and vice any more, unless one is an ill-paid (and therefore ill-used) cleric, because folly and vice assume such pettifogging and ludicrous aspects that one's risible faculties are at once excited, and pity dries up at its fountain-head. For we live in a little age, and nothing great can breathe in the stifling atmosphere of our languid, listless indifference to God and man.

Nevertheless, there is a curious touch of fantastic buffoonery in everything that temporarily stirs our inertia nowadays. Consider our Browning-mania! Our Stanley-measles! With what dubious and half-bewildered enthusiasm we laid the mortal remains of our incomprehensible "Sordello" to rest in Westminster Abbey! With what vulgar staring and ridiculous parade we gathered together to see the "cute" Welsh trader in ivory wedded to his "Tennant for life" in the same wrongfully-used sacred edifice! Has not our "world of fashion" metaphorically kissed the cow-boots of Buffalo Bill? and "once upon a time," as the fairy-tales say, did not the great true heart of England pour itself out on--Jumbo? A mere elephant, vast of trunk and small of tail--a living representative of our Indian and African possessions; sure 'twas an innocent beast-worship that became us well! What matter if giddy France held her sides with hilarious laughter at us, and Spain and Italy giggled decorously at us behind their fans and mantillas, and Germany broke into a huge guffaw at our "goings-on" over the brim of her beer-mug,--let those laugh who win! And have we not always won? yea, though (in an absent-minded moment) we allowed Barnum, of ever-blessed memory, to buy for vulgar dollars that which we once so loved!

Ah, we are a marvellous and motley crowd at this huge gathering called Life, dear gossips all!--gossips in society and out of society--a motley, lying, hypocritical, crack-brained crowd! I glide in among you, masked for the nonce; I hold my silver draperies well up to my eyes that the smile of derision I now and then indulge in may not show itself too openly. I am not wishful to offend, albeit I am oft offended. Yet it is well-nigh impossible to avoid giving offence in these days. We are like hedgehogs: we bristle at a touch, out of the excess of our hog-like self-consciousness, and the finger of Truth laid on a hair of our skins makes us start with feeble irritability and tetchy nervousness. Christ's command to "bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you," is to us the merest feeble paradox; for our detestation of all persons who presume to interfere with our business, and who say unpleasant things about us, is too burningly sincere to admit of discussion. I, for my part, frankly confess to entertaining the liveliest animosity towards certain individuals of my acquaintance, people who shake my hand with the utmost cordiality, smile ingenuously in my eyes, and then go off and write a lying paragraph about me in order to pocket a nefarious half-crown. I never feel disposed to "bless" such folk, and certes, I should be made of flabbier matter than a jelly-fish if I prayed for them.

But then I am not a Christian; please understand that at once. I am a Jew, a Gentile, a Pharisee, and--a devil! I may be all four if I like and yet be Pope of Rome. Why not? since these are the days of free thought, and one's private religious opinions are not made the subject of inquisitorial examination. Moreover, all classes aid and abet the truly pious hypocrite, provided his hypocrisy be strictly consistent. With equal delightsomeness, all creeds, no matter how absurd, just now obtain some kind of a hearing. We are at perfect liberty to worship any sort of fetish we like, without interference. We can grovel before our Divine Self, and sink to the lowest possible level of degradation in ministering to its greedy wants, and yet we shall not for this cause be ostracised from society or excommunicated from any sacred pale. With clerics and with laymen alike, our Divine Self needs more care than our soul's salvation; for our Divine Self, in its splendid egoism, is a breathing, eating, drinking, digesting Necessity; our soul's salvation is a hazy, far-off, dubious concern wherein we are but vaguely interested, a sort of dream at night which we now and then remember languidly in the course of the day.

Talking of dreams, one cannot but consider them with a certain respect. They are such very powerful "factors," as the useful penny-a-liner would say, in the world's history. We affect to despise them; and yet how large a portion of the community are at this moment getting their daily bread-and-butter out of nothing more substantial than the "airy fabric" of a vision, which in this particular instance has proved solid enough to establish itself as one of the foundations of European civilisation.

"_The angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream._"

It is all there. That dream of the good Joseph was the strange nutshell in which lay the germ of all the multitudinous Churches, Popes, Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, confessors, priests, parsons, and last (not least), curates. One wonders (when one is a doomed and damned "masquer" like myself) what would have happened if Joseph had dreamed a different dream? or, as might have chanced, if he had slept so profoundly as not to have dreamed at all? We should have perhaps been under the sway of Mahomet (another dream), or Buddha (another dream); for certain it is we cannot do without dreams at any period of our lives, from the celebrated "deep sleep" of Adam, when he dreamt he lost a rib to gain a wife, down to the "hypnotic-trance" schools of to-day, where we are gravely informed we can be taught how to murder each other "by suggestion." The most abandoned of us has an Idea--or an Ideal--of something better (or worse) than ourselves, according to whether our daily potations be crushed out of burgundy grape, or made of mere vulgar gin-and-water. Even Hodge, growing stertorous and sleepy over his poisoned beer and _Daily Telegraph_ at his favourite "public," takes his turn at castle-building, and drowsily muses on a coming time of Universal Uproar, which _till_ it comes is proudly called Socialism, when the "sanguinary" aristocrat will be laid low in the levelling mire, and he, plain Hodge, will be proved a more valuable human unit than any educated ruler of any realm. Alas for thee, good Hodge, that thou should'st boozily indulge in such romantic flights of fancy! Thou, who in uninstructed thirsty haste dost rush to vote for him who most generously plies thee with beer, what would'st thou do without the aristocrat or rich man thou would'st fain trample upon? Who would employ thee, simple Hodge? Another Hodge like thyself? Grant this, and lo! Hodge Number Two, by possessing the means, the will and the power to make thee work for him, tacitly becomes thy master and superior. Wherefore the Equality thou clamourest after, is wholly at an end if thou, Hodge Number One, dost hire thyself out as labourer or servant to Hodge Number Two! This is a plain statement, made plainly, without Gladstonian periods of eloquence; think it over, friend Hodge, when thou art alone, _sans_ beer and cheap news-sheet to obfuscate thy simple intelligence.

Nevertheless, it would be cruel to deprive even Hodge of an idea, provided the idea be good for him. For ideas are the only unalterable suggestions of the eternal; their forms change, but themselves are ever the same. One Idea, running through history, built Baal-bec, the Pyramids, the temples of India, the Duomo of Milan, and in our own poor day of brag, the hideous Eiffel tower. The idea has always been the same; to compass great height and vastness of some kind, and Eiffel has only dragged down to the level of his merely mechanical intelligence Nimrod's fantastic notion of the Tower of Babel. Nimrod had a belief that he could reach Heaven. M. Eiffel was convinced he could advertise himself. _Voilà la difference!_ That "difference" is the great gulf between ancient art and modern. In the past they went star-gazing and tried to climb--in the present, we stay where we are, look after ourselves, and put up an advertisement. Thus has the form of the idea changed from the likeness of a god into a painted clown--yet, fundamentally, it is still the same idea. And, reduced to its primeval element, its first dim, nebulous hint, an idea is nothing but a dream.

Hence I return to my previous proposition, _i.e._, the respect we owe to dreams, particularly when they result in fixed realities such as, well!--such as curates, for example. I mention this class of individuals particularly, because there are so many of them, and also because they are generally so desperately poor, and (to young ladies in country parishes) so desperately interesting. What English fiction would do without a curate or a clerical personage of some kind or other to figure in its pages I dare not imagine. The novels of other countries do not produce such hosts of invaluable churchmen, but in England the most successful books are frequently those which treat of the clergy, from "Robert Elsmere," who found himself startled out of orthodoxy by a few familiar and well-ventilated French and German theories of creed, down to the gentle milksops of the church as found in the novels of Anthony Trollope and the dreary stories of Miss Edna Lyall. This well-intentioned lady's productions would assuredly find few readers were it not for the "old-woman-and-faded-spinster" fanaticism for clergymen. And yet--I once knew a wicked army man (worshippers of Edna Lyall prepare to be disgusted! truth is always disgusting) who for some years amused himself by collecting out of the daily newspapers, cuttings of all the police reports and criminal cases in which clergymen were implicated, and this volume, an exceedingly bulky one, he brought to me, with a Mephistophelian twinkle in his bad old eyes.

"Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest!" said he. "These fellows in 'holy orders' have committed every crime in the calendar, and the only mischief I have not found them out in yet is Arson!"