ONE summer evening a rather disreputable-looking individual stood regarding the Thames from London Bridge. On his head was a broad soft hat, so artfully kneaded and cocked that it seemed to claim for its owner the possession of superior intelligence. Had it not been that the coat upon his back was pointedly suggestive of poverty, one might almost have been led to mistake him for a high dignitary in some imposing body. He stood with his elbows resting upon the parapet of the bridge, and his hands clasped behind his head. He was not a Socialist, yet he claimed to be a philosopher. When his mind had been unusually active during the day, he loved to stand on the bridge at sunset and unbosom himself to the river. He would have preferred an argument, but that was not always available; those whom he deemed worthy his strife being remarkably few. Occasionally, when hard pressed by a shrewder head than his own, he would imitate the malpractices of the hermit crab, and retreat into the shell of some author deceased, where he had the advantage that sometimes comes from being better read than your friends. On his own peculiar subject, however, he was invincible. After much consideration, he had named his favourite theme, the Philosophy of Pessimism and the Pessimism of Culture. As was to be expected, even from one claiming the mighty title of Philosopher, his treatment of the problem generally favoured the suspicion that it had been concocted simply as a basis for a foregone conclusion. This person, then, standing on the bridge, mused.

"The only luxury which Misery allows her victims is a sneer. A sneer may be roughly described as the suicide of a smile. There is imprinted on its once fair aspect a mixed and ugly

expression of failure, fear, and fury. Yet all sneers have not all the same history. Endeavour to smile when your mouth is stringent with acid, and you do something very different. Thus Sniffins sneers because he has a foul mouth, and cannot help doing so. Sometimes he even intends to be friendly, but fate (or his mouth) is against him. I know Sniffins and I know myself, and there are many others of the same kidney whom I do not, and have no wish to know. For myself, I sneer because, as I have already said, it is the only luxury which Misery allows her victims. I am not, I may say, so bitter as Sniffins, for the simple reason that I am more philosophical. But I must guard myself from misapprehension. Could any one overhear me, they would cry, 'Ah! you are a pessimist.' 'Granted,' I would reply. But not your literary pessimist, not your snivelling pessimist, not one of your pessimistic précieux.' Ah! sublime Molière ! how quickly could you have sympathized with me-you who knew men and laughed at them but never despised them, as unfortunately I do. My weakness in this respect would have exposed me also to your laughter. Alas! we cannot all possess genius, nor can every one have a king for his friend. My case, even you would admit, is peculiar. Once I was admired, sought after, even loved by somebody. Now I am sordid, disreputable, regarded of nobody. I do not complain of disillusion so much as of physical discomfort. I am come to this pretty pass, that whereas when I was prosperous I had one friend-myself, now I have none. Yet Timon's rage be far from me! Low as I am, I will never condescend to hate what formerly I laughed at, but enjoyed. Nor am I a Thersites spiteful cur-hiring out

my bitterness as another does her charms. No! Give me a crust and a sip of wine, a clean-swept door-step warmed by the sun in some quiet street, and a literary pessimist sitting at my feet, and he who brought me there to hear me curse life will have bitter reason to complain, 'Behold, you have blessed it.' I am such an one, that if Horace had never known Mæcenas, and had taken to the gutter by a choice that wore the aspect of necessity to deceive him, I think he might have deigned to shake me by the hand. I rail with good reason, but not always bitterly, and mostly without malice. I am discontented with my lot, yet I pride myself justly on my equanimity. My philosophy makes me superior to the position which I am forced to occupy in society, but it is none the less the veritable fruit of that position. This is interesting. The futility of life no longer affords me food for mournful reflections, because having tried everything and failed there is nothing left for me to attempt. It is generally those who have not exhausted half the possibilities of success and happiness that life affords who have most to say about the unreachableness of things. Again, the transitoriness of life is a consoling thought to one who but seldom gets any enjoyment out of it. That was a strengthening thought to the big blackguard,

Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the

roughest day.

kind at large, or deplore rapid currents of events which you prophesy are hurrying their victims to certain destruction, but which you yourselves calmly survey from a place of safety; I am beset with troubles, and cry out not caring who hears me. You are mournfully musical over the vanishing form of Immortality. It is enough for me if after life's fitful fever I sleep well.' Are you, indeed, pessimists worthy of the name, compared with one whose only comfort is that a luckless finish to a joyless day makes at least an end of it? Ah! Barty! where is the good of heaping up the agony when you are alone? Be candid! I will, though it goes against the grain. Yes, I have to confess that the only hindrance to my perfect calm are the amorous visits of the slut Expectation. I go to sleep with my head upon a stone and with the pattering of gentle rain for a lullaby; and lo! I awaken in the morning with her soft arms round my neck and her whisper in my ear that on that day for certain Fortune is coming to visit me. Of course I do not believe her; still it is annoying. Certainly I do not regret that as I grow older her visits are becoming less frequent; I feel but the more philosophical."

So he rambled on. Just then some one paused near him. The new-comer was well dressed and had an air of distinction about him, as of pride continually lapsing to the verge of confirmed melancholy and suddenly jerking itself alive again. They had once been friends; and when their eyes met, for an instant they seemed to recognize the fact, then as suddenly to forget it. As the silence grew between them, they each became more and more absorbed in watching the river. At last the new-comer's thoughts took utterance thus.

"Life is so transitory, illusory, anonymous. Here to-day, gone tomorrow; so much attempted, so little done; for ever nameless. What matters it that all our lives through,

like obedient slaves, we toil to lay something upon the world's altar? The hand that offers withers with the gift. As the Present issues radiant from the womb of the Past, life comes trippingly forward and promises priceless kingdoms that shall never perish. And scarcely is the promise spoken before part of it is withdrawn; and all years it is one sad story of relinquished hopes. The soldier dreams of glory, and it comes to him glimmering faintly through a mist of blood and with a sound of lamentation.' The poet hopes for immortality in the realms that his songs have peopled. Alas! do not even the Immortals die? The statesman receives the homage of a nation. Then the Silences receive him; and his acts, his innumerable acts, whether good, bad, or indifferent-who can say what they are?-work themselves out so differently from what he had expected, and in the course of a few years become as useless as he is himself.

through the brief space of a few

And

the religious sceptics and the common people shriek of doing one's duty and thinking of that only. But faith in these days what is duty?"

"Go it," murmured the shabby man, rubbing his hands softly.

"And the lesser tragedies of life that the world seldom hears of, how unspeakably bitter they are! High promise dwindling down to impotence, till Love's eyes swim sick at the sight; Love herself blasted in her bloom; Hope ruthlessly deflowered; the despair of emptied hearts. If the Graces must be separated, if Love has limbs distinct from Hope's, and an embroidered garment all her own, then may we never have to choose between them! Yetit is a sad confession-the heart can live without love, but not without hope. We talk glibly of despair; one glimpse of the hideous spectre shatters the tongue; those whom it embraces -die. It is in life as it is in art, to bring out the sunshine the shadows must be deepened. What a wonderful picture life presents to us! Here we see happy faces whose smiling light

need not fear comparison with that of the orb of day itself; and there is hideous darkness that makes night luminous. And our most comforting philosophy is that without both we can have neither. But even where the sunlight is brightest, suddenly an eye quickens with agony that does not pass, and there another glazes in death. And in the region where darkness crouches, a sunbeam-a mote of light -dances and instantly is gone, lost in the too great gloom. And the terror of it all is that those whom we see bathed in light know nothing of it, and those whom night seems to swallow are yet not blind. Just as when in the evening the sun sinks beyond the headland, those to westward of us on the sea are smitten with his falling sceptre that fails by so little to touch us also, while those to eastward seem lost in the twilight. We are all alike deceived."

"What a sweet specimen I have come across," murmured the shabby Then aloud "Ahem! Mr.--" Opaline is my name," returned the other graciously.

one.

66

To

"Ah! the name of Opaline is well known. Mine is Black, at your service. Mr. Bartholomew Black, pessimist. Your thoughts are suggestive, Mr. Opaline; they stir one. have one's name writ in water, that is to be anonymous. To leave footprints on the sands of time proves at least that you did not die there, but it is to be anonymous sooner or later, for the tide comes in. We, the myriads, scramble and scrape and snap just where the waters of Oblivion turn to flow shoreward. It does not take long to put a stop to our screaming—and a good thing too-but we take our revenge sometimes by floating on the surge."

"It is all inexpressibly sad," sighed Mr. Opaline.

"So it is," rejoined Mr. Black. "The big tragedies that you talked about so splendidly are too big for me to comprehend. But those minor tragedies of life, Mr. Opaline, what

business have you to be drivelling over them? Were you once a youth of high promise, and are Love's eyes at this moment swimming sick at the sight of you? Has your own sweet love been blasted in its bloom? Have all your hopes been ruthlessly deflowered? Is your great heart at this moment quite empty and yet full of despair Out upon you, sir, for a sham! a maudlin, hypocritical, dishonest quack!" Black trembled in his wrath.

“I am afraid, Mr. Black," said the other calmly," that if I am to continue to have the pleasure of your company you must moderate your zeal."

"True," replied Mr. Black, "and I humbly beg your pardon. I have been very abstemious lately, and have been thinking a great deal, and am apt to be unreasonable. I can assure you I did not mean what I said. Let us return to the myriads. Ours is a bad case, and doubtless we ought to be comforted in knowing that we have your sympathy. But the truth is I speak plainly your sympathy is of no value to us because we have no sympathy with you. To us it seems that men of culture are not thorough enough to be able to give us any real help. They are half of one thing and half of another. They have much refinement, but quite as much lassitude. Their interests are manifold, yet their interest in life is scant. I say that in the face of your Jeremiad. They love that blossom of every civilizationArt, but they love little else. Indeed, they only know life as Art presents it to them. They will snivel over it, or laugh over it, or delight in it, or despise it; what they will not do is to come into real contact with it. They have plenty of sympathy with human effort in the past, and can write about it beautifully, sparing no effort to come at the truth concerning it; the more obscure it is, the more it will interest them and draw out all their powers of patience, tolerance, and forbearance. But with human effort in the present their sympathy

is of a very different strain; it is vague and dyspeptic, mournful and inert. They profess to believe in the brotherhood of man; but their pleasures are those of a caste-one must gain admittance to it before the relationship can do any good."

"Your language, sir," said Mr. Opaline, "is that of an embittered and disappointed man, and I am afraidplain speaking is what you like-of an ignorant man. Culture admits of no caste; it is open to every one. Certainly it presupposes a thinking, reasonable creature-one fully alive to the intellectual riches of humanity, and convinced that they are life's choicest gifts and worth toiling for. Culture is an Alp, not a molehill; and there must be strenuous climbing if the summit is to be attained."

"Oh certainly!" responded Mr. Black. "Culture is free and so are the mountains. But unless the cripple is carried up, I fear he will have to remain at the bottom. The truth is that in this world the cripples are left to help themselves and so they do. Two men with one leg apiece, however, are not equal to one man with two. So we cripples do not attempt to climb, but play our little game of chances at the bottom. We miss the fine view, and content ourselves with finding out holes where we can hide. Some of you fine fellows think that the best thing to do is to block up our hiding-holes, and then, you swear, we will be seen running like hares. So we will if you prepare better places for us within our reach. If not? Why, we will make you run. So far I have been speaking from the point of view of the myriads, and that much of such criticism is wide of the point I am very willing to admit. Still there must be some ground for the notion, or it surely would not have such wide acceptance, that men of culture are simply intellectual dandies good for nothing but playing with words. I have no quarrel with you on that account, not at all; my personal grievance against you is that you are developing a vein of ex

quisite pessimism that threatens sooner or later to leave us honest pessimists high and dry."

"The myriads, I am afraid," replied Mr. Opaline, "are certainly a good deal at sea in their criticism of us, more perhaps than even you are aware of. You have made the mistake, I fancy, of holding Culture responsible for, and of even identifying it with, the phrase, 'Art for Art's sake.' Now

the adoption of such a sentiment as a rule of life over and above its evident propriety as a rule of art is not evidence, as many people suppose, of overcultivation resulting in a fastidious dilettantism, but is rather an indication of imperfect culture; it is pursuing life to the end, as it were, on a side issue. Pray, do not misunderstand me. I do not despise, I believe with all my heart in the sentiment of ‘Art for Art's sake.' I am certain that to it in due degree we owe all that is most excellent in poetry, music, and the plastic arts. Some persons object that it is as cowardly-some even say as silly for any one to take refuge in Art and shut themselves up in it so as to escape from the storms and sorrows of the world, as it was for the saints to betake themselves into the wilderness. I cannot consider the comparison well balanced, for the one was a wilderness and the other is not. As for myself, I must confess that I share the objection but slightly, and am glad to pay for my weakness with the admission that to make the sentiment 'Art for Art's sake' a rule of life is to bring one's self under the charge of imperfect culture. But I should like, if you will give me a minute, to extricate the phrase, considered solely as a rule of art, from your misapprehension of it. What is beautiful, Mr. Black, satisfies and pleases just because it is beautiful, and we can assign no other reason. The poet, the artist, the musician, bring what is beautiful before us. To accomplish this they must give themselves up to Art body and soul, if one may so speak. It is an unconscious surrender, but it is none the No. 359.-VOL. LX.

less a surrender. They stand between life and its infinite possibilities on the one hand, and the ideal loveliness which they have created out of it on the other. The world of Art is simply the world of Consciousness, after it has passed through the imagination, that potent and most subtle of all prisms, and been enriched in the process with all the magic music, priceless wealth of colour and splendid imagery which Nature had been slowly and blindly accumulating through genera tions till the hour should arrive and bring along with it the rightful heir. Art is not an undermaster in the industrial school of life, as some people conceive, whose business is to make us well behaved boys by teaching us singing, drawing and versemaking. Art is life; but it is life transfigured. Every noble emotion of which the most commonplace person is capable is identical with Art in its effect upon life. But it is Art alone that is capable of magnifying, elaborating, perpetuating and preserving those best and supreme moments of the race. And it is because Art does all this and is what it is that, like Virtue, it is its own reward. This I take to be the true meaning of the sentiment from the artist's point of view. But on our side admiration may be extravagant and we may waste our enthusiasm on what deserves but a passing glance. I have heard some persons lay all the stress of their praise on the fact that some peculiar difficulty had been overcome. This is surely as absurd as if a lover should admire his mistress because she has succeeded in being beautiful—has triumphed over some defect. On the other hand the artist (using that word in its widest sense) may have for his object merely the celebration of his own skill. Such an one surely is to be but sparingly applauded. One cannot deny that he is an artist, but certainly he is at the bottom of the class. Now it seems to me that it is these dunces and their admirers who have brought upon the phrase so much abuse, and on true and great artists much un

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