Title: 'That Very Mab'
Author: Lang, Andrew, Kendall, May
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "'That Very Mab'" ***


‘That Very Mab’

by May Kendall and Andrew Lang


‘Ah! now I see Queen Mab has been with you’

γλαῦκ’ Ἀθήναζε



LONDON

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

1885


Contents

 CHAPTER I. — UNDER TWO FLAGS
 CHAPTER II. — DISILLUSIONS
 CHAPTER III. — THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION
 CHAPTER IV. — THE POET AND THE PALÆONTO-THEOLOGIST
 CHAPTER V. — ST. GEORGE FOR MERRY ENGLAND
 CHAPTER VI. — JUSTICE AND THE NEW DEMOCRACY
 CHAPTER VII. — MACHINERY AND THE SUCCESSFUL MERCHANT
 CHAPTER VIII. — THE BEAUTIFUL
 CHAPTER IX. — IN WHICH THE NIHILIST, THE DEMOCRAT, AND THE PROFESSOR OFFER A SUGGESTION TO THE BISHOP
 CHAPTER X. — THE SUBSEQUENT CAREER OF THE NIHILIST
 CHAPTER XI. — HOME AND FOREIGN POLICY COMBINED
 CHAPTER XII. — THE DELUGE



'THAT VERY MAB'



CHAPTER I.
UNDER TWO FLAGS.


‘You send out teachers of religion to undermine and ruin the people.’
Black Flag Proclamation to the French, 1883.


The moonlight, in wave on wave of silver, flooded all the Sacred
Island. Far away and faint ran the line of the crests of Samoa, like
the hills of heaven in the old ballad, or a scene in the Italian opera.
Then came a voice from the Calling Place, and the smooth sea thrilled,
and all the fishes leaped, and the Sacred Isle itself was moved, and
shuddered to its inmost heart. Again and again came the voice, and now
it rose and fell in the cadences of a magical song (or _Karakia_, if we
_must_ have local colour), and the words were not of this world. Then,
behold, the smooth seas began to break and plash round the foremost
cape of the Holy Island, and to close again behind, like water before
the keel and behind the stern of a running ship, so they plashed, and
broke, and fell. Next the surface was stirred far off with the
gambolling and sporting of innumerable fishes; the dolphin was tumbling
in the van; the flying fish hovered and shone and sank; and clearer,
always, and yet more clear came the words of the song from Samoa.
Clearer and louder, moment by moment, rose the voice of Queen Mab,
where she stood on the Calling Place of the Gods, and chanted to the
Islands, and to the sea, and the dwellers in the sea. It was not that
she left her stand, nor came nearer, but the Sacred Island itself was
steering straight, like a magical barque, drawn by the wonderful song,
to the mystic shore of Samoa. Now Queen Mab, where she stood among her
court, with the strange brown fairies of the Southern Ocean, could
behold the Sacred Island, with all its fairy crew. Beautiful things
they seemed, as the sailing isle drew nearer, beautiful and naked, and
brave with purple pan-danus flowers, and with red and yellow necklets
of the scented seed of the pandanus. At last Queen Mab, the fairy in
the fluttering wings of green, clapped her hands, and, with a little
soft shock, the Sacred Island ran in and struck on the haunted beach of
Samoa. What was Queen Mab doing here, so far away from England? England
she had left long ago; when the Puritans arose the Fairies vanished.
When 'Tom came home from labour and Cis from milking rose,' there was
now no more sound of tabor, nor 'merrily went their toes.' Tom went to
the Public House or the Preaching House, and Cis—Cis waited till Tom
should come home and kick her into a jelly (his toes going merrily
enough at that work), or tell her she was, spiritually, in a parlous
case. So the Fairy Queen and all her court had long since fled from
England, and long ago made a home in the undiscovered isles of the
South. Now they all met and mingled in the throng of the Polynesian
fairy folk, and, rushing down into the waters, they revelled all night
on the silvery sand, in the windless dancing places of the deep. Tanê
and Tawhiti came, the Gods of the tides and the shores, and all the
fairies sang to them:

'Tawhiti, on the sacred beach
    The purple pandanus is thine!
How soft the breakers come and go,
    How bright the fragrant berries blow,
The fern-tree scents the shining reach,
    And Tanê dances down the brine!'


Such is the poetry of the Polynesian fairies. It is addicted to
frequent repetitions of the same obvious remark, and it does not
contain a Criticism of Life, so we do not give any more of it. But,
such as it was, it seemed to afford great pleasure to the dancers,
probably because every one of them could compose any amount of it
himself, at will, and every dancer was 'his own poet,' than which
nothing can be more salubrious and delightful.

Thus the dance and the revel swang and swayed through the silver halls
till the green lights began to glow with gold and scarlet and crimson,
burning into dawn. Then came a sudden noise, like thunder, crashing and
roaring through the silence of the sea. Queen Mab clapped her hands,
and, in one moment, the Sacred Isle had flitted back to its place, and
the music stopped, and the dancers vanished.

Then, as the island swiftly receded, came a monstrous wave, and no
wonder, which raised the surface of the sea to a level with the topmost
cliff of the Calling Place. Queen Mab, who had flown to a pine-tree
there, saw the salt water fall back down the steeps like a cataract,
and heard a voice say, 'The blooming reef has bolted.' Another voice
remarked something about 'submarine volcanic action.' These words came
from a level with her head, where the Queen saw, stranded in a huge
tree, a boat with a funnel that poured forth smoke, and with wheels
that still rapidly and automatically revolved in mid air. In fact, a
missionary steamer had been raised by the mighty tidal wave to the
level of the cliff. Then the sailors climbed into the trees, talking
freely, in a speech which Queen Mab knew for English, but not at all
the English she had been accustomed to hear. Also the sailors had among
them men with full, sleek, shining faces, wearing tall hats and long
coats, and carrying little books whose edges flashed in the sun. And
Queen Mab did not like the look of them. Then she heard the sailors and
the men in black coats making straight for the very pine-tree in which
she was sitting. So she fled into a myrtle-bush, and behold, the
sailors chopped every branch of the pine clean away, and changed the
beautiful tree into a bare pole. Then they brought out ropes, and a
great piece of thin cloth, white with red and blue cross marks on it,
and they tugged it up, and it floated from the top of the tree. Then
the people from the ship gathered round it, and sang songs, whereof one
repeated

'Rule Britannia!'


and the other contained the words,

'Every prospect pleases,
And only Man is vile.'


Soon some specimens of vile Man, some of the human beings of Samoa,
came round, beautiful women dressed in feathers and leaves, carrying
flowers and fruit, which they offered to the men in black coats and
white neckties. But the men in black coats held up their hands in
horror, and shut their eyes, while some of them ran to the boat and
brought bonnets, and boots, and cotton gowns, and pocket-handkerchiefs,
and gave them to the women. And the women, putting them on anyhow,
walked about as proud as peacocks; while the men in black coats
explained that, unless they wore these things, and did and refrained
from many matters, they would all be punished dreadfully after they
were dead. Now, while the women were crying at such glad tidings, came
another awful crash and shock, which indeed, like the previous noise
that had frightened the dancers, was produced by a ship's gun. And
another cloud of black smoke floated round the point, and another set
of sailors got out and cut the branches off a tree, and ran up a flag
which was black and red and yellow. Then those sailors (who had men
with red beards and spectacles among them) cried _Hoch!_ and sang the
_Wacht am Rhein_. Thereupon the sailors of the first steamer, with a
horrid yell, rushed on the tree under the new flag, and were cutting it
down, when some of the singers of the _Wacht am Rhein_ pointed a
curious little machine that way and began to turn a handle. Thereon the
most dreadful cracking sounds arose, cracking and crashing; fire flew,
and some of the first set of sailors fell down and writhed on the sand,
while the rest fled to their boat. Several of the native women also
fell down bleeding and dying in their new cotton gowns and their
bonnets, for they had been dancing about while the sailors were hacking
at the tree with the black and red and yellow flag.

Seeing all this, Queen Mab also saw that Samoa was no longer a place
for her. She did not understand what was happening, nor know that a
peaceful English annexation had been disturbed by a violent German
annexation, for which the English afterwards apologised. Queen Mab also
conceived a prejudice against missionaries, which, perhaps, was
justified by her experience. For, in the matter of missionaries, she
was unlucky. The specimens she had observed were of the wrong kind. She
might have met missionaries as learned as Mr. Codrington, as manly as
Livingstone, as brave and pure as Bishop Pattison> who was a martyr
indeed, and gave his life for the heathen people. Yes, Queen Mab was
unlucky in her missionaries.



CHAPTER II.
DISILLUSIONS.


'The time is come,' the walrus said,
'To talk of many things.'
'Alice in Wonderland.'


It was on April 1, the green young year's beginning, that Mab arrived
in England. She had hired a seagull—no, the seagull offered his
services for nothing; I was forgetting that it was not an English, but
a Polynesian seagull—to take her across. She did not altogether admire
the missionaries, as we have seen, in their proceedings, the fact being
that she had grown used to Polynesians in the course of the centuries
she had spent among them, and the missionaries were such a remarkable
contrast to the Polynesians. But their advent was certainly a source of
mental improvement to her, for fairies as we know, understand things
almost by instinct, and Queen Mab, one evening, chanced to overhear a
good deal of the missionaries' conversation. She learned, for instance,
the precise meanings, and the bearings on modern theology and
metaphysics, of such words as kathenotheism, hagiography,
transubstantiation, eschatology, Positivist, _noumenon, begriff,
vorstellung, Paulismus, wissenschaft_, and others, quite new to her,
and of great benefit in general conversation.

With this additional knowledge she started on the voyage, leaving her
faithful subjects to take care of the island and themselves, till she
came back to tell them whether their return to England would ever be
practicable. She landed in Great Britain, then, on April 1, and the
seagull went across to the Faröe Islands and waited there till the time
which she had appointed for him to come and carry her back to
Polynesia.

Queen Mab found England a good deal altered. There were still fairy
circles in the grass; but they were attributed, not to fairy dances,
but to unscientific farming and the absence of artificial phosphates.
The country did not smell of April and May, but of brick-kilns and the
manufacture of chemicals. The rivers, which she had left bright and
clear, were all black and poisonous. Water for drinking purposes was
therefore supplied by convoys from the Apollinaris and other foreign
wells, and it was thought that, if a war broke out, the natives of
England would die of thirst. This was not the only disenchantment of
Queen Mab. She found that in Europe she was an anachronism. She did not
know, at first, what the word meant, but the sense of it gradually
dawned upon her. Now there is always something uncomfortable about
being an anachronism; but still people may become accustomed to it, and
even take a kind of a pride in it, if they are only anachronisms on the
right side—so far in the van of the bulk of humanity, for instance,
that the bulk of humanity considers them not wholly in their right
minds. There must surely be a sense of superiority in knowing oneself a
century or two in front of one's fellow-creatures that counterbalances
the sense of solitude. Queen Mab had no such consolation. She was an
anachronism hundreds of years on the wrong side; in fact, a relic of
Paganism.

Of course she was acquainted with the language of all the beasts and
birds and insects, and she counted on their befriending her, however
much men had changed. Her brief experience of modern sailors and
missionaries, whether English or German, had indeed convinced her that
men were, even now, far from perfection. But it was a crushing blow to
find that all the beasts were traitors, and all the insects.

If it had not been for the loyal birds she would have gone back to
Polynesia at once; but they flocked faithfully to her standard, led by
the Owl, the wisest of all feathered things, who had lived too long,
and had too much good feeling to ignore fairies, though he was,
perhaps, just a little of a prig. The insects, however, who,
considering the size of their brains, one might have thought would
believe in fairies and in the supernatural in general, if anybody did,
behaved disgracefully, and the ant was the worst all. She started by
saying that _her_ brain was larger in proportion than the brain of any
other insect. Perhaps Queen Mab was not aware that Sir John Lubbock had
devoted a volume to the faculties and accomplishments of ants, together
with some minor details relating to bees and wasps, of which these
insects magnified the importance. Under _these_ circumstances, it was
impossible for her to countenance a mere vulgar superstition, like
faith in fairies. She begged leave to refer Queen Mab to various works
in the International Scientific Series for a complete explanation of
her motives, and mentioned, casually, that she also held credentials
from Mr. Romanes. Then, explaining that her character with the sluggard
was at stake, she hurried away. Evidently she did not care to be seen
talking to a fairy. It may be mentioned here, however, that Queen Mab's
faith in entomological nature was considerably shaken by the fact that
when no one was looking at her the ant always folded up her work and
went to sleep—though, if surprised in a siesta, she explained that she
had only just succumbed to complete exhaustion, and lamented that mind,
though infinitely superior to, was not yet independent of matter.

The bees hummed much to the same tune. The Queen Bee recommended our
foreigner to read a work on 'Bees and Wasps,' with a few minor details
relating to Ants, by Sir John Lubbock, in the International Scientific
Series. She was not, indeed quite so timid about her reputation as the
ant, and even volunteered to give her visitor an account of the
formation of hexagonal cells by Natural Selection, culled from the
pages of the 'Origin of Species'; but she observed that, though her
brain might be smaller in proportion than the brains of some inferior
insects, it was of finer quality, what there was of it, and that
fairies were merely an outgrowth of the anthropomorphic tendency which
had been noticed by distinguished writers as persisting even in the
present day. Then she departed, humming gaily, to the tune of a popular
hymn in the 'Ancient and Modern' collection:

'And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower?


But the whole sad history of Queen Mab's failures to enlist sympathy
and protection it would be vain to tell. The fishes, all that were left
of them, took her part; but they lived in the water, and she had never
had very much to do with them. In the birds she found her true allies.
They were not attached to the higher civilisation. The higher
civilisation, so far, had treated them inconsiderately, at sparrow
clubs. The Owl talked a good deal about the low moral tone of the human
race in this respect, and was pessimistic about it, failing to perceive
that higher types of organisms always like to signify their superiority
over lower ones by shooting them, or otherwise making their lives a
burden. The Owl, however, was a very talented bird, and one felt that
even his fallacies were a mark of attainments beyond those common to
his race. He had read and thought a great deal, and could tell Queen
Mab about almost anything she asked him. This was pleasant, and she sat
with him on a very high oak in Epping Forest, above a pond, and made
observations. It was lovely weather, just the weather for sitting on
the uppermost branches of a great oak, and she began to feel like
herself again. She had forgotten to put her invisible cloak on; but as
she was only half a foot high, and dressed in green, no one saw her up
there. Having reached the Forest at night, she had met as yet with few
British subjects; but the Owl explained that she would see hundreds of
them before the day was over, coming to admire Nature.

'The English people,' he observed, 'are great worshippers of Nature,
and write many guide-books about her, some on large paper at ten
guineas the volume. I have sometimes fancied, indeed,' he added,
doubtfully,' that it was their own capacity for admiring Nature that
they admired, but that were a churlish thought. For, do they not run
innumerable excursion trains for the purpose of bowing at her shrine?
Epping Forest must be one of Nature's favourite haunts, from the
numbers of people who come here to worship her, especially on Bank
Holidays. Those are her high festivals, when her adorers troop down,
and build booths and whirligigs and circuses in her honour, and gamble,
and ride donkeys, and shy sticks at cocoanuts before her. Also they
partake of sandwiches and many other appropriate offerings at the
shrine, and pour libations of bottled ale, and nectar, and zoedone, and
brandy, and soda-water, and ginger-beer. They _always_ leave the corks
about, and confectionery paper bags, for the next people to gaze upon
who come to worship Nature: you may see them now, if you look down. I
have often thought those corks, and cigar-ends, and such tokens that
the British public always leaves behind it, must be symbolical of
something—offerings to Nature, you know, an invariable part of the
rite, and typical—well, the question is, of what are they typical?'
mused the Owl, getting beyond his depth, as he had a way of doing.

'However,' he resumed, 'it is certain that their devotion is strong,
and they offer to Nature the sacrifices dearest to their own hearts,
and probably dearest, therefore, to the heart of Nature. They cut their
names all over her shrine, which is, I have no doubt, a welcome
attention; but they do not look at her any more than they can help, for
they stay where the beer is, and they are very warm, and flirt.'

'What is "flirt"?'

'A recreation,' said the Owl decorously; 'a pastime.'

'And does _nobody_ believe in fairies?' sighed Queen Mab.

'No, or at least hardly anyone. A few of the children, perhaps, and a
very, very few grown-up people—persons who believe in Faith-healing and
Esoteric Buddhism, and Thought-reading, and Arbitration, and Phonetic
Spelling, can believe in anything, except what their mothers taught
them on their knees. All of these are _in_ just now.'

'What do you mean by "in"?'

'In fashion; and what is fashionable is to be believed in. Why, you
might be the fashion again,' said the Owl excitedly. 'Why not? and then
people would believe in _you_. What a game it all is, to be sure! But
the fashions of this kind don't last,' the bird added; 'they get
snuffed out by the scientific men.'

'Tell me exactly who the scientific men are,' said the fairy. 'I have
heard so much about them since I came.'

'They are the men.' sighed the Owl, 'who go about with microscopes,
that is, instruments for looking into things as they are not meant to
be looked at and seeing them as they were never intended to be seen.
They have put everything under their microscopes, except stars and
First Causes; but they had to take telescopes to the stars, because
they were so far off; and First Causes they examined by stethoscopes,
which each philosopher applied to his own breast. But, as all the
breasts are different, they now call First Causes no business of
theirs. They make most things their business, though. They have had a
good deal of trouble with the poets, because the poets liked to put
themselves and their critics under their own microscopes, and they
objected to the microscopes of the scientific men. You know what poets
are?'

'Yes, indeed,' said Queen Mab, feeling at home on the subject. 'I have
forgotten a good many things, I daresay, with living in Polynesia, but
not about the poets. I remember Shakespeare very well, and Herrick is
at my court in the Pacific.'

'Ah, he was a great man, Shakespeare, almost too large for a
microscope!' said the Owl reflectively. They have put him under a good
many since he died, however, especially German lenses. But we were
talking about the philosophers—another name for the scientific men —the
men who don't know everything.'

'I should have thought they did,' said Queen Mab.

'No,' said the Owl. 'It is the theologians who know everything, or at
least they used to do so. But lately it has become such a mark of
mental inferiority to know everything, that they are always casting it
in each other's teeth. It has grown into a war-cry with both parties:
"You think you know everything," and it is hard for a bird to find out
how it all began and what it is all about. I believe it sprang
originally out of the old microscope difficulty. The philosophers
wanted to put theology under the microscope, and the theologians
excommunicated microscopes, and said theology ought never to be looked
at except with the Eye of Faith. Now the philosophers are borrowing an
eye of Faith from the theologians, and adding it on to their own
microscope like another lens, and they have detected a kind of
Absolute, a sort of a Something, the Higher Pantheism. I could never
tell you all about it, and I don't even know whether they have really
put theology under the microscope, or only theologians.'

'And the people worship St. George still?' asked Queen Mab, who, being
only a fairy, and owning no soul, had private theories of belief, based
merely on observation of popular customs.

'Oh yes, St. George and the Dragon. They have them both together on the
beads of their rosaries—the yellow things they count, and pray with, or
pay with.' said the Owl rather vaguely.

'St. George _and the Dragon!_ Why, St. George killed the Dragon.'

'Ah! the Dragon was not really killed.' said the Owl coolly. 'It was
only syncope, and he kept quiet for a time, and grew seven other heads
worse than the first. Some say St George worships the Dragon now,
himself; but people always are saying unpleasant things, and probably
it isn't true. At all events, the English worship St George and the
Dragon till they don't seem to know which is which.'

'What, has St George grown like the Dragon then?' cried Queen Mab
distractedly, wringing her hands.

'Oh no,' replied the Owl, with some condescending pity for the
foreigner's ignorance. 'But the Dragon has grown vastly like St.
George.'

'Is that all they worship?' said Queen Mab.

'Oh no, there are plenty of other patent religions. A hundred religions
and only one sauce—melted butter, as the Frenchman said, but the sauce
has outlived many of the patent religions.'

'I don't understand how religions are patent.' remarked her inquisitive
Majesty.

'We call it a patent religion.' said the Owl, 'when it has only been
recently invented, and is so insufficiently advertised, that it is only
to be found in a very few houses indeed, and is not a commodity in
general request. The Patentees then call themselves a Church, and
devote their energies to advertising the new "Cult," as they generally
style it. For example, you have Esoteric Buddhism, so named because it
is not Buddhism, nor Esoteric. It is imported by an American company
with a manufactory in Thibet, and has had some success among
fashionable people.'

'What do the Esoteric Buddhists worship?'

'Teacups and cigarettes, standing where they ought not.' replied the
owl; 'but I believe these things are purely symbolical, and that _au
fond_ the Priestess of Esoteric Buddhism herself adores the Dragon.'

'That is enough about _that_. Are there no patent religions warranted
free from Dragon worship?'

'Well.' said the Owl dubiously, 'there are the Altruists. '_They_
worship humanity. As a rule, you may have noticed that adorers think
the object of adoration better than themselves,—an unexpected instance
in most cases, of the modesty of their species. But the Altruists
worship Humanity.'

'And they don't think Humanity better than themselves?'

'Far from it. Their leading idea is that they are the cream of
Humanity. Their principal industry is to scold and lecture Humanity.
Whatever Humanity may be doing—making war or making peace, or making
love to its Deceased Wife's Sister—the Altruists cry out, "Don't do
that." And they preach sermons to Humanity, always beginning, "We
think;" and they publish their remarks in high-class periodicals, and
they invariably show that everyone, and especially Mr. Herbert Spencer,
is in the wrong, and nobody pays the slightest attention to them. In
their way the Altruists do to others as they would have others do to
them, To my mind, while they pretend that Humanity is what they
worship, they really want to be worshipped by Humanity.'

'Are there many of this sect?' asked Mab.

'There were twenty-seven of them.' said the Owl, 'but they quarrelled
about canonising the Emperor Tiberius, and now there are only thirteen
and a half.'

'Where do you get the fraction?' said Mab.

'That is a mystery.' said the Owl. 'Every religion should have its
mystery, and the Altruists possess only this example; it is a cheap
one, but they are not a luxurious sect.'

'Well.' said Mab mournfully at last, 'I must go back to Samoa; there is
too much mystery here for me. But who is that?'

She broke off suddenly, for a new and mysterious object had just
entered the glade, and was advancing towards the pool.

'Hush!' said the Owl. 'Do take care. It is a scientific man—a
philosopher.'

It was a tall, thin personage, with spectacles and a knapsack, and what
reminded Queen Mab of a small green landing-net, but was really
intended to catch butterflies. He came up to the pond, and she imagined
he was going to fish; but no, he only unfastened his knapsack and took
some small phials and a tin box out of it Then, bending down to the
edge of the water, he began to skim its surface cautiously with a ladle
and empty the contents into one of his phials. Suddenly a look of
delight came into his face, and he uttered a cry—'Stephanoceros!'

Queen Mab thought it was an incantation, and, trembling with fear, she
relaxed her hold of the bough and fell. Not into the pond! She had
wings, of course, and half petrified with horror though she was, she
yet fluttered away from that stagnant water. But alas, in the very
effort to escape, she had caught the eye of the Professor; he sprang
up—pond, animalcule all forgotten in the chase of this extraordinary
butterfly. The fairy's courage failed her: her presence of mind
vanished, and the wild gyrations of the owl, who, too late, realised
the peril of his companion, only increased her confusion. In another
moment she was a prisoner under the butterfly-net.

Beaming with delight, the philosopher turned her carefully into the tin
box, shut the lid and hastened home, too much enraptured with his prize
even to pause to secure the valuable Stephanoceros.

But Queen Mab had fainted, as even fairies must do at such a terrible
crisis; and perhaps it was as well that she had, for the professor
forbore to administer chloroform, under the impression that his lovely
captive had completely succumbed. He put her, therefore, straight into
a tall glass bottle, and began to survey her carefully, walking round
and round. Truly, he had never seen such a remarkable butterfly.



CHAPTER III.
THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION.


'Rough draughts of Man's
Beginning God!'
Swinburne.


When Queen Mab recovered consciousness she heard the sound of violent
voices in the room before she opened her eyes, which she did half
hoping to find herself the victim of some terrible delusion. But the
sight of the professor, standing not a yard away, brought a fatal
conviction to her heart. It was too true. Was there ever a more
undesirable position for a fairy, accustomed to perfect freedom, and
nourished by honey and nectar, than to be closely confined in a tall
bottle, with smooth hard slippery walls that she could not pierce, and
nothing to live upon but a glass-stopper! It was absurd; but it was
also terrible. How fervently she wished, now, that the missionaries had
never come to Polynesia.

But the professor was not alone, two of his acquaintances were there—a
divine veering towards the modern school, and a poet—the ordinary poet
of satire and Mr. Besant's novels, with an eye-glass, who held that the
whole duty of poets at least was to transfer the meanderings of the
inner life, or as much of them as were in any degree capable of
transmission, to immortal foolscap..Unfortunately, as he observed with
a mixture of pride and regret, the workings of his soul were generally
so ethereal as to baffle expression and comprehension; and, he was wont
to say, mixing up metaphors at a great rate, that he could only stand,
like the High Priest of the Delphic oracle, before the gates of his
inner life, to note down such fragmentary utterances as 'foamed up from
the depths of that divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds
with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a
condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties,
and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up
in the epithet 'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately
described only by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the professor
always fully coincided.

With the two had entered the professor's little boy, a motherless child
of eight, who walked straight up to the bottle.

No sooner did the child's eyes light on the vessel than a curious thing
occurred. He fell down on his knees, bowed his head, and held up his
hands.

'Great Heavens!' cried the professor, forgetting himself, 'what do I
behold! My child is praying (a thing he never was taught to do), and
praying to a green butterfly! Hush! hush!' the professor went on,
turning to his friends. 'This is terrible, but most important. The
child has never been allowed to hear anything about the
supernatural—his poor mother died when he was in the cradle—and I have
scrupulously shielded him from all dangerous conversation. There is not
a prayer-book in the house, the maids are picked Agnostics, from
advanced families, and I am quite certain that my boy has never even
heard of the existence of a bogie.'

The poet whistled: the divine took up his hat, and, with a pained look,
was leaving the room.

'Stop, stop!' cried the professor, 'he is doing something odd.'

The child had taken out of his pocket certain small black stones of a
peculiar shape. So absorbed was he that he never noticed the presence
of the men.

He kissed the stones and arranged them in a curious pattern on the
floor, still kneeling, and keeping his eye on Mab in her bottle. At
last he placed one strangely shaped pebble in the centre, and then
began to speak in a low, trembling voice, and in a kind of cadence:

'Oh! you that I have tried to see,
Oh! you that I have heard in the night,
Oh! you that live in the sky and the water;

Now I see you, now you have come:

Now you will tell me where you live,
And what things are, and who made them.

Oh Dala, these stones are yours;
These are the goona stones I find,
And play with when I think of you.

Oh Dala, be my friend, and never leave me
Alone in the dark night.'


'As I live, it's a religious service, the worship of a green
butterfly!' said the professor. At his voice the child turned round,
and seeing the men, looked very much ashamed of himself.

'Come here, my dear old man.' said the professor to the child, who came
on being called.

'What were you doing?—who taught you to say all those funny things?'

The little fellow looked frightened.

'I didn't remember you were here.' he said; 'they are things I say when
I play by myself.'

'And who is Dala?'

The boy was blushing painfully.

'Oh, I didn't mean you to hear, it's just a game of mine. I play at
there being somebody I can't see, who knows what I am doing; a friend.'

'And nobody taught you, not Jane or Harriet?'

Now Harriet and Jane were the maids.

'You never saw anybody play at that kind of game before?'

'No,' said the child, 'nobody ever.' 'Then,' cried the professor, in a
loud and blissful voice, 'we have at last discovered the origin of
religion. It isn't Ghosts. It isn't the Infinite. It is worshipping
butterflies, with a service of fetich stones. The boy has returned to
it by an act of unconscious inherited memory, derived from Palaeolithic
Man, who must, therefore, have been the native of a temperate climate,
where there were green lepidoptera. Oh, my friends, what a thing is
inherited memory! In each of us there slumber all the impressions of
all our predecessors, up to the earliest Ascidian. See how the
domesticated dog,' cried the professor, forgetting that he was not
lecturing in Albemarle Street, 'see how the domesticated dog, by
inherited memory, turns round on the hearthrug before he curls up to
sleep! He is unconsciously remembering the long grasses in which his
wild ancestors dwelt. Also observe this boy, who has retained an
unconscious recollection of the earliest creed of prehistoric man.
Behold him instinctively, and I may say automatically, cherishing
fetich stones (instead of marbles, like other boys) and adoring that
green insect in the glass bottle! Oh Science,' he added rapturously,
'what will Mr. Max Müller say now? The Infinite! Bosh, it's a
butterfly!'

'It is my own Dala, come to play with me,' said the boy.

'It is a fairy,' exclaimed the poet, examining Mab through his
eyeglass. This he said, not that he believed in fairies any more than
publishers believed in him, but partly because it was a pose he
affected, partly to 'draw' the professor.

The professor replied that fairies were unscientific, and even
unthinkable, and the divine declared that they were too heterodox even
for the advanced state of modern theology, and had been condemned by
several councils, which is true. And the professor ran through all the
animal kingdoms and sub-kingdoms very fast, and proved quite
conclusively, in a perfect cataract of polysyllables, that fairies
didn't belong to any of them. While the professor was recovering
breath, the divine observed, in a somewhat aggrieved tone, that he for
his part found men and women enough for him, and too much sometimes. He
also wished to know whether, if his talented but misguided friend
required something ethereal, angels were not sufficient, without his
having recourse to Pagan mythology; and whether he considered Pagan
mythology suitable to the pressing needs of modern society, with a
large surplus female population, and to the adjustment of the claims of
reason and religion.

The poet replied, 'Oh, don't bother me with your theological
conundrums. I give it up. See here, I am going to write a sonnet to
this creature, whatever it is. Fair denizen—!'

'Of a glass bottle!' interrupted the professor somewhat rudely, and the
divine laughed.

'No. Of deathless ether, doomed.'

'And that reminds me,' said the professor, turning hastily, 'I must
examine it under the microscope carefully, while the light lasts.'

'Oh father!' cried the child, 'don't touch it, it is alive!'

'Nonsense!' said the professor, 'it is as dead as a door-nail. Just
reach me that lens.'

He raised the glass stopper unsuspiciously, then turned to adjust his
instrument And even as he turned his captive fled.

'There!' cried the boy.

Like a flash of sunshine, Queen Mab darted upwards and floated through
the open window. They saw her hover outside a moment, then she was
gone—back into her deathless ether.

'I told you so!' exclaimed the poet, startled by this incident into a
momentary conviction of the truth of his own theory.



CHAPTER IV.
THE POET AND THE PALÆONTO-THEOLOGIST.


'Puis nous fut dit que chose estrange ne leur sembloit estre deux
contradictoires Vrayes en mode, en figure, et en temps.'
Pantagruel, v. xxii.


Moved by an uncontrollable impulse, they all three rushed out into the
garden; and far beyond them, in the sunlight, they did indeed catch one
parting gleam of gauzy wings, as the fairy vanished. When the professor
led the way into the room again, and, rather crestfallen, looked at the
tall empty bottle and the stopper, which in his hurry he had thrown
down upon the floor.

'She is gone!' sobbed the child. 'My beautiful Dala. I shall never see
her again.'

He was right; the professor and the theologian, between them, had
scared Queen Mab away pretty successfully. She would certainly never
revisit that part of the city if she could help it. The divine looked
uncomfortable. In spite of himself he had recognised something strange
and unusual in the appearance of this last capture of his friend's
butterfly-net, and almost unconsciously he began to ponder on the old
theory that the Evil One might occasionally disguise himself as an
angel of light. The poet, meanwhile, was more voluble.

'Your soul is sordid!' he said indignantly to the professor. 'You have
no eyes for the Immaterial, the intangibly Ideal, that lies behind the
shadowy and deceptive veil that we call Matter.'

'My soul,' said the professor with equal indignation, 'that is, if I
have got one, is as good as yours.'

'No, it isn't,' said the poet; 'I am all soul, or nearly all. You are
nothing but a mass of Higher Protoplasm.'

'No one need wish to be anything better. I should like to know,' cried
the professor angrily, 'where we should all be without Protoplasm.'

'My friends,' said the theologian, still rather confused, 'this heat is
both irreverent and irrational. Protoplasm is invaluable, but is it not
also transient? The flight of that butterfly may well remind us—'

'Stop!' interrupted the philosopher. '_Was_ it a butterfly? Now I come
to think of it, I hardly know whether to refer it to the lepidoptera or
not. At all events, it is a striking example of the manner in which
natural and sexual selection, continued through a series of epochs, can
evolve the most brilliant and graceful combinations of tint and
plumage, by simple survival of the favourable variations.'

'It is indeed,' suggested the theologian, 'a remarkable proof of the
intelligent construction of the universe, and of the argument from
design, that this insect should have been framed with such exquisite
perfection of form and colour to delight the eyes of the theologian.'

'Not at all,' said the professor irritably. 'It was to delight the eyes
of butterflies of the opposite sex. It is no more an argument from
design than I am!'

'Do stop that!' said the poet. 'How can a fellow write a sonnet with
you two for ever sparring away at your musty scholasticisms? Haven't we
heard enough about Paley and Darwin? You have frightened away the fairy
between you, and that is plenty of mischief for one day.

'Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed
For one brief hour to languish and repine.


Entombed? That will do, but I'm afraid there are not many more rhymes
to "doomed." "Loomed," "boomed," "exhumed," "well-groomed." My thoughts
won't flow, hang it all!'

'You _are_ an argument for design,' said the theologian, taking no
notice of the poet, 'though you won't admit it. Why won't you take up
with my scientific religion?—a religion, you know, that can be
expressed with equal facility by emotional or by mathematical terms. It
is as easy, when you once understand it, as the first proposition in
Euclid. You have two points, Faith and Reason, and you draw a straight
line between them. Then you must describe an equilateral triangle—I
mean a scientific religion, on the straight line, F R—between Faith and
Reason.'

'Oh!' said the professor. 'How do you do it?'

'First,' said the theologian hopefully, 'taking F as your centre, F R
as your radius, describe the circle of Theology. Then, taking R as your
centre, F R as your radius, describe the circle of Logic. These two
circles will intersect at Science, indicated in the proposition by the
point S. Join together S F, and then join S R, and you will have the
equilateral triangle of a scientific religion on the line F R S.'

'Prove it,' said the professor grimly.

'Science and Faith,' replied the theologian readily, 'equal Faith and
Reason, because they are both radii of the same circle, Man being the
Radius of the Infinite. Theology—'

'Stop!' ejaculated the professor in the utmost indignation. 'What do
you mean by it? I never in my life listened to such unmitigated
nonsense. Who gave you leave to talk of a scientific religion as an
equilateral triangle? If it is a triangle at all, which there is not
the remotest reason to suppose—but I cannot argue with you? You might
as well call it a dodecahedron, or the cube root of minus nothing.'

'Oh, very well,' said the theologian with exasperating coolness. 'I
thought it possible that even your blind prejudice might not refuse to
listen to a simple mathematical demonstration of the possibility of a
true scientific religion, but I find that I was mistaken. I am not
annoyed—not at all. I prefer to look with lenity upon this outburst of
passion, which might, I admit, have roused the anger of a theologian of
the old school. But, believe me, I personally feel towards you no
enmity—only the profoundest compassion.'

Inarticulate sound from the professor.

'I find in you,' continued the theologian with benevolence, 'much to
tolerate, much even to admire. I regret that, formerly, some of my
predecessors may have been led, by your aggressive and turbulent
spirit, to form unnecessarily harsh judgments of your character, and
put unnecessarily tight thumbscrews on your thumbs; but as for me, I
desire to win you by sympathy and affection and physico-theological
afternoon parties, not to coerce you by vituperation. Your eye of
Reason, as I have often observed, is already sufficiently developed;
supplement it with the eye of Faith, and you will be quite complete. It
will then only remain for you to learn which objects it is necessary to
view with which eye, and carefully to close the other. This takes a
little practice (which must not be attempted in Society), but I am sure
that a person of your attainments will easily master the difficulty. We
will then joyfully receive you into our ranks. No sacrifice on your
part will be required; you will retain the old distinction of F.R.S.,
of which you have always been justly proud; but we shall take the
liberty of conferring upon you the additional privilege of the honorary
title of D.D.'

The professor uttered a brief but trenchant observation, on which the
theologian was about to launch down a reply, less brief but equally
trenchant. But the poet, as his fate would have it, struck in, in the
capacity of a lightning conductor, and succeeded in turning the wrath
of both combatants upon his own devoted head.

'If you must quarrel,' he cried, 'pray don't quarrel here. You would
fight on the very peaks of Parnassus. I can't think of a word that will
rhyme except "design." Stop, now I have it:

'Bright messenger of the Celestial Nine,
Now in translucent ambience entombed.'


Celestial Nine is commonplace, but what can a man do in this region of
trivial souls? Soar, my mind! What does "ambience" mean, by the way?
Never mind, if the Sublime is unfettered by literal meaning, all the
better for the Sublime!'

At this the divine and the philosopher turned upon him together, as
they were wont to do every now and then.

'This laxity of terms,' said the professor, 'is unscientific and
unpractical.'

'I am a poet,' said the poet, 'I bow to no narrow machinery of
definitions. Words have a gemlike beauty and colour of their own. They
are _not_ merely the signs of ideas—of thoughts.'

'I wish they were!' groaned the professor. 'They are with us.'

'The idea,' continued the poet, 'must conform to the word, when the
word honours the idea by making use of it. What care I for the
conventional, the threadbare significance? My heart recognises, through
the outer vestment of apparent insanity, the inner adaptability. Soar,
my mind!'

'And in this way,' said the professor sternly, 'ignoring the great
principles of classification and generalisation, you let a chaos of
disordered ideas abroad upon the universe, destroying all method and
definite arrangement and retarding the great progress of Evolution!'

'A jewel-like word, a transfigured phrase,' replied the poet, 'is worth
all your scientific dictionaries and logic threshing-machines put
together. Ruskin was in error. He tells us that Milton always meant
what he said, and said exactly what he meant.

'This had been an ignoble exactitude. How can a man whose words are
unbounded confine himself within the limits of an intellectual bound?

How can he, that is to say, know exactly what he means, in words, or
mean exactly what, to souls less gloriously chaotic, his words appear
to express? I have always felt this an insuperable difficulty.'

'I have no doubt of it,' said the professor ironically. 'Now,' he went
on, turning to the theologian, 'you see what comes of having too much
soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ
should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have
a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.'

'Not a bit of it,' said the theologian indignantly. 'It comes of not
having soul enough, or of allowing the sway the soul should exercise to
fall upon the feeble sceptre of imagination. If our misguided young
friend had been thoroughly grounded in Paley's Evidences and scientific
primers—for these should never be separated—do you think we should have
heard anything about his chaotic soul? Not a bit of it. It would all
have been as clear as an opera-glass, or as Mr. Joseph Cook's theory of
Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical
Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid,"
on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the
"Tales from the Norse?" It was very remiss of them.'

'On the contrary,' said the professor, 'I should have recommended the
entire elimination of doctrinal matter from his studies. I should have
guided him to a thorough investigation of the principle of all the
Natural Sciences, with especial devotion to one single branch, as
Botany or Conchology, and an entire mastery of its terminology I should
have urged our gifted but destitute of all scientific method friend to
the observation and definition of objective phenomena, rather than to
subjective analysis, and turned his reflections—'

'Flow, my words!' said the poet dreamily. 'Soar, my mind!'

He had flung himself into the solitary armchair in a graceful and
distraught pose, and with half-closed eyes had fallen into a reverie.
The divine and the professor stood and gazed at him despondently.

'Such,' said the divine, 'are the consequences of the lack of sound
ethical and eclectic principles in our day and generation!'

'Such,' said the professor, 'are the pernicious results of a classical
training, the absence of a spirit of scientific research and a broad
and philosophical mental culture.'

Those readers who have not yet perused the poet's sonnet may recognise
it, of course, by the first line:

'Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed.'


It attracted a good deal of attention at the time. The public were
informed, in the 'Athæenum,' that the poet was engaged on a sonnet, and
the literary world was excited, but, not having the key, could not make
out what on earth it meant. Meanwhile the professor's paper in
'Nature,' which appeared in the course of the same week, being written
from a wholly different standpoint, did not tend to elucidate the
mystery. The latter merely described the locality in which the fairy,
or butterfly, as the professor called it, was found, and the
circumstances of its capture and escape, with such an account of its
manifold peculiarities, and the reasons to suppose it an entirely new
genus, that Epping Forest was as much haunted for the next two or three
months by naturalists on the watch, as by 'Arries making holiday. Our
professor himself visited the fairy's pond several times, in the
company of the poet, with whom he soon patched up a reconciliation. But
Queen Mab, in the meantime, had taken her departure.

The professor also sent to the 'Spectator' an account of the Origin of
Religion, as developed by his little boy, under his very eyes. But the
editor thought, not unnaturally, that it was only the professor's fun,
and declined to publish it, preferring an essay on the Political Rights
of the Domesticated Cat.



CHAPTER V.
ST. GEORGE FOR MERRY ENGLAND.


'Geese are swans, and swans are geese,'
M. Arnold.


At first Mab was so overwhelmed at the nature of her reception by
Science and Theology, that she meditated an immediate return to
Polynesia; but the birds implored her so pathetically to stay longer,
that she yielded, and went with the owl into Surrey. She had seen
enough of Epping Forest.

Surrey was very beautiful, and once pleasantly established in Richmond
Park, she watched the human life that seemed so strange to her with
great interest, taking care nevertheless, for some time, to keep clear
of anything that looked like a scientific man. The owl supported her in
this policy. He was not intimately acquainted with any of the members
of the learned societies, but he had a deeply-rooted and perhaps
overstrained horror of vivisection. Still, being a liberal-minded bird,
he extenuated the professor's conduct as far as possible.

'Perhaps he did not mean to do you any harm,' he suggested. 'He only
wanted to put you under the microscope.'

'He might have had more sense, then?' returned Queen Mab, still
ruffled. 'He might have seen that I was a fairy. The child suspected
something at once.'

'Ah, he was an exceptional child,' said the Owl. 'Most of the children,
nowadays, don't believe anything. In fact, now that education is
spreading so widely, I don't suppose one of them will in ten years'
time.'

'It is very dreadful,' said Queen Mab. 'What are we coming to?'

'I am sure I don't know,' said the Owl. 'But we are being educated up
to a very high point. It saves people the trouble of thinking for
themselves, certainly; they can always get all their thoughts now,
ready made, on every kind of subject, and at extremely low prices. They
only have to make up their minds what to take, and generally they take
the cheapest. There is a great demand for cheap thought just now,
especially when it is advertised as being of superior quality.'

'How do they buy it?' asked Queen Mab. 'I don't quite understand.'

'Well, you know a little about Commerce. Education is another kind of
commerce. The authors and publishers are the wholesale market, and
teachers and schools and colleges are a kind of retail dealers. Of
course, not being human, we can't expect to find it quite clear, but
that is what we _do_ make out. The kingfisher and I were listening
lately to a whole course of lectures on Political Economy; we were on a
skylight in the roof of the building, and we found that Popular
Education was part of the system of co-operation. The people who don't
think, you know, but want thoughts, hand education over to the people
who do think, or who buy up old thoughts cheap, and remake them, and
this class furnishes the community. So that, by division of labour, no
one is obliged to think who doesn't want to think, and this saves any
amount of time and expense. It is really astonishing, I hear, how few
people have to think under this new system. But Thought is in great
demand, as I said, and so is Knowledge—whether there was any difference
between the two we could not quite gather. It is a law that everyone
must buy a certain quantity from the dealers: in other words, education
is compulsory. Eating is _not_ compulsory; you _may_ starve, you _must_
learn. The Government has founded a large system of retail
establishments, or schools, and up to a certain age all the children
are taught there whose parents do not undertake to have them supplied
with thoughts at other establishments. I say thoughts, but it is facts
principally that they acquire. Of course, some thoughts are necessary
to mix the facts together with; but they generally take as few as
possible, because facts are a cheaper article, and by the principles of
competition and profit, people use the cheapest article that will sell
again for the same price. Some writers say that thoughts at retail
establishments are very inferior, and that customers had better go to
wholesale dealers at once, or else make on the premises; but I don't
know about that. Generally people buy the kind that comes handiest;
they are not half so particular about them as about articles of food
and dress, and the dealers, wholesale or retail, can sell almost
anything they like if they have a good reputation. History, languages,
science, art, theology, are all so many departments. Politics are
always in demand, and there are many great manufacturers who issue
supplies at a penny, every day, all over the kingdom. There is no
branch where the labourers employed have such stirring times as the
makers of politics: we call them statesmen. They seem, however, rather
to enjoy it, and I suppose they get used to the heat, like stokers. I
think that the burden of the whole scheme really falls most heavily on
the children. But you are tired.'

'Tell me about the children,' said Queen Mab. 'I shall understand that
better.'

'They have to learn facts, facts, for ever facts,' said the Owl
compassionately. 'It makes one's head ache to think of it. I am a
pretty well educated bird myself, though I say it; but if I had spent
my time in acquiring a quarter of the knowledge those children have to
acquire, then I should certainly never have been able to look at things
in the broadly scientific light in which they should be looked at. It
does not seem to matter what the facts are, so long as they are cheap
and plenty of them; it does not even matter whether they are true, or,
at least, that is of very minor importance. But see! see there! That is
an example of what I have been telling you.'

A child was passing below them with a weary step. Queen Mab trembled at
the sight of him, secure as she was among the broad chestnut leaves,
and her fear was justified, for in another moment the professor himself
came into view. The fairy-had seen the child before, and, as Mr.
Trollope used to say, 'she had been to him as a god'—it was the
professor's little boy. But this time the philosopher was without his
butterfly-net, and she found him much less alarming. He was occupied
with the pale, tired child, and telling him charming stories about
coral islands, that sounded to Queen Mab's astonished ears almost like
a real fairy tale. They sat down, while the professor talked. Wonderful
things he told, and said not a word all the time about generalisation
or classification.

'It is like a fairy tale,' said the boy, echoing Queen Mab's thought,
when at last they rose to go. 'Oh, father, how I wish we could see Dala
again!'

'Dala, my boy? What, the lepidoptera? Ah, I wish we could! You will
find, as you grow older, Walter, that science is better than a
butterfly.'

The boy looked up wistfully, and over the face of the philosopher, too,
came a sudden shadow. When Walter grew older? Hand in hand, the two
passed silently out of sight.

'He is a good man, after all,' said the Owl sententiously. And then
there came by a British manufacturer, in a gold watch-chain and patent
creaking leather boots, warranted to creak everywhere without losing
tone.

'Who is that?' asked Queen Mab.

'It is one of the pillars of the Church,' replied the Owl. 'The
Dragon's church, I mean, where he is worshipped by himself. In some
places you may worship St. George and the Dragon together; but in the
Stock Exchange, for instance, you may only worship the Dragon.'

'Is the Dragon very wicked?'

'I don't know,' said the Owl. 'I think he can't be, or else so many
respectable people would not worship him. The professor doesn't, or
very little; but then he doesn't worship St. George either. The people
who worship the Dragon are sometimes called Snobs—not by themselves
though; it is one of the marks of the true Snob that he never knows he
is one. They never call the Dragon by that name either. He has as many
other names as Jupiter used to have, and all the altars, and temples,
and sacrifices are made to him under the other names.'

'Sacrifices!' exclaimed Queen Mab. 'What do they sacrifice?'

'It would be shorter to say what they _don't_ sacrifice,' replied the
Owl. 'Only nobody knows, for many of his worshippers sacrifice anything
and everything. The manufacturer you saw go past—'

'Yes,' said Queen Mab, a good deal impressed, for the owl was speaking
solemnly.

'He is sacrificing the happiness, and even the lives of hundreds of men
and women. Also the playtime of the children and their innocence. As
for his own peace and charity, he sacrificed them long ago. And yet—it
is very strange; he calls himself a worshipper of St. George. You
remember, in very early times there used to be sacrifices to the
Dragon.'

'I remember,' said the fairy. 'In wicker baskets. But never anything.
like this!'

'I daresay not,' said the Owl 'We do things on a larger scale now,
sacrifices and all. Everybody prefers, of course, to make sacrifices of
the belongings of other people; but there are certain possessions of
their own that unavoidably go too—as Truth, Sympathy, Justice; abstract
nouns, the names of any quality, property, state or action,' murmured
the Owl, falling unconsciously into his old habit of parsing. 'The
English,' he added, 'are very generous with their abstract nouns, and
will sacrifice or give away any quantity of them. It is a national
characteristic, of which they are justly proud.'

'Do the women worship the Dragon?'

'Certainly!' said the Owl. 'They generally profess a great deal of
veneration for St. George too; but they will worship either to get
front seats. I don't know why the English are so fond of front seats;
back ones are just as comfortable, and one can often hear better in
them; but they don't suit dragon-worshippers. They want front seats
anywhere—at concerts, in the church, in art or literature, or even in
subscription lists. The persons who can't afford front seats generally
adore those who can, and those who can, say that the others ought to be
grateful to Providence for putting them in the gallery or letting them
into the free pews. There is a great deal of veneration in the English,
and it shows itself in this way; they reverence the people with
reserved tickets. That is why they are so fond of a noble lord, and
that is why they admire Abraham, and even Lazarus, because he
ultimately got such an excellent place in the next world. They don't
care much about Lazarus in this, because their souls have not such a
natural affinity with his when he is hanging about anyone's doorstep,
or loafing round street-corners with oranges to sell or a barrel-organ.
Sometimes they give him the crumbs that fall from their tables, and
sometimes they don't, because they are afraid he will take advantage of
it to steal the spoons. Or else they take the lofty patriotic ground,
and say that their principles forbid them to countenance vagrancy, and
that Heaven helps those who help themselves. This is very consoling to
Lazarus, and it always gives him pleasure to hear what good moral
principles the Philistines—or Snobs—have got, even if he hasn't got any
himself. From what they frequently say, you would not think that they
looked forward to seeing him in Heaven. It is part of their
great-mindedness—a national characteristic—that the chords of their
nature are more deeply stirred by sympathy with him when he has got
into a good berth. I can fancy how, in Paradise, a British Snob will
edge round to some retired crossing-sweeper, who was converted by the
Salvation Army, and went straight up among the front row of angels and
prophets, and will say:

'"Pardon me; but I remember you _so_ well!" And I can fancy that the
seraph might reply:

'"Ah, yes! I used to sweep a crossing up your street. I asked you for a
copper once, and you told me to go—not where you find me."

'It would be a little awkward for the Snob: things often are; but he
would soon get over it. His sense of locality, you perceive, is
extremely acute. He may not always know at a glance exactly what men
are in themselves, but he can always tell _where_ they are. If you put
one of Madame Tussaud's waxworks into a front seat, or on a Woolsack,
or on a Board of Directors, the English would venerate it more than
most real persons. Their sensibilities are so strong that the merest
symbol stirs them. A noble lord need not do anything remarkable; but he
is in the front row, and if he just radiates ability, that is quite
enough. And he can't help radiating "ability;" it is one of his
characteristics, and has become automatic.'

'What is automatic?'

'Automatic! Oh, it means acting of its own accord, without any effort
of the will to make it work. Automatic actions may go on a very long
time without stopping, sometimes for ever. If I continued in this
strain much longer it might get automatic too: speaking often does,
especially with Members of Parliament. It is as if they were wound up
to say similar things one after the other, like musical-boxes, by
reflex action, and you never know when they will give up. The automatic
method has this advantage, that when you have had some experience of an
automaton, you can always tell—suppose that it is wound up, for
instance, to speak on a motion—what it will probably say next, and
certainly how it will vote, and that gives you a sense of calm peace.
It is a method very common among stump orators, because it comes
cheaper in the long run. But there are other things—novel-writing, for
instance. Novelists, many of them, are wound up at the beginning to
write novels periodically, and the action gradually gets feebler and
feebler, till at last it stops. It does not, however, generally stop
till they die, and that is why we have so many bad novels from some
writers. All authors, though, don't write automatically, any more than
all clergymen preach automatically. But it is a very easy habit to fall
into: I have done it myself more than once. Of course it is very
useful, and very inexpensive, and an immense saving of energy, and one
would advise the rising generation to cultivate it as much as possible,
that their years may be long in the land. But one ought never to allow
such a habit as swearing,—or shooting,' added the Owl gravely, 'to
become automatic. Let me see, where did I begin? I was telling you
about the female dragon-worshippers, who dress in symbolical costumes,
like the old priestesses or the Salvation Army captains. Lately,
though, a good many of the women who were brought up to it have taken
"a new departure," and gone off after the wholesale education
establishments at Camford, where they are fed on biscuits and
marmalade, and illuminate the fragments of Sappho on vellum. This may
not be very good: still I think it is better than the Dragon; the worst
of it is that it forces up the educational prices.'

With which remark the Owl began a long series of observations, a
mixture of political economy and his views on popular education, which
Queen Mab found rather tedious. But they inspired her with a few
verses, which she resolved, being the most philanthropic of fairies,
and full of compassion for the dreary state of Great Britain in
general, and of the rising generation in particular, to circulate among
the Polynesian children as soon as she returned home. In this
determination, unfortunately, she either forgot or ignored the fact
that she had left her happy island a prey to the combined effects of
annexation, civilisation, and evangelisation. But the verses ran thus:

'Upon my childhood's pallid morn
    No tropic summer smiled,
In foreign lands I was not born,
    A happy, heathen child.

Alas! but in a colder clime,
    A cultured clime, I dwell
All in the foremost ranks of time,
    They say: I know it well.

_You_ never learn geography,
    No grammar makes you wild,
A book, a slate you never see,
    You happy, heathen child.

I know in forest and in glade
    Your games are odd but gay,
Think of the little British maid,
    Who has no place for play.

When ended is the day's long joy,
    And you to rest have gone,
Think of the little British boy,
    Who still is toiling on.

The many things we learn about,
    We cannot understand.
Ah, send your missionaries out
    To this benighted land!

You blessed little foreigner,
    In weather fair and mild,
Think of the tiny Britisher,
    Oh, happy heathen child.

Ah! highly favoured Pagan, born
    In some far hemisphere,
Pity the British child forlorn,
    And drop one sorrowing tear!'



CHAPTER VI.
JUSTICE AND THE NEW DEMOCRACY.


'They will soon be here,
They are upon the road,'
John Gilpin.


'I should like,' said Queen Mab one day, 'to go and see the City. Do
you think it would be safe?'

'Yes,' said the Owl, 'if you fly out of the way of the smoke and the
net of overhead wires, and take care not to be suffocated, and not to
go near the Houses of Parliament, nor the Bank, nor St. Paul's, nor the
Exchange, nor any great public building. And if you keep clear of all
the bridges, and the railway stations, and Victoria Embankment, and go
the other way whenever you see a person carrying a black bag.'

'Why?' inquired Queen Mab, a good deal mystified.

'Because all these places,' said the Owl, 'are in danger of being blown
up. If you could get a Home Ruler to take you round now; but I'm afraid
it wouldn't do, as he might put you into an explosion and leave you
there, as likely as not. Besides, I was forgetting, you are immortal,
aren't you? You _couldn't_ be blown up? If so, it is all right.'

'I don't suppose I could,' said Queen Mab a little doubtfully, 'but
still I shouldn't care to try. What is it like?'

'I don't know,' replied her mentor. 'I have never tried it myself. You
had better ask Mr. Bradlaugh, or some eminent popular sciolist Huxley
or Spencer would do. They have been exploding or blowing up popular
theology for a number of years, and popular theology and Mr. Joseph
Cook have been exploding them. As far as I can make out, they both
appear to think it very good fun. But I was going to tell you about the
black bags, which are filled with dynamite, a very explosive though
inexpensive substance indeed, and carried by persons called
"dynamiters." These bags are left at large in public buildings, while
the dynamitards go away, and as soon as their owners turn the corner
the bags explode and blow up the buildings, and anyone who happens to
be about.'

'Why do they do it?' exclaimed Queen Mab, breathless.

'Nobody seems to know,' said the Owl. 'It is one of the problems of the
nineteenth century. Even the dynamiters themselves don't appear to have
gone into the whole logic of it I suppose that they are tired of only
blowing things up on paper, and they are people who have a great
objection to things in general. They complain that they can't get
justice from the universe in its present state of preservation, and
therefore they are going to blow as much of it as possible into what
they call _smithereens_, and try to get justice from the smithereens.
It is a new scheme they have hit upon, a kind of scientific experiment.
The theory appears to be, that justice is the product of Nihilism plus
public buildings blown up by dynamite, and that the more public
buildings they blow up the more justice they will obtain. I hear that
they have also started a company for supplying statesmen, and all
public orators except Home Rulers, with nitro-glycerine jujubes to
improve the voice. Nitro-glycerine is a kind of condensed dynamite. A
City sparrow told me—but perhaps it was only his fun—that they were
borrowing the money from the Government, under the pretext of applying
it to a fund for presenting three-and-sixpenny copies of Jevons'
"Logic" to Members of Parliament who can't afford to buy the book for
themselves. It is reported, also, that if the Nihilists can't obtain
justice enough by any less extensive measures, they will lower a great
many kegs of nitro-glycerine to the molten nucleus of the globe, and
then—'

'Then?' said Queen Mab, much excited.

'Then the globe will explode, and all the inhabitants, even the
dynamiters themselves; but justice will remain; according to the
theory, that is. But it is rather an expensive experiment.'

'How dreadful!' said the fairy. 'Do you think I had better not go to
London?'

'I think you might,' replied the Owl thoughtfully. 'There would be a
little risk certainly; but you could fly high, and remember that
dynamite strikes downwards. You had better take the sparrow, though,
for I'm afraid I should attract too much attention. Otherwise I should
like to go with you.'

'I will make us both invisible,' said Queen Mab. 'That will be easy.'

'Oh, very well, if you do _that!_' And they started.

'After all,' said the Owl an hour later, 'as we _are_ here, and
invisible, we may as well rest on the dome of St. Paul's. Dynamite does
strike downwards, and I don't see any black bags about,' he added,
looking round suspiciously.

'All right,' said the fairy. 'Now you can tell me all about things,'
for they had been flying too fast to exchange many remarks. 'What is
this building?'

'It is one of St. George's best churches,' said the Owl.

A burst of melancholy music swelled out below them as he spoke, and
Queen Mab started with delight.

'That is like Fairyland,' she said promptly. 'What is it?'

'It is the organ and the choristers,' said the Owl. 'If you fly down a
moment you can look in; but don't wait long, because of the dynamite.
It would be just like them,' he added pensively, 'to blow it up when we
are here.'

Queen Mab obeyed, leaving the owl, still a little nervous, seated
invisible on the dome.

'I have heard the music,' she said when she flew back, 'and seen the
singers, and the great golden pipes the music comes out of. What a
beautiful big place it is! We have nothing like that in Polynesia.'

'No, I should think not,' returned the bird. 'Look round you. That
street where all the people and the vehicles are rushing up and down is
Cheapside.'

'Why do they all go so fast?' said the fairy.

'Oh, for many reasons. Competition, struggle for existence, and all
that. They are in a normal condition, in that street, of having trains
to catch, and not having any time to catch them in. Besides, they are
dragon-worshippers, most of them, and it is part of their religion to
walk as fast as they can, not only through Cheapside but through life.
The one who can walk fastest, and knock down the greatest number of
other people, gets a prize.'

'Who are the big men in black robes who stand at corners, and look as
if everything belonged to them? Are they the owners of the City?'

'They are policemen,' said the Owl. 'Products,' he went on learnedly,
'of the higher civilisation, evolved to put the lower civilisation into
prisons.'

'What are prisons?'

'A kind of hothouses,' said the Owl, 'for the culture of feeble moral
principles that the Struggle for Existtence has been too much for. They
are a wonderful system. The weak morality is supplied with bread and
water and a cell to develop in, and it is exercised on a treadmill, and
allowed to expand and pick oakum, and so it is turned into a beautiful
plant of virtue.'

'What do they do with it then?'

'Then they let it run wild, unless it comes across a Home Missionary,
or a School Board, or Dr. Barnardo, and gets trained.'

'Oh!' said Queen Mab. 'Are there many of these hothouses?'

'A good many. You see, such a number of the members of the lower
portion of the higher civilisation have moral principles that need
training. The moral principle is the latest product of evolution, or so
the professor says, and evolution has not yet got quite into the way of
always turning it out first class. Like everything else, it wants
practice. Some moral principles are excellent; but others are really
bungles, and require periodical prison culture. At present we need
policemen for the transplanting; but it is hoped that, in the course of
an era or two, the automatic method will be so much further developed
that a member of the higher civilisation who gets very drunk, or
steals, will put himself to prison at once, by reflex action. I told
you about that: it is a lengthy subject; but the kingfisher and I quite
mastered it one day, and I daresay you will. It is much easier than
portions of the Thirty-nine Articles.'

'I know what that is,' said Queen Mab; 'the missionaries were talking
about it once.'

'I have taken a good deal of trouble,' said the Owl, 'but there were
parts of the Thirty-nine Articles I never could make out. They are a
kind of tinned theology, and so much tinned that no one appreciates
them but the theologians.'

'Why is the theology tinned?' asked the Queen. 'Why don't they have it
fresh and fresh?'

'They like it old,' said the Owl. 'They have tried various ways of
treating it, for theology does not keep well in a scientific
atmosphere. Frozen theology has been experimented with by Archdeacon
Farrar and others, and has some vogue. But the popular taste prefers it
tinned. And yet it is very tough, in Articles. I am surprised that no
one has written a simple explanation of them: "Primer of the
Thirty-nine Articles," "The Thirty-nine Articles made Easy," or
"Thirty-nine Articles for Beginners;" but no one ever has. It is a book
that is very much needed, and if I had any influence with the
theologians I would ask them to do it at once. In days like ours, when
floods of Nonconformity and Socialism are pouring in on every hand, the
very foundations of Church and State are being sapped for want of a
plain popular guide ta the Thirty-nine Articles, that a child could
understand. A child couldn't expect to find them clear in their present
condensed state, could he now? But then, when I come to think of it,
perhaps there is no reason why he should.' And the owl fell into a
reverie.

After this they departed in search of a more sequestered resting-place,
and ultimately alighted in Kensington Gardens. And there they came upon
a Democrat and an Aristocrat who was also a landholder, and the
Aristocrat was saying:

'What will you do without an aristocracy? What will you look up to?'
'We shall do,' said the Democrat, 'very well indeed. We shall do, in
fact, a good deal better; for we shall be an aristocracy in ourselves,
and look up to ourselves, and reverence humanity. What, I should like
to know, has the British aristocracy done for us?'

'We have set you an example,' replied his companion impressively.

'We have told you what to do and what not to do. We have employed you;
we have let you vote for us; we have represented you in Church and
State; we have given you a popular education; and a pretty use you have
made of it! We have, in short,' he continued, trying hard to remember
the popular maxim, 'cherished you like a viper, and you turn again and
rend us.'

'All that,' said the Democrat, 'you did because you couldn't help it.'
'We have been,' exclaimed the Aristocrat with deep pathos, 'as lights
in a benighted land. We have improved the breed of horses and
cultivated the fine arts, and literature, and china, and the fashions,
and French cookery—'

'And drinking, and racing, and gambling, and betting, and
pigeon-shooting,' put in the Democrat thoughtfully. 'So you have.'

'We have come to church,' continued the Aristocrat unheeding, 'and you
have surveyed us from the free seats—when you were there. I regret to
say that your attendance at the established places of worship has been
far from satisfactory. We have allowed you to pay us the highest rents
you could afford, solely to develop in you the sense of competition and
a stimulus to progress, and we have daily displayed to you, in our
persons and equipments, the advantages of the higher life. Our wives
and daughters have played the piano, done crewel work, danced, sung and
skated, and painted on plaques for your edification and improvement. We
have trained ourselves, physically, mentally, morally, and
aesthetically to be a thing of beauty in your eyes and a joy for ever.
Alas, you have no vision for the beautiful and intrinsically complete;
you can't appreciate an aristocracy when you see one. We have even
flung open our parks and grounds for your benefit, and let you admire
our mansions, and you knocked down the ornaments, and smudged the
tapestry and the antimacassars, and trod on the flower-beds, and pulled
up the young trees, and threw orange-peel into the fountains, and
ridiculed the statuary. Then you asked us for peasant proprietorship.'

'It wasn't me,' said the Democrat with unusual humility. 'It was the
British public.'

'And what are you,' retorted his companion firmly—for he felt that he
had scored a point—'but a representative of the British public? Alas, I
could weep for your short-sightedness! When the reins of the ship of
State—no, the helm of the chariot of Government, is in the hands of a
semi-barbarous public, what will it do with it? The old aristocratic
ballast once thrown overboard, it will drive that chariot upon the
rocks of anarchy, it will overturn it upon the shores of revolution.
And you, contemptible tool of an infatuated majority, what will you do
then? Ah, then, too late you will cry, "Give me back my aristocracy,
the aristocracy I so madly flung away!" When you have the Church and
State flying about your ears, you will wish you had minded what we said
to you. You will long with remorse unspeakable for the old English
gentleman, the bulwark of the land; but the good old English gentleman
will be no more. He will have gone to the vaults of his fathers, to the
happy hunting-grounds of the noble lord.'

'You are really very eloquent,' said the Democrat, with more politeness
than his wont ('I didn't think he had it in him,' he murmured under his
breath.) 'But you exaggerate our intentions. We are only democrats: we
are not Nihilists. We desire justice.'

'Ah, that is what you all say!' exclaimed the Aristocrat hastily. 'I
have heard enough about justice: I wish it had never been invented.
Never knew any of your fine-sounding phrases yet that did not end in
gunpowder.'

'You mistake,' said the Democrat severely. 'Our requirements are few
and simple: Universal suffrage, the abolition of the peers, of entail,
and of primogeniture, the overthrow of establishments and armaments
equally bloated, the right to marry the deceased wife's sister, the
confiscation of landed property by the State—'

'Oh lord, yes!' groaned the Aristocrat 'I thought you were coming to
that next. Take our landed property, do—I wish you joy of it! What with
all your Communistic legislation and bad harvests, and backing good
things that don't come off—like an ass as I was—by Jove, I feel
disposed to quit the whole business and compete for a Mandarin's Button
in China. It's the only country for a British Aristocracy to live
comfortably in and be properly appreciated, and you can't come sneaking
about with your red-hot Republicanism, for they are all good
Conservatives. Who ever heard of The Chinese Revolution?'

They parted hastily, the common consequence of all lengthy argument,
and the aristocrat repaired to his club, smoking a cigar to soothe his
ruffled feelings, while the democrat also turned on his heel, and went
to address the British public in Hyde Park. Queen Mab, however, had
heard enough of social problems for one day, and she did not follow
him. The Owl took her, instead, to Westminster Abbey, and offered
explanations after the manner of a verger.

'This is our museum of 'dead celebrities,' he said. 'Here lie our great
men—poets, soldiers, artists, and statesmen. When the British public
feels elevated and sublime it comes here to look at the tombstones, and
it says: "These are my great men: they worked for me. I bought them: I
paid for them!" And it turns away with tears in its eyes.'

'And while they are alive?' asked Mab.

'That is rather a long subject,' replied the Owl.

'In the first place, they set up a great man, like a target, to shoot
at and fight over, and find out whether he is really a great man or
only a "lunatic ritualist," like General Gordon, in the view of
Thoughtful persons. It takes them some time to decide: sometimes they
never do decide till he has gone to his reward, if even then. It is an
admirable quality in him, always, not to mind being shot at. But when
the British public has really made up its mind that a man is a great
man, and that however low they rate him at market value he is sure to
be above the average, they sing a psalm of thanksgiving, and they cry,
"Where is his coffin? Let us drive nails into the coffin of this great
man! Let us show our magnanimity, our respect for the higher life, our
reverence for the lofty soul! Give us the hammer." Then they begin. It
is an imposing ceremony, and lasts during the lifetime of the great
man, whoever he happens to be. He may be a literary great man, a poet,
perhaps a Laureate. This type, according to the notions of the British
public, requires a great quantity of nails, and every class of society
almost brings them to his coffin. The young lady authors come, many
troops of them, all conscious of greatness in their own souls, and all
having made it the dream of their lives to turn their souls inside out
for the benefit of a really great man. Surely, they think, there must
be in the heart of him a natural affinity for the details of their
inner lives. They give him the details of their inner lives: they also
bring with them hammer and nails. There is nerve in those delicate
fingers, energy in those sympathetic souls: the number of nails they
contrive to hammer in is astonishing.

'Then the theologians come, with a doctrinal hammer and many nails, the
lineal descendants of the nail that Jael drove into the head of Sisera
because he fought against the Israelites. They have found out that
there is a want of sound sectarian teaching in the works of the poet,
and they say that in the interests of theology they must drive a nail
in. They drive it: they know how to drive nails, some of the
theologians. Good sound crushing, rending, comfortable nails of
doctrine—none of your airy latitudinarian tin-tacks. Then come the
critics: they have been brought up to it. They have all manner of
nails—nails with broad heads, and narrow heads, and brass heads, and no
heads, but all with points. If a critic ever should drive in a nail
without a point he would feel everlastingly disgraced, but he never
does: he sharpens them on the premises. He can always find a place for
another nail, till by-and-by the coffin is quite covered, and then the
great man is thankful to rest in it. Then the British public sings more
psalms.

But it seems to afford them solid comfort and happiness to find out, or
to think they find out, that a great man was really not so great after
all, and that they can look down on him. It is certainly a more piquant
sensation to look down on a great man than on an ordinary mortal, and
makes one feel happier. There is a melancholy, sweet satisfaction—I
have noticed it myself—in pointing out exactly where this or that great
man erred, and where we should not have erred if we had been this or
that great man. There is a calm, blessed sense of the law of
compensation among humans when they murmur over the grave: "Ah! his was
a mighty soul; everybody says so; but his umbrella was only gingham,
and mine has a silver handle." Or, "Yes, his force of mind was
gigantic; but just here he left the beaten track. If I had been in his
place at that moment I should have kept it; I always do." Or, "His
morality looks elegant, but it hasn't got any fibre to it. Now my
morality is all fibre; you never met with such fibrous morality. What
did he do with the fibre out of his? Did he pawn it? did he sell it?
did he give it away? We should like to know all about it—is it in his
autobiography? Did he write an autobiography? If he didn't, why didn't
he? We prefer all our great men to write autobiographies. We like to be
well up in them, and we think it would throw a great deal of light on
the study of psychology, and gratify our sense of reverence, to know
the exact details of the daily life of this great man, and at what hour
he dined, and whether he wrote with a quill or a J pen. Whether the
quality of the pens he used was or was not intimately connected with
the quality of his moral fibre, and whether his ethical degeneration
could or could not be dated from his ceasing to make two fair copies of
his manuscripts. We should also like to be informed whether his studs
were gold or gilt, and, if they were gold, whether it was 18-carat
gold, or only 15. If they were gilt, whether he wore them gilt on
principle, or because he hadn't money enough to buy a better pair; and
if, supposing that it was because he hadn't money enough, _why_ he
hadn't, and whether he spent the money on cigars. Why he was not an
anti-tobacconist. Did anyone ever invite him to join the
anti-tobacconists? and if they didn't, why didn't they? Did he approve
of the Blue Ribbon movement? Is it true that he once got intoxicated,
and smashed a blue china teapot? If he did, was it by way of protest
against the demoralising doctrine of Art for Art's sake? Has anybody
written his wife's biography?—if not, why not? We should like it at
once, and also the biographies of all his second and third cousins, and
of his publishers, and of the conductor of the tramcar he once went
into town by. Why did he travel by tram that day, and what had the
twopence he paid for the tramcar to do with the flow of the hexameters
used by him in translating the Æneid? Let us trace the effects of both
on the growth of individuality in his writings, and find out, if
possible, the influence of the twopence as affecting his views on the
opium traffic." But what a long time I have been talking,' said the
Owl, suddenly recollecting himself. 'Automatic action again. Dear me!'

'Yes, you have,' said Queen Mab, whose thoughts had been wandering. 'I
did not suppose you meant to stop. Is it not time for us to go?'

It was indeed growing late, and the Owl was tired after his long
harangue, but though they set out at once on their return journey, the
day's experiences were not quite ended. For behold! the mob, returning
from Hyde Park, with the Democrat at its head, in search of a Cabinet
Minister, a Lord Mayor, a Government, anything administrative and
official that they could lay their hands upon, and to whom they could
make representations. The mob was half-starved; but that, as the Owl
whispered to Queen Mab, was a way it had, and did not amount to much.
It was also able-bodied and unemployed but these too were normal
characteristics, and did not amount to much either. Fortunately, or
unfortunately, it met a Cabinet Minister just at the entrance of Oxford
Street, and the Cabinet Minister, who had been walking gaily, and
twirling his cane, instantly slackened his pace, and, with inherent
fine tact, put on a serious and sympathetic expression. The mob pushed
the Democrat forward, and he confronted the Cabinet Minister.

'What are you going to do for these people?' he said abruptly; 'they
are starving.'

'No; are they?' said the Cabinet Minister, looking very properly
horrified, at which the mob cheered. 'I am very sorry indeed to hear
it. Let me see if I can find a sixpence.'

He fumbled in all his pockets, and, finally, with some difficulty,
produced a threepenny bit. The mob cheered again.

'I am sorry,' he said, 'that I haven't a sixpence, but perhaps this
will be of use?'

'That won't do,' replied the Democrat roughly, as he pocketed the coin.
'Do you suppose that you are going to feed thousands of starving men,
women, and children on a threepenny bit?'

'I deeply sympathise,' said the Cabinet Minister, without any distinct
impression that he was quoting from 'Alice in Wonderland.' 'In fact, I
may say that I weep for you; but what can I do? Am I not with you?
Don't I hate criticism, and political economy, and Mr. Goschen?'

'You must _act_, returned the Democrat impressively. 'You are in the
Government; 'and there came from the mob a hoarse, funereal echo, 'You
are in the—qualified—Government!'

'Ah, but I am not in that department,' said the Minister, seeing a way
of escape. 'My friends—I may say, indeed, my suffering
fellow-citizens—be reasonable. Don't be vexed with _me_. I am only a
capitalist, a toiler and spinner. Go for dukes and earls, or
better—exercise patience. "The night," says the poet, "is always
darkest just before the dawn." I am not in that department.'

'Hang your departments!' said the Democrat. 'If you are not in that
department, at least you might be expected to know where it is, and to
tell it what to do. Who would give a farthing for departments and
officials who can't join hands at a time like this, to help their
starving countrymen? We shan't stop to quarrel with you how you do it,
if you only lift us out of the mire. Here are these men'—he pointed to
the mob, and the mob hurrahed—'willing to work, eager to work,
perishing for want of food, and not a soul of your benevolent
Governments will lift a finger to set them to work for it. Give them
public buildings to erect and to be blown up, canals to make, railways
to cut; assist them to emigrate, if you have nothing for them to do at
home, but in Heaven's name be sharp about it!'

'It is really very awkward,' said the Cabinet Minister. 'You see I am
not in the Railroad Department, nor in the Canal Department, nor in the
Emigration Department. I am sure you see that!' he continued hopefully,
looking round upon the crowd, who, though they admitted the fact, did
not appear to appreciate its deep and intrinsic force. 'But I am quite
willing at some future opportunity—indeed, I may say I hope at some
opportunity comparatively not distant, to consider the advisability of
representing the matter to the heads of certain departments who might
be able, in the course of the next but one Septennial Parliament, or'
(even more sanguinely) 'I might under favourable circumstances even
hope to say, the _next_ Septennial Parliament, to lay the topic before
the Government. In the meantime, my friends, consider that such means
as you have suggested for alleviating the hardships with which I so
profoundly sympathise are not things to be lightly rushed into. You
will agree with me doubtless. You will show that fine sense of the
propriety of your lots innate in the breast of every Briton, by
agreeing with me that canals, for instance, are not things to be
lightly rushed into. Emigration, my friends, is not a thing to be
lightly rushed into. In the meantime, knowledge, as the good old maxim
tells us, never comes amiss, and whatever be the eventual scheme
resolved upon by Government for relieving your necessities, you cannot
better employ your leisure than in preparatory academic study of the
arts of building, railway cutting, and canal-making, and in acquainting
yourselves with the principles and methods of emigration, the nature of
our different colonial settlements, their situation and productions,
during the seven years that must inevitably elapse—'

He would have proceeded, but a howl, long and loud, drowned his
utterance, and the mob surged forward, driving him back, in a state of
bewildered astonishment, into the premises of a fashionable dealer.
Various tokens of regard followed him in the shape of rotten eggs and
cabbage leaves, which, as the Owl observed in a thoughtful voice, were
doubtless symbolical.

Then the mob broke up and went on its different ways. Mab and the Owl,
following one of its scattered detachments, met another procession,
with a drum and trumpets and other instruments, all working their
hardest at one of Sankey and Moody's hymns, which procession drew up
straightway before the remnant of the mob, and began to convert it.

'What is this?' asked Queen Mab. 'Is it British Polynesians going to a
war-dance?'

'No,' replied the Owl. 'It is only the Salvation Army, walking
backwards into glory.'

'Come away,' said Mab. 'They are very noisy, these British Polynesians,
and the mob makes me miserable. Let us go back.'

'I am ready,' said the Owl. 'I don't wonder that London has this effect
on you at first. You are not sufficiently automatic, and a
non-automatic mind has always much to contend with.'



CHAPTER VII.
MACHINERY AND THE SUCCESSFUL MERCHANT.


'Now to the eye of Faith displayed,
    The Prototype is seen,
In every office, every trade,
I mark, in human garb arrayed,
    The conquering Machine!

By careful evolution planned,
    With many a gliding wheel,
To warn, to comfort, to command,
Or fly, or drive a four-in-hand,
    Or dance a Highland Reel!

When, urged no more by Passions gale,
    Or impulse unforeseen,
Humanity shall faint and fail,
Upon its ruins will prevail
    The conquering Machine!'


Perhaps the exhibition of machinery-struck Queen Mab with more horror
than any other novelty in this country. The Owl declared that she ought
to develop a stronger automatic principle, and he therefore took her to
an exhibition full of appliances for making the world over again, if
ever, as North-country folk say, it 'happened an accident' All the
different industries of the higher life were represented, and the scene
was calculated to drive a non-automatic mind, as the Owl called Queen
Mab's, entirely out of itself in the course of three-quarters of an
hour.

There was machinery, worked by electricity, for beating gold to that
degree of fineness that it could not be seen except through a powerful
microscope, and there was the powerful microscope for seeing it
through, also worked by electricity.

'Why do they want it so fine?' asked Mab.

'In order,' said the Owl, 'that they may be able to take a microscope
to it, and so increase the demand for microscopes. The trades play into
each other's hands. Look at these watches making themselves.'

He pointed to an arrangement of ropes and wheels and pulleys and
electricity, directing the movements of a few human assistants with
admirable dexterity and precision.

'You don't have anything like that in Polynesia!' said the Owl with
pardonable pride.

'No, I should think not,' said Queen Mab. 'Why, we haven't any watches
at all there. We look at the sun.'

'Ah yes,' returned the Owl. 'But the sun is rather unreliable, after
all. He has the Ecliptic to go round, and the whole of the Solar System
to attend to, and one must make allowances for him. But, for purposes
of strict chronology, watches are better, especially these watches!
They wind themselves up punctually every night, and if their owners
break the mainsprings of them, they pack themselves up to go by Parcels
Post back to the Company, and then they direct the parcel—or so I hear.
Oh! they are very intelligent watches!'

'Is that true? 'inquired Mab doubtfully.

'I believe so,' said the Owl.

There seemed to Queen Mab something rather too preternatural about
this, though she could well believe it, as she looked at the wonderful
manner in which the watches turned themselves out. It frightened her,
and they proceeded farther on, and came to much artillery, carefully
constructed by the higher civilisation for the purpose of turning the
lower civilisation, or the non-civilisation, or the alien civilisation,
from the error of its ways.

'These,' said the Owl, pointing at random to a collection of elegantly
polished torpedoes, cannons of superior excellence, gunpowder and
gun-cotton of all descriptions and colours, arranged artistically in
cases, to resemble sugar-candy and other confectionery, 'are the
weapons of our philanthropy, the agents by which we disseminate truth,
charity, and freedom, among tribes and races as yet imperfectly
supplied with cardinal virtues and general ideas. They cost a great
deal, but we would sacrifice anything for such a purpose. There is
nothing mean about the British public. "What are a few bales of
gun-cotton,' it cries—" a few tons of paltry bullets, in comparison
with the march of civilisation and humanity and open markets? We do but
give them of our best, our finest Bessemer steel, our latest thing in
torpedo-boats—nothing is too good for them. What are we, if not
magnanimous?' says the British public. I always like that about it—it
never grudges a few millions for war expenditure in the cause of
philanthropy! Considering how very sharply it looks after its £ s. d.
in other directions, this liberality is especially touching and
gratifying.'

But Queen Mab preferred to hurry past these dangerous-looking engines
of Altruism, and they continued their survey. They came next to a
company of umbrellas who were also barometers, and found out when it
was going to rain in time for their masters to take them out. This, Mab
said, was absurd, and, in fact, she was heartily tired of the whole
thing before the Owl had explained to her half-a-dozen ingenious
structures. She said that inanimate objects had no business to be so
clever, and that, if the mechanicians did not take care, they would
shortly invent machines that would conspire together to assassinate
them, and then share the profits.

'Let us go away,' she exclaimed finally, 'before we turn into machines
ourselves! Everything is going round and round, and I am afraid of
having to begin to go round and round too.'

'Ah, I knew this would be the place for cultivating the automatic
principle in you,' said the Owl triumphantly. 'We will come again.'

'No, thank you,' said Mab, energetically spreading her wings, and, in
her preoccupation, taking the wrong road and darting into the great
luncheon-room, whither the Owl followed her. The tables were crowded
with people, and numbers of other people who had not yet lunched, were
pacing up and down, looking anxiously for vacant places which were not
there. The invisible spectators recognised the British manufacturer
they had seen in Richmond Park. He was seated at a table; he had been
sitting there since the disappearance of his last glass of claret, half
an hour by the great clock, and for the whole of that half-hour several
persons, standing very near his chair, had been fixing hungry eyes upon
him, and expecting him to get up. Every time his boots creaked they
moved perceptibly nearer, and made swift mental calculations of the
chances each would have to reach the chair; but the worthy manufacturer
still sat on, stolid and complacent, with a sense of comfort the keener
by contrast.

Queen Mab and the Owl found him uncongenial, and flew away again.

'That is just like him,' said the Owl, when they had reached the
outside of the building at last, and were perched on the roof, enjoying
the fresh air. 'He _will_ get all he can for his money. In him you may
see a typical and beautiful example of the Survival of the Fittest. He
worked his way, by means of native moral superiority and pure chocolate
composed of mortar and molasses tinted with sepia, right from the
gallery into one of the very best reserved seats, and now has little
books written on himself, as exemplifying the reward of virtue, and
exhorts everybody to go in and do likewise. The pamphlets conclude:

'"If your vocation furnishes only the trivial round and the common
task; if it does not fall to your lot to invent a new pure chocolate,
you can at least buy Mr. Tubbs's pure chocolate, and reverence the
benefactors of humanity."

'He sends copies to all the dukes, and earls, and archbishops, and the
result is an immense sale of the pure chocolate. He has never missed a
chance of advertising it; he takes boxes to the meetings of the Church
Missionary Society for propagation among the heathen, and so has
managed to get large profits from the Zunis, and the Thlinkeets, and
the Mikado, and the Shah. He nearly got into difficulty with the Low
Church party once by writing privately to the Pope to solicit
orders—not holy orders; orders for pure chocolate, I mean. I hope he
won't carry it too far. His wife's uncle, who was a wholesale draper,
seized one golden opportunity too many, and never recovered from the
effects.'

'How was that?' asked Mab.

'It was an incident that took place in the Strand one day,' said the
Owl with a modest air, 'of which I learned the particulars from two
City sparrows. It struck my fancy, and I wrote a few stanzas upon it.
The kingfisher, in fact, did me the honour to say that I had wedded the
circumstance to immortal verse; but that was his partiality. I will,
however, repeat the little poem to you.' And with becoming diffidence
the Owl recited:

'The Seraph and the Snob.

It was a draper eminent,
    A merchant of the land,
On lofty calculations bent,
Who raised his eyes, on cent, per cent.
    From pondering, in the Strand.

He saw a Seraph standing there,
    With aspect bright and sainted,
Ethereal robe of fabric fair,
And wings that might have been the pair
    Sir Noel Paton painted.

A real Seraph met his gaze—
    There was no doubt of that—
Irradiate with celestial rays.
Our merchant viewed him with amaze,
    And then he touched his hat.

I own, before he raised his hand,
    A moment he reflected,
Because in this degenerate land,
To meet a Seraph in the Strand
    Was somewhat unexpected.

Yet there one stood, as wrapt in thought,
    Amid the City's din,
No other eye the vision caught,
Not even a stray policeman sought
    To run that Seraph in.

But on the merchant curious eyes
    Men turned, and mocking finger,
For well they knew his mien and guise,
_He_ was not wont, in moonstruck wise,
    About the Strand to linger.

Mute stood the draper for a space,
    The mystery to probe,
Alas! in that his hour of grace,
His eyes forsook the Seraph's face,
    And rested on his robe.

And wildly did he seek in vain
    To guess the strange material,
And golden fancies filled his brain,
And hopes of unimagined gain
    Woke at the sight ethereal.

Then, suffered not by fate austere
The impulse to discard,
    He never paused to idly veer
About the bush; but calm and clear
    He said: 'How much a yard?'

A bright and tremulous lustre shone
    Through the dull, dingy Strand,
From parting wings seraphic thrown;
And then, mute, motionless, alone,
    Men saw the merchant stand.


In town to-day his memory's cold,
    No more his name on 'Change is,
Idle his mart, his wares are sold,
And men forget his fame of old,
    Who now in Earlswood ranges.

Yet evermore, with toil and care
    He ponders on devices
For stuffs superlatively rare,
Celestial fabrics past compare,
    At reasonable prices.

To him the padded wall and dead
    With gorgeous colour gleams,
And huge advertisements are spread,
And lurid placards, orange, red,
    Drive through his waking dreams.'


'Thank you,' said Queen Mab, 'that is very interesting; but I can't
help being sorry for the merchant. For, after all, you know, it was his
nature to. Is it not time, now, for us to go back?'



CHAPTER VIII.
THE BEAUTIFUL.


'Tweet!' cried the sparrows, 'it is nothing! It only looks like
something. Tweet! that is the beautiful. Can you make anything of it? I
can't?'
Hans Andersen.


'How exceedingly successful,' observed Queen Mab one day, 'the
Permanent Scarecrows have been!'

'The Permanent Scarecrows?' said the Owl.

The winged and gifted pair had been on another visit to London, and Mab
had found rows on rows of stucco houses, where she had left green
fields, running brooks, and hedges white with may, on the northern side
of the Strand.

'Yes 'said Mab 'you hardly ever see a crow now, where, in my time, the
farmers were so much plagued by the furtive bird. But, as the crows
have been thoroughly frightened off, and as there are now no crops to
protect, I do think they might remove the permanent scarecrows.'

'Your Majesty's meaning,' said the Owl, 'is beginning to dawn on me.
True, in your time there were no statues in London, and the mistake
into which you have fallen is natural. You went away before the great
development of British Art, and British Sculpture, and British worship
of Beauty. The monuments you notice are expressive of our love of
loveliness, our devotion to all that is fair. These objects of which
you complain are not meant to alarm predatory fowls (though well
calculated for that purpose) but to commemorate heroes, often
themselves more or less predatory.'

'Do you mean to tell me?' asked Mab, 'that that big burly scarecrow,
about to mend a gigantic quill with a blunt sword, was a hero?'

'He was indeed,' said the Owl, 'though I admit that you would never
have guessed it from his effigy.'

'And that other scarecrow, all claws and beak, who blocks up the narrow
street where the Dragon worshippers throng? Was _he_ a hero?'

'He is believed by some to be the Dragon himself,' said the Owl; 'but
no one knows for certain, not even the sculptor.'

'And the Barber's Block with the stuffed dog, looking into the Park?'

'He was a poet,' said the Owl, 'and expressed so much contempt for men
that they retorted by that ridiculous caricature. Would you believe it,
English sculptors actually quarrelled among themselves as to who made
that singular and, for its original purpose, most successful
scarecrow!'

'I don't wonder,' remarked the Queen, 'that birds of taste are rare in
the Metropolis, and that, on the Embankment especially, a rook would be
regarded as a kind of prodigy. Nowhere has the manufacture of permanent
scarecrows been conducted with more ingenious success. But tell me, my
accomplished fowl, have Britons any other arts? Long ago the men used
to paint themselves blue, but, as far as I have remarked, the women are
now alone in staining their cheeks with a curious purplish dye and
their locks with ginger colour.'

'Among the Arts,' said the Owl, 'the modern English chiefly excel in
painting. To-morrow, by the way, the shrine of Loveliness begins to
open its gates. The successful worshippers, are admitted to varnish
their offerings to Beauty, while the unsuccessful are sent away in
disgrace, with their sacrifices. Suppose we go and examine this curious
scene.'

'In Polynesia,' replied Mab, 'no well-meant offering is rejected by the
gods.'

'The Polynesian gods,' answered the Owl, 'are too indiscriminate.'

On the next morning any one whose eyes were purged with euphrasy and
rue might have observed an owl and a fairy queen fluttering in the
smoky air above Burlington House. Here a mixed multitude of men and
women, young and old, were thronging about the gates, some laughing,
some lamenting. A few entered with proud and happy steps, bearing
quantities of varnish to the goddess; others sneaked away with pictures
under their arms, or hastily concealed the gifts rejected at the shrine
of Beauty in the hospitable shelter of four-wheeled cabs.

'Let us enter,' said the Owl, 'and behold how wisely the Forty Priests
of Beauty (or the Forty Thieves, as their enemies call them) and the
Thirty Acolytes have arranged the gifts of the faithful.

Lightly the unseen pair fluttered past the servants of Beauty, nobly
attired in gold and scarlet. They found themselves in a series of
stately halls, so covered with pictures in all the hues of the aniline
rainbow, that Queen Mab winked, and suffered from an immortal headache.

'How curious it is,' said Queen Mab, 'that of all the many thousand
offerings only a very few, namely, those hung at a certain height from
the floor, are really visible to any one who is neither a fairy nor a
bird.'

'The pieces which you observe,' remarked the Owl, 'are almost in every
case the work of the Forty Priests of Beauty, of the Thirty Acolytes,
and of their cousins, their sisters, and their aunts. Those other
attempts, almost invisible, as you say, to anyone but a bird or a
fairy, have been produced by other worshippers not yet admitted to the
Holy Band.'

'Then,' asked the Queen, 'are the Forty Priests by far the most expert
in devising objects truly beautiful, and really worthy of the Goddess
of Beauty?'

'On that subject,' said the Owl, 'your Majesty will be able to form an
opinion after you have examined the sacrifices at the shrine.'

Swiftly as Art Critics the winged spectators flew, invisible, round the
galleries, and finally paused, breathless, on the gigantic group of St.
George and the Dragon, then in the Sculpture Room.

'Well, what do you think?' asked the Owl.

'The Forty Priests,' replied Queen Mab, 'are, with few exceptions, men
who seem to have been blinded, perhaps by the Beatific Vision of
Beauty. If the Beatific Vision of Beauty has not blinded them, why are
they and their friends so hopelessly absurd? Why do they have all the
best of the shrine to themselves, while the young worshippers are
consigned to holes and corners, or turned out altogether? Who makes the
Forty the Forty? Does the goddess choose her own Ministers?'

'By no means,' said the Owl, 'they choose themselves. Who else, in the
name of Beauty, would choose them? But you must not think that they are
all blind or stupid; there are some very brilliant exceptions,' and he
pointed triumphantly to the offerings of the High Priest and of five or
six other members of the Fraternity.

'This is all very well, and I am delighted to see it,' said Queen Mab,
'but tell me how the choosing of the Forty and of the Acolytes is
arranged. 'When one of the Forty dies,' replied the Owl, 'which happens
only at very long intervals, for they belong to the race of
Struldbrugs, several worshippers who have become bald, old, nearly
sightless, with other worshippers' still young and strong, are paraded
before the Thirty-nine. And they generally choose the old men, or, if
not, the young men who come from a strange land in the North, where
rain falls always when it is not snowing, and whither no native ever
returns. If such a man lives in a fine house, and has a cunning cook,
then (even though he can paint) he may be admitted among the Forty, or
among the Thirty who attain not to the Forty. After that he can take
his ease; however ugly his offerings to Beauty, they are presented to
the public.'

'Well,' said Queen Mab, 'my curiosity is satisfied, and I no longer
wonder at the permanent scarecrows. But one thing still puzzles me.
What becomes of the offerings of the Forty after the temple closes?'

'They disappear by means of a very clever invention,' said the Owl.
'Long ago a famous priest, named Chantrey, perceived that the country
would be overrun with the offerings to which you allude. He therefore
bequeathed a sum of money, called the Chantrey bequest, to enable the
Forty to purchase each other's pictures.'

'But what do they do with them after they have bought them?' persisted
Mab, who had a very inquiring mind.

'Oh, goodness knows; don't ask _me_,' said the Owl crossly; 'nobody
ever inquires after them again!'



CHAPTER IX.
IN WHICH THE NIHILIST, THE DEMOCRAT, AND THE PROFESSOR OFFER A
SUGGESTION TO THE BISHOP.


'Were it not better not to be!'
Tennyson: The Two Voices.

'Si tu veux', je te tuerais ici tout franc, en sorte que tu rien
sentiras rien, et m'en croy, car j'en ay bien tué d'autres qui s'en
sont bien trouvez'
Pantagruel, ii. xiv.


'Look there!' said the Owl one day. 'There is a bishop, one of the
higher priests of St. George.'

He was a beautiful bishop, in his mitre, canonicals, and crozier, all
complete—so the Owl said. It strikes one as a novelty for bishops to
wear their rochettes and mitres when they go out walking in Richmond
Park; but one is forced to believe the Owl, he has such a truthful way
with him, like George Washington. By the way, what scope George
Washington had for telling lies, if he had wished it, after that
incident of the cherry-tree, which gave everyone such a high opinion of
his veracity!

The Bishop advanced slowly into full view, and then drew up before a
tree. He did not lean against the tree, for fear of spoiling his
splendours, but he drew up before it, and began to ponder, with a mild,
benevolent expression on his fine features. At the same time, two
hundred yards away, Queen Mab caught sight of the Democrat, walking
very fast, a little out of breath, and looking for the Bishop. He
wanted to explain to him the principles of Church and State, and to
talk things over in a friendly way. The Democrat had great faith in
talking things over, spite of his failure to convince the Aristocrat;
he never really doubted that if he only harangued against obstacles
long enough they would ultimately disappear. The Bishop, for instance,
would willingly rush into nonentity, if once he could be brought to
look at his duty in that light, and the Democrat was eager to begin to
put it before him in that light immediately. But while he was still
looking earnestly for his expected proselyte, someone else advanced
with a similar purpose—a tall, gentlemanly individual, with a pleasing
exterior, spotless linen cuffs, and a black bag. The Owl uttered a cry
of horror.

'Come away!' he exclaimed. 'It is a Nihilist, a dynamiter!'

But Queen Mab held her ground, or rather her branch. She was a
courageous fairy, and though she turned a shade paler she spoke
resolutely:

'No!' she said. 'I mean to stay and see what he does with it. _You_ may
go.'

But the Owl was either too chivalrous to desert her, or he was
paralysed with terror.

'Dynamite strikes downwards,' the fairy heard him murmur with
chattering beak, and that was all he could say. Meanwhile the Nihilist
went up to the Bishop.

'Excuse me!' he murmured politely, and knelt down. The Bishop stretched
out his hands absently, in an attitude of blessing; but the Nihilist
did not look up. He took an American cloth parcel from the black bag
and laid it at the Bishop's feet. Then, gradually withdrawing, he began
to lay the train.

'He is going to blow him up!' whispered Mab, shuddering. But the
Bishop, absorbed in rapt contemplation, heard and saw nothing, till the
Democrat, breaking rudely through some bushes and into his reverie,
roused him effectually. The Democrat was not a person of whose
neighbourhood one could remain unconscious.

'Ah!' he exclaimed, while the Bishop looked upon him with an air of
mild disapprobation. 'I have found you at last! I was anxious to
discuss with you—but what is this?'

For the more observant Democrat had caught sight of the cloth parcel.

'What is this?' he repeated suspiciously.

'I really don't know,' said the Bishop mildly, putting on his
spectacles and gazing down. 'I am a little shortsighted, you know. It
is the size of the quarto edition of—'

'There!' interrupted the Democrat, who had caught a glimpse of the
Nihilist's shadowy figure. He darted after it, while the Bishop, a
little perturbed, moved slowly in the same direction.

'Don't move,' said the Nihilist, raising an abstracted face. 'I will
only be a moment. Just step back there, will you?' and he pointed
towards the parcel with one hand, while the other still scattered the
train.

'What are you doing?' cried the Democrat, shaking him.

'Stop that!' said the Nihilist 'You had better not lay hands on _me_,
or you mayn't like it. It is really inconsiderate,' he continued,
appealing to the Bishop in an injured voice. 'I am only going to blow
you up, and you won't be quiet half a minute together. How _can_ I blow
you up properly, if you will keep walking about?'

'You are going to blow _me_ up!' said the Bishop, awaking to the
situation, and becoming as indignant as his gentle nature would allow
him to be. 'Miserable man! What will you want to blow up next? I
utterly discountenance it. Take your dynamite to the haunts of iniquity
and atheism, if you will. Rather blow up Renan, and Dissenters, and the
Rev. Mr. Cattell; but as for _me_, this is really carrying it too far!'

'Waal,' said the Nihilist, rising with a surprised stare, and in the
astonishment of the moment betraying his nationality, 'I guess things
air come to a pretty pass when a Bishop of the Church of England
refooses to be blown up in the interests of hoomanity!'

He took up the American cloth parcel as he spoke and walked
despondently away, musing over the lack of public spirit displayed by
established orders in general and prelates in particular.

'I would cheerfully consent to be blown up any day,' he murmured
pensively, 'in the interests of hoomanity; but it is not for the
interests of hoomanity—'

'Why did you not arrest him?' said the Bishop reproachfully, when he
was out of sight.

'He is the natural product of the present depraved state of Society and
of the Legislature,' replied the Democrat, shaking his head, 'and
therefore to be pitied rather than condemned. He should be accepted as
a warning, a merciful token sent to all thrones, principalities and
powers, reminding them of the error of their ways and of their latter
end. And besides,' he continued unwillingly, 'he has a whole magazine
of explosives on his person. If I had not been carried away by my
indignation just now I should never have taken him by the collar. I did
remonstrate with him once, on the strength of his political bias. I
said, "Look at us, why can't you profit by our example? We don't wish
to blow up, but gently to 'disintegrate. We are mild, but firm. We
never express a wish for revolution, but for reform. We are as active
as anyone in bringing about the Millennium, but we don't desire to be
shot into it head foremost, like a projectile from one of your infernal
machines. Dynamite, that last infirmity of noble minds, should only be
resorted to when all other modes of conciliation have failed." And what
do you think he replied? He smiled affably and offered me a box. "Thank
you!" he said, "Take a torpedo?"'

'Dear me!' said the Bishop; 'he is really a terrible character. I have
here some of his advertisements, sent to me the other day. Actually
sent by post, to me, a Prelate of the Church of England. I saved them,
intending to deliver a discourse upon the subject.'

He took a handful of papers from his pocket-book, and the Democrat
perused them, while Queen Mab, invisible, looked over his shoulder.

'Home Comfort! Hints to Architects and Builders.

'In the construction of tenements, it is absolutely necessary, for the
safety and convenience of the inmates, to place in the recess at the
back of each fireplace a couple of Donovan's Patent Dynamite Fire
Bricks, warranted. The advantages of this novel and most ingenious
contrivance will be fully appreciated when, for the first time, the
family circle gathers round the cheerful blaze.'

'To Clergymen.


'For a pure religious light, suitable to the Liturgy of the Church of
England, try Donovan's Wax Tapers for Church Illumination. Two of
these, placed in the sconces, will give more light than twenty ordinary
candles, and will also impart vigour and fervency of tone to the whole
of the proceedings. Donovan and Co. are so confident of the superiority
of their manufactures that they are willing to refund costs, on
receiving the written attestation of the Bishop of the diocese that the
article has proved unsuitable. Try them; you can have no idea of the
effects.'

'Directors of Railway Companies.


'Take care to have carriages illuminated with Donovan's Patent Safety
Lamps. These exert a bracing and salutary influence, not only on the
atmosphere and the spirits of the passengers, but on the tunnel walls
themselves, which are invariably found, after the passage through them
of a train lighted by Donovan's Patent Safety Lamps, completely
prostrate with astonishment at the unparalleled effects of the same, to
the immense convenience of traffic and judicious prevention of
accidents.'

There were several more advertisements, similar in tone and of
attractive appearance, which the Democrat perused with interest.

'What could possess the fellow to send all these to _you?_' he
exclaimed when he had finished. 'I always said he pushed the thing to
an extreme. He has got dynamite on the brain: he will go off himself
some day if he doesn't take care, like a new infernal machine.'

'I wish he would!' said the Bishop hastily; and then correcting
himself, 'I was about to say, "Whatever is, is best."'

'Oh, stow that!' exclaimed the Democrat. 'I mean,' he added
apologetically, on observing the Bishop's startled glance, 'that, of
course, that sounds very well, and it is a pretty thing to say, but
everybody knows it isn't true. I will undertake to prove to you, if you
will allow me'—here the Bishop's face gathered a shade of
melancholy—'that, in fact, there never was a more outrageous falsehood
on the earth. As for the Nihilist, naturally we should be thankful to
get rid of him, either by explosion or otherwise; but he is such a
dangerous fellow to tackle. The fact is, one hardly dare shake hands
with him, for fear of being blown into the middle of next week, and
then one couldn't toil for the benefit of humanity.'

'Act, act in the living Present,' murmured the Bishop.

'Just so,' said his companion approvingly. 'And you can't act in the
living Present when you are in the middle of next week.'

'And yet, you know,' said the Bishop, with a glimpse before him of some
possible advantage in the argument, 'I have often fancied that you
yourself—'

He paused judiciously.

'Oh no!' returned the Democrat promptly, 'we wouldn't do it on any
account. I assure you that our motives are quite unimpeachable.'

'Oh!' said the Bishop. 'And about the House of Lords, for example?
Being a Spiritual Peer oneself, you see, one naturally takes an
interest—limited.'

'Well, as for that,' said the Democrat, 'it would really be such an
excellent thing for you in all respects to be abolished, that you would
never make any objection, would you now? We have your welfare so deeply
at heart, and long study of your characteristics has convinced us that
a course of judicious abolition would be your salvation, temporal,
spiritual—and eternal.'

'I say!' exclaimed the Bishop, 'isn't _that_ putting it rather strong?
To a Bishop, you know.'

'Ah,' said his companion encouragingly, 'all that feeling will pass
away. The full beauty of true Democracy is not, I admit, at first
wholly apparent to the Conservative mind; but once afford the requisite
culture, and it unfolds new attractions every day. Believe me, we are
acting in this matter solely, or almost solely, with a view to your
ultimate benefit. We are not acting for ourselves—ourselves is a
secondary consideration. But your true fife, as Goethe so beautifully
says, probably with an intentional reference to bishops and noble
lords, must begin with renunciation of yourself. Till you have once
been abolished you can never know how nice it is.

"The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower,"'


he added, quoting the words of the hymn-book, with the firm impression
that they were from some Secularist publication.

'And is it necessary?' said the Bishop somewhat helplessly.

'Absolutely necessary,' replied the Democrat.

'I don't know about that,' said a voice behind them, and Queen Mab
started, seeing the Professor. 'But depend upon it, the fittest will
survive. I think, myself, that it is quite time you were gone; but some
types die out very slowly, especially the lower types; and you may be
said, as regards freedom of intellect and the march of Science, to be a
low type—in fact, a relic of barbarism. There can be no doubt that, in
the economy of Nature, bishops are an unnecessary organ, merely
transmitted by inheritance in the national organism, and that in the
course of time they will become atrophied and degenerate out of
existence. When that time comes you must be content to pass into
oblivion. Study Palæontology.' Now he pronounced it Paleyon-tology, not
having had a classical education. 'Think of the pterodactyles, who
passed away before the end of the Mesozoic ages, and never have
appeared again. What, in the eternal nature of things, are bishops more
than pterodactyles?'

'I wonder,' interrupted the Bishop severely, 'that you dare to speak of
your pernicious teachings under the name of Paleyontology, as if the
First Principles of that revered divine, whose loss we all deplore,
were ever anything like that!'

The Professor only glared, and was going on, but the Democrat stopped
him, by remarking, in a loud and exasperatingly complacent voice:

'You are quite correct. Only upon the wreck of the old order of
existence can arise the New Democracy.'

'Can you never stop talking about yourself?' snapped the Professor
testily. 'One would think, to hear you, that Democracy was the goal of
everything.'

'So it is,' said the Democrat.

'Not a bit of it. You and your democracies are only a fleeting phase,
an infinitesimal fraction of the aeons to be represented, perhaps, in
some geological record of the future, by a mere insignificant
conglomerate of dust and bones, and ballot-boxes, and letters in the
_Spectator_ and other articles characteristic of this especial period.
What a dream of Science that, interstellary communication established,
some being of knowledge and capacities as infinitely excelling our own
as our faculties excel those of the lowly monad, wandering on this
terrestrial globe, and culling from the imperfect archives of these
bygone years a corkscrew, an opera-glass, or, perchance, a pot of long
since petrified marmalade, preserved intact by some protecting
incrustation of stalagmite from the ravages of time, may dart a
penetrating gleam of intelligence through the dark abysses of
innumerable ages, and exclaim: "This clay, upon which I gaze, was of
the human period. This coin, this meerschaum, this china shepherdess,
this prayer-book with gilt edges, this _Sporting Times_, were the
inseparable companions of a fossil species of Englishmen who once
colonised this globe, and minute traces of whom have been found in its
most widely separated regions. Alas that the action of marine and
subaerial denuding agents has deprived us of an opportunity for closer
examination of the habits and idiosyncrasies of this interesting
fossil. Into such small compass are compressed the pride and wealth of
nations and of centuries. O genus humanum! O tempora! O mores!" Thus
will he muse. No democrat! no stump orator will be that Being of the
Future, nor anything of human mould. One's imagination may well revel
in the thought that Evolution, mighty to conceive and to perform, lias
not yet completed her work. What are vertebrates? Even these are
transient. But four classes of vertebrates—only four!' shouted the
Professor in his enthusiasm, wholly forgetting the Democrat, and the
Bishop, who was gazing at him with a look of blank horror on his
venerable countenance. 'Why, it is preposterous, it is inconceivable
that we should stop at four!—fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals!
Where is the fifth! Cannot Natural Selection, Struggle for Existence,
Variability and Survival of the Fittest, between them, furnish a fifth
class of vertebrates? I demand it in the name of Science and of
Evolution. We have been human long enough. There we are, ever since the
Age of Stone, pinned down to one particular tribe of mammals. Ah, when
shall we begin to move on again? Is not this a hope beyond the
niggardly aspirations of a purblind democrat?'

'What will the future reality be? I care not; but progress demands a
new and conquering organism. For my part, I see no reason why we should
not immediately leave the vertebrates. That would be something like a
New Departure.'

Here the professor stopped suddenly, becoming aware of the eyes of the
Democrat, which were fixed on him with a mixture of contempt and
curiosity.

'I don't understand all that,' he said in an exasperating tone. 'It is
very elevating, I daresay, but what I want is Universal Suffrage. There
is something tangible for you. When we get that, there will be time to
think about the future, and indeed, we shall have it in our own hands,
and can furnish any kind we like, by Ballot. Ballot is better than
Natural Selection. Natural Selection is all very well; but it does not
know what we want. We do.'

'Science may be allowed her dreams as well as Theology,' said the
Professor rather shamefacedly.

'But you can't bring about a new sub-kingdom, or the kingdom of heaven
either, by Act of Parliament.'

'Why not?' returned the Democrat confidently. 'It is only to get a
majority; and there you are, you know!'

'My brethren,' said the Bishop, inspired thereto, as the Owl observed,
by reflex action, 'Perfection is not of this world!'

'It will be though,' replied the Democrat cheerfully,' before we have
done with it. Bless you, Perfection will be upon you before you have
time to turn round! That is the beauty of the New Democracy. You have
merely to be abolished, and then we get a majority, and then, you know,
there we are!'

'What will you do with the minority?' said the Professor grumpily. 'How
about Proportional Representation?'

'Oh, the minority?' said the Democrat. 'Well, it will be all right—you
will see how right it will be if you give us a majority. We have
everybody's interests at heart—deeply at heart!' he added hopefully.
'We first pass a Bill for the manufacture (National Monopoly) of all
the cardinal virtues at reduced prices—may be ordered direct from the
Company, carriage paid; and then a Bill for the repression of all the
Cardinal Crimes, which the Company is also willing to buy up at market
value, for exportation—and then, you see, there we are!'

'Where are you?' said the Professor sharply.

'Where?' replied the Democrat, looking puzzled for a moment, but soon
recovering himself triumphantly. 'Where? oh, we are there, you know.
_There_ we are!'

'Humph!' ejaculated the Professor, turning on his heel. The Bishop
turned away also, saying that he had an engagement, and the Democrat
followed him, talking very fast and bringing forward arguments. When
they reached the gate there was a sad, perplexed look upon the Bishop's
face, and finally shaking off his companion by an effort of the will,
he entered the nearest churchyard and began to meditate upon mortality.
The Democrat, observing in an acrid voice that he had something better
to do with mortality than to meditate upon it, turned away reluctantly
from the gate, and began to compose a popular ode, which had tremendous
success, and of which the rhymes were dubious but the sentiments
unimpeachable. Meanwhile, Queen Mab and the Owl, who had followed
un-perceived, perched upon the tower of the church, and surveyed the
landscape and the Bishop, who, a venerable appropriate figure in his
vestments, had turned naturally to the east, and was standing by a
marble cross.

'What a pleasant place!' said Mab. 'The dead must rest quietly here.'

'I am not sure that they don't keep up class distinctions,' said the
Owl rather misanthropically. 'They would if they could. But, on the
whole, I prefer to think that this place is the goal of the Democrat,
where Equality reigns indeed. If so, it will be consoling to him, for I
am afraid he will never get equality in life. Death, at present, has
the monopoly. Mr. Mallock thinks that Social Equality, if it ever came
to pass, would be ruinous to the welfare of the nation; but happily we
are in no immediate danger of it. Inequality, he says, is the condition
of Progress, and if it is only Inequality that is wanted, Progress
ought to be making rapid strides. Oh yes, we have Social Inequality
enough to carry us on at the rate of a mile a minute. It would be
interesting, would it not, to know in what direction we are
progressing—though, of course, the Progress is the chief thing—from
good to better or from bad to worse?'

'Very interesting,' said Queen Mab. 'I mean to think that we are
progressing from good to better. But do you know that you are a very
dismal bird? Are things really as bad as you say they are?'

'Perhaps I _am_ cynical,' replied the Owl. 'The kingfisher says so. The
kingfisher is an optimist, and he told me I thought it was clever to be
cynical; but that was when we had a few words one day. It is from
living in a belfry, doubtless, that I have contracted a habit of
looking at things on the dark side; but when one has made allowance for
the belfry, the world is not so bad after all. Of course animals can't
be expected to know what it means; they are not social philosophers,
and men say so many different things. Some think the universe is under
a dual control, and some that it is altogether a blunder—a clock
running down and the key lost I don't know about that, I am only a
bird; but if it is a failure, it is a glorious failure. Sometimes,
indeed, the theologians call life a howling wilderness; but that is in
comparison with the next world. For they are immortal.'

'I am immortal too,' said Queen Mab proudly.

'So you are,' returned the Owl. 'I was forgetting. I'm not,' he added
rather doubtfully. 'But I hope you will enjoy it.'

'It is my intention,' said Queen Mab.

The Bishop, from whose face the look of perplexity had departed,
leaving only his old serene, benevolent expression, turned as the bell
chimed out the hour, and walked slowly towards the gate. The east was
growing grey towards sunset, the east that lent the light wherein he
lived, for he was a man of a gentle heart. Far off, in the town, a
million lamps were beginning to burn. Gas lamps, and electric, and
matches that struck only on the box, and not always on that. But the
face of the Bishop shone with another radiance, and a lustre not of
this world.



CHAPTER X.
THE SUBSEQUENT CAREER OF THE NIHILIST.


'Cucullus nonfacit monachum.'


Queen Mab and the Owl were returning, rather tired, from an excursion,
when a procession of the Salvation Army came across them, with drums
and banners, and the General at its head, and,—they could hardly
believe their eyes,—the Nihilist walking by the side of the General and
weeping abundantly. The Salvation Army had brought him to a conviction
of his sins, and he was wringing his hands—at least one of them; the
other, as if automatically, still carried the black bag. The General,
on the contrary, was highly delighted. It was not every day that he
converted a Nihilist, and the thought occurred, small blame to him,
that the whole history of the incident would sound remarkably well in
the 'War Cry.' So it would have done, but for that unfortunate bag.

'You renounce the devil,' said the General confidently, 'and all his
ways?'

'I renounce him,' said the Nihilist, still clasping the black bag
fervently, in a glow of pious enthusiasm, as if it were a prayer-book.

'Then you are all right,' said the General in an encouraging tone.
'Throw away the black bag, my friend, and shout Hallelujah! Do you feel
your sins forgiven?'

'I do! I do!' exclaimed the Nihilist. 'But I daren't throw it away: it
would make such a noise in the street. I'll tie it on to the next
balloon that comes by empty. They'll assassinate me; but I don't care:
I have peace in my heart!'

'That's the right ring,' said the General, not without conquering a
feeling of repugnance towards the vicinity of the bag. 'Faith without
works, you know. Well, my brother, we must be back to head-quarters.
You'll meet us at the Hall to-night—seven sharp.'

'I will,' cried the Nihilist enthusiastically. 'I must go to one of
your blessed gatherings before my enemies are on my track. Ah, it's
true—the world is vanity. Dynamite is vanity. Torpedoes,
nitro-glycerine—they're dust and ashes, broken cisterns! I renounce
them all.'

They had reached an important metropolitan railway station, and the
General's party, entering, began to take tickets for their return
journey. Then, for the first time, the Nihilist noticed that the
General also carried a black bag, in shape and size similar to his own,
which he placed on the floor of the booking-office as he went to take
his ticket. Queen Mab never fully comprehended what happened next. She
could only assert that the expression on the face of the Nihilist was
one of fervent and devoted piety, as, with an ejaculation of
'Hallelujah!' he absently put down his own bag and took up that of the
General. Then he broke out, as in irrepressible enthusiasm, with a
verse of 'Dare to be a Daniel!' The General, turning round, looked duly
edified at this outburst of ardour, and took up his bag of pamphlets,
as he supposed, without any suspicion of the length to which his
friend's devotional rapture had carried him. The Nihilist then bade a
hurried farewell, observing rather incoherently that the weight of sin
was heavy on his conscience, and he was going to submerge it instantly
at St. Paul's Pier. With this parting statement he rushed from the
station, and Queen Mab, with a sense of misgiving, followed hastily.

A moment after, the city was thrilled by a loud explosion. No one was
killed: above a hundred persons were injured, and the cause of the
disturbance was traced to a bag left by the General on the platform
close to the bookstall. For the next two or three days the station wore
a blackened, distracted, and generally intermingled appearance. The big
drum suffered the most severely, and shreds of parchment were wafted to
a great distance, and gathered up, many of them, by adherents of the
Army, as relics of this unfortunate martyr of Progress and of Nihilism.
Many of the other instruments were shattered, and so great was the
force of the explosion, that a small fragment of a bagpipe was
propelled into St. Paul's Cathedral, where it was discovered next day,
on the lectern, by the Canon who read the lessons. The General, for
some time, was supposed to have disappeared with these instruments; but
it was afterwards asserted, on good authority, that he had been seen
the same evening on board a vessel bound for America; and the most
reasonable conjecture appeared to be, that his native discrimination,
at once perceiving the weight of evidence for the prosecution, had led
him, during the tumult incident on the explosion, to effect an escape.
Certain it is that the Hall at Clapton knew him no more.

Meanwhile, outside the station, amid a medley of blackened officials,
disintegrated portions of railway carriages and book-stalls, Salvation
Army captains, converted reprobates, policemen, cabmen, and orange
vendors, was found a Nihilist! Once a Nihilist, but a Nihilist no
longer. With a threepenny hymn-book in one hand and a black bag in the
other, filled, not with dangerous explosives, but with a whole arsenal
of tracts, 'War Crys,' hymn-books, addresses to swearers and
Sabbath-breakers, and other devotional literature, he was calmly
spouting:

'Convulsions shake the solid world,
My faith shall never yield to fear!'


It may not be amiss, here, to say a few words as regards his subsequent
history, as related by the Owl. After that somewhat untoward incident,
he was not warmly received into the ranks of the Salvation Army. A
coldness sprang up which, though not inexplicable, had the unfortunate
effect of causing our Nihilist to renounce connection with that body.
The influences which they had brought to bear upon him, however, did
not so easily pass away, and it was in the continued glow of pious
enthusiasm that he joined a Dissenting Society, in which respectability
and fervour were happily combined, and which, accusing the Salvation
Army of the fervour without the respectability, regarded the Nihilist
as an interesting martyr of unjust suspicion. For two months he
remained in this society, and rose to the post of deacon, or what
corresponded to deacon in their system; but at the end of that time his
native bias proved too strong for him. With singular injudiciousness he
brought to the Sunday evening service a hymn-book carefully
constructed, including the hymns of the society, and also a small but
superlatively powerful block of explosive material, arranged to go off
at the moment in which the collection was being taken up. So confident
was he of the excellent workmanship of this article that he did not
scruple even to write his name in it, and to leave it in the pew,
assured that, once exploded, no trace of its ownership would remain. He
then left before the collection—a thing which he had been repeatedly
known to do before, and which struck the congregation with no alarm.
But, from the pew behind, an eye was upon him. It was the eye of the
Professor. What was the Professor! doing there? The answer was simple
enough. He was writing a book on 'Competition, and the Survival of the
Fittest, as displayed in Modern Sectarianism,' and he had come to this!
dissenting place of worship in quest; of information. Always ardent in
the pursuit of knowledge, he entered the Nihilist's pew the moment that
individual left it, and began to scan the leaves of the hymn-book. To
his infinite amazement, on turning over page 227, he came upon a
cunning piece of machinery, not a musical-box, like those one comes to
unexpectedly in the midst of photograph albums, but a _chef d'œuvre_ of
Donovan's own, smouldering away at a great rate. The time was just up;
the collection-boxes were being handed round; instant destruction
seemed inevitable, when, to the amazement of the congregation, the
Professor, starting up, rushed to the altar, and, with _the cool
forethought and intrepidity_ so eminently characteristic of that gifted
man, dropped the hymn-book into the large font, then full of water. The
ignited wick ceased to smoulder; the peril was averted.

But the Nihilist was sought for in vain by the civil authorities.
Glancing back at the threshold of the building, he had caught sight of
the Professor, and, as if fascinated to the spot, he had watched him
take up the fatal hymn-book. Then, with an instant presentiment of the
consequences, he had rushed away. He has since joined the Parsees, and
the Democrat, visiting America on business, met him the other day in
New York, in the full costume of a Fire-worshipper. His complexion had
assumed a more Eastern appearance, and his turban was pulled low down,
and partially concealed his features; but the Democrat's keen eyes
detected a resemblance, even before the Parsee began to hum, in a
singularly rich and flexible tenor voice, a verse from Omar Khayyam:

'Ah Love, could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
_Would we not shatter it to bits_, and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?'


From the depth of feeling which the Nihilist flung into these words,
the Democrat conjectured that he had at last found his true devotional
sphere, but he did not venture on renewing the acquaintance,
judiciously reflecting that the flowing costume of a Persian magnate
was favourable to the secretion of infernal machines of all sorts and
sizes.



CHAPTER XI.
HOME AND FOREIGN POLICY COMBINED.


Knowest thou the House where the members elected
Consider the measure apart from the brand,
Where Voting by Party is quite unaffected,
And solely concerned with the good of the land?
Knowest thou the House of Amendments and Clauses,
Where Reason may reel but debate never pauses,
Where words, the grand note of Humanity, reign
(Oh Müller, Max Müller, expound us the gain!),
Articulate always, if often insane?


'Tis the Temple of Justice, the home of M.P.'s,
Our noble, our own representatives these,
But endless as sands of the desert, and worse,
Are the Bills they discuss and the rules they rehearse.


'What about the Government?' said Queen Mab to the Owl one day. 'Is
there anything that it would do to introduce into Polynesia—that is, if
the Germans and the missionaries have gone away again? If they
haven't—!' and she sighed.

'I think you had better not try,' returned her counsellor, after
considering the point. 'You have got a queen already, and I should
think the Polynesians are hardly ripe for a representative Government
No doubt, in the course of the struggle for existence, they will get
into a good many difficulties, but I rather think that a British
constitution on the top of them would not improve matters. If you could
get up a Witenagemot now!'

'Oh, the gathering of the Wise Men,' said the fairy. 'I remember that.
Has not England got a Witenagemot now, then?' she inquired. Her
historical notions, during her long residence in Polynesia, had got
fearfully mixed up and hazy.

'They don't call it so,' said the Owl gravely. 'I wonder they don't, it
would be very suitable.'

'And what is it for?' asked Mab.

'Chiefly to legislate for the Millennium, I think,' replied the Owl.
'They have been legislating now for a considerable time, but it hasn't
come yet. It is late. We expect, however, that it will arrive when the
New Democracy is in power. There has been a good deal of annoyance with
the Established Church lately for not telegraphing for it sooner, and
people say that but for the Church's neglect the Millennium would have
been here a very long time ago. Therefore, when the New Democracy
comes, it intends, as the Democrat was saying, to be mild but firm, and
see if the Millennium can't be got to travel faster. And the first mild
but firm thing it will do will be to pull down the Established Church
of England and level it with the—with other denominations.'

'What _is_ the Millennium?' said Queen Mab.

'Some think one thing and some another,' returned the Owl. 'Perhaps we
had better not discuss it; it is so easy to be profane on the subject
before you know where you are. But you can hear Parliament legislating
for it any day, and see people living up to it under the gangway.'

'I should like to go and see how they do it,' said Mab, 'just for
once.'

'Well, so you can,' said the Owl. 'We can start directly if you like.
It is the safest place in London now that the session is on, because of
the Home Rulers. The dynamiters couldn't very well blow it up with the
Irish members in, and it would look too pointed for them all to be away
at the time of its being blown up. Make me invisible and we will go.'

So Queen Mab made them both invisible, and they flew away to the House
of Commons. There ensconcing themselves on a high beam, they soon
forgot the cobwebs in the interest of the debate. It was a remarkable
debate, and, what is also remarkable, I can find no traces of it in the
Hansard for that year, and it hardly conforms to the latest rules.
Sometimes I am inclined to think that the Owl must have invented it or
dreamed it, but he says that every word is mathematically correct, and
I know him for a most truthful bird, who never told, or at all events
never meant to tell, a lie. The debate was on a Bill introduced by
Government for the colonisation of the lunar world by emigration of the
able-bodied unemployed, and the House was full. All the Home Rulers
were present, a fact which gave the Owl a feeling of pleasant security,
and members generally were wide awake and very attentive.

In a brief speech of three hours the Prime Minister advocated the
principles of the Bill.

'I am not what is vulgarly called a Jingo' (hear, hear!) he said
finally, 'and measures of simple aggrandisement, sir, I have never been
known to advocate.'

'How about Bechuana?' from Mr. Jacob Bright.

'If the rules of courtesy demanded a reply to that interruption,' said
the Prime Minister, 'I would answer,' and he did so for an hour by
Shrewsbury clock. He then proceeded:

'But there is a wide difference between annexation necessary to
maintain the integrity of our glorious realm, as in the case of
Bechuana, and the annexations so often observed in the policy of
Continental Powers, springing from a mere greed of empire. We may
deplore, indeed, that a preceding Administration has involved us in
responsibilities almost beyond the power of statesmen to grapple with
successfully; but that is the habit of preceding Administrations, and
now that such measures are beyond recall we shall not shirk their
consequences. The recent annexation of Mercury by Russia, and the
presence in Jupiter of a German emissary, whose ulterior object, though
the Press of that country states him to have gone there solely for the
benefit of his health, cannot be viewed with too much suspicion, make
it incumbent on all parties to unite in speedy measures for the
security of our home and colonial interests.' (Ministerial cheers.) 'I
am at a loss to conceive,' said a member of the Opposition, rising—and
here the irregularity comes in, for which we can only refer readers to
the Owl—'what is the drift of the remarks we have just listened to. I
am no enemy to annexation, as honourable members know well. We have
been annexing ever since we had a rood of land to make annexations to,
and it would be a pity to begin to stop now. But as for occupying a
place like the Moon, without water, without air, without
inhabitants—that, sir, appears to me to be adding folly to madness. Is
the Government not content with the proofs of utter
imbecility'—(order)—'I will say, of excruciating feebleness, it has
given to the public, that it must squander the resources of the nation
for the sake of a wild-goose chase like this? As for the German envoy,
he has gone to Jupiter for the benefit of a settled climate, and to
drink the waters, not to annex a planet which, with the present
indifferent means of communication, could be of no service to his
country. This is the simple explanation, which anybody but an old owl
like the Prime Minister—'

'Order, order!' shouted several voices, and the Speaker, rising
gravely, called upon the honourable member to withdraw the epithet of
'old owl' as unparliamentary.

'I withdraw it,' said the member readily. 'I should have said, the
gentleman so highly distinguished for youth and sanity, who has plunged
us into oceans of disaster at home and abroad, and, not content with
making the world we live in too hot to hold us, intends to make all the
planets related to us in the Solar System too hot to hold us, as well.
He has determined wantonly to attack a sphere with which we have always
maintained the most cordial relations, to invade its territories,
ravage its villages, and introduce the atrocious benefits of Maxim guns
and Gladstone claret to the Selenites.'

'The honourable member observed a moment ago,' said the Prime Minister
ironically, 'that there were no Selenites.'

'So I did,' returned the Opposition member unabashed. 'I am not ashamed
of that. If the Moon has no inhabitants, you can have no commercial
relations with the Moon; if it has, you can only demoralise an
unsophisticated population. But I refuse to be held responsible for the
opinions I expressed two minutes ago. I am a true Briton, and I
absolutely decline to limit myself to a single contradiction, or to a
dozen, in the course of a quarter of an hour's harangue.'

'We can quite believe _that_!' said the Home Secretary blandly. 'But
till my honourable friend undertakes the management of affairs—before
which may heaven remove me! ("Hear, hear!" from the honourable
friend)—it is the business of competent statesmen to preserve relations
friendly yet firm with foreign Powers terrestrial and celestial, and we
shall do it, sir, if we have to annex the Pleiades (cheers). To
illustrate by a single case the urgency of an action which the
honourable member, in his own choice and happy phraseology, stigmatised
as a wild-goose chase. If a Power which I will not specify is allowed
to occupy that interesting orb which it is our hope to link closely
with our own destinies in national union—_what of the tides_? (Cheers.)
Sir, it has long been our proud boast that Britannia rules the waves.
How much longer, I ask you, would she continue to rule them, if once
the sway with which the studies of our childhood have made us all
familiar passed into the hands of alien and perhaps hostile
authorities? (Prolonged cheers.) Can we doubt that unfriendly
arbitration would eventually turn away all the tides from our hitherto
favoured island, and would divert the current of the Gulf Stream to
Powers with whom our relations are strained, while punctually supplying
us with icebergs and a temperature below zero from the Arctic Zone?
Once hemmed in (or surrounded) by icebergs, what becomes of your
carrying trade? Can we doubt that the trade-winds, too, would be mere
playthings in the hands of a lunar colonial Government, inspired in
every action by the malice of an unfriendly terrestrial Admiralty, and
that, in short, by a terrible reversal of the national motto for which
we feel so just a reverence, Britannia would cease to rule the waves,
while the waves would rule Britannia?' (Loud and prolonged Ministerial
cheers, during which another member of the Opposition rose and inquired
the precise policy of Her Majesty's Government towards the Selenites.)

'I am instructed,' said a Cabinet Minister, 'to inform the honourable
member that the Selenites have no existence. The step contemplated is
therefore a mere peaceful annexation, and war and bloodshed, such as
were pathetically alluded to by the honourable member for Putney, are
out of the question. I may here bring clearly before the minds of the
House the fact that, as the Moon is destitute of any atmosphere,
scientific men have unanimously declared the impossibility of animal
life upon it.'

'I should like to know,' said a member, rising below the gangway,
'whether the Government has given its attention to one point, namely,
that as where there is no atmosphere there can be no inhabitants, where
there can be no inhabitants there can be no representatives of rival
terrestrial Powers. Unless the forces of a certain Power are capable of
living without air, I fail to see that we have anything to apprehend
from their occupation of the Moon. Russians, for instance, are not
personally dear to me; and I should say that the more of them introduce
civilisation to that extinct and uninhabitable sphere the better; but I
utterly decline to go there myself, or to vote for sending even our
convicts there, much less our able-bodied unemployed. I should like
this little difficulty explained, for I confess that, to an
unstatesmanlike mind, this debate seems to be verging on nonsense.' 'I
had not thought it necessary, at this early stage of the debate,'
observed the Prime Minister plaintively, 'to remind the House that no
such difficulty as that present to the mind of the honourable member
really exists. Has my honourable friend below the gangway never heard
of a mental or a moral atmosphere? Is it not one which inevitably
surrounds us, in the incandescent Soudan or in the chill abode of
departed Selenites? What he regards as an insuperable drawback only
furnishes me with another reason for urging the Bill upon you. Would it
not be a disgrace to the British flag, ever the friend of civilisation
and of virtue, to allow a perverted moral atmosphere to be introduced
into an orb which has done so much for us in the way of tidal action,
of artistic enjoyment, and, I will say, of amatory
sentiment—(cheers)—as our satellite? Now what kind of moral atmosphere,
I would ask, surrounds the average Russian? Of a mental atmosphere I
will not speak—suffice it to say that that also is immeasurably
inferior; but is it fitting for a nation like ours, in the van of
progress, to suffer a moral atmosphere degraded, pernicious, and
suffocating to circulate in regions to which we could furnish one so
infinitely more salubrious?' (Prolonged Ministerial cheers.)



CHAPTER XII.
THE DELUGE.


'The drivelling of politicians!'
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.


It is said that the unexpected always happens, and therefore one may
deplore without surprise the fact that schemes set on foot by a
charitable government to relieve the necessities of their starving
fellow-countrymen should frequently have a diametrically opposite
effect. Into the Ministerial cheers that followed the Premier's last
statement broke a sound outside the House, a sound as of much wailing,
the howling of innumerable newsboys, the cries of 'Woe, woe!' the dirge
of an empire _qui s'en va_! With those now familiar noises was mingled,
but at a greater distance, a strain of martial music.

'What is this?' said the Prime Minister through the increasing tumult,
with a vague idea of legions of the able-bodied unemployed coming in
person to state their views on the debate. 'A riot?'

'No,' shouted the member below the gangway, promptly divining, by a
prophetic instinct, the real nature of the case. 'It is a Revolution.'

'Heavens!' said the leader of the Opposition helplessly. 'I hope not. I
had no idea!'

It was too true. The Army was advancing to the House—the broken-down,
ragged, wasted remnant of an Army of Heroes. Sent forth, too late, to
'smash' Prester John, and relieve the Equator, they had all but
overcome the Desert, and had only been defeated by space. Too many of
them lay like the vanished legions of Cambyses, swathed by the sand and
lulled by the music of the night wind. The remnant had returned of
their own motion. It was an impressive spectacle, and the British
public, finding no more appropriate action, cheered vociferously, while
the newsboys, hundreds of them, continued to howl one against another.
For the newspapers had got wind of Something, and it only remained for
them to find out what the Something was. At present they had confused
the facts—an accident which will happen sometimes with the
best-regulated newspapers. But all of them had made shots at the truth,
more or less un-veracious. 'The Banner' asserted that Sir Charles Dilke
and the Democrat, arrayed in costumes of the beginning of the
seventeenth century for effect, were parading the cellars under the
House of Lords, after the manner of Guy Fawkes, laying trains of
gunpowder and singing the well-known lines about the fifth of November.
The 'Daily Pulpit,' on the other hand, declared that Lord Randolph
Church-hill had set the Thames on fire with native genius and a lighted
fusee, which, on the face of it, seemed so extremely probable, that all
of the British public that was not cheering the Army's arrival rushed
to the bridges to investigate the river. Delegates from the 'Holywell
Street Gazette,' in the meantime, were madly interviewing everything
and everybody with such celerity that the British public probably
arrived at the truth of matters somewhere about that journal's fifth
edition. Up to this time, unfortunately, the 'Gazette' had only been
able to contradict flatly all the statements of all its contemporaries
in language, to say the least of it, most emphatic. But at a national
crisis one is nothing if not emphatic. And this was a national crisis.
And while the crowd was rushing and swaying hither and thither, and the
light-fingered brigade was taking advantage of the crowd's
absent-mindedness to borrow its watches and pocket-handkerchiefs, the
General, just returned from the Desert, with the demeanour of a second
Cromwell, was marching on the House of Commons. In the House itself
reigned confusion much worse confounded. There was no time for lengthy
recrimination, for in another moment the General, alone, and with a
mien of indignant resolution that struck a chill to the hearts of the
most irrepressible members, was striding boldly up to the table. The
Speaker looked at the Serjeant-at-Arms, and the Serjeant-at-Arms looked
at the Speaker, but neither of them said a word. This was worse than
Mr. Bradlaugh at his worst.

'Behold in this handful of broken and wasted men, returned, not by
_your_ order, but by _mine_, to their native shore,' exclaimed the
General in a voice of stern thunder that reverberated through the
building, 'the result of your imbecile, idiotic, ignominious,
incomprehensible policy and of your absurd "Intelligence" and
"Righteousness!" Call yourselves a Parliament? I tell you, your
Constitution is rotten to the core. Do you think we are to shed our
blood for you, to perish of famine, sword and pestilence, while you sit
here, talking the most delirious nonsense that ever was talked since
the Confusion of Tongues? You never have anything fresh to say; but
there you are, and nothing stops you. If it was the Day of Judgment you
would go on moving resolutions; and you have the insolence to maunder
over your gallant band of heroes, sacrificed to a whim of party rancour
or a struggle for place. We put you here to maintain law and order, to
give justice to your fellow-countrymen, and you sit listening to your
own melodious voices raving of the welfare of the nation, of Political
Economy, Budgets, and Ballots; but so much as the meaning of true
justice the bulk of you never guess. _You_, you turn Parliament into a
club, and your ambition is satisfied by invitations to dinner. But we
have borne enough, and marched enough; now you must march. We have
trudged at your bidding thousands of weary miles, for an end you made
impossible by your word-splitting cowardice. _Your_ turn has come. The
troops are in readiness; we are drilling the unemployed in event of
civil war, and you had better look out. "Obey me,"' added the General,
insensibly sliding into a popular quotation, '"and my nature's ile:
disobey me, and it's still ile, but it's ile of vitriol."'

For the most part honourable members sat stunned and silent; but from
the more rebellious came a few cries of 'Order!' 'Turn him out!' and
the Speaker slowly rose. 'I would remind the gallant General of the
Mutiny Act,' he said.

'An obsolete restriction of free contract,' said the General. He
stamped his foot, and in a second a file of soldiers had appeared.

'Take away that bauble!' exclaimed the General to his aide-decamp in a
severe and terrible tone, as he pointed to the mace. But as he gazed
upon the venerable emblem his frown melted, and his eyes grew dim. For
one instant the victorious warrior, the inexorable avenger of his
country's wrongs, was the dreamy worshipper of Blue China, the
aesthetic adorer of marquetry, and Chippendale.

'Take away that bauble,' he repeated in a low voice of ineffable
sweetness, 'and deposit it in the upper compartment of my bureau. You
know the spot. The bauble has a Chippendale feeling about it.'

Then his fortitude returned; he was once more the dauntless General,
the saviour of society.

'A passing weakness,' he said, smiling sadly. '"Richard's himself
again!"'

Into the lull that followed his words fell the familiar accents of the
future Dictator, the Member for Woodstock, as he said in a cool aside
to Mr. Goschen:

'The Hour has come.'

And Mr. Goschen, with his usual calm impartiality, replied:

'Yes, Randolph, and the Man!'

Through all the uproar Queen Mab and the Owl had looked on with
breathless interest; but now, at a reiterated mandate from the General,
the members were compelled to disperse, some furious, some alarmed, and
all discomfited. There only remained one policeman, the General, and
the Democrat to fight it out between themselves, and decide whether a
European war would be advisable, or whether they should disband the
army and devote themselves to Home Reform. But by this time Queen Mab
and the Owl had had enough, for the din which still continued outside
the windows was giving them neuralgia. They therefore left the House
and flew away westward over the crowd, where differences of opinion,
expressed in the British public's own graceful and forcible manner, had
become the order of the day. They met Mr. Bradlaugh at a little
distance, hurrying to the scene of combat with the air of 'Under which
king, Bezonian?' and if the locality had not been so extremely noisy
they could not have but turned back to see the fun. The Prime Minister
had unaccountably (though not unexpectedly) disappeared from the arena,
and his adherents were under the impression that he had been
treacherously stowed away in the Tower or some subterranean dungeon.
The fact was, that, as eloquence could have no effect on the House in
its present state of delirium, the temptation to study Hittite
inscriptions in their native home became too strong for him, and he was
on his peaceful way to the shores of the Orontes and the ruins of
Megiddo.

Shortly after, the Owl and the Fairy met the Bishop, who had heard of
the catastrophe, and was torn by conflicting emotions; personal anxiety
about his prospects being overclouded by the fear that the new
Government might proceed to pass the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill
immediately. 'And a man who marries his Deceased Wife's Sister,' he
exclaimed pathetically to the air, 'may very soon end in the swamps of
Rationalism!' Only Queen Mab and the Owl heard the words as they flew
overhead. Next they met Mr. Matthew Arnold, smiling a happy smile, and
concocting a 'childlike and bland' article for the 'Nineteenth Century'
on the present crisis. So they flew on westward till, gaining a freer
and fresher neighbourhood, they came upon a wide green lawn, and on the
lawn three old acquaintances, the Poet, the Palæonto-theologist,
and—wholly altered from the pale and dreamy boy of their
recollection—Walter, the Professor's child.

The Professor was a man given to promptitude of speech and action, and,
once awakened to the serious state of Walter's health, physical and
mental, he had resolved, at whatever discomfort to himself, to check
the boy's undue mental precocity and substitute for it mere physical
vigour. He was content with no half-measures, and he sent the lad at
once to a preparatory school for Eton. At Eton he knew Walter's brain
would have a rest. The effect was miraculous. The boy, whom the
Palæonto-theologist had rashly invited to spend a holiday at his home,
was a different creature. He had become sturdy and robust; he had
forgotten his new religion of Dala, with his science primers, and could
no more have composed a hymn to a fairy than he could have endured a
false quantity. He had forgotten the Goona stones; he had forgotten the
dates of the Kings of England. He said that bogies were all bosh; he
said that Cardinal Wolsey was imprisoned in the Tower for thirteen
years and wrote 'Robinson Crusoe' there, and that the Nile rose in
Mungo Park. He had forgotten his father's instructions, and regarded
birds, not as products of Evolution, but as things suitable to shy
stones at, and to be treated with contempt, and catapults. He was
incorrigible at Euclid, but he was excellent at cricket, and on this
occasion he had fagged the Poet and the Palæonto-theologist to bowl to
and field out for him. It was beyond human nature to expect them to
enjoy it. The Poet was in the midst of a sublime stanza when he was
peremptorily ordered to come and bowl, and he went dreamily and
reluctantly, to be greeted with a further mandate of 'Look sharp
there!' The Palæonto-theologist was deep in an exhaustive inventory of
the animals in Noah's Ark, and was discussing the probability of the
Mammoth's having been one of its residents. If so, there came the
knotty point of how Noah contrived to stow him and the Megatherium in
comfortably, and whether they never wanted to do away with the other
animals, in which case the Patriarch must have had stirring times. The
Palæonto-theologist was just about to begin the grand chain of evidence
in which he proves conclusively, from careful study of the original
Hebrew manuscripts, and from examination of the soil of Mount Ararat,
whose fossils are abraded to this day where the Ark rested on them,
that the dimensions of the Ark were anything but what they are said to
be, when Walter ordered him to come and field. There was no help for
it; he went and fielded; 'he ran, he fell, he fielded well.'

While he and the Poet were thus occupied, Mab and the Owl rested on a
great horse-chestnut and watched the game, and Mab, under the
impression that the boy, at sight of her, would be filled with wonder
and delight, slipped off her invisible cloak. For some time he was too
much absorbed in 'crumping the Poet's slows,' as he said, to notice
her; but at last, when the Poet and the Palæonto-theologist were
utterly 'collared' (as Walter put it) and exhausted, and the
perspiration stood thick on their intellectual foreheads, the advent of
refreshments gained them a momentary respite. Walter attacked the fruit
and cakes so vigorously that Queen Mab grew impatient, and descended to
a lower branch of the huge tree, where at last the boy, raising his
eyes, beheld her.

'Hi!' he cried, rushing indiscriminately at his companions. 'Get me a
catapult, lower boy, I say! Stones, peashooter, anything. Look alive!
Here goes!'

And he assailed the astonished Mab with a cricket-ball, and next 'it
came to pleats,' as Mrs. Major O'Dowd said; and then he hurled a jampot
and a fruit-knife. Fortunately for the fairy, who at the moment was too
much astonished to move, his aim was rendered inaccurate by his
excitement, and the missiles flew wide. The unhappy fags had started
up, and the Poet, looking round bewildered, with a volley of desperate
expletives un-uttered in his soul, caught sight of Mab.

'Celestial being!' he exclaimed rapturously. 'I again behold thee.
Bright inmate! How did it run?'

'Bother your verses!' cried the boy with utter contempt. 'Shy at it,
you duffer! Oh, what a Butterfly! Get her into the teapot. Blockhead!'

This last disdainfully to himself, for he had hurled the ancient and
valuable teapot at Mab, who was flying to a higher branch, and the
teapot had missed.

'Rash boy!' cried the Palæonto-theologist, shaking him angrily, 'you
have broken my grandfather's teapot.'

'Run for the butterfly-net,' returned the boy unabashed. 'By George,
I'll give you the jolliest licking!'

'Hi, there she goes! Seize her!' he shouted distractedly, and the
unlucky Palæonto-theologist rushed after a butterfly-net, while Queen
Mab, in unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed by
the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new
departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they
were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened
his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but
scientific delight, the word—

'Reaction!'

But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from
Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the
New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the
rising generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and
cricket, 'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education,
Philosophy, and the Philistines had made of the island she once loved
well a wilderness wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings.

She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to
all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like
Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was
evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going to
Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their
children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating
Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading
the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and
paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they
had no time for fairies.

Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of
the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps
of the old folk-lore has driven her thence—with constitutions, and
microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism in
the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century—she is
secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the
approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific
theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men
whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is
not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day
is over, that she is too tangible by far for a higher Pantheism, and
that only among the heathen, in some obscure corner of Oceania, she is
still permitted to linger on, till that lagging island too receives its
chrism of intellect, and is caught up into the van of time.

The Owl is yet the wisest of the birds, though he has commenced a
course of psychological research that, it is to be feared, if persisted
in, will seriously injure his brain. For he said, only yesterday, that
as he was conscious of external objects merely through the medium of
his own ego, how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole
ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be
informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or
somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it
was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective
phenomenon, mere _Schein_ or _maya_, and that he gave it up.

But the Democrat, untroubled by transcendental scruples, goes on his
way, rejoicing in the prospect of the Millennium, now close at hand. He
does not much care what the universe is, but he knows what he wants to
get out of it, and that is sufficient for his purpose. To be sure, he
wants to get what no one ever did or will obtain, but his moments are
impassioned, and his idea is a distraction, like another.

PRINTED BY SPOTTSWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "'That Very Mab'" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.