six or seven and twenty, and five feet ten in height. Prince Edward, it was said, was asked by the Queen to remonstrate with the old lady. But she met him by saying that she could not make her dear boy unhappy. 'He is head over ears in love with me, you know,' she said. The Prince could only smile and perhaps repeat the British saying under his breath: 'No fool like an old fool.'
The week after the marriage Corlett published the announcement in the Pink 'Un, and underneath in large letters, this:
AN ARITHMETICAL PROBLEM:
How many times does twenty-seven go into sixty-eight and what is there over?
Perhaps nothing except the famous naughty blunder in The Times some years later ever caused such widespread merriment.
The tone of English society is the tone of a well-bred man of the world, whereas the tone of American society is the tone of a Puritan grocer.
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CHAPTER XIV
In my early days in London one event moved me profoundly, the death and burial of Charles Reade. Somehow or other he had got the name of being bad tempered and quarrelsome and his lovable and great qualities were almost forgotten. Indeed, were it not for the fact that a prominent journalist, George Augustus Sala, took up the cudgels for his private character and wrote of him as kind-hearted as well as noble-minded, judgment against him would have gone by default. Of course, like all the younger ones, I measured him wholly as a writer and accepted at once every word of Sala's eulogy and went far beyond it. Unlike most Englishmen, I regarded Reade as a far greater writer than Dickens, and indeed had no hesitation in putting The Cloister and the Hearth side by side with Vanity Fair in my admiration, and perhaps a little higher in my love. Again and again I talked of Reade's masterpiece as the greatest English novel, though the spirit of opposition may have added a tinge of challenge to my passionate superlative.
The announcement of his death reminded me that I might have known him, had I wished. Rossetti's passing some two years before, my regret was keen and lasting. But I went to his burial and from it learned how careless, or rather how chanceful, is England's sympathy with her great men. True, that Easter Tuesday was a vile day: it rained and the air was raw. He was to be buried too at Willesden, miles away from the centre, but there was not a great crowd even at Shepherd's Bush, whence the funeral procession started.
A more dismal burial would be hard to imagine. And so I resented even Sala's praise of It is never too late to mend as a 'magnificent work,' and his comparison of Hawes, the governor of the gaol, and Eden the chaplain, as 'distinctly original and dramatic characters,' with the Faust and Mephistopheles and the Gretchen of Goethe. Such over praise seemed as impertinent-odious as his talking of two Charles Reades: 'One a very pugnacious and vituperative old gentleman, always shaking his fist in somebody's face and not infrequently hitting somebody over the head,' and 'the other Charles Reade I knew and revered as a valiant, upright and withal a charitable and compassionate Christian man, inexhaustible in his pity for suffering, implacable only in his hatred of things shameful and cruel and mean. He was throughout his life a militant man; but his soldiering is over now; there he rests in a peaceful tomb by the side of the Friend whom he loved so long and so deeply.'
Only three months before, Tennyson had been made a peer amid universal eulogy; yet here was as great a man put away forever without pomp or circumstance; the ordinary English reader thought more of Maud or The May Queen than The Cloister and the Hearth; still what did it matter? I for one walked through the rain and slush while the gallant Denys, with his 'the Devil is dead', went with me and Gerard and Catherine and the rest of the glorious and ever-living company; and perchance one man's understanding and admiring, passionate love is more than most of us get in this earthly pilgrimage. Surely it is well with dear Charles Reade: I saw his coffin lowered into the grave, but I find it hard to forgive myself. I ought to have seen and known him in order at least to have thanked him for his deathless gift to humanity and the many hours of pure delight I had had with his brave heart and noble spirit.
But now I must say a word or two of other occurrences that throw a certain light on English character and conditions. An American actress, Mary Anderson, took London by storm. It was said that Lord Lytton bought a row of the stalls night after night and filled the seats with chosen guests; his admiration surprised everyone who knew him, because he was regarded as an avowed admirer of the ephebos, rather than of woman's beauty; but he certainly fell for 'our Mary,' as some tried to nickname her. This was the Lord Lytton, who in The New Timon sneered at Tennyson:
The jingling medley of purloined conceits, Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats.
And Tennyson's answer was even more savage:
What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot, a little hand,
If half the little soul is dirt?
Before Mary Anderson appeared I had called on her and done a sketch of her career for the Evening News. She was a tall, graceful, good-looking blonde, but I never dreamed of her huge success. Her mind was as commonplace as her voice. She had no special gift, but on the stage she was beautiful: the foot-lights set her off peculiarly, though she could not act for nuts. To compare her as an actress with Ellen Terry or even with Ada Rehan would be ridiculous: she was comparatively inarticulate. Yet her appearances were events; she went from triumph to triumph. Through her success I realized that there are special scenic qualities demanded by the stage. She was very tall and when she came down the stage in white, she dominated it and dwarfed all the other women; in talking she had a slight American accent that would have ruined her as a Shakespearean actress, but by the time she played in The Winter's Tale she had shed her twang and spoke fairly; her eyes were a little deep set, her nose perfectly cut: in a room she was just pretty, on the stage a goddess. How much of her success was due to her statuesque grace and how much to Lytton's passionate advocacy can never be known.
Her career taught me how susceptible the English are to mere physical beauty. They rate it in all animals higher than any other race and study it more intimately: shorthorn bull or Berkshire sow, bulldog or greyhound, terrier or mastiff, Southdown ram or Welsh sheep, race-horse or hunter- all are admired for their perfect conformity to type, which argues a most passionate and imaginative understanding of what type is or should be.
Were it not for their idiotic Puritanism the English would be the greatest sculptors in the world and world- renowned besides for their extraordinary understanding of every form and type of bodily beauty.
I visited the British Museum with Rodin later to study the figures from the Parthenon. He went into ecstasies over them; they were as sensuous, he declared, as any figures in all plastic art. George Wyndham went with me at another time but he would not be seduced. The Greek feet and ankles were too large and ill-shaped, he argued; the womens' necks, too, and breasts were coarse. He preferred the figures from the Temple of Nike Apteros, and even they had bad faults. At length he asserted that the facial type was too wooden: the nose in a straight line from the forehead was ugly. In fine, the best English type, he insisted, was far finer, lovelier at once and more spiritual than the Greek ideal, and I agreed with him.
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year.
Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely.
There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany.
And as the trees, so are the men and women: one can find more types of exquisite girlhood and splendid
