many books at a time, a book being a book just as an orange is an orange. If the book the reader wants is not there, why, there is another book for him to take; by which beautiful system the good writer reaps very little advantage over the mediocre, for indifferent books are forced upon the public as the conjuror forces cards on people who think they are choosing them. It is a wonder the libraries do not purvey their literature by the pound.
PART II. HERE, THERE, AND SOMEWHERE ELSE: PHILOSOPHIC EXCURSIONS.
[The following pages are not intended as a substitute for Raedeker or Murray. Nor can I solicit your interest on the ground of new places and strange discoveries. To the philosophic tourist all places are equally good to soliloquise in; and in inviting you to accompany my excursions I need scarcely explain that the route is not according to Bradshaw but to the A. B. C., and that you may break the journey at any point.]
ABERDEEN
Critics of London allow too little for the charm of irregularity and historical association-for odd bits and queer views coming unexpectedly round the corner to meet one, for strange ancient gardens and fragments of field in the backways of Holborn, for quaint waterside alleys and old-world churches in out-of-the-way turnings-for everything, in fact, that has the charm of natural growth. If I had my way, I would not give up Booksellers' Bow for a thousand improvements in the Strand. Where shall you find a more piquant peace than in the shady quadrangles that branch out of the bustle of Fleet Street, and flash a memory of Oxford spires or Cambridge gardens on the inner eye? What spot in the world has inspired a nobler sonnet than Wordsworth's on Westminster Bridge? Who would exchange our happy incongruity for the mechanical regularity of the mushroom cities of the States? Paris has, no doubt, made herself beautiful; but she could have afforded not to be, much better than she can afford to be. The theorist holds up Glasgow as a model city-a pioneer-and the splendour of its municipal buildings is as the justice of Aristides. But if an ugly woman does not dress well, who should? With all its civic spirit, Glasgow remains grey, prosaic, intolerable-the champion platitude of commercial civilisation. Aberdeen would have been a far finer example of the schematic city of which theorists dream. There is something heroic about the spaciousness of its streets, the loftiness of the buildings, and the omnipresence of granite-a Tyrtsean spirit, which finds its supreme embodiment in the noble statue of Wallace poised on rough craglets of unpolished granite, and of General Gordon with his martial cloak around him. If Edinburgh be the Athens of Scotland, Aberdeen is its Sparta. And yet after a while Aberdeen becomes a weariness and an abomination. For you discover that it is one endless series of geometrical diagrams. The pavements run in parallel lines, the houses are rectilineal, the gardens are squares or oblongs; if by chance the land sprawls in billocks and hollows, nevertheless is it partitioned in rigid lines. The architecture is equally austere. The very curves demonstrate the theorem that a curve is made up of little straight lines, the arches are stiff and unbending, and wherever a public building demands an ornament, a fir-shaped cone of straight lines rises in stoic severity. In vain one seeks for a refuge from Euclid-for an odd turning or a crooked by-way. To match the straight- ness of their streets and the granite of their structures the Aberdonians are hard-headed, close-fisted, and logical (there is a proverb that no Jew can settle among them), and when they die they are laid out neatly in a rectangular cemetery with parallel rows of graves. Even when they stand about gossiping they fall naturally into geometric figures: if two disconnected men are smoking silently in the roadway, they trisect it; and if another man arrives he converts the company into an equilateral triangle. I am convinced the moon shrinks from appearing in Union Street except it is in perfect quarters, and hides timidly behind a cloud unless its arcs are presentable. Professor Bain was born in Aberdeen. This accounts for much in our British metaphysics. Aberdeen produced the man who vivisected Shelley's 'Skylark,' and explained away the human mind and all that is therein; Aberdeen educated him, graduated him, married him, gave him the chair of Logic in her University, and finally made him Lord Rector. Bain thinks entirely in straight lines. He is the apotheosis of the Aberdonian. Which is a warning against regular cities.
According to the Rev. W. A. Cornaby in 'The Contemporary Review,' the straight line is an abomination to the Chinese; they avoid it by curves and zigzags, and they think in curves and zigzags. Hence it seems the Chinese suffer from a spurious idealism, just as my Aberdonians suffer from a spurious materialism. If only the maidens of Aberdeen would marry the mandarins of the too Flowery Land, what a perfect race we might expect!
ANTWERP
This is the era of Exhibitions. An epidemic of Exhibitions traverses the world, breaking out now at Paris, now at Chicago, now at Antwerp. To visit them is our modern Pilgrimage; they force us to make the Grand Tour, as our little wars teach us geography. They are supposed to give a fillip to the prosperity of their town, and to nourish the pride and pocket of the citizens. What other function they fulfil is dubious. Time was when 'the long laborious miles' of the Crystal Palace were acclaimed as the dawn of the Golden Age, when swords should be turned into the most improved substitute for pruning-hooks, and each man
find his own in all men's good,
And all men work in noble brotherhood.
Unhappily, that millennial vision is still far away,-
Far, how far, no tongue can say,
as the canny Tennyson did not forget, even in his rapt prophetic strain. And we have grown chiller. We no longer raise the song of praise because manufacturers of all nations send specimens of their work to a common centre in quest of medals. The world is already federated by the chains of commerce; international barter is an inseparable part of the movement of life, and infinite intertangled threads of union stretch across the seas from shipping office to shipping office. Wherefore the millennium is as likely to arrive vid Bayreuth or Lourdes, or any other centre of Pilgrimage, as by way of an International Exhibition. No, we must take our Exhibitions more humbly: they are amusing and instructive; they earn dividends or lose capital; they stimulate orders for the goods on view, and they end in a shower of medals. In France, according to Mark Twain, few men escape the Legion of Honor. Is there any artificial product that has escaped a medal at some Exhibition or the other? I cannot recall eating or drinking anything undecorated. They grow on every bush, those medals, copious as the Queen's Arms over the shop-windows of the High Street. No store, however lowly, but the Queen deals there; no article, however poor, but has earned golden opinions, or at least silver and bronze. For the industrial or Gradgrind mind an Exhibition is doubtless a riot, an orgy; for the exhibitors it is a sensational battle-field; for the average spectator it is as exciting as a walk through Whiteley's, or a stroll down Oxford Street. From the Antwerp Exhibition proper I bear away nothing but an impression of a wonderful paper-making machine, at one end of which the paper enters as liquid pulp, to issue at the other as a solid sheet. A pity the process was not carried one step farther, to the printed newspaper stage-so that what went in as rags should come out as mendacity. Such success as the Antwerp Exhibition has won is a success of side-shows; a panorama of camels and dancing-girls defiles before my eyes, my ears are yet ringing with the barbarous music and incantations of the Orient. Old Antwerp rises picturesque, with its burghers and warriors; the glorious picture galleries stretch away, overladen with artistic treasure; the mimic elephant mounts, mammoth-like, to the skies; the grounds and the facades of the buildings gleam fairy-like in the soft night air, with a million illuminations; and lo! there in the German restaurant the beautiful daughters of the Fatherland smile, in coifs and tuckers and short skirts, Katti and Luisa and Nina, dulciferous names that trip off the tongue as the gentle creatures trip from table to table with flasks of Rhenish wine; the mellifluous voice of Sarah cries cigarettes at her booth in the Rue du Caire-Sarah, the Egyptian Jewess, whose ancestors went back to the land of Pharaoh in defiance of Rabbinic decree-Sarah, with the charm of her eighteen summers and her graceful virginal figure and her sweet unconscious coquetry, as different from the barmaid's as Rosalind's from Audrey's; and Sarah's brother, briskest of business boys, resurges with his polyglot solicitations to buy nougat: a mannish swashbuckler without, a cherubic infant within: I see the Congo negroes, mere frauds from the States, in your opinion, daintiest of American friends, who came all the way from Paris to meet me. But soft! what has all this to do with the Industrial Exhibition?
