She looked up at them, and said: “How is it that though we are so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves? How is it that we find the dreadful times of the past so interesting to us—in pictures and poetry?”
Old Hammond smiled. “It always was so, and I suppose always will be,” said he, “however it may be explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care (as Clara hinted just now) to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs.”
“Well,” said Dick, “surely it is but natural to like these things strange; just as when we were children, as I said just now, we used to pretend to be so-and-so in such-and-such a place. That’s what these pictures and poems do; and why shouldn’t they?”
“Thou hast hit it, Dick,” quoth old Hammond; “it is the childlike part of us that produces works of imagination. When we are children time passes so slow with us that we seem to have time for everything.”
He sighed, and then smiled and said: “At least let us rejoice that we have got back our childhood again. I drink to the days that are!”
“Second childhood,” said I in a low voice, and then blushed at my double rudeness, and hoped that he hadn’t heard. But he had, and turned to me smiling, and said: “Yes, why not? And for my part, I hope it may last long; and that the world’s next period of wise and unhappy manhood, if that should happen, will speedily lead us to a third childhood—if indeed this age be not our third. Meantime, my friend, you must know that we are too happy, both individually and collectively, to trouble ourselves about what is to come hereafter.”
“Well, for my part,” said Clara, “I wish we were interesting enough to be written or painted about.”
Dick answered her with some lover’s speech, impossible to be written down, and then we sat quiet a little.
XVII
How the Change Came
Dick broke the silence at last, saying: “Guest, forgive us for a little after-dinner dullness. What would you like to do? Shall we have out Greylocks and trot back to Hammersmith? or will you come with us and hear some Welsh folk sing in a hall close by here? or would you like presently to come with me into the City and see some really fine building? or—what shall it be?”
“Well,” said I, “as I am a stranger, I must let you choose for me.”
In point of fact, I did not by any means want to be “amused” just then; and also I rather felt as if the old man, with his knowledge of past times, and even a kind of inverted sympathy for them caused by his active hatred of them, was as it were a blanket for me against the cold of this very new world, where I was, so to say, stripped bare of every habitual thought and way of acting; and I did not want to leave him too soon. He came to my rescue at once, and said—
“Wait a bit, Dick; there is someone else to be consulted besides you and the guest here, and that is I. I am not going to lose the pleasure of his company just now, especially as I know he has something else to ask me. So go to your Welshmen, by all means; but first of all bring us another bottle of wine to this nook, and then be off as soon as you like; and come again and fetch our friend to go westward, but not too soon.”
Dick nodded smilingly, and the old man and I were soon alone in the great hall, the afternoon sun gleaming on the red wine in our tall quaint-shaped glasses. Then said Hammond—
“Does anything especially puzzle you about our way of living, now you have heard a good deal and seen a little of it?”
Said I: “I think what puzzles me most is how it all came about.”
“It well may,” said he, “so great as the change is. It would be difficult indeed to tell you the whole story, perhaps impossible; knowledge, discontent, treachery, disappointment, ruin, misery, despair—those who worked for the change because they could see further than other people went through all these phases of suffering; and doubtless all the time the most of men looked on, not knowing what was doing, thinking it all a matter of course, like the rising and setting of the sun—and indeed it was so.”
“Tell me one thing, if you can,” said I. “Did the change, the ‘revolution’ it used to be called, come peacefully?”
“Peacefully?” said he; “what peace was there amongst those poor confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end—bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it.”
“Do you mean actual fighting with weapons?” said I, “or the strikes and lockouts and starvation of which we have heard?”
“Both, both,” he said. “As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition of life for all men arose, quite
