The matter which appears in the following pages was originally contributed, in the shape of a series of articles under the general title of "Some Impressions of My Elders," to the North American Review at intervals during the years 1920 and 1921. The order in which the articles appear in this book is different from the order in which they appeared in the Review: this order is alphabetical whereas that was capricious. Some excisions and some additions have been made to them and I hope that I have evaded the danger which besets all those who reprint their journalism in book form, the danger of repetitions. Why I reprint them at all is a point on which I am not able to offer conclusive explanations. I have reached that period of my life when my wish is rather not to write a book than to write one, and I have lost all the cheery conceit which caused me in my youth to feel that anything I wrote ought to be published in a handsome volume. Indeed, when I think of the great quantity of books there already are in this world, it seems to me a sign of hopeless irresponsibility to add to their number. There are so many books that ought to be read, but never can be read because there is not enough time for any of us to do so, that no author can plead justification for printing a book which does not come within the catalogue of those that ought to be read unless he needs the money which, presumably, he will get for it. I cannot urge even that plea, for I have few needs and they are easily satisfied. I have never been afflicted with the mania for owning things, as Walt Whitman calls it, and therefore have no wish to accumulate either goods or money. Were it not for the insistence of some of my friends, I do not suppose I should issue this book to the public at all. We are too prone, we scribblers, to put our casual writings between the covers of a book, when regard for our craft would compel us to reserve that dignity for our greatest efforts; and I have feared for several years now to be one of these offenders. And yet, one likes to have an array of books on a shelf and be able to say, "I wrote those." The profession of writing gives degree and reputation to a man which is often greater than his due, and people of ability will listen respectfully to the opinions of a lesser person than themselves merely because he (or even she) has printed a book. Many clever men and women actually paid good American money to hear me talk on odds and ends of subjects, although they probably had views on them that were at least as sound as mine and no doubt a great deal sounder. I am afraid of this tribute to the author. It may make us, a much assorted crowd, esteem ourselves more highly than we are naturally prone to do. The mere fact that a man has contracted a profitable habit of putting words together does not entitle him to more of the world's respect that is due to one who has contracted the habit of putting bits of metal together and calling the result a motor-car. I do not know why a man who writes books should regard himself as a better man than one who makes butter. Far less do I know why the man who makes butter should consent to believe that he is less worthy than the man who makes books. But undoubtedly some such superstition fills the minds of most of us. When a man or woman of ordinary appearance and uninteresting speech comes into our presence, we say "How do you do!" and turn away; but when we are informed that this same person has written a novel, immediately we become interested and turn again to him or her in the expectation that something profoundly illuminating will be said to us. Experience does not cure us of that delusive hope. We do not prick up our ears when a man who owns the largest motor-car factory in the world comes into our presence, and we yawn in the face of a railway director. Yet either of these may be far more entertaining company than any author. It is true that the author is presumably more imaginative than the owner of the factory or the president of the railroad, and perhaps the instinctive tribute paid by mankind to the author, even when mankind omits to buy his books, is a recognition of the value of imagination to human life. As such I gladly accept it. Nevertheless, I could wish for more discrimination in these tributes. On the whole, I would prefer to see our authors neglected than over-estimated. No one on earth and probably no one in heaven can prevent an author from making books while he has breath in his body and energy in his brain and fingers. Therefore, neglect will not greatly harm him. But too much praise, too much consideration of his views, above all, too much profit from his work, will make a sad mess of an excellent writer. I tell myself sometimes that no author should be praised until he is dead, though he might occasionally be dispraised during his lifetime. We should thus save our authors, though there is no certainty in this, from excess of vanity. Let Shakespeare's reputation grow to legendary proportions when he is safely within his grave, but do not, if you desire the best that is in him, let him be often or much praised while he is alive. We have come to a period of time when authors feel that they must write so many books each year. But I would have an author publish a book only when the compulsion to publish it becomes greater than he can resist. Books would not necessarily be better, but they would certainly be fewer, and they might be better.

II

I have written thus far, partly to resolve my own doubts (which, however, are not resolved) but chiefly to excuse myself to those who may buy this book. I beg of them to believe that I have not reprinted these fugitive pieces without deliberation on their value. My friends tell me that any impressions of men of quality and genius have value, and undoubtedly Boswell's biography of Dr. Johnson confirms many mediocrities in their intention to accept a man's hospitality for the purpose of earning money by describing his personal habits in a public journal. We would be very grateful for an account of Shakespeare no better than any one of the chapters in this book. If an Elizabethan had had a mind like Boswell's and had noted down all that he ever heard Shakespeare say, had pressed him with questions on his work, had noted his personal appearance, his habits of dress, his ways of eating, his effect on women, his likes and dislikes, the thousand and one small things which, when summed up, make a man out of a myth, how happy we should all be, how many thousand commentators and emendators and wrathful Baconians and cypher maniacs would be put out of employment! One could cry with vexation at the thought that there was no one with sufficient intelligence to keep a diary during those last few mysterious years in Stratford-on-Avon when Shakespeare, though still a young man as ages go, ceased to work at his trade and went in silence to his grave. Such are the considerations which have affected me in my decision to reprint these chapters, though they may add very little to any one's knowledge of the men who are described in them. It is, perhaps, an additional factor in the decision that they record impressions made on the mind of a young man by his elders and betters and expressed at a time when he was ceasing to be young. The generation to which I belong was much impressed by the men whose work and beliefs are sketched in this book. All young men, whatever their class or culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will end when young men cease to have heroes. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy and, rather more remotely, "A. E." were heroes worthy of emulation by me and the likes of me. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were too far up the slopes of Olympus for us to hope ever to touch the hem of their garments, but we were alive in the same world with them and sometimes spoke with people who knew them. Once, even, on a hot Sunday morning I walked for miles in Surrey, stiff with determination to see Meredith and to speak with him, even if I should have to skulk about his house the entire day and run the risk of being arrested for suspicious loitering; but my heart failed me when, tired and thirsty, I came into his neighbourhood. Who was I, I demanded of myself, that I should thrust my unimportant person on the notice of a genius? And when I had made that demand of myself, I realised that I could do no other than go away and leave the old man in peace. And so I went, though now I regret that I did, for a little while after I made my expedition to Box Hill, Meredith died and I had lost for ever my hope of seeing him. Time has been kinder to me over Mr. Hardy whose friendship I have the happiness to enjoy.

I have described these men as our heroes, but of course the degree of respect we gave to them varied. The feeling we had for Mr. Galsworthy, for example, was diminished by the fact that we were afraid he would turn aside and shed a few unaccountable tears. His work, particularly "The Man of Property," "The Country House" and "The Silver Box," had the great appeal which all passionately sincere work has, but it left some of us in a state of chilled speculation. We were afraid of the effect Mr. Galsworthy had on our emotions and we resisted him more, perhaps, than we ought to have done because we suspected him of sentimentality and were afraid he might let our minds down by pressing too hardly on our hearts. His work excited a remote pity in us, but it did not rouse us to wrath or warm our affections. His characters were the creatures of an aloof, impassive and immovable Destiny; and it is difficult to feel much interest in automatons. If a man is wronged by another man, I may be stirred to his defence, but if he is thwarted or crushed by some passionless Force which cannot be controlled or persuaded or defeated, I am unlikely to do more than murmur "Poor fellow!" and pass on my way. Spineless men, impotently submitting to Circumstances, do not stir the blood, and Mr. Galsworthy's characters, though they might excite our pity, killed our hope. Mr. Galsworthy seemed to us to say, "Vain youths, it is idle to make any effort! Things happen and they cannot be helped. You are doomed from the moment of your birth to die frustrated!..." He is easily made indignant by suffering, but we could not imagine him sounding a call to fight. We could think of him only in the act of surrender. We asked for a challenge; he counselled submission. He was a Tolstoyan, not of his Free Will, for he had no Free Will, but because he could not help himself. He turned the other cheek because he would not clench his fist. Mr. Hardy did not fill our mouths with dust as Mr. Galsworthy did, for his people, though they, too, were creatures of Destiny, were gallant creatures and went to their end with a noble gesture. He left us with the sensation that although we were obliged to submit to a doom determined for us by a Power that understood neither Itself nor us, yet we could put ribbons in our hats. We could die like men and not like rats. When Mr. Hardy celebrated his eighty-first birthday, his younger comrades in the craft of letters presented an address to him from which I quote the following passages:

"In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of life which is informed by your knowledge of character and relieved by the charity of your humour and sweetened by your sympathy with human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it. When Mr. Justice Shallow sought to instruct Sir John Falstaff in the choice of soldiers, the knight said: 'Care I for the limbs, the thewes, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit, Master Shallow.' So would you have answered him, for in all that you have written you have shown the spirit of man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting through defeat. You have inspired us both by your work and by the manner in which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have observed so closely as you have the Host's instruction in the Canterbury Tales:

Your termes, your colours and your figures,

Keep them in store, till so be ye indite

High style, as when that men to kinges write.

From your first book to your last, you have written in the 'high style, as when that men to kinges write,' and you have crowned a great prose with a noble poetry."

Those extracts express, I think, some of the quiet quality of courage discoverable in the determinism of Mr. Hardy, but absent from the determinism of Mr. Galsworthy.

III

Our attitude towards Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc was very different from our attitude towards Mr. Galsworthy. These challenging, fighting, protesting men were concerned less with pity for the victims of life than with anger against or opposition to the oppressors of life. They did not wring their hands; they put up their fists. The Early Twentieth Century Youth listened respectfully to Mr. Galsworthy, but he went out to fight with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc. These four men did not move him in equal measure. Mr. Wells stimulated him with the quick succession of his ideas, but disconcerted him also with the rapidity with which he shed one idea for another. While we were willing to challenge everything and make it justify its existence, we were eager also to find firm ground for our feet. We felt that Mr. Wells ought to make up his mind a little more carefully before he took the public into his confidence. Mr. Shaw's awful consistency, even when he took to religion, drew us to him more than Mr. Wells's willingness to modify or enlarge his views. Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton stimulated us in a different way from that in which Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells stimulated us. Mr. Wells sent us out into the world in search of new and more adequate formulÆ; Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton checked us in headlong flights with words of warning and remonstrance. They reminded us that man is of the earth, earthy; that man does not live by Good Will alone; that society is composed of a great variety of beings, generous and mean, exalted and debased, hearty and miserable, noble and ignoble, self-sacrificing and self-seeking, kind and cruel; and they reminded us also that unless we took care to remember this vital fact of the variety of man, we should lose our way in the deserts ahead of us. They told us that Mr. Wells's "Good Will" was merely Godwin's "Universal Benevolence" all over again, and that Godwin's doctrine had made the way easy for the Utilitarians and the growth of a devitalizing political theory which expressed itself in the brutal industrial system of the first half of the nineteenth century. Mr. Wells sought to convict man of a sense of stupidity and disorganization, but they sought to convict him of a sense of sin. Mr. Wells reminded man of his power to aspire; they reminded him of his lapse from grace. Mr. Wells said, "You can climb!" They said, "You have fallen!" He said, "Think!" They said, "Repent!" The world, in Mr. Wells's opinion, needed Love and Fine Thinking. In the opinion of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton it needed the love of God and faith in the Catholic Church. There probably was less difference in essentials between Mr. Wells and the Chesterbelloc, as Mr. Shaw nicknamed them, than appeared on the surface of things. The Catholic Church in its organized state may move Mr. Wells to admiration, though, in its religious aspect, it probably moves him only to derision. It is a shabby sort of faith, with a tendency to tawdriness which makes it ultimately unsuitable to the spiritual needs of a gentleman, although adequate to the needs of servant-girls and actors. No one who has visited a Catholic church or witnessed the ceremonials in Rome can help, if he or she be possessed of any culture at all, feeling that the whole business is second-rate: the effort of an overblown actor-manager to interpret Shakespeare in pretentious terms. The fundamental sanity of Mr. Chesterton has, no doubt, saved him from the folly of secession to Rome, but his partiality for it and Mr. Belloc's rigid attainment to it, made the young men of my time suspicious of the Chesterbelloc. Mr. Belloc said, on a public occasion, that he would support the Church in an act of repression if the Church came into serious conflict with an antagonist; and he proved that he meant what he said by applauding the execution of Ferrer, the anti-clerical, in Spain. It was natural, perhaps, that my Orange blood should boil when I heard Mr. Belloc palliating the offences of his obsolete church, but my more tolerant friends were as dashed by his behaviour as I was, and what respect we had for him was considerably diminished by the knowledge that he would always come to heel when some priest snapped fingers at him. Neither he nor Mr. Chesterton, although their criticism interested and on occasions checked us, ever established dominion over us because of their preoccupation with Catholicism. They might spell the word with a capital C, but we knew very well that Mr. Belloc in his heart spelt it with a small one, and we were not going to deliver ourselves into the hands of men who were priest-ridden, however "jolly" they might be or however well they might write.

We were not interested in their beer-swilling habits which we regarded as queer nastinesses in otherwise reputable persons. Their efforts to make a tenet of religion out of beer-swilling seemed to us to be as ridiculous as would be an effort by a Chinaman to make a tenet of religion out of opium-smoking.

Mr. Shaw was incontestably the supreme figure among these men of mind who stimulated and influenced the young men and women of the Early Twentieth Century. I doubt whether any one has ever captured or held the fancy of young men as Mr. Shaw captured and held our fancy. Dr. Johnson had an influence as powerful in his time as Mr. Shaw had in ours; but Dr. Johnson's influence was mainly exercised over men of older years than we were, of more established habits than we had; and I doubt very much whether he affected their thoughts and outlook on life so profoundly as Mr. Shaw affected us. He could not persuade the faithful Boswell to accept his view of the American colonists, and his pamphlet, "Taxation No Tyranny" displeased his friends as much as it appeared to gratify George III and his supporters. Dr. Johnson was a critic and a scholar with very little creative ability; he was too conservative a man to be a man of genius; and he looked back too often for the liking of young men who are always looking forward. His love of tradition and settled order, while it was pleasing to men of an age when comfort and security and familiar things began to attract the mind more than effort and adventure and change, made him unattractive to the stirring minds of young men. Shelley derived from Godwin, not from Johnson.

There is a passage in Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson" in which Dr. Johnson's peculiar views on the respect due to men of rank are set out very clearly.

" ... a discussion took place, whether ... Lord Cardross did right to refuse to go Secretary of the Embassy to Spain, when Sir James Gray, a man of inferior rank, went Ambassador. Dr. Johnson said, that perhaps in point of interest he did wrong; but in point of dignity he did well.... Sir, had he gone Secretary, while his inferior was Ambassador, he would have been a traitor to his rank and family."

The question, to Dr. Johnson's mind, was not one of merit: Lord Cardross was entitled to "go Ambassador," not because he was a more skilful diplomatist than Sir James Gray, but because he was a lord while Sir James was only a knight! This extraordinary doctrine, which may be held accountable for much in British history, might appeal to elderly men who love rules and regulations and like to have everything neatly set out in books, but it certainly does not appeal to young men who believe in conflicts won by superior qualities; for young men, as Dr. Johnson himself said on one occasion, "have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect."

Mr. Shaw is incapable of uttering such a remark as Dr. Johnson uttered in support of Lord Cardross's inept behaviour. He has, indeed, said and written foolish things and he is capable of making what are called "debating" points and cheap scores and of saying things for the sake of saying them or of annoying the complacent and the smug; but he is incapable of saying anything which supports a belief that one man shall have precedence over another, not because of his merit, but because of his birth. Dr. Johnson's statement was not a casual, fantastic, perverse statement; it was a natural result of his general theory of society. It is recorded of him that he declined to leave a room until a Bishop had done so on the ground that the Bishop's office gave him a title to precedence over a man of greater mentality! It was not humility that caused Dr. Johnson to behave thus, for he was an arrogant man, nor was it indifference to such matters, for he was a stickler for respect to himself even when he did not deserve respect: it was his belief in the providential arrangement of society in settled grades that caused him to behave in this way. The man was entitled to quit the room first, not because he was a good man or a great man, but because he was a bishop! There is probably some convenience in this belief, a simple method of preventing incivility, but it is a small convenience which does not greatly matter to youth.

I can imagine Mr. Shaw refusing to go out of the room before the Bishop has done so, in sheer humility or indifference, but I cannot imagine him refusing to do so because of his regard for the man's office as distinct from the man himself. And it is, I suppose, his irreverence for office, more than anything else, which draws young men to him. He is no respecter of persons or authorities: he criticizes them all, high or low. His courage, his vitality, his arrogance, his humility, his championship of persecuted persons, his impulse to help an unpopular cause not, as stupid people imagine, because it is unpopular, but because it seems to him to be a just cause, and his absolute indifference to vested interests and the power of the majority—these qualities of his draw young men to him as a magnet draws a needle. It is significant, I think, that Dr. Johnson had a very strong dislike of Dean Swift to whom, in many respects, Bernard Shaw bears a close mental resemblance. It is very certain that had Bernard Shaw lived in the eighteenth century, to which, in spirit, he really belongs, he would have supported the Americans as fiercely as Johnson denounced them; and I do not doubt that his would have been the most scathing and powerful of the pamphlets written in reply to "Taxation No Tyranny."

IV

These, then, were the men who guided in greater or less degree the opinions of the young men and women of the Early Twentieth Century in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. "A. E." greatly influenced young Irishmen who remained curiously unimpressed either by Mr. Moore or Mr. Yeats. Rumours of his doctrine came to the ears of young Englishman, but they had no personal contact with him as they had with Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. It is not possible to calculate the extent to which these men moulded the minds of my generation, but indisputably it was large. No one who grew from youth to manhood between 1900 and 1914 could escape from their influence, even if he were unconscious of it. The greater part of that generation died in the War. The young men who drew their ideas chiefly from Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw, directly or indirectly, did not live to make their world, and so we can never tell what good or ill would have resulted to mankind had they succeeded to authority. Their bones are buried in France and Italy, in Palestine and Turkey, in Russia and East Africa, on the shores of Gallipoli and in the marshes of Salonica, in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and the North Sea; and there is nothing to remember them by but broken lands in France and the broken vows of politicians the world over. These young men went out to die in a mood of selflessness that has never, perhaps, been equalled or excelled in the history of mankind; and when their backs were turned, they were betrayed. We cannot look on them again, but we may find comfort in our loss by remembering and considering the men who formed the faith they held.