distinguishable it was manifest that they were spoken by a man in
serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is convincing in

elocution.
When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting

blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of
the type that grows stout and wears whiskers. The man was in

BOURGEOIS dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small
station building, shaking his thick fist at the sky. No one was on

the platform with him except the railway officials, who seemed in
doubt as to their duties in the matter, and two women. Of one of

these there was nothing to remark except her distress. She wept as
she stood at the door of the waiting-room. Like the second woman,

she wore the dress of the shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with
the local black lace veil in place of a bonnet over her hair. It is

of the second woman--O unfortunate creature!--that this record is
made--a record without sequel, without consequence; but there is

nothing to be done in her regard except so to remember her. And
thus much I think I owe after having looked, from the midst of the

negative happiness that is given to so many for a space of years, at
some minutes of her despair. She was hanging on the man's arm in

her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting. She
had wept so hard that her face was disfigured. Across her nose was

the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear. Haydon saw it on
the face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London

street. I remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via
Reggio, in her intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs

lifting it. She was afraid that the man would throw himself under
the train. She was afraid that he would be damned for his

blasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear. It was
horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the
clamour. No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the

woman's horror. But has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To
me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely

mental image. Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a
background, and against it appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with

sobs, under the provincial black lace veil. And at night what
emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my hotel

there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were
giving Offenbach. The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and

the little town was placarded with announcements of La Bella Elena.
The peculiarvulgarrhythm of the music jigged audibly through half

the hot night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its
pauses. But the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the

persistentvision of those three figures at the Via Reggio station
in the profoundsunshine of the day.

POCKET VOCABULARIES
A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in

such a collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a
portablevocabulary. It is suited to the manners of a day that has

produced salad-dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the
saving of processes. Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic'

things, of 'quaint' things and 'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy'
Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-painting' (is not that the

way of it?), and it will serve the turn. Especially did the
Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of language. It

seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature that if
anything could convince him of his own success it must be the energy

of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,
fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century. Literature

doubtless is made of words. What then is needful, he seems to ask,
besides a knack of beautiful words? Unluckily for him, he has

achieved, not style, but slang. Unluckily for him, words are not
style, phrases are not style. 'The man is style.' O good French

language, cunning and good, that lets me read the sentence in
obverse or converse as I will! And I read it as declaring that the

whole man, the very whole of him, is his style. The literature of a
man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his qualities, with

little fibres running invisibly into the smallest qualities he has.
He who is not a man of letters, simply is not one; it is not too

audacious a paradox to affirm that doing will not avail him who
fails in being. 'Lay your deadly doing down,' sang once some old

hymn known to Calvinists. Certain poets, a certain time ago,
ransacked the language for words full of life and beauty, made a

vocabulary of them, and out of wantonness wrote them to death. To
change somewhat the simile, they scented out a word--an earlyish

word, by preference--ran it to earth, unearthed it, dug it out, and
killed it. And then their followers bagged it. The very word that

lives, 'new every morning,' miraculously new, in the literature of a
man of letters, they killed and put into their bag. And, in like

manner, the emotion that should have caused the word is dead for
those, and for those only, who abuse its expression. For the maker

of a portablevocabulary is not content to turn his words up there:
he turns up his feelings also, alphabetically or otherwise.

Wonderful how much sensibility is at hand in such round words as the
New Literature loves. Do you want a generousemotion? Pull forth

the little language. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine!
Take, as an instance, Mr. Swinburne's 'hell.' There is, I fear, no

doubt whatever that Mr. Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a
vocabulary, with the inevitableconsequences to the word. And when

the minor men of his school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may
very well happen to any young man practising authorship), I must not

be accused of phantasy if I say that they put their hands into Mr.
Swinburne's vocabulary and pick it. These vocabularies are made out

of vigorous and blunt language. 'What hempen homespuns have we
swaggering here?' Alas, they are homespuns from the factory,

machine-made in uncostly quantities. Obviously, power needs to make
use of no such storage. The property of power is to use phrases,

whether strange or familiar, as though it created them. But even
more than lack of power is lack of humour the cause of all the

rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of commerce, of
all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is moved to

exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense of
humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries

to make amends for a currency debased. No more than any other can a
witty writerdispense with a sense of humour. In his moments of

sentiment the lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at
least perceptible. A sense of humour cannot be always present, it

may be urged. Why, no; it is the lack of it that is--importunate.
Other absences, such as the absence of passion, the absence of

delicacy, are, if grievous negatives, still mere negatives. These
qualities may or may not be there at call, ready for a summons; we

are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily aware, unless they
ought to be in action, whether their action is possible. But want

of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these are lacks
wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are all-

influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying;

what other paradoxes can I adventure? Without power--no style.
Without a possible humour,--no style. The weakling has no

confidence in himself to keep him from grasping at words that he
fancies hold within them the true passions of the race, ready for

the uses of his egoism. And with a sense of humour a man will not
steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the language and put it

in his pocket.
PATHOS

A fugitivewriter wrote but lately on the fugitive page of a minor
magazine: 'For our part, the drunkentinker [Christopher Sly] is

the most real personage of the piece, and not without some hints of
the pathos that is worked out more fully, though by different ways,

in Bottom and Malvolio.' Has it indeed come to this? Have the
Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz and the other things compared to which

'le spleen' was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no
laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham

real-life? So it would seem. Even what the great master has not
shown us in his work, that your criticconvinced of pathos is

resolved to see in it. By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy
he will come at it. It is of little use now to explain Snug the

joiner to the audience: why, it is precisely Snug who stirs their
emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they can see through that:

but the Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the
Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and