and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all kinds of

poets.
As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one Friar goes

about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain
order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not

otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or
rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive

individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is
understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it. But these

poets so triumph over their repugnance that it does not appear. And
yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's

fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress
one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to utilise the

mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and
phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are

familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise
and pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of

love: which is the vow. 'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too
simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there

is the least tolerable of banalities--that of other men's
disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of

assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose
love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus

simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the
gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in public.

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE
There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of

a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the

vulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas
Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that

humourist's serial, Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which were
presumably considered good comic reading in the Punch of that time,

and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque.
Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which others

consider or have considered humorous is to put one's-self at a
disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the

superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought
it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least

tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to
turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the

mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the
arriere boutique. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of

literature. Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of
Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted.

But the essential vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some
old Punch volume a drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing

named the gentle, the refined--where the work of the artist has vied
with the spirit of the letter-press. Douglas Jerrold treats of the

woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays. They lie on a chair by the
bed, beyond description gross. And page by page the woman is

derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish ugliness of
person, of manners, and of language. In that time there was,

moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in
vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the

vulgarising of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing
man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman

incoherent, woman abandoned without restraint to violence and
temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of these ignominies is

woman so common, foul, and foolish for Dickens as she is in child-
bearing.

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are

humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is
moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is

that her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of
her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him

that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the
annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire

to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases
him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its

hat--a burlesque baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for
that too makes subtly for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--

another contemporary, though he lived into a later and different
time. He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy--

indignities of civic physique, of stupidprosperity, of dress, of
bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he

found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of
inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not sure which

is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a
completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness

of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced
that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have

insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through
almost a whole career. There is one drawing in the Punch of years

ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to
even the invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual

broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and
his umbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when

she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a night-cap. Every one
who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was