I ask, Did any one ever see a gay club room?  Can any one imagine such a thing?  You can’t have a club room without mahogany tables, you can’t have mahogany tables without magazines—­Longmans, with a serial by Rider Haggard, the Nineteenth Century, with an article, “The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern Society,” by W.E.  Gladstone—­a dulness that’s a purge to good spirits, an aperient to enthusiasm; in a word, a dulness that’s worth a thousand a year.  You can’t have a club without a waiter in red plush and silver salver in his hand; then you can’t bring a lady to a club, and you have to get into a corner to talk about them.  Therefore I say a club is dull.

As the hearth and home grew all-powerful it became impossible for the husband to tell his wife that he was going to the tavern; everyone can go to the tavern, and no place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.  This is the genesis of the Club—­out of the Housewife by Respectability.  Nowadays every one is respectable—­jockeys, betting-men, actors, and even actresses.  Mrs. Kendal takes her children to visit a duchess, and has naughty chorus girls to tea, and tells them of the joy of respectability.  There is only one class left that is not respectable, and that will succumb before long; how the transformation will be effected I can’t say, but I know an editor or two who would be glad of an article on the subject.

Respectability!—­a suburban villa, a piano in the drawing-room, and going home to dinner.  Such things are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote intensity of feeling, fervour of mind; and as art is in itself an outcry against the animality of human existence, it would be well that the life of the artist should be a practical protest against the so-called decencies of life; and he can best protest by frequenting a tavern and cutting his club.  In the past the artist has always been an outcast; it is only latterly he has become domesticated, and judging by results, it is clear that if Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at least an adjuvant.  For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics?  If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers—­Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara?  Mrs. Kendal nurses children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night.  What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavour!  To realise the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the transformation, a woman must have sinned, for only through sin may we learn the charm of innocence.  To play Rosalind a woman must have had more than one lover, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and has been beaten she will have done a great deal to qualify herself for the part.  The ecstatic Sara makes no pretence to virtue, she introduces her son to an English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love of Richepein, she can, therefore, say as none other—­