Is the Kingdom of Heaven really at hand?  For, indeed, men and women, and perhaps particularly literary men and women, are once more becoming as little children in their pleasures.

Seriously, one of the most curious and significant of recent literary phenomena is the sudden return of the literary man to physical, and so-called ‘Philistine,’ pleasures and modes of recreation.  Perhaps Stevenson set the fashion with his canoe and his donkey.  But at the moment that he was valiantly daring any one to tell him whether there was anything better worth doing ‘than fooling among boats,’ Edward Fitzgerald, all unconscious and careless of literary fashions, was giving still more practical expression to the physical faith that was in him, by going shares in a Lowestoft herring-lugger, and throwing his heart as well as his money into the fortunes of its noble skipper ‘Posh.’  A literary man par excellence, Mr. Lang reproaches his sires for his present way of life—­

  ’Why lay your gipsy freedom down
  And doom your child to pen and ink?’

and by steady and persistent golfing, and writing about angling and cricket, comes as near to the noble savage as is possible to so incorrigibly civilised a man.  Mr. Henley—­that Berserker of the pen—­sings the sword with a vigour that makes one curious to see him using it, and we all know Mr. Kipling’s views on the matter.  Then Mr. Bernard Shaw rides a bicycle!

Those men of letters whose inclinations or opportunities do not lead them to these out-of-door, and more or less ferocious, pleasures seek to forget themselves at the music-hall, the Aquarium, or the numerous Earl’s Court exhibitions.  They become amateurs of foreign dancing, connoisseurs of the trapeze, or they leave their great minds at home and go up the Great Wheel.  Earl’s Court, particularly, is becoming quite a modern Vauxhall—­Tan-ta-ra-ra!  Earl’s Court!  Earl’s Court!—­and Mr. Imre Kiralfy, with his conceptions and designs, is to our generation what Albert Smith was to the age of Dickens and Edmund Yates.

It takes some experience of life to realise how right this is; to realise that, after all our fine philosophies and cocksure sciences, there is no better answer to the riddle of things than a good game of cricket or an exciting spin on one’s ‘bike.’  The real inner significance of Earl’s Court—­Mr. Kiralfy will no doubt be prepared to hear—­is the failure of science as an answer to life.  We give up the riddle, and enjoy ourselves with our wiser children.  Simple pleasures, no doubt, for the profound!  But what is simple, and what is profound?