you would like to be allowed to look and dress as like it as possible.  It is no use; if you dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen—­and other critics—­it is at your peril.  If you are beautiful, you are expected to disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.

Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself on this stage of life.

In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists.  Perhaps it is taken for granted that the musician is a fool—­the British public is so intuitive.  Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him a like immunity.  And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had Tennyson—­of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!  Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so distinguished-looking as his publisher?

Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of letters.  Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world; but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even the military.

It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and eloquently to image our moods—­to look glad when we are glad, sorry when we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.

The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful thing.  Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less openly affects?  Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a wild visit to ’The Empire’—­by kind indulgence of the County Council? that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know—­and then ran away?

One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.

The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of his love in his eyes—­nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour of his mistress.  Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours, according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions—­one of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.