a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvincing is your weary expression—­as unconvincing as one’s expression when, having weakly pretended acquaintance with a strange author, we feign ecstatic recognition of some passage or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer.  There is this hope in the case of the photograph:  that its amorous possessor will probably be incapable of imagining any one insensitive to such a Golconda of charms, and you have always in your power the revenge of showing him your own sacred graven image.

Is it not curious that the very follies we delight in for ourselves should seem so stupid, so absolutely vulgar, when practised by others?  The last illusion to forsake a man is the absolute belief in his own refinement.

A test experience in other people’s poetry is to sit in the pit of a theatre and watch ’Arry and ’Arriet making love and eating oranges simultaneously.  ’Arry has a low forehead, close, black, oily hair, his eyes and nose are small, and his face is freckled.  His clothes are painfully his best, he wears an irrelevant flower, and his tie has escaped from the stud and got high into his neck, eclipsing his collar.  ’Arriet has thick unexpressive features, relying rather on the expressiveness of her flaunting hat, she wears a straight fringe low down on her forehead, and endeavours to disguise her heavy ennui by an immovable simper.  This pair loll one upon each other.  Whether lights be high or low they hold each other’s hands, hands hard and coarse with labour, with nails bitten down close to the quick.  But, for all that, they, in their strange uncouth fashion, would seem to be loving each other.  ’Not we alone have passions hymeneal,’ sings an aristocratic poet.  They smile at each other, an obvious animal smile, and you perhaps shudder.  Or you study them for a realistic novel, or you call up that touch of nature our great poet talks of.  But somehow you cannot forget how their lips will stick and smell of oranges when they kiss each other on the way home.  What is the truth about this pair?  Is it in the unlovely details on which, maybe, we have too much insisted—­or behind these are we to imagine their souls radiant in celestial nuptials?

Mr. Chevalier may be said to answer the question in his pictures of coster love-making.  But are those pictures to be taken as documents, or are they not the product of Mr. Chevalier’s idealistic temperament?  Does the coster actually worship his ‘dona’ with so fine a chivalry?  Is he so sentimentally devoted to his ‘old Dutch’?  If you answer the question in the negative, you are in this predicament:  all the love and ’the fine feelings’ remain with the infinitesimal residuum of the cultured and professionally ‘refined.’  Does that residuum actually incarnate all the love, devotion, honour, and other noble qualities in man?  One need hardly trouble to answer the absurd question.  Evidently behind the oranges, and the uncouth animal manners, we should find souls much like our own refined essences, had we the seeing sympathetic eye.  All depends on the eye of the beholder.