an audience. It is not the possession of virtue that matters; it pines and wastes, unless it be communicated. Surely it is more blessed to give than to receive. It is not the possession of virtue that matters; but the assurance in other people that you possess it. One sees at once how perilous a diabolism this is. Cant has its being in momentum-travelling, like Virgil's Rumor, from pillar to post. Like a ball, it fulfils itself in rapid passing from hand to hand. Canter No. 1, who lit the torch, begets a generation of little canters, and cant whirs like an aeroplane over all the land. Being a positive evil it must, I think, be hatched in the brain of an evil-doer. But it can very well be fostered in the woolly top-nests of any number of innocents.

Another thing abhorrent to cant is the due, sharp, and appropriate expression of a thought. Hence its frequent use of jargon, which swims, like a Leviathan, in a vague and chaotic verbiage. But not indispensably so, because cant both feeds more readily from the succulent Stilton of the pseudo-picturesque, and is radically a vice of the intellect. Own brother to hypocrisy, it uses its mind to effect its purpose. It is subtle and venomous, one of the vices that crawl upon their bellies-not leisurely, but with deadly speed. It is coldness counterfeiting heat, malice charity, profit disinterestedness, evil metamorphosed into good. To say to a man (as I saw recorded in a newspaper) who had pleaded the contrary, "God's law be damned," for instance, is not cant. That is direct and honest. For one of our public men to speak of our soldiers in the war as "game-dogs," scrimmaging in a dog-fight, is not cant, because there is no essential contradiction here between the quality of the

expression and the quality of the mind that expressed it. But it is cant for another of our public men to declare that "whenever I am feeling run-down, I always go to the front," because the plain meaning of such a statement is too vilely inhuman for sanity to admit. "The war has opened a window in heaven," again, is supreme cant, cant in excelsis, a cant of large generosity, because its tools are forged of elementally opposite principles. £20,000,000 or £30,000,000 a year should be saved by cutting down the amounts paid to our soldiers and their pampered dependents " is the most interesting example of all. It is only the word " pampered" that at once fixes the sentence as cant and, at the same time, betrays and reveals what cant is. Had the speaker said, “Paid to our soldiers and their dependents "the statement

would have been the bare reflection of a character.

But

pampered" at once introduces the moral element and bids us contrast these Lucullan dependents with the exemplary Spartanism of the speaker-Lord Devonport. But I must give no more rein to examples or I should fill the vaults of the British Museum with these letters. Read the Northcliffe Evening Press, my dear X, and I warrant you will soon be glutted.

Inverted cant, which consists in professing not a greater degree of goodness than you possess, but of wickedness, the swash-buckling-desperado-fee-fi-fo-fum-no-tamewomen-for-me attitude, which many of our harmless poets adopt, is not really an inverted cant, because its assumed pose is not primarily one of wickedness but of fine audacity and adventurousness. It is simply Byronism.

At any rate from whatever angle you look at it, cant

feeds on corruption, and the greater the corruption, the more fatted is cant. For it is the lie in the soul made true in the flesh. As Job says, "Can any man bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one."

XXXI

ARCADIA

MY DEAR X,

There is a village in the mountainous wilds of what our novelists would call "Blankshire," which Nature besieges with every Wordsworthian device in her armoury. The lines of the country are uniformly severe and cut into sweeping sombre designs, symmetrical in spite of their fullness and varied within their uniformity. I know of no countryside more accommodating to the painter. He has but to plant his stool capriciously to copy what he sees, and, however realistic he be, he can hardly avoid the finished composition with which Nature, illegally turning artist, so obligingly provides him. The hills are bare except for scrub, gorse or bracken; the trees group themselves in the valleys-as hills and trees ought to do. Thank St. Michael (whose flaming sword preserved Adam and Eve from a too luscious Eden), those hills have more self-respect than the dollish tumuli of some of the midland counties, whose diminutive woods are perched upon them like parlour-maids' caps. Blankshire is no cosy, upholstered county, for the dalliance of button-booted poets. But it must not be imagined that she carries the

classical principle too far. She has her scarves, her colours and her graces to suggest rather than to reveal the austere nakedness of her moulding. Blue-bells are her spring garland, foxgloves her summer kirtle, and purple heather her autumn veil.

"Where Nature's horn increases so,
The flowers have hardly room to grow,
Children for lack of food are sick

And men earn twelve-and-six a week."

In the village dwell the stern and simple sons of her soil. There are only a few families, mostly of the fairly prosperous farmer type. One of these families possessed a young collie which they fed once a day on half a pint of separated milk. When we bought the collie to save him from starvation, the apple-cheeked matron of the farm hoped that we would send her a photograph of him that she might put it on the mantel-piece next to that of her little dead daughter. The night before we left, she bore down upon us like a benevolent duck with a jar of cream and a pot of jam, and pressed them into our deprecatory hands. She only charged us five shillings for them, sending her son to us on the following morning. This son was regarded as mentally deficient by the entire village. The only dealings we had with him were when, meeting him in a lane one day, he begged of us our name and address so that he might send us a rabbit at Christmas. That proved he was half-Bedlamite. The household of the farm in which we lodged consisted of a middleaged father, mother and daughter, none of whom had ever been to London. The father had an intrigue with the wife of a labourer, who lived thirty yards away. Being