One day it occurred to Leibel that he ought to get married. He went to Sugarman the Shadchan forthwith. “I have the very thing for you,” said the great marriage broker. “Is she pretty?” asked Leibel. “Her father has a boot and shoe warehouse,” replied Sugarman, enthusiastically. “Then there ought to be a dowry with […]

CHAPTER I HOW I FOUND THE MODEL I cannot pretend that my ambition to paint the Man of Sorrows had any religious inspiration, though I fear my dear old dad at the Parsonage at first took it as a sign of awakening grace. And yet, as an artist, I have always been loath to draw […]

‘English, all English, that’s my dream.’ CECIL RHODES. I Even in his provincial days at Sudminster Solomon Cohen had distinguished himself by his Anglican mispronunciation of Hebrew and his insistence on a minister who spoke English and looked like a Christian clergyman; and he had set a precedent in the congregation by docking the ‘e’ […]

I There was a storm in Sudminster, not on the waters which washed its leading Jews their living, but in the breasts of these same marine storekeepers. For a competitor had appeared in their hive of industry–an alien immigrant, without roots or even relatives at Sudminster. And Simeon Samuels was equipped not only with capital […]

I With the Christian Mayoress of Middleton to take in to dinner at Sir Asher Aaronsberg’s, Leopold Barstein as a Jewish native of that thriving British centre, should have felt proud and happy. But Barstein was young and a sculptor, fresh from the Paris schools and Salon triumphs. He had long parted company with Jews […]

I When her Fanny did at last marry, Natalya–as everybody called the old clo’-woman–was not over-pleased at the bargain. Natalya had imagined beforehand that for a matronly daughter of twenty-three, almost past the marrying age, any wedding would be a profitable transaction. But when a husband actually presented himself, all the old dealer’s critical maternity […]

The curious episode in the London Ghetto the other winter, while the epidemic of small-pox was raging, escaped the attention of the reporters, though in the world of the Board-schools it is a vivid memory. But even the teachers and the committees, the inspectors and the Board members, have remained ignorant of the part little […]

I Leopold Barstein, the sculptor, was sitting in his lonesome studio, brooding blackly over his dead illusions, when the postman brought him a letter in a large, straggling, unknown hand. It began ‘Angel of God!’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Just when I am at my most diabolical!’ He did not at first read the letter, divining […]

When Elias Goldenberg, Belcovitch’s head cutter, betrothed himself to Fanny Fersht, the prettiest of the machinists, the Ghetto blessed the match, always excepting Sugarman the Shadchan (whom love matches shocked), and Goldenberg’s relatives (who considered Fanny flighty and fond of finery). ‘That Fanny of yours was cut out for a rich man’s wife,’ insisted Goldenberg’s […]

I As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery, clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the ‘Yvonne Rupert cigar,’ he wondered dully–after the first flush of joy at getting a job after weeks of hunger–at the strange fate that had again brought him into connection, however […]

I The little poet sat in the East-side cafe looking six feet high. Melchitsedek Pinchas–by dint of a five-pound note from Sir Asher Aaronsberg in acknowledgement of the dedication to him of the poet’s ‘Songs of Zion’–had carried his genius to the great new Jewry across the Atlantic. He had arrived in New York only […]

I When Schneemann, the artist, returned from Rome to his native village in Galicia, he found it humming with gossip concerning his paternal grandmother, universally known as the Bube Yenta. It would seem that the giddy old thing hobbled home from synagogue conversing with Yossel Mandelstein, the hunchback, and sometimes even offered the unshapely septuagenarian […]

I Crowded as was the steamer with cultured Americans invading Europe, few knew that Rozenoffski was on board, or even that Rozenoffski was a pianist. The name, casually seen on the passengers’ list, conveyed nothing but a strong Russian and a vaguer Semitic flavour, and the mere outward man, despite a leonine head, was of […]

I Aaron Ben Amram removed from the great ritual dish the roasted shankbone of lamb (symbolic residuum of the Paschal Sacrifice) and the roasted egg (representative of the ancient festival-offering in the Temple), and while his wife and children held up the dish, which now contained only the bitter herbs and unleavened cakes, he recited […]

I Milovka was to be the next place reddened on the map of Holy Russia. The news of the projected Jewish massacre in this little Polish town travelled to the Samooborona (Self-Defence) Headquarters in Southern Russia through the indiscretion of a village pope who had had a drop of blood too much. It appeared that […]

I They both styled themselves “Madame,” but only the younger of the old ladies had been married. Madame Valiere was still a demoiselle, but as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more convenable to possess a mature label. Certainly Madame Depine had no visible matrimonial advantages over her fellow-lodger at the Hotel des Tourterelles, […]

He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast. To-night he was among the maddest of the […]

I SET TO PARTNERS “Oh, look, dear, there’s that poor Walter Bassett.” Amber Roan looked down from the roof of the drag at the crossing restless shuttles, weaving with feminine woof and masculine warp the multi-coloured web of Society in London’s cricket Coliseum. “Where?” she murmured, her eye wandering over the little tract of sunlit […]

They had quarrelled in girlhood, and mutually declared their intention never to speak to each other again, wetting and drying their forefingers to the accompaniment of an ancient childish incantation, and while they lived on the paternal farm they kept their foolish oath with the stubbornness of a slow country stock, despite the alternate coaxing […]

I She came ‘to meet John Lefolle’, but John Lefolle did not know he was to meet Winifred Glamorys. He did not even know he was himself the meeting-point of all the brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in the publisher’s Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he was modest and lovable. Perhaps his […]

Far-fetched as the idea seems that names and characters have any interconnection, yet no great writer but has felt that one name, and one alone, would suit each particular creation. The tortures and travels that Balzac went through till he found “Z. Marcas” are well known. So is the agony of Flaubert on hearing that […]

It is done. The publishers have formed a League. The poor sweated victims of the author’s greed have at last turned upon the oppressor. Mr. Gosse, on a memorable occasion, confusedly blending the tones of the prophet of righteousness with the accents of the political economist, admonished the greedy author that he was killing the […]

There is one form of persecution to which celebrity or notoriety is subject, which Ouida has omitted in her impassioned protest. It is interviewing carried one step further–from the ridiculous to the sublime of audacity. The auto-interview, one might christen it, if the officiating purist would pass the hybrid name. Yon are asked to supply […]

Between three and four of the morning the last words of the book were written, and, putting down my pen–without falling asleep, as I should have done had my task been to read the book, instead of to write it–I began to muse on the emotions I ought to have felt, and on the emotions […]

Love! Love! Love! The air is full of it as I write, though the autumn leaves are falling. Shakespeare’s immortal love-poem is playing amid the cynicism of modern London, like that famous fountain of Dickens’s in the Temple gardens. The “largest circulation” has barely ceased to flutter the middle-class breakfast-table with discussions on “the Age […]

It was with melancholy amusement that I read in the scientific journals that sewer-gas was comparatively innocuous. After the hundreds of sanitary tracts in which the deadliness of sewer-gas has been an axiom of faith, after the thousand-and-one deaths from it in the contemporary novel, it is grimly diverting to learn that sewer-gas may be […]

“Yes,” said Marindin quietly, “they may say they write for Posterity, but what living author besides myself does write for Posterity?” This sounded so unlike Marindin’s modesty that I wondered if the port and the paradoxes of our Christmas dinner had got into his head at last. The veteran man of letters had talked brilliantly […]

It seems only yesterday–and it is only yesteryear–since Walter Pater sat by my side in a Club garden, and listened eloquently to my after-lunch causerie, and now he is gone To where, beyond the Voices, there is Peace. You grasp that his eloquence was oracular, silent. He had an air. There was in him–as in […]

My friends, topsy-turveydom is not so easy as it looks. The trouble is not in inverting, but in finding what to invert. Our language is full of ancient saws, but it takes wit to discover which to turn upside down. Anybody can stand anything on its head, but it is only the real humourist who […]

Why do ghosts walk at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record the temperature? Is it that Dickens is responsible for […]

The yearning of humanity for the supernatural, even for the pseudo-supernatural, is as pathetic as it is profound. Wherefore I regret that I can make no concessions to it. The following theory of table-turning came to me as I experimented, from my general knowledge of psychology. I have not compared it with the theories of […]

I have noted in my Sancho Panza moments a number of deficiencies in the commonweal which can only be remedied–in our modern manner–by societies. Let me start with a few of the most needed. 1. SOCIETY FOR PROVIDING NEW OATHS The present currency is badly worn and was always nasty. Swear-words are a necessity. They […]

[This protest was dated Jan. 1, 1891. Things are rather better now.] I am not a young person. Nothing ever brings a blush to my cheek except the rouge-pencil or the exposure of my stealthy deeds of good I can read the Elizabethan dramatists or Rabelais with equanimity, and the only thing that mars my […]

What is the critic’s duty at the play? Does he represent Art, or does he represent the Public? If he represent Art, then he is but a refracting medium between the purveyor and the public, which will therefore be wofully mistaken if it seek in his critiques a guide to its play-going, as it to […]

Now that the world is so full of free dinners for the well-fed, it behoves hostesses to reconsider their methods. With so many dinner-tables open to the lion, or even to the cub, they must do their spiriting dexterously if they would feed him. In these days when seven hostesses pluck hold of the swallow-tails […]

The Cynic was very old and very wise and very unpopular. I was the only person at his “At Home” that afternoon. I gave him my views on Bi-metallism, having just read the leader in the “Times.” He yawned obtrusively, and growled, “Bi-metallism, indeed! The only remedy for modern civilisation is A-metallism. Money must be […]

So far as I can gather from the publications of the Folklore Society, the science of Folklore is in a promising condition. The doctors seem to be agreed neither about the facts nor the methods nor the conclusions, but otherwise their unanimity is wonderful. Originally the science was made in Germany, where it still flourishes, […]

Twice in succession has it befallen me to be privately busy in a backwater when the main stream was spuming and ramping with the great bore of a general election. I have been able to hear the swallows twitter at sunrise in serene unconsciousness of the crisis, to watch the rooks homing at twilight, as […]

The realistic novel, we know from Zola, that apostle of insufficient insight, is based on “human documents,” and “human documents” are made up of “facts.” But in human life there are no facts. This is not a paradox, but a “fact.” Life is in the eye of the observer. The humour or the pity of […]

Without gambling life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement […]

“ENGINEER AND SURVEYOR’S DEPARTMENT. “5 & 6 Wm. IV., cap. 50, sect. 65. “SIR, “I am directed to call your attention to the present condition of trees within your premises, which now overhang the public footpath adjoining, and thereby cause considerable inconvenience to the public. I shall be glad if you will kindly give the […]

When I first met the Young Fogey I thought him very brilliant. His philosophical pose, too, of combining the caution of age with the daring of youth was fascinating. “I have evolved,” he used to say. “Once I would not attach sanctity to ideas because they were old: now I attach no sanctity to ideas […]

And it came to pass that my soul was vexed with the problems of life, so that I could not sleep. So I opened a book by a lady novelist, and fell to reading therein. And of a sudden I looked up, and lo! a great host of women filled the chamber, which had become […]

They were “tuning up” in a wooden hall, stupidly built on the pier to shut off the sea and the night (a penny to pay for the privation), and in that strange cacophony of desolate violin strings, tuneless trombones, and doleful double basses, in that homeless wail of forlorn brass and lost catgut, I found […]

My friend the Apostle was in hot haste, and would not stay to be contradicted. “Not going to-night!” he cried, in horror-struck accents. “Why, to-night is the turning-point in the history of the British drama! To-night is the test-battle of the old and the new; it is the shock of schools, the clash of nature […]

It is one of the pleasures of my life that I never saw Tennyson. Hence I am still able to think of him as a poet, for even his photograph is not disillusionising, and he dressed for the part almost as well as Beerbohm Tree would have done. Why one’s idea of a poet is […]

I wonder if you have ever been struck by the catholicity–not to say the self-contradictoriness–of the constant correspondent. The creature will enter with zest into any discussion; there is no topic too small for it, and certainly none too great. The following letters, carefully culled from the annual contributions of a lady whose epistolary career […]