“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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 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, […]

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 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 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 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 […]

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 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 […]