him look almost like a fair man. The
framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;
and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write
poetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as people
do when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never
held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated
his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished
by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature
has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could
have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest
water-colours, on the smoothest ivory.

I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one of
which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents
an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate
language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it
strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They
would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate
Max's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to
find the man.

This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific
civilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man
that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations,
seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever
since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had
shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time
afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was
quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black
men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But
it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so
startling an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of a
photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were
told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,
which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admitted
that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been
a Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black
is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to
moral independence. But why does it so seldom ha