ather so many, in the
feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate
at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness
and to overcome it. But these poets so triumph over their repugnance
that it does not appear. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather
to make use of one's fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to
use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to
utilise the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse
and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are
familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise and
pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love:
which is the vow. 'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too simple and too
natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least
tolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a
delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption,
of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were
thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.
This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither
love nor remember in public.

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a
certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the
vulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold
for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial,
_Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably considered
good comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintance
with a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious
comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is
to put one's-self at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself
somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he
thought it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least
tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to turn
over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere
boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy