cafe; and my
thoughts have gone back to the plain wooden bench and wooden table that
stands solitary and weather-stained outside so many neglected English
inns. We talk of experimenting in the French cafe, as of some fresh and
almost impudent innovation. But our fathers had the French cafe, in the
sense of the free-and-easy table in the sun and air. The only difference
was that French democracy was allowed to develop its cafe, or multiply
its tables, while English plutocracy prevented any such popular growth.
Perhaps there are other examples of old types and patterns, lost in the
old oligarchy and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with a hint
that the new structures are not so very new; and that they remind me of
something very old. As I look from the balcony floor the crowds seem to
float away and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know I am in
one of the simplest and most ancestral of human habitations. I am
looking down from the old wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn.
This new architectural model, which I have described, is after all one
of the oldest European models, now neglected in Europe and especially in
England. It was the theatre in which were enacted innumerable picaresque
comedies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from Sancho Panza to
Sam Weller. It served as the apparatus, like some gigantic toy set up in
bricks and timber, for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis.
The very terms of the original game were taken from the inn courtyard,
and the players scored accordingly as they hit the buttery-hatch or the
roof. Singular speculations hover in my mind as the scene darkens and
the quadrangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. Some
day perhaps this huge structure will be found standing in a solitude
like a skeleton; and it will be the skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the
Blue Boar. It will wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a
tavern. I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground floor,
with various scores and prizes for hitting the electric fan, or the
lift, or the head waiter. Perhaps the very words will only remain as
part of some such rustic game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer
be electric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the waiter will
only wait to be hit. But at least it is only by the decay of modern
plutocracy, which seems already to have begun, that the secret of the
structure even of this plutocratic p