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his Nemesis in that American memory which does not even wait far from it!-for a tombstone to cover his last resting-place. For no matter how great a man is, there is always some one who thinks, or whose friends think, that he is as great, if not possibly greater, and so there is always some one waiting with unconcealed impatience for his empty shoes while he still has them on. Whereupon, the shoes being finally empty, the famous man who once wore them becomes an 'ex,' and such future career as is left to him is suffocated by his distinguished past as by a mountainous feather-bed.

It is enough to study the careers of the ex-Presidents of the United States to realise the phenomenal brevity of the American memory -that is, during life. Sometimes, after they are dead, they have a renaissance of appreciation. As for Vice-Presidents, they are forgotten while still in office. Occasionally one emerges from the singular obscurity of his exalted position by disaster to his chief; but unless such a chance arises many an able but bothersome man, who cannot be overlooked by party politics, has been nicely buried in that distinguished office which is only next in unimportance to the silent tomb.

It was within three months of the assassination of President McKinley that an Englishman of my acquaintance called upon him. In the course of the conversation he expressed to Mr. McKinley the universal regret felt here at the loss to Great Britain by the departure of that distinguished statesman Mr. John Hay, who had resigned his position as Ambassador to England to become Secretary of State. The Englishman seemed to think that not only England but Mr. Hay was the loser.

'To be Ambassador to England is of course the greatest office in your gift,' he said, conscious that there is only one England.

'No,' the President replied, 'it is a much greater position to be Secretary of State. He comes next in importance to the President.' Here he paused and then added casually, as an afterthought which had nearly escaped him, 'I mean, of course, with the exception of the Vice-President.'

Three months after the Vice-President, who in the enumeration had been so nearly overlooked, took up the reins of government. It of course, Mr. Roosevelt.

was,

It does seem as if the United States could make more worthy use of many a distinguished 'ex.' By the time their statesmen have become profoundly versed in the science of statecraft they are relegated to oblivion, instead of having their tried wisdom still employed in the councils of the nation. There comes a time in the lives of great statesmen when circumstances deprive them of the ordinary outlets of ambition at the very moment when it would seem that their impartial services would be of vast value to the nation. But so far the highest in the land cannot escape the universal tragedy. However, there is no profession, no art, no position in life which can escape that dom. In

contradiction to that mistaken pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence that we are all born free and equal, one can only be absolutely sure that we die free and equal. When we are born we are at once bound by unbreakable chains. We are all slaves of our environment, slaves of inherited disease, slaves of inherited unintelligence, slaves of inherited good or evil tendencies, and such we remain until we die, and only then are we free and equal-free from the chains that bound us, and which made us the helpless playthings of destiny, and equal in our helplessness one to the other.

The longer one lives and observes how each life, however great or however modest, has its climax of usefulness, the more one is struck by the folly of the human attitude towards humanity. There is not human being, however great, who is not at the mercy of some other man; or supposing he is not-which is, however, inconceivablethen he is at the mercy of some inherited disease. Or, supposing that he has no disease which may make him curse his forbears, he is at any rate at the mercy of natural laws, and he must inevitably die. For laws are even greater than the God who has made them. A tap on the head, or a fatal disease, will make even an Emperor a pitiable thing with whom no healthy beggar would change destinies. It is melancholy to think how faint is the boundary line between ourselves and destruction. To contemplate the loftiness with which the human being promenades on the brink of the precipice into which, sooner or later, he is destined to tumble! How little it takes to swell the average human being's head! How proud he is of his little intellect, his big bank account, his social position, or any other thing by which he can proclaim his superiority (God save the mark!) to his fellow worm! If the Supreme Power, who is responsible for human laughter as well as human tears, has a sense of humour, how grimly He must be amused at the airs and the eternal fierce conflicts of the little creatures who grub in this familiar ant-hill! Nor is it one of the least of the tragedies of our existence that we waste our few measured hours on trivialities. It is only at the end of life, when the little remaining sand in the hour-glass runs with appalling swiftness, that we realise the preciousness of the hours that will never return. To meditate on the chances that we once had, but which we have had to relinquish, is the intimate tragedy of the 'ex.' Every dog has his day, but, alas! it is only a day.

This electric age is the age of youth. Every man is being understudied by some aspiring youngster who, in his own imagination, has shelved his chief, while that unconscious man still thinks that the world cannot possibly do without him. Now there is no man so great but the world can do perfectly well without him. It is one of the profoundly wise provisions of Nature that no man is missed because he is merely important. Youth is constantly at the heels of age, and clamours insistently for recognition, and it is only the narrow

and the foolish who refuse it. I was struck by the remark of a clever and thoughtful man, to whose attention the somewhat preposterous claims of a group of talented but untried youngsters had been brought. Instead of agreeing with the rather scornful reference to their unreasonable demands, considering their youth and inexperience, he said: 'You forget. These boys are destined to be the great men of the future.' How many of us think that?

If youth is often uncharitable to age, age is often enough blind to the claims of youth. It is rather difficult to realise that the youth whose ears one has cuffed in early days has claims to one's profound admiration. No man ever was a hero to his valet, and age knows youth too well to take it seriously.

To what mother does her child ever grow old? No matter how famous the child. It is so hard to lay aside the old habit of authority, even when the child has grey hair, and is starting on the downward path. Perhaps of all the tragedies none is more painful than the irrevocable one, when the parent realises that the child has ceased to be dependent on him for advice, if not for sympathy. It does seem as if the wise recognition that one's day of usefulness has a limit, and that it is only fair to give another man a chance, should influence our attitude to other human beings. It ought to make for a friendly humility, for a wider charity, for a profounder sense of human brotherhood. When a king dies, he dies to all intents and purposes in no other way than the poorest outcast in his kingdom; he has entered the republic of death, and he is an ex-king. The richest man in the world cannot, at the price of all his wealth, buy one single heartbeat more from destiny. The wisdom of the greatest intellect cannot obtain for its possessor the respite of another instant of time. Would it not seem natural if this universal helplessness, which spares no one, should be a bond to make us profoundly tolerant one to the other, profoundly charitable? Instead, one is amazed at the mean and trivial standards by which human beings judge each other, as well as at the tragic importance they attach to what is of colossal unimportance. Do we not judge our fellow-creatures by their clothes, their right or their wrong religion, their cleverness, their success, their wealth and their social position? Society, on the brink of the universal precipice, runs after the bad man with influence, after the rich man whose riches are tainted, after the man of rank with neither intellect nor character.

The truth is the world has ceased to have any convictions, and martyrdom is dreadfully out of fashion. We have so much to think of that we don't think at all. The martyrs believed in some one thing profoundly; we haven't time or conviction enough to think of anything profoundly, for the world clamours for our attention in a hundred thousand different ways every moment of time. We believe only in the material aspects of life and faith; our creed is to have

only faith in what we can see and prove. So we have great scientists, but no martyrs. The martyrs were the scientists of the ideal, but ideality, like poets and martyrs, is of a bygone age.

No, not even women are able to escape the tragedy of the 'ex.' Who has not watched a beautiful woman grow old? That tragedy at least is spared a plain woman. Put a pair of spectacles on your plain nose and who cares? But when the loveliest eyes in the world hide behind glasses—that is indeed a woman's tragedy.

To fall from great beauty, great wealth, great power, great position-to realise, if you only can, that, in short, you have come to the end-is the supreme tragedy of life, and proves the benevolence of destiny towards those who are nothing in particular, and who therefore escape the doom of falling so far. Perhaps the acutest suffering for the prominent 'ex' is that he has to suffer in public, and we all have that in common with the noble savage, that when we suffer we prefer to retire from view. To suffer in the curious eyes of the world is to suffer doubly. It is hard and undignified, if not impossible, to push one's way to the front again, to the place one once occupied, through a mob of clamouring youngsters, who bar one's path. The consolation for all must be that it is everybody's destiny sooner or later. What use to rebel? Look, rather, with profound and amused philosophy at Arrogance that elbows its way through the world as if there were no bad fairy with a wand waiting for it at the end to turn it into an 'ex.'

Would it not be well in the day of triumph to think of the inevitable future? To be not only great but civil? To be famous and yet not devoured by conceit? To appreciate a great position at its full worth and yet not to be a snob? Not to judge success by the standard of mere wealth?

One offers these modest suggestions to the rich and great and famous, because who of us has not suffered from the rich, the great and the famous? After all, even these are all destined to be back numbers sooner or later. Why not consider the probability of being a back number in the heyday of life, when your natural instinct is, of course, to snub your fellow-men? Even the greatest of you would be wise to be somewhat modest, for the inexorable motto of this world is The King is dead! Long live the King!'

And who ever bothers about a dead king!

ANNIE E. LANE.

VOL. LXI-No. 360

X

THE MARRIAGE OF PELEUS AND THETIS

(AFTER CATULLUS, CARMEN LXIV)

AND when the Gods, on thrones of ivory couched,
Had gathered round the marriage feast, bespread
With ample fare and dainties manifold,

Behold! the Fates, the Sisters Three, drew near:
Their limbs swayed feebly with the weight of years,
Their mystic voices chanted words of sooth.

Clad in white raiment were those tremulous forms,
Fringes of purple circled round their feet,
And rosy chaplets bound their snow-white locks.
Their hands, as ever, span the Eternal Task,
And one, the left, held high a distaff, swathed
With fleecy wool; the other deftly drew
The limber thread, which upturned fingers shaped :
Whilst now and then a downward thumb would drive
The spindle, with its balanced disc, a-whirl.

And alway, as they worked and worked, their teeth
Would shear the yarn, and smooth the fretted strands,
Whereof the woolly tags that flecked the thread
Clove, as they plucked them, to their withered lips,
While creels of osier harboured at their feet
The tempered fleeces, twined in silvery spheres.
And as they span, lo! from their shrilly throats
Poured forth the Song of Fate, a song so true
That never man shall dare in after years

To call it counterfeit-and thus they sang :

I.

Warden of Emathian splendour, famous in thy famous seed,
Thou who crownest matchless honours with the might of doughty

deed!

On this day of glad espousals to the Ancient Sisters list,
Listen to their words of cunning, while the spindles turn and twist.
Twist and turn, O Spindles Three: spin the Thread of Destiny.

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