sordid details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is a
harlequin's jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's cap and bells
tied to the beggar's wallet. I have said artist life in England is apt
to have such chapters; artist life everywhere, probably. But it is only
in England, I think, that the full bitterness of such experience is
felt; for what knows the foreign artist of the inexorable element of
Respectability? In England alone is the pervading atmosphere of
respectability that which artists breathe in common with all other
men--respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tint
and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German
title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some
of its inexpressibly mean manifestations--respectability, the
pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but
which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the
general result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen;
a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element in the homes and lives of
many, where, without it, the recklessness bred of insecure means and
obscure position would run miserable riot; a tremendous power of
omnipotent compression, repression, and oppression, no doubt, quite
consistent with the stern liberty whose severe beauty the people of
these islands love, but absolutely incompatible with license, or even
lightness of life, controlling a thousand disorders rampant in societies
where it does not exist; a power which, tyrannical as it is, and
ludicrously tragical as are the sacrifices sometimes exacted by it,
saves especially the artist class of England from those worst forms of
irregularity which characterize the Bohemianism of foreign literary,
artistic, and dramatic life.

Of course the pleasure-and-beauty-loving, artistic temperament, which is
the one most likely to be exposed to such an ordeal as that of my