wife."

Now, there is no doubt in my mind, after some thought, that the Chief
Officer was right in insisting on the unspanned gulf between the old
style officer and the men of our sphere. Heavenly powers! What have I
not seen, now that the Mate has reminded me? The fatuous ignorance,
the bigoted conceit, the nauseous truckling to "the Old Man," the
debased intellect. And yet the Second Officer does not always lie in
drunken stupor on the galley bench. I call to mind a time when he took
a violin and played to me as the sun went down across the foam-flecked
sea. Let us remember him by that rather than by his present state, and
leave the rest to God.

XXXII

It is, I think, an inestimable privilege to claim the friendship of a
man whose life and letters are a perpetual stimulus to action, an
invariable provocative of thought. I have just had a letter from my
friend, telling me that he is in despair of the stage. His play is a
thing of the past, and he vows that he has done with dramatic art for
ever.

Now being, like Goldsmith, a person who spends much time in taverns
and coffee-houses, where one can study every conceivable shade of
character, I took my friend's letter up town with me, and sat down to
muse over it and a tankard of ale. It was a cosy bar, cosier than the
Cheshire Cheese, if more modern; I sank back in a deep lounge and
watched the world go round.

To commence, I thought to myself, these people here constitute a
potential public for a play. Therefore, supposing it were _my_ play,
my attitude towards them is a factor in the dramatic problem. What is
my definition, my analysis of this potential public?

Well, they are all engaged in a terrific struggle for _safety_. They
have no social instinct apart from the instinct to combine for
_safety_. Their ideal is a tradesman, a pedlar, who has accumulated
sufficient wealth to be safe from poverty. Their ideal of religion is
one which guarantees safety from hell. They do not believe, and they
tell you bluntly they do not believe, any man who claims to be an
altruist. They do not believe any man who protests that he does not
worship wealth--_i.e._, safety.

By this time I was puzzled to know how to answer my friend's
complaints. All I knew was that, to strike one blow on the metal and
drop the hammer because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the
"artistic temperament." Oh, _mon ami_, that "artistic temperament."
"Is this all? Up again!" If you