Three centuries ago a man of the same type as Chidley, the eminent Quaker, Solomon Eccles, who had his gospel too, would now and then come to Westminster Hall, "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal" (as Pepys, a great stickler for propriety, noted with satisfaction), to call to repentance the wicked generation of Charles II.'s day. But the people of that day were not altogether without wisdom. They let the strenuous Quaker alone. He was doubtless the better, and they were none the worse.
Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians, afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone. The police moved him on, worried him as well as they could, invented reasons for locking him up now and then, and finally, by what seemed a masterstroke, they persuaded the doctors to shut him up in the Asylum. That, however, proved to be too much for Australian popular opinion. The voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street until new reasons can be puzzled out for harassing him, neurotic, without doubt, but now hall-marked sane.
Like the Athenians of old, the Australians are not averse to hearing some new thing, and they have bought Chidley's book by the thousand. But the Athenians, notwithstanding their love of novelty, offered the cup of hemlock to Socrates. Chidley, if not exactly the Australian Socrates, clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So he still awaits his Plato.
_December_ 15.--Like a Gargantuan _casserole_ outside, but modelled on a kettle inside, the Albert Hall, more or less filled with people, is often to me a delightful spectacle. It is so at this Sunday afternoon concert, when the lights are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is thickspread with humanity, and sprinkled with splashes of dusky crimson or purple on women's hats, while the sides are more slightly spread with the same humanity up to the galleries. The spectacle so fascinates me sometimes that I cannot listen to the music. At such moments the Albert Hall faintly recalls a miniature Spanish bull-ring. It is a far-off resemblance, even farther than the resemblance of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its enclosed dome and its worrying detail, to the simple and superb strength of the Pantheon, which lives in memory through the years as a great consoling Presence, but it often comes to me and brings with it an inspiring sense of dignity and colour and light before which the actual spectacle grows dim.