Privileged classes are fast becoming an anachronism;
and swept away with the rest, happily, is
the privileged out-at-elbowism of the artist world.

It is very sad to watch the gradual falling
into out-at-elbowism of things new and bright,
and lovely: the gradual decay and disintegration
of what once looked as solid as granite, and
as durable as the everlasting hills. For things,
as well as people, get out at elbows; and time
wears holes in feeling as well as in velvet and
corduroy. Love and hope and happiness and
aspiration all go threadbare, and fall into rents
as the months pass on and winter frosts wither
up and blight the last of the summer flowers.
In the youth and heyday of our life our moral
elbows are covered an inch thick with generous
padding; and we scout as sacrilege the idea that
we shall ever go ragged, whatever happens to
our neighbours. Impossible that we, burning
fiery hot with poetry and zeal, should ever calm
down into prose and vulgar fractions— that our
philanthropic designs for regenerating mankind
should subside into trading on our neighbours'
necessities— that our poetic flights into the
regions of the beautiful and the true should end
in the Icarian sea of the useful and the expedient.

Look at the wedding coat, and the wedding
gown too, for the matter of that. Bright, new,
glossy, stainless, intact, do they not look as if
fashioned for a lifetime? as if their brightness
could never fade? their gloss be never rubbed
away? their wholeness never broken? And yet
what is the truth of that wedding wardrobe?
In many cases out-at-elbowism before the year
is fulfilled; in some before the wedding feast is
cold; in almost all before life is ended; in only
a gracious few, so few that we can all count up
on our fingers the rare examples known to us,
the seams kept close and the nap unrubbed to
the last, and the gloss and the beauty and the
wholeness the same in the end as was in the
beginning. Only a few gracious instances of
this preservation of the wedding garment known
to any of us; but scores of those in which there
are threadbare places, and jagged holes, and
elbows all abroad, and premature dilapidation, and
bitter repentance for the special pattern accepted
— others so much more suited, maybe, rejected!—
and enduring irritation with the "fit." Enduring
indeed, ofttimes to the life's end. And when
elbows once get adrift from the padding and
close stitching of the wedding garment, I doubt
if any amount of darning and fine drawing can
re-cover them before they get swathed for ever-
lasting in the shroud. You may darn up any
other hole but this: bankruptcy, insolvency,
even a hole in your good name, a hole in your
heart, and the doctors say one in your head,
friendship out of order (though this is difficult),
habits out at elbows (and this is difficult too),
anvthing, in short, maybe mended and restored
— but when once the wedding coat gets threadbare,
and the bride's white satin soiled, and the
state of conjugal out-at-elbowism sets in, bid
good-by to needle and thread, for there will be
no darning of those rents, and no restoring of
those stains!

How terribly lives get out at elbows
sometimes! Once off the rails is, with some people,
to be always with their elbows in the mud, trying
vainly to work their way back to the tram-
road of success again. Shabby, ill-found,
hopeless, desperate— will those ragged elbows ever
get themselves cleansed from the mire and
decently clothed in honest broadcloth again?
In some cases certainly not, where fate and
nature have predestined; in others, mayhap,
yes; but out-at-elbowism is more often a
permanent institution than a temporary disease,
and seams once unripped are not easy to
restitch. Very bad is this state when it comes
to a man on the lower half of the great highway;
when the energy and hope of youth are dimmed,
and the shadows are lengthening in the evening
sunset. It is rare when a man can patch up his
elbow-rents after fifty; for once in tatters always
in tatters, according to some, and it is difficult
to convince the hard-headed that elbows now
naked can ever clothe themselves in decent
array again. Strong too is the clothed man's
instinct against denuded elbows— strong as the
horror of the plump ortolan when the lean snake
fixes on him the charmed eye which presages a
transfer of adipose tissue. Denuded elbows,
like lean snakes, have little shame and no
mercy. The natural man protruding through
the artificial covering of conventional tailordom
demands boldly his natural inheritance, and,
never stopping to ask how your porridge-pot is
filled or it you have supper enough left for
yourself, undauntedly thrusts his elbow in your face,
and claims a share of the beer he has not
brewed and of the bread he lias not baked.
But then, he is naked and hungry; and can we
wonder?

There are two sides to everything; and
though all manner of help and kindness and
generosity and patching up of our neighbour's
ragged elbows— taking our own coat if need
be, for the tailoring of mercy— is of the pure
law of God in the dealings of man with his
fellows, yet there is also a good in the sturdy
appreciation of self-help and independence,
which may (it has this dangerous tendency, I
admit) run into hardness and want of charity
towards the troubles which a little sympathy
could avert, and a little timely help tide over
into the current of success again. Still, turning
the thing round once more, it is a truth,
though sorrowful and humiliating, that if there
was always a tailor for every hole, elbows
would be perpetually rubbing into nudity, and
seams would be perpetually unripping without
ever an attempt at self-darning, sure
that some one would be found to take that
labour on himself, and rig up the luckless
ragamuffin as good as new again, and at his
own cost. And it is a question whether the
loveliness of universal charity would compensate
for the ugliness of chronic out-at elbowism
content to be pauperised, to be fed with food
it has not earned, and to live on labour it
will not share. After all, a man's elbows are
his own; and when they do get denuded it