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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pebbles on the Shore
+by Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pebbles on the Shore
+
+Author: Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2004 [EBook #10675]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEBBLES ON THE SHORE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brendan Lane and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PEBBLES
+ON THE SHORE
+
+
+Alpha of the Plough
+
+
+  ... collecting toys
+And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge;
+As children gathering pebbles on the shore
+
+
+
+
+         TO
+     ALL WHO LOVE
+  THE COTTAGE IN THE
+      BEECHWOODS
+
+
+
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+These papers were begun as a part of a causerie in _The Star_, the other
+contributors to which--men whose names are household words in contemporary
+literature--wrote under the pen names of "Aldebaran," "Arcturus" and
+"Sirius." But the constellation, formed in the early days of the war, did
+not long survive the agitations of that event, and when "Arcturus" left for
+the battlefield it was finally dissolved and "Alpha of the Plough" alone
+remained to continue the causerie. This selection from his papers is a sort
+of informal diary of moods in a time of peril. They are pebbles gathered on
+the shore of a wild sea.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ON CHOOSING A NAME
+ON LETTER-WRITING
+ON READING IN BED
+ON CATS AND DOGS
+"W.G."
+ON SEEING VISIONS
+ON BLACK SHEEP
+THE VILLAGE AND THE WAR
+ON RUMOUR
+ON UMBRELLA MORALS
+ON TALKING TO ONE'S SELF
+ON BOSWELL AND HIS MIRACLE
+ON SEEING OURSELVES
+ON THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
+ON FALLING IN LOVE
+ON A BIT OF SEAWEED
+ON LIVING AGAIN
+TU-WHIT, TU-WHOO!
+ON POINTS OF VIEW
+ON BEER AND PORCELAIN
+ON A CASE OF CONSCIENCE
+ON THE GUINEA STAMP
+ON THE DISLIKE OF LAWYERS
+ON THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE BLIND
+ON TAXING VANITY
+ON THOUGHTS AT FIFTY
+THE ONE-EYED CAT
+ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HATS
+ON SEEING LONDON
+ON CATCHING THE TRAIN
+IN PRAISE OF CHESS
+ON THE DOWNS
+ON SHORT LEGS AND LONG LEGS
+ON A PAINTED FACE
+ON WRITING AN ARTICLE
+ON A CITY THAT WAS
+ON PLEASANT SOUNDS
+ON SLACKENING THE BOW
+ON THE INTELLIGENT GOLF BALL
+ON A PRISONER OF WAR
+ON THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
+"I'M TELLING YOU"
+ON COURAGE
+ON SPENDTHRIFTS
+ON A TOP HAT
+ON LOSING ONE'S MEMORY
+ON WEARING A FUR-LINED COAT
+IN PRAISE OF WALKING
+ON REWARDS AND RICHES
+ON TASTE
+ON A HAWTHORN HEDGE
+
+
+
+
+PEBBLES ON THE SHORE
+
+
+
+
+ON CHOOSING A NAME
+
+
+"As for your name, I offer you the whole firmament to choose from." In that
+prodigal spirit the editor of the _Star_ invites me to join the
+constellation that he has summoned from the vasty deeps of Fleet Street. I
+am, he says, to shine punctually every Wednesday evening, wet or fine, on
+winter nights and summer eves, at home or abroad, until such time as he
+cries: "Hold, enough!" and applies the extinguisher that comes to all.
+
+The invitation reaches me in a tiny village on a spur of a range of beech
+clad hills, whither I have fled for a breathing space from the nightmare of
+the war and the menacing gloom of the London streets at night. Here the
+darkness has no terrors. In the wide arch of the sky our lamps are lit
+nightly as the sun sinks down far over the great plain that stretches at
+our feet. None of the palpitations of Fleet Street disturb us, and the
+rumours of the war come to us like far-off echoes from another world. The
+only sensation of our day is when, just after darkness has fallen, the
+sound of a whistle in the tiny street of thatched cottages announces that
+the postman has called to collect letters.
+
+In this solitude, where one is thrown entirely upon one's own resources,
+one discovers how dependent one is upon men and books for inspiration. It
+is hard even to find a name. Not that finding a name is easy in any
+circumstances. Every one who lives by his pen knows the difficulty of the
+task. I would rather write an article than find a title for it. The
+thousand words come easily (sometimes); but the five-words summary of the
+thousand, that is to flame at the top like a beacon light, is a gem that
+has to be sought in travail, almost in tears. I have written books, but I
+have never found a title for one that I have written. That has always come
+to me from a friend.
+
+Even the men of genius suffer from this impoverishment. When Goldsmith had
+written the finest English comedy since Shakespeare he did not know what to
+call it, and had to leave Johnson to write the label. I like to think that
+Shakespeare himself suffered from this sterility--that he, too, sat biting
+the feather of his quill in that condition of despair that is so familiar
+to smaller men. Indeed, we have proof that it was so in the titles
+themselves. Is not the title, _As You Like It_, a confession that he had
+bitten his quill until he was tired of the vain search for a name? And what
+is _Twelfth Night: or What You Will_ but an evidence that he could not hit
+upon any name that would fit the most joyous offspring of his genius?
+
+What parent does not know the same agony? To name a child, to give him a
+sign that shall go with him to his grave, and that shall fit that mystery
+of the cradle which time and temptation and trial shall alone reveal--_hoc
+opus, hic labor est_. Many fail by starting from false grounds--fashion,
+ambition, or momentary interest. Perhaps the little stranger arrives with
+the news of a battle, or when a popular novel appears, or at a moment when
+you are under the influence of some austere or heroic name. And forgetful
+that it is the child that has to bear the burden of your momentary impulse,
+you call him Inkerman Jones, or Kitchener Smith, or Milton Spinks.
+
+And so he is started on his journey, like a little historical memory, or
+challenging comparison with some hero of fact or fable. Perhaps Milton
+Spinks grows up bow-legged and commonplace--all Spinks and no Milton. As
+plain John he would pass through life happy and unnoticed, but the great
+name of Milton hangs about him like a jest from which he can never
+escape--no, not even in the grave, for it will be continued there until the
+lichen has covered the name on the headstone with stealthy and kindly
+oblivion.
+
+It is a good rule, I think, to avoid the fanciful in names. So few of our
+children are going to be heroes or sages that we should be careful not to
+stamp them with the mark of greatness at the outset of the journey. Horatio
+was a happy stroke for Nelson, but how few Horatios win immortality, or
+deserve it! And how disastrous if Horatio turns out a knave and a coward!
+If young Spinks has any Miltonic fire within him, it will shine through
+plain John more naturally and lustrously than through any borrowed
+patronymic. You may be as humble as you like, and John will fit you: as
+illustrious as you like, and John will blaze as splendid as your deeds,
+linking you with that great order of nobility of which John Milton, John
+Hampden, and John Bright are types.
+
+I had written thus far when it occurred to me that I had still my own name
+to choose and that soon the whistle of the postman would be heard in the
+street. I went out into the orchard to take counsel with the stars. The far
+horizon was still stained wine-red with the last embers of the day;
+northward over the shoulder of the hill the yellow moon was rising
+full-orbed into the night sky and the firmament glittered with a thousand
+lamps.
+
+How near and familiar they seem to one in the solitude of the country! In
+the town our vision is limited to the street. We see only the lights of the
+pavement and hear only the rattle of the unceasing traffic. The stars seem
+infinitely removed from our life.
+
+But here they are like old neighbours for whom we never look in vain,
+intimate though eternal, friendly and companionable though far off. There
+is Orion coming over the hill, and there the many-jewelled Pleiades, and
+across the great central dome of the sky the vast triangle formed by the
+Pole Star, golden Arcturus (not now visible), and ice-blue Vega. But these
+are not names for me. Better are those homely sounds that link the pageant
+of night with the immemorial life of the fields. Arcturus is Alpha of the
+Herdsman. Shall it be that?
+
+And then my eye roves westward to where the Great Bear hangs head downwards
+as if to devour the earth. Great Bear, Charles's Wain, the Plough, the
+Dipper, the Chariot of David--with what fancies the human mind through all
+the ages has played with that glorious constellation! Let my fancy play
+with it too. There at the head of the Plough flames the great star that
+points to the pole. I will hitch my little waggon to that sublime image. I
+will be Alpha of the Plough.
+
+
+
+
+ON LETTER-WRITING
+
+
+Two soldiers, evidently brothers, stood at the door of the railway
+carriage--one inside the compartment, the other on the platform.
+
+"Now, you won't forget to write, Bill," said the latter.
+
+"No," said Bill. "I shall be back at--tonight, and I'll write all round
+to-morrow. But, lor, what a job. There's mother and the missus and Bob and
+Sarah and Aunt Jane and Uncle Jim, and--well, you know the lot. You've had
+to do it, Sam."
+
+"Yes," said Sam, ruefully; "it's a fair teaser."
+
+"And if you write to one and miss another they're offended," continued
+Bill. "But I always mention all of 'em. I say 'love to Sarah,' and 'hope
+Aunt Jane's cold's better,' and that sort of thing, and that fills out a
+page. But I'm blowed if I can find anything else to say. I just begin
+'hoping this finds you well, as it leaves me at present,' and then I'm
+done. What else is there to say?"
+
+"Nothing," said Sam, mournfully. "I just sit and scratch my head over the
+blessed paper, but nothing'll come. Seems as though my head's as empty as a
+drum."
+
+"Same here. 'Tisn't like writing love-letters. When I was up to that game
+'twas easy enough. When I got stuck I just put in half a page of crosses,
+and that filled up fine. But writing to mother and the missus and Sarah and
+Jim and the rest is different. You can't fill up with crosses. It would
+look ridiklus."
+
+"It would," said Sam.
+
+Then the train began to move, and the soldier in the train sank back on his
+seat, took out a cigarette, and began to smoke. I found he had been twice
+out at the front, and was now home on sick leave. He had been at the battle
+of Mons, through the retreat to the Marne, the advance to the Aisne, the
+first battle of Ypres, and the fighting at Festubert. In a word, he had
+seen some of the greatest events in the world's history, face to face, and
+yet he confessed that when he came to writing a letter, even to his wife,
+he could find nothing to say. He was in the position of the lady mentioned
+by Horace Walpole, whose letter to her husband began and ended thus: "I
+write to you because I have nothing to do: I finish because I have nothing
+to say."
+
+I suppose there has never been so much letter-writing in the world as is
+going on to-day, and much of it is good writing, as the papers show. But
+the case of my companion in the train is the case of thousands and tens of
+thousands of young fellows who for the first time in their lives want to
+write and discover that they have no gift of self-expression. It is not
+that they are stupid. It is that somehow the act of writing paralyses them.
+They cannot condense the atmosphere in which they live to the concrete
+word. You have to draw them out. They need a friendly lead. When they have
+got that they can talk well enough, but without it they are dumb.
+
+In the great sense letter-writing is no doubt a lost art. It was killed by
+the penny post and modern hurry. When Madame de Sevigny, Cowper, Horace
+Walpole, Byron, Lamb, and the Carlyles wrote their immortal letters the
+world was a leisurely place where there was time to indulge in the luxury
+of writing to your friends. And the cost of franking a letter made that
+letter a serious affair. If you could only send a letter once in a month or
+six months, and then at heavy expense, it became a matter of first-rate
+consequence. The poor, of course, couldn't enjoy the luxury of
+letter-writing at all. De Quincey tells us how the dalesmen of Lakeland a
+century ago used to dodge the postal charges. The letter that came by stage
+coach was received at the door by the poor mother, who glanced at the
+superscription, saw from a certain agreed sign on it that Tom or Jim was
+well, and handed it back to the carrier unopened. In those days a letter
+was an event.
+
+Now when you can send a letter half round the globe for a penny, and when
+the postman calls half a dozen times a day, few of us take letter-writing
+seriously. Carlyle saw that the advent of the penny post would kill the
+letter by making it cheap. "I shall send a penny letter next time," he
+wrote to his mother when the cheap postage was about to come in, and he
+foretold that people would not bother to write good letters when they could
+send them for next to nothing. He was right, and the telegraph, the
+telephone, and the postcard have completed the destruction of the art of
+letter-writing. It is the difficulty or the scarcity of a thing that makes
+it treasured. If diamonds were as plentiful as pebbles we shouldn't stoop
+to pick them up.
+
+But the case of Bill and Sam and thousands of their comrades to-day is
+different. They don't want to write literary letters, but they do want to
+tell the folks at home something about their life and the great things of
+which they are a part. But the great things are too great for them. They
+cannot put them into words. And they ought not to try, for the secret of
+letter-writing is intimate triviality. Bill could not have described the
+retreat from Mons; but he could have told, as he told me, about the blister
+he got on his heel, how he hungered for a smoke, how he marched and marched
+until he fell asleep marching, how he lost his pal at Le Cateau, and how
+his boot sole dropped off at Meaux. And through such trivialities he would
+have given a living picture of the great retreat.
+
+In short, to write a good letter you must approach the job in the lightest
+and most casual way. You must be personal, not abstract. You must not say,
+"This is too small a thing to put down." You must say, "This is just the
+sort of small thing we talk about at home. If I tell them this they will
+see me, as it were, they'll hear my voice, they'll know what I'm about."
+That is the purpose of a letter. Keats expresses the idea very well in one
+of those voluminous letters which he wrote to his brother George and his
+wife in America and in which he poured out the wealth of family affection
+which was one of the most amiable features of his character. He has
+described how he had been to see his mother, how she had laughed at his bad
+jokes, how they went out to tea at Mrs. Millar's, and how in going they
+were struck with the light and shade through the gateway at the Horse
+Guards. And he goes on: "I intend to write you such volumes that it will be
+impossible for me to keep any order or method in what I write; that will
+come first which is uppermost in my mind, not that which is uppermost in my
+heart--besides I should wish to give you a picture of our lives here
+whenever by a touch I can do it; even as you must see by the last sentence
+our walk past Whitehall all in good health and spirits--this I am certain
+of because I felt so much pleasure from the simple idea of your playing a
+game of cricket."
+
+There is the recipe by one of the masters of the craft. A letter written in
+this vein annihilates distance; it continues the personal gossip, the
+intimate communion, that has been interrupted by separation; it preserves
+one's presence in absence. It cannot be too simple, too commonplace, too
+colloquial. Its familiarity is not its weakness, but its supreme virtue. If
+it attempts to be orderly and stately and elaborate, it may be a good
+essay, but it will certainly be a bad letter.
+
+
+
+
+ON READING IN BED
+
+
+Among the few legacies that my father left me was a great talent for
+sleeping. I think I can say, without boasting, that in a sleeping match I
+could do as well as any man. I can sleep long, I can sleep often, and I can
+sleep sound. When I put my head on the pillow I pass into a fathomless
+peace where no dreams come, and about eight hours later I emerge to
+consciousness, as though I have come up from the deeps of infinity.
+
+That is my normal way, but occasionally I have periods of wakefulness in
+the middle of the night. My sleep is then divided into two chapters, and
+between the chapters there is a slab of unmitigated dreariness. It is my
+hour of pessimism. The tide has ebbed, the water is dead-low, and there is
+a vista of endless mud. It is then that this tragi-comedy of life touches
+bottom, and I see the heavens all hung with black. I despair of humanity, I
+despair of the war, I despair of myself. There is not one gleam of light in
+all the sad landscape, and the abyss seems waiting at my feet to swallow me
+up with everything that I cherish. It is no use saying to this demon of the
+darkness that I know he is a humbug, a mere Dismal Jemmy of the brain, who
+sits there croaking like a night owl or a tenth-rate journalist. My Dismal
+Jemmy is not to be exorcised by argument. He can only be driven out by a
+little sane companionship.
+
+So I turn on a light and call for one of my bedside friends. They stand
+there in noble comradeship, ready to talk, willing to remain silent, only
+asking to do my pleasure. Oh, blessed be the name of Gutenberg, the Master
+Printer. A German? I care not. Even if he had been a Prussian--which I
+rejoice to think he was not--I would still say: "Blessed be the name of
+Gutenberg," though Sir Richard Cooper, M.P., sent me to the Tower for it.
+For Gutenberg is the Prometheus not of legend but of history. He brought
+down the sacred flame and scattered the darkness that lay on the face of
+the waters. He gave us the _Daily Owl_, it is true, but he made us also
+freemen of time and thought, companions of the saints and the sages,
+sharers in the wisdom and the laughter of the ages. Thanks to him I can,
+for the expenditure of a few shillings, hear Homer sing and Socrates talk
+and Rabelais laugh; I can go chivvying the sheep with Don Quixote and
+roaming the hills with Borrow; I can carry the whole universe of
+Shakespeare in my pocket, and call up spirits to drive Dismal Jemmy from my
+pillow.
+
+Who are these spirits? In choosing them it is necessary to avoid the
+deep-browed argumentative fellows. I do not want Plato or Gibbon or any of
+the learned brotherhood by my bedside, nor the poets, nor the novelists,
+nor the dramatists, nor even the professional humorists. These are all
+capital fellows in their way, but let them stay downstairs. To the intimacy
+of the bedside I admit only the kindly fellows who come in their
+dressing-gowns and slippers, so to speak, and sit down and just talk to you
+as though they had known you ever since you were a little nipper, and your
+father and your grandfather before you. Of course, there is old Montaigne.
+What a glorious gossip he is! What strange things he has to tell you, what
+a noble candour he shows! He turns out his mind as carelessly as a boy
+turns out his pockets, and gives you the run of his whole estate. You may
+wander everywhere, and never see a board warning you to keep off the grass
+or reminding you that you are a trespasser.
+
+And Bozzy. Who could do without Bozzy by his bedside--dear, garrulous old
+Bozzy, most splendid of toadies, most miraculous of reporters? When Bozzy
+begins to talk to me, and the old Doctor growls "Sir," all the worries and
+anxieties of life fall magically away, and Dismal Jemmy vanishes like the
+ghost at cock-crow. I am no longer imprisoned in time and the flesh: I am
+of the company of the immortals. I share their triumphant aloofness from
+the play that fills our stage and see its place in the scheme of the
+unending drama of men.
+
+That sly rogue Pepys, of course, is there--more thumb-stained than any of
+them except Bozzy. What a miracle is this man who lives more vividly in our
+eyes than any creature that ever walked the earth! What was the secret of
+his magic? Is it not this, that he succeeded in putting down on paper the
+real truth about himself? A small thing? Well, you try it. You will find it
+the hardest job you have ever tackled. No matter what secrecy you adopt you
+will discover that you cannot tell yourself the _whole truth_ about
+yourself. Pepys did that. Benvenuto Cellini pretended to do that, but I
+refuse to believe the fellow. Benjamin Franklin tried to do it and very
+nearly succeeded. St. Augustine was frank enough about his early
+wickedness, but it was the overcharged frankness of the subsequent saint.
+No, Pepys is the man. He did the thing better than it has ever been done in
+this world.
+
+I like to have the _Paston Letters_ at my bedside, too. Then I go off to
+sleep again in the fifteenth century with the voice of old Agnes Paston
+sounding in my ears. Dead half a thousand years, yet across the gulf of
+time I hear the painful scratching of her quill as she sends "Goddis
+blyssyng" to her son in London, and tells him all her motherly gossip and
+makes the rough life of far-off Tudor England live for ever. Dear old
+Agnes! She little thought as she struggled with her spelling and her pen
+that she was writing something that was immortal. If she had known, I don't
+think she would have bothered. She was a very matter-of-fact old lady, and
+was too full of worries to have much room for vanities.
+
+I should like to say more about my bedside friends--strapping George Borrow
+sitting with Petulengro's sister under the hedge or fighting the Flaming
+Tinman; the dear little Boston doctor who talks so chirpily over the
+Breakfast Table; the _Compleat Angler_ that takes you out into an eternal
+May morning, and Sainte-Beuve whom I have found a first-rate bedside
+talker. But I must close.
+
+There is one word, however, to be added. Your bedside friends should be
+dressed in soft leather and printed on thin paper. Then you can talk to
+them quite snugly. It is a great nuisance if you have to stick your arms
+out of bed and hold your hands rigid.
+
+
+
+
+ON CATS AND DOGS
+
+
+A friend of mine calling to see me the other day and observing my faithful
+Airedale--"Quilp" by name--whose tail was in a state of violent emotion at
+the prospect of a walk, remarked that when the new taxes came in I should
+have to pay a guinea for the privilege of keeping that dog. I said I hoped
+that Mr. McKenna would do nothing so foolish. In fact, I said, I am sure he
+will do nothing so foolish. I know him well, and I have always found him a
+sensible man. Let him, said I, tax us all fairly according to our incomes,
+but why should he interfere with the way in which we spend the money that
+he leaves us? Why should he deny the friendship of that most friendly
+animal the dog to a poor man and make it the exclusive possession of the
+well-to-do?
+
+The emotion of Quilp's tail kept pace with the fervour of my remarks. He
+knew that he was the subject of the conversation, and his large brown eyes
+gleamed with intelligence, and his expressive eyebrows were eloquent of
+self-pity and appeal. He was satisfied that whatever the issue I was on his
+side, and at half a hint he would have given my friend a taste of the rough
+side of his tongue. But he is a well-mannered brute, and knows how to
+restrain his feelings in company.
+
+What would be the result of your high tax? I continued with passion. It
+would be a blow at the democracy of dogs. It would reduce the whole of
+dogdom to a pampered class of degenerates. Is there anything more odious
+than the spectacle of a fat woman in furs nursing a lap dog in furs, too?
+It is as degrading to the noble family of dogs as a footman in gold buttons
+and gold braid is to the human family. But it is just these degenerates
+whom a high tax would protect. Honest fellows like Quilp here (more
+triumphant tail flourishes), dogs that love you like a brother, that will
+run for you, carry for you, bark for you, whose candour is so transparent
+and whose faithfulness has been the theme of countless poets--dogs like
+these would be taxed out of existence.
+
+Now cats, I continued--(at the thrilling word Quilp became tense with
+excitement), cats are another affair. Personally I don't care two pence if
+Mr. McKenna taxes them a guinea a whisker. There is only one moment in the
+life of a cat that is tolerable, and that is when it is not a cat but a
+kitten. Who was the Frenchman who said that women ought to be born at
+seventeen and die at thirty? Cats ought to die when they cease to be
+kittens and become cats.
+
+Cats, said my friend coldly, are the spiritual superiors of dogs. The dog
+is a flunkey, a serf, an underling, a creature that is eternally watching
+its master. Look at Quilp at this moment. What a spectacle of servility.
+You don't see cats making themselves the slaves of men. They like to be
+stroked, but they have no affection for the hand that strokes them. They
+are not parasites, but independent souls, going their own way, living their
+own lives, indifferent to applause, calling no man master. That is why the
+French consider them so superior to dogs.
+
+I do not care what the French think, I said with warmth.
+
+But they are our Allies, said my friend severely. The Germans, on the other
+hand, prefer dogs. I hope you are not a pro-German.
+
+On the cat-and-dog issue I am, and I don't care who knows it, I said
+recklessly. And I hate these attempts to drag in prejudice. Moreover, I
+would beg you to observe that it was a great Frenchman, none other than
+Pascal, who paid the highest of all tributes to the dog. "The more I see of
+men," he said, "the better I like dogs." I challenge you to produce from
+any French source such an encomium on the cat.
+
+No, I continued, the dog is a generous, warmhearted, chivalrous fellow, who
+will play with you, mourn for you, or die for you. Why, literature is full
+of his heroism. Who has climbed Helvellyn without being haunted by that
+shepherd's dog that inspired Scott and Byron? Or the Pass of St. Bernard
+without remembering the faithful hounds of the great monastery? But the cat
+is a secret and alien creature, selfish and mysterious, a Dr. Jekyll and
+Mr. Hyde. See her purring on the hearth-rug in front of the fire, and she
+seems the picture of innocence and guileless content. All a blind, my dear
+fellow, all a blind. Wait till night comes. Then where is demure Mistress
+Puss? Is she at home keeping vigil with the good dog Tray? No, the house
+may be in blazes or ransacked by burglars for all she cares. She is out on
+the tiles and in back gardens pursuing her unholy ritual--that strange
+ritual that seems so Oriental, so sinister, so full of devilish purpose. I
+can understand the old association of witchcraft with cats. The sight of
+cats almost makes me believe in witchcraft, in spite of myself. I can
+believe anything about a cat. She is heartless and mercenary. Her name has
+become the synonym of everything that is mean, spiteful, and vicious. "An
+old cat" is the unkindest thing you can say about a woman.
+
+But the dog wears his heart on his sleeve. His life is as open as the day.
+He has his indecorums, but he has no secrets. You may see the worst of him
+at a glance, but the best of him is inexhaustible. A cat is as remote from
+your life as a lizard, but a dog is as intimate as your own thoughts or
+your own shadow, and his loyalty is one of the consolations of a disloyal
+world. You remember that remark of Charles Reade's: "He was only a man, but
+he was as faithful as a dog." It was the highest tribute he could pay to
+his hero--that he was as faithful as a dog. And think of his services--see
+him drawing his cart in Belgium, rounding up the sheep into the fold on the
+Yorkshire fells, tending the cattle by the highway, warning off the night
+prowler from the lonely homestead, always alert, always obedient, always
+the friend of man, be he never so friendless.... Shall we go for a walk?
+
+At the joyous word Quilp leapt on me with a frenzied demonstration. "Good
+dog," I said. "If Mr. McKenna puts a guinea tax on you I'll never say a
+good word for him again."
+
+
+
+
+"W.G."
+
+
+The worst of spending week-ends in the country in these anxious days is the
+difficulty of getting news. About six o'clock on Saturday evening I am
+seized with a furious hunger. What has happened on the East front? What on
+the West? What in Serbia? Has Greece made up its heroic mind? Is Rumania
+still trembling on the brink? What does the French communique say? These
+and a hundred other questions descend on me with frightful insistence.
+Clearly I can't go to bed without having them answered. But there is not an
+evening paper to be got nearer than the little railway station in the
+valley two miles away, and there is no way of getting it except by Shanks'
+mare. And so, unable to resist the glamour of _The Star_, I start out
+across the fields for the station.
+
+As I stood on the platform last Saturday evening devouring the latest war
+news under the dim oil lamp, a voice behind me said, in broad rural accent,
+"Bill, I say, W.G. is dead." At the word I turned hastily to another column
+and found the news that had stirred him. And even in the midst of
+world-shaking events it stirred me too. For a brief moment I forgot the war
+and was back in that cheerful world where we used to be happy, where we
+greeted the rising sun with light hearts and saw its setting without fear.
+In that cheerful world I can hardly recall a time when a big man with a
+black beard was not my King.
+
+I first saw him in the 'seventies. I was a small boy then, and I did him
+the honour of playing truant--"playing wag" we called it. I felt that the
+occasion demanded it. To have the god of my idolatry in my own little town
+and not to pay him my devotions--why, the idea was almost like blasphemy. A
+half-dozen, or even a dozen, from my easily infuriated master would be a
+small price to pay. I should take the stripes as a homage to the hero. He
+would never know, but I should be proud to suffer in his honour.
+Unfortunately there was a canvas round the field where the hero played, and
+as the mark of the Mint was absent from my pockets I was on the wrong side
+of the canvas. But I knew a spot where by lying flat on your stomach and
+keeping your head very low you could see under the canvas and get a view of
+the wicket. It was not a comfortable position, but I saw the King. I think
+I was a little disappointed that there was nothing supernatural about his
+appearance and that there were no portents in the heavens to announce his
+coming. It didn't seem quite right somehow. In a general way I knew he was
+only a man, but I was quite prepared to see something tremendous happen,
+the sun to dance or the earth to heave, when he appeared. I never felt the
+indifference of Nature to the affairs of men so acutely.
+
+I saw him many times afterwards, and I suppose I owe more undiluted
+happiness to him than to any man that ever lived. For he was the genial
+tyrant in a world that was all sunshine. There are other games, no doubt,
+which will give you as much exercise and pleasure in playing them as
+cricket, but there is no game that fills the mind with such memories and
+seems enveloped in such a gracious and kindly atmosphere. If you have once
+loved it and played it, you will find talk in it enough "for the wearing
+out of six fashions," as Falstaff says. I like a man who has cricket in his
+soul. I find I am prejudiced in his favour, and am disposed to disbelieve
+any ill about him. I think my affection for Jorkins began with the
+discovery that he, like myself, saw that astounding catch with which Ulyett
+dismissed Bonnor in the Australian match at Lord's in 1883--or was it 1884?
+And when to this mutual and immortal memory we added the discovery that we
+were both at the Oval at the memorable match when Crossland rattled Surrey
+out like ninepins and the crowd mobbed him, and Key and Roller miraculously
+pulled the game out of the fire, our friendship was sealed.
+
+The fine thing about a wrangle on cricket is that there is no bitterness in
+it. When you talk about politicians you are always on the brink of bad
+temper. When you disagree about the relative merits of W.B. Yeats or
+Francis Thompson you are afflicted with scorn for the other's lack of
+perception. But you may quarrel about cricketers and love each other all
+the time. For example, I am prepared to stand up in a truly Christian
+spirit to the bowling of anybody in defence of my belief that--next to him
+of the black beard--Lohmann was the most naturally gifted all-round
+cricketer there has ever been. What grace of action he had, what an
+instinct for the weak spot of his opponent, what a sense for fitting the
+action to the moment, above all, what a gallant spirit he played the game
+in! And that, after all, is the real test of the great cricketer. It is the
+man who brings the spirit of adventure into the game that I want. Of the
+Quaifes and the Scottons and the Barlows I have nothing but dreary
+memories. They do not mean cricket to me. And even Shrewsbury and Hayward
+left me cold. They were too faultily faultless, too icily regular for my
+taste. They played cricket not as though it was a game, but as though it
+was a proposition in Euclid. And I don't like Euclid.
+
+It was the hearty joyousness that "W.G." shed around him that made him so
+dear to us youngsters of all ages. I will admit, if you like, that
+Ranjitsinhji at his best was more of a magician with the bat, that Johnny
+Briggs made you laugh more with his wonderful antics, that A.P. Lucas had
+more finish, Palairet more grace, and so on. But it was the abundance of
+the old man with the black beard that was so wonderful. You never came to
+the end of him. He was like a generous roast of beef--you could cut and
+come again, and go on coming. Other men flitted across our sky like
+meteors, but he shone on like the sun in the heavens, and like the sun in
+the heavens he scattered largesse over the land. He did not seem so much a
+man as an institution, a symbol of summer and all its joys, a sort of
+Father Christmas clothed in flannels and sunshine. It did you good merely
+to look at him. It made you feel happy to see such a huge capacity for
+enjoyment, such mighty subtlety, such ponderous gaiety. It was as though
+Jove, or Vulcan, or some other god of antiquity had come down to play games
+with the mortals. You would not have been much surprised if, when the
+shadows lengthened across the greensward and the umpire signalled that the
+day's play was done, he had wrapped himself in a cloud of glory and floated
+away to Olympus.
+
+And now he is gone indeed, and it seems as though a part, and that a very
+happy part, of my life has gone with him. When sanity returns to the earth,
+there will arise other deities of the cricket field, but not for me. Never
+again shall I recapture the careless rapture that came with the vision of
+the yellow cap flaming above the black beard, of the Herculean frame and
+the mighty bared arms, and all the godlike apparition of the master. As I
+turned out of the little station and passed through the fields and climbed
+the hill I felt that the darkness that has come upon the earth in these
+days had taken a deeper shade of gloom, for even the lights of the happy
+past were being quenched.
+
+
+
+
+ON SEEING VISIONS
+
+
+The postman (or rather the postwoman) brought me among other things this
+morning a little paper called _The Superman_, which I find is devoted to
+the stars, the lines of the hands, and similar mysteries. I gather from it
+that "Althea," a normal clairvoyant, and other seers, have visited the
+planets--in their astral bodies, of course--to make inquiries on various
+aspects of the war. Althea and "the other seers" seem to have had quite a
+busy time running about among the stars and talking to the inhabitants
+about the trouble in our particular orb. They seem really to have got to
+the bottom of things. It appears that there is a row going on between
+Lucifer and Arniel. "Lucifer is a fallen planetary god, whose lust for
+power has driven him from his seat of authority as ruler of Jupiter. He is
+the evil genius overshadowing the Kaiser and is striving to possess this
+world so that he may pass it on to Jupiter and eventually blot out the
+Solar Logos," etc., etc.
+
+I do not know who sent me this paper or for what purpose; but let me say
+that it is sheer waste of postage stamps and material. I hope I am not
+intolerant of the opinions of others, but I confess that when people talk
+to me about reading the stars and the lines of the hand and things of that
+sort I shut up like an oyster. I do not speak of the humbugs who
+deliberately exploit the credulity of fools. I speak of the sincere
+believers--people like my dear old friend W.T. Stead, who was the most
+extraordinary combination of wisdom and moonshine I have ever known. He
+would startle you at one moment by his penetrating handling of the facts of
+a great situation, and the next moment would make you speechless with some
+staggering story of spirit visitors or starry conspiracies that seemed to
+him just as actual as the pavement on which he walked.
+
+I am not at home in this atmosphere of mysteries. It is not that I do not
+share the feeling out of which it is born. I do. Thoreau said he would give
+all he possessed for "one true vision," and so long as we are spiritually
+alive we must all have some sense of expectancy that the curtain will lift,
+and that we shall look out with eyes of wonder on the hidden meaning of
+this strange adventure upon which we are embarked. For thousands of years
+we have been wandering in this wilderness of the world and speculating
+about why we are here, where we are going, and what it is all about. It can
+never have been a greater puzzle than now, when we are all busily engaged
+in killing each other. And at every stage there have been those who have
+cried, "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and have called men to witness that
+they have read the riddle and have torn the secret from the heart of the
+great mystery.
+
+And so long as men can feel and think, the quest will go on. We could not
+cease that quest if we would, and we would not if we could, for without it
+all the meaning would have gone out of life and we should be no more than
+the cattle in the fields. Nor is the quest in vain. We follow this trail
+and that, catch at this hint of a meaning and that gleam of vision, and
+though we find this path ends in a cul-de-sac, and that brings us back to
+the place from whence we started, we are learning all the time about the
+mysteries of our wilderness. And one day, perhaps--suddenly, it may be, as
+that vision of the great white mountains of the Oberland breaks upon the
+sight of the traveller--we shall see whither the long adventure leads. "Say
+not the struggle naught availeth," said a poet who was not given to
+cultivating illusions. And he went on:--
+
+    For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.
+      Seem here no painful inch to gain,
+    Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
+      Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
+
+But though I want to see a vision as much as anybody, I am out of touch
+with the company of the credulous. I am with Doubting Thomas. I have no
+capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark
+rooms and magic. People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but
+cold. I know a man--a most excellent man--whose life is a perfect debauch
+of visions and revelations. He seems to discover the philosopher's stone
+every other day. Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation.
+If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live
+until everybody is tired of you. Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of
+bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption. For one period he
+could talk of nothing but dried milk; for another, acetic acid was the
+thing. Rub yourself with acetic acid and you would be as invulnerable to
+the ills of the body as Achilles was after he had been dipped by Thetis in
+the waters of Styx. The stars tell him anything he wishes to believe, and
+he can conjure up spirits as easily as another man can order a cab. It is
+not that he is a fool. In practical affairs he is astonishingly astute. It
+is that he has an illimitable capacity for belief. He is always on the road
+to Damascus.
+
+For my part I am content to wait. I am for Wordsworth's creed of "wise
+passiveness." I should as soon think of reading my destiny on the sole of
+my boot as in the palm of my hand. The one would be just as illuminating as
+the other. It would tell me what I chose to make it tell me. That and no
+more. And so with the stars. People who pretend to read the riddle of our
+affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying
+to deceive others. They are giving their own little fancies the sanction of
+the universe. The butterfly that I see flitting about in the sunshine
+outside might as well read the European war as a comment on its aimless
+little life. The stars do not chatter about us, but they have a balm for us
+if we will be silent. The "huge and thoughtful night" speaks a language
+simple, august, universal.
+
+It is one of the smaller consolations of the war that it has given us in
+London a chance of hearing that language. The lamps of the street are
+blotted out, and the lamps above are visible. Five nights of the week all
+the year round I take the last bus that goes northward from the City, and
+from the back seat on the top I watch the great procession of the stars. It
+is the most astonishing spectacle offered to men. Emerson said that if we
+only saw it once in a hundred years we should spend years in preparing for
+the vision. It is hung out for us every night, and we hardly give it a
+glance. And yet it is well worth glancing at. It is the best corrective for
+this agitated little mad-house in which we dwell and quarrel and fight and
+die. It gives us a new scale of measurement and a new order of ideas. Even
+the war seems only a local affair of some ill-governed asylum in the
+presence of this ordered march of illimitable worlds. I do not worry about
+the vision; I do not badger the stars to give me their views about the war.
+It is enough to see and feel and be silent.
+
+And now I hope Althea will waste no more postage stamps in sending me her
+desecrating gibberish.
+
+
+
+
+ON BLACK SHEEP
+
+
+When I was in France a few weeks ago I heard much about the relative
+qualities of different classes of men as soldiers. And one of the most
+frequent themes was the excellence of the "black sheep." It was not merely
+that he was brave. That one might expect. It was not even that he was
+unselfish. That also did not arouse surprise. The pride in him, I found,
+was chiefly due to the fact that he was so good a soldier in the sense of
+discipline, enthusiasm, keenness, even intelligence. It is, I believe, a
+well-ascertained fact that an unusually high proportion of reformatory boys
+and other socially doubtful men have won rewards for exceptional deeds, and
+every one knows the case of the man with twenty-seven convictions against
+him who won the V.C. for one of the bravest acts of the war.
+
+It must not be assumed from this that to be a successful soldier you must
+be a social failure. On the contrary, nothing has been so conclusively
+proved by this war as the widespread prevalence of the soldierly instinct.
+Heroes have sprung up from all ranks and all callings--from drapers' shops
+and furniture vans, from stools in the city and looms in Lancashire, from
+Durham pits and bishops' palaces. Whatever else the war has done, it has
+knocked on the head the idea that the cult of militarism is necessary to
+preserve the soul of courage and chivalry in a people. We, with a wholly
+civic tradition, have shown that in the hour of need we can draw upon an
+infinite reservoir of heroism, as splendid as anything in the annals of the
+human race.
+
+But the case of the black sheep has a special significance for us. The war
+has discovered the good that is in him, and has released it for useful
+service. After all, the black sheep is often only black by the accident of
+circumstance, upbringing, or association. He is a misfit. In him, as in all
+of us, there is an infinite complexity--good and ill together. No one who
+has faithfully examined his own life can doubt how trifling a weight turns
+the scales for or against us. An accidental meeting, a casual friendship, a
+phrase in a book--and the current of life takes a definite direction this
+way or that. There are no doubt people in whom the elements are so
+perfectly adjusted that the balance is never in doubt. Their character is
+superior to circumstance. But they are rare. They are the stars that dwell
+apart from our human struggles. Most of us know what it is to be on the
+brink of the precipice--know, if we are quite honest with ourselves, how
+narrow a shave we have had from joining the black sheep. Perhaps, if we are
+still honest with ourselves, we shall admit that the thing that turned the
+balance for us was not a very creditable thing--that we were protected from
+ourselves not by any high virtue, but by something mean, a touch of
+cowardice, a paltry ambition, a consideration that we should be ashamed to
+confess.
+
+We are so strangely compact that we do not ourselves know what the ordeal
+will discover in us. You have no doubt read that incident of the sergeant
+who, in a moment of panic, fled, was placed under arrest and sentenced to
+be shot. Before the sentence was ratified by the Commander-in-Chief, there
+came a moment of extreme peril to the line, when irretrievable disaster was
+imminent and every man who could fill a gap was needed. The condemned man
+was called out to face the enemy, and, even in the midst of brave men,
+fought with a bravery that singled him out for the Victoria Cross. Tell
+me--which was the true man? I saw the other day a letter from a famous
+doctor dealing with the question of the psychology of war. He was against
+shooting a man for cowardice, because cowardice was not necessarily a
+quality of character. It was often a temporary collapse due to physical
+fatigue, or a passing condition of mind. "Five times," he said, "I have
+been at work in circumstances in which my life was in imminent peril. On
+four occasions I worked with a curious sense of exaltation. On the fifth
+occasion I was seized with a sudden and unreasoning panic that paralysed
+me. Perhaps it was a failure of digestion, perhaps a want of sleep. Anyhow,
+at that moment I was a coward."
+
+The truth is that, except for the aforesaid stars who dwell apart, we all
+have the potential saint and the potential sinner, the hero and the coward,
+the honest man and the dishonest man within us.
+
+There is a fine poem in _A Shropshire Lad_ that puts the case of the black
+sheep as pregnantly as it can be put:--
+
+    There sleeps in Shrewsbury gaol to-night,
+      Or wakes, as may betide,
+    A better lad if things went right
+      Than most that sleep outside.
+
+If things went right.... Do not, I pray you, think that in saying this I am
+holding the candle to that deadly doctrine of determinism, or that, like
+the tragic novelist, I see man only as a pitiful animal caught in the trap
+of blind circumstance. If I believed that I should say "Better dead." But
+what I do say is that we are so variously composed that circumstance does
+play a powerful part in giving rein to this or that element in us and
+making the scale go down for good or bad, and that often the best of us
+only miss the wrong turning by a hair's breadth. Dirt, it is said, is only
+matter in the wrong place. Put it in the right place, and it ceases to be
+dirt. Give that man with twenty-seven convictions against him a chance of
+revealing the better metal that is in him, and, lo! he is hailed as a hero
+and decorated with the V.C.
+
+
+
+
+THE VILLAGE AND THE WAR
+
+
+"Well, have you heard the news?"
+
+It was the landlord of the Blue Boar who spoke. He stopped me in the
+village street--if you can call a straggling lane with a score of thatched
+cottages and half a dozen barns a street--evidently bursting with great
+tidings. He is an old soldier himself, and his views on the war are held in
+great esteem. I hadn't heard the news, but, whatever it was, I could see
+from the landlord's immense smile that there was nothing to fear.
+
+"Jim has got a commission," said the landlord, and he said it in a tone
+that left no doubt that now things would begin to move. For Jim is his son,
+a sergeant-major in the artillery, who has been out at the front ever since
+Mons.
+
+The news has created quite a sensation. But we are getting so used to
+sensations now that we are becoming _blase_. There has never been such a
+year of wonders in the memory of any one living. The other day thousands of
+soldiers from the great camp ten miles away descended on our "terrain"--I
+think that's the word--and had a tremendous two-days' battle in the hills
+about us. They broke through the hedges, and slept in the cornfields, and
+ravished the apple-trees in my orchard, and raided the cottagers for tea,
+and tramped to and fro in our street and gave us the time of our lives.
+
+"_I_ never seed such a sight in _my_ life," said old Benjamin to me in the
+evening. "Man and boy, I've lived in that there bungalow for eighty-five
+year come Michaelmas, and _I_ never seed the like o' _this_ before.... Yes,
+eighty-five year come Michaelmas. And my father had that there land on a
+peppercorn rent, and the way he lost it was like this--"
+
+Happily at this moment there was a sudden alarum among the soldiers, and I
+was able to dodge the familiar rehearsal of old Benjamin's grievance.
+
+And who would ever have dreamed that we should live to hear French talked
+in our street as a familiar form of speech? But we have. In a little
+cottage at the other end of the village is a family of Belgians, a fragment
+of the flotsam thrown up by the great inundation of 1914. They have brought
+the story of "frightfulness" near to us, for they passed through the terror
+of Louvain, hiding in the cellars for nights and days, having two of their
+children killed, and escaping to the coast on foot.
+
+Every Sunday night you will see them very busy carrying their few chairs
+and tables into a neighbouring barn, for on Monday mornings mass is
+celebrated there. The priest comes up in a country cart from ten miles
+away, and the refugees scattered for miles around assemble for worship,
+after which there is a tremendous pow-pow in French and Flemish, with much
+laughter and gaiety.
+
+Old Benjamin "don't hold with they priests," and he has grave suspicions
+about all foreign tongues, but the Belgians have become quite a part of us,
+and their children are learning to lisp in English down at the school in
+the valley.
+
+Much less agreeable is the frame of mind towards the occupants of the
+cottage next to the Blue Boar. They are the wife and children of a German
+who had worked in this country for many years and is now in America. The
+woman is English and amiable, but the proximity of anything so reminiscent
+of Germany is painful to the village, and especially to the landlord, whose
+views about Germans can hardly be put into words.
+
+"I should hope there'll be no prisoners took after _this_," he says grimly
+whenever he hears of a new outrage. "Vermin--that's what they are," he
+says, "and they should be treated according-ly."
+
+The Germans, in fact, have become the substitute for every term of
+execration, even with mild David the labourer. He came into the orchard
+last evening staggering under a 15-ft. ladder. We had decided that if we
+were going to have the pears before the wasps had spoiled them we must pick
+them at once.
+
+"It's a wunnerful crop," said David. "I've knowed this pear-tree [looking
+up at one of them from the foot of his ladder] for twenty-five year, and
+I've never seen such a crop on it afore."
+
+Then he mounted the ladder and began to pick the fruit.
+
+"Well, I'm blowed," he said, "if they ain't been at 'em a'ready." And he
+flung down pear after pear scooped out by the wasps close to the stalk.
+"Reg'lar Germans--that's what they are," he said. "Look at 'em round that
+hive," he went on. "They'll hev all the honey and them bees will starve and
+git the Isle o' Wight--that's what they'll git.... Lor," he added,
+reflectively, "I dunno what wospses are made for--wospses _and_ Germans. It
+gits over me."
+
+I said it got over me too. And then from among the branches, while I hung
+on to the foot of the ladder to keep it firm, David unbosomed his disquiet
+to me about enlisting.
+
+"Most o' the chaps round here has gone," he said, "an' I don't like staying
+be'ind. Seems as though you were hanging back like. 'Taint that I shouldn't
+like to go; but it's this way ... (Hullo, I got my hand on a wasp that
+time) ... There's such a lot o' women-folk dependent on me. There's my wife
+and there's my mother down the village _and_ my aunt; and not a man to do
+anything for 'em but me. After my work on th' farm, I keeps all three
+gardens going and a patch of allotment down the valley as well."
+
+"You're growing a lot of good food, and that's military work," I said.
+
+He seemed cheered by the idea, and asked me if I'd like to see the potatoes
+he had dug up that evening--they were "a wunnerful fine lot," he said.
+
+So after he had stripped the pear-tree he shouldered the ladder, and we
+went down the village to David's garden. There I saw his potatoes, some
+lying to dry where they had been dug up, others in sacks. Also his marrows
+and beans and cabbages and lettuces. A little apologetically, he offered me
+some of the largest potatoes--"just as a hobby," he said, meaning thereby
+that it was only a trifle he offered.
+
+As I went away in the gathering dark, with my hands full of potatoes, I met
+the landlord of the Blue Boar, his shirt sleeves rolled up as usual above
+his brown, muscular arms.
+
+"Bad news that about Mrs. Lummis," he said, looking towards the cottage on
+the other side of the road.
+
+"What is that?" said I. "Her son?" There had been no news of him for two
+months.
+
+"Yes, poor Jack. She's got news that he was killed near la Bassee in June.
+Nice feller--and her only son."
+
+Then, more cheerfully, he added, "Jim's coming home to-morrow. Going to get
+his officer's rig out, you know, and have a rest--the first since he went
+out a year ago."
+
+"You'll be glad to see him," said I.
+
+"Not half," said he with a vast smile.
+
+
+
+
+ON RUMOUR
+
+
+I was speaking the other day to a man of cautious mind on a subject of
+current rumour. "Well," he said, "if I had been asked whether I believed
+such evidence four months ago I should have said 'Certainly.' But after the
+great Russian myth I believe nothing that I can't prove. I believed in that
+army of ghosts that came from Archangel! There are people who say they
+didn't believe in it. Some of them believe they didn't believe in it. But I
+say defiantly that I did believe in it. And I say further that there was
+never a rumour in the world that seemed based upon more various or more
+convincing evidence. And it wasn't true.... Well, I find I'm a changed man.
+I find I am no longer a believer: I am a doubter."
+
+This experience, I suppose, is not uncommon. The man who believes as easily
+to-day as he did six months ago is a man on whom lessons are thrown away.
+We have lived in a world of gigantic whispers, and most of them have been
+false whispers. Even the magic word "Official" leaves one cold. It is not
+what I am "officially" told that interests me: it is what I am "officially"
+not told that I want to know in order to arrive at the truth.
+
+You remember that famous answer of the plaintiff in an action against a
+London paper years ago. "What did you tell him?" "I told him to tell the
+truth." "The whole truth?" "No, _selected truths_."
+
+What we have to guard against in this matter of rumours is the natural
+tendency to believe what we want to believe. Take that case of the reported
+victory in Poland in November 1914. There is strong reason to believe that
+a large part of Hindenburg's army narrowly escaped being encircled, that
+had Rennenkampf come up to time the trick would have been done. But it
+wasn't done. Yet nearly every correspondent in Petrograd sent the most
+confident news of an overwhelming victory. The _Morning Post_ correspondent
+spoke of it as something "terrible but sublime. There has been nothing like
+it since Napoleon left the bones of half a million men behind him in
+Russia." Even Lord Kitchener, in the House of Lords, said that Russia had
+accomplished the greatest achievement of the war. And so, just afterwards,
+with the equally empty rumour of Hindenburg's "victory," which sent Berlin
+into such a frenzy of rejoicing. It believed without evidence because it
+wanted to believe.
+
+And another fruitful source of rumour is fear. The famous concrete
+emplacement at Maubeuge will serve as an instance. We had the most
+elaborate details of how the property was acquired by German agents, how in
+secret the concrete platform was laid down, and how the great 42-cm.
+howitzer shelled Maubeuge from it. And instantly we heard of concrete
+emplacements in this country--at Willesden, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. We
+began to suspect every one who had a garage or a machine shop with a
+concrete foundation of being a German agent. I confess that I shared these
+suspicions in regard to a certain factory overlooking London, and could not
+wholly argue myself out of them, though I hadn't an atom of evidence beyond
+the fact that the building had been owned by Germans and had a commanding
+position. I was under the hypnotism of Maubeuge and the fears to which it
+gave birth.
+
+Yet there never was a concrete emplacement at Maubeuge, and no 42-cm.
+howitzer was used against that fortress. The property belonged, not to
+German agents, but to respectable Frenchmen, and the apology of the _Matin_
+for the libel upon them may be read by anybody who is interested in these
+myths of the war.
+
+I refer to this subject to-day not to recall these historic fables, but to
+show what cruel wrong we may do to the innocent by accepting rumours about
+our neighbours without examining the facts. Was there ever a more pitiful
+story than that told at the inquest on an elderly woman at Henham in
+Suffolk? Her husband had been the village schoolmaster for twenty-eight
+years. The couple had a son whom they sent to Germany to learn the
+language. The average village schoolmaster has not much money for luxuries,
+and I can imagine the couple screwing and saving to give their boy a good
+start in life. When he had finished his training he set out to seek his
+fortune in South America, and there in far Guatemala he became a teacher of
+languages. When the war broke out he heard the call of the Motherland to
+her children and like thousands of others came back to fight.
+
+But in the meantime the lying tongue of rumour had been busy with his name
+in his native village. It was said that he was an officer in the German
+Army, and on the strength of that rumour his parents were ordered by the
+Chief Constable to leave the village and not to dwell on the East Coast. It
+was a sentence of death on them. The order broke the old man's heart, and
+he committed suicide. The son arrived to find his father dead and his
+mother distracted by her bereavement. He took her away to the seaside for a
+rest, but on their return to the village she, too, committed suicide. And
+the jury did not say "Killed by Slander": they said "Suicide while of
+unsound mind." Oh, cautious jurymen!
+
+How do rumours get abroad? There are many ways. Let me illustrate one of
+them. In his criticism of the war the other week Mr. Belloc said:
+
+"The official German communique which appeared in print last Saturday is a
+very good example upon which to work. I quote it as it appeared in the
+_Westminster Gazette (which has from the beginning of the war, and even
+before its outbreak, been remarkable for the volume of its German
+information_), and as it was delivered through the Marconi channel."
+
+Then follows the communique. Now, when I read this I smiled, for I love the
+subtleties of the ingenious Mr. Belloc. He quotes a document which appeared
+in every paper in the country, but he says he quotes it from the
+_Westminster Gazette._ Why, since it appeared everywhere, does he mention
+one paper? Obviously in order to make that parenthetical remark which I
+have italicised.
+
+Now the reputation of the _Westminster_ stands too high to be affected by
+the suggestion that it is "remarkable"--which it isn't--for its German
+information. But suppose you, a mere ordinary citizen, were alleged by some
+one to have special intercourse with Germany at this time. You might be as
+innocent as that Suffolk schoolmaster, but that would not save you from the
+suspicions of your neighbours and, perhaps, the attentions of the Chief
+Constable.
+
+Let me give another little illustration. A friend of mine, who happens to
+be a Liberal journalist, went to a private dinner recently to meet M.
+Painleve, the French Academician, Senator Lafontaine, of Brussels, and two
+other French and Belgian deputies. The next morning he was stated in the
+_Daily Express_ (edited by Mr. Blumenfeld) to have dined with "_three or
+four foreigners_" for the purpose of discussing peace. And in the next
+issue of the _London Mail_ the question was asked, "Who were the foreigners
+with whom ------ dined?" You see the insinuation. You see how the idea
+grows. He did not reply, because there are some papers that one can afford
+to ignore, no matter what they say. But I mention the thing here to show
+how a legend is launched.
+
+And the moral of all this? It is that of my friend whom I have quoted. Let
+us suspect all rumours whether about events or persons. When Napoleon's
+marshals told him they had won a victory, he said, "Show me your
+prisoners." When you are told a rumour do not swallow it like a hungry
+pike. Say "Show me your facts." And before you accept them be sure they are
+whole facts and not half facts.
+
+
+
+
+ON UMBRELLA MORALS
+
+
+A sharp shower came on as I walked along the Strand, but I did not put up
+my umbrella. The truth is I couldn't put up my umbrella. The frame would
+not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the
+thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella
+than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of
+ragamuffins. The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all. It is the
+umbrella of some person who I hope will read these lines. He has got my
+silk umbrella. I have got the cotton one he left in exchange. I imagine him
+flaunting along the Strand under my umbrella, and throwing a scornful
+glance at the fellow who was carrying his abomination and getting wet into
+the bargain. I daresay the rascal chuckled as he eyed the said abomination.
+"Ah," he said gaily to himself, "I did you in that time, old boy. I know
+that thing. It won't open for nuts. And it folds up like a sack. Now, this
+umbrella...."
+
+But I leave him to his unrighteous communings. He is one of those people
+who have what I may call an umbrella conscience. You know the sort of
+person I mean. He would never put his hand in another's pocket, or forge a
+cheque or rob a till--not even if he had the chance. But he will swop
+umbrellas, or forget to return a book, or take a rise out of the railway
+company. In fact he is a thoroughly honest man who allows his honesty the
+benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he takes your umbrella at random from the
+barber's stand. He knows he can't get a worse one than his own. He may get
+a better. He doesn't look at it very closely until he is well on his way.
+Then, "Dear me! I've taken the wrong umbrella," he says, with an air of
+surprise, for he likes really to feel that he has made a mistake. "Ah,
+well, it's no use going back now. He'd be gone. _And I've left him mine_!"
+
+It is thus that we play hide-and-seek with our own conscience. It is not
+enough not to be found out by others; we refuse to be found out by
+ourselves. Quite impeccable people, people who ordinarily seem unspotted
+from the world, are afflicted with umbrella morals. It was a well-known
+preacher who was found dead in a first-class railway carriage with a
+third-class ticket in his pocket.
+
+And as for books, who has any morals where they are concerned? I remember
+some years ago the library of a famous divine and literary critic, who had
+died, being sold. It was a splendid library of rare books, chiefly
+concerned with seventeenth-century writers, about whom he was a
+distinguished authority. Multitudes of the books had the marks of libraries
+all over the country. He had borrowed them and never found a convenient
+opportunity of returning them. They clung to him like precedents to law.
+Yet he was a holy man and preached admirable sermons, as I can bear
+witness. And, if you press me on the point, I shall have to own that it
+_is_ hard to part with a book you have come to love.
+
+Indeed, the only sound rule about books is that adopted by the man who was
+asked by a friend to lend him a certain volume. "I'm sorry," he said, "but
+I can't." "Haven't you got it?" asked the other. "Yes, I've got it," he
+said, "but I make it a rule never to lend books. You see, nobody ever
+returns them. I know it is so from my own experience. Here, come with me."
+And he led the way to his library. "There," said he, "four thousand
+volumes. Every--one--of--'em--borrowed." No, never lend books. You can't
+trust your dearest friend there. I know. Where is that _Gil Blas_ gone? Eh?
+And that _Silvio Pellico_? And.... But why continue the list.... He knows.
+HE KNOWS.
+
+And hats. There are people who will exchange hats. Now that is
+unpardonable. That goes outside that dim borderland of conscience where
+honesty and dishonesty dissemble. No one can put a strange hat on without
+being aware of the fact. Yet it is done. I once hung a silk hat up in the
+smoking-room of the House of Commons. When I wanted it, it was gone. And
+there was no silk hat left in its place. I had to go out bareheaded through
+Palace Yard and Whitehall to buy another. I have often wondered who was the
+gentleman who put my hat on and carried his own in his hand. Was he a Tory?
+Was he a Radical? It can't have been a Labour man, for no Labour man could
+put a silk hat on in a moment of abstraction. The thing would scorch his
+brow. Fancy Will Crooks in a silk hat! One would as soon dare to play with
+the fancy of the Archbishop of Canterbury in a bowler--a thought which
+seems almost impious. It is possible, of course, that the gentleman who
+took my silk umbrella did really make a mistake. Perhaps if he knew the
+owner he would return it with his compliments. The thing has been done. Let
+me give an illustration. I have myself exchanged umbrellas--often. I hope I
+have done it honestly, but one can never be quite sure. Indeed, now I come
+to think of it, that silk umbrella itself was not mine. It was one of a
+long series of exchanges in which I had sometimes gained and sometimes
+lost. My most memorable exchange was at a rich man's house where I had been
+invited to dine with some politicians. It was summer-time, and the weather
+being dry I had not occasion for some days afterwards to carry an umbrella.
+Then one day a sensation reigned in our household. There had been
+discovered in the umbrella-stand an umbrella with a gold band and a gold
+tassle, and the name of a certain statesman engraved upon it. There had
+never been such a super-umbrella in our house before. Before its golden
+splendours we were at once humbled and terrified--humbled by its
+magnificence, terrified by its presence. I felt as though I had been caught
+in the act of stealing the British Empire. I wrote a hasty letter to the
+owner, told him I admired his politics, but had never hoped to steal his
+umbrella; then hailed a cab, and took the umbrella and the note to the
+nearest dispatch office.
+
+He was very nice about it, and in returning my own umbrella took all the
+blame on himself. "What," he said, "between the noble-looking gentleman who
+thrust a hat on my head, and the second noble-looking gentleman who handed
+me a coat, and the third noble-looking gentleman who put an umbrella in my
+hand, and the fourth noble-looking gentleman who flung me into a carriage,
+I hadn't the least idea what I was taking. I was too bewildered by all the
+noble flunkeys to refuse anything that was offered me."
+
+Be it observed, it was the name on the umbrella that saved the situation in
+this case. That is the way to circumvent the man with an umbrella
+conscience. I see him eyeing his exchange with a secret joy; then he
+observes the name and address and his solemn conviction that he is an
+honest man does the rest. After my experience to-day, I think I will
+engrave my name on my umbrella. But not on that baggy thing standing in the
+corner. I do not care who relieves me of that. It is anybody's for the
+taking.
+
+
+
+
+ON TALKING TO ONE'S SELF
+
+
+I was at dinner at a well-known restaurant the other evening when I became
+aware that some one sitting alone at a table near by was engaged in an
+exciting conversation with himself. As he bent over his plate his face was
+contorted with emotion, apparently intense anger, and he talked with
+furious energy, only pausing briefly in the intervals of actual
+mastication. Many glances were turned covertly upon him, but he seemed
+wholly unconscious of them, and, so far as I could judge, he was unaware
+that he was doing anything abnormal. In repose his face was that of an
+ordinary business man, sane and self-controlled, and when he rose to go his
+agitation was over, and he looked like a man who had won his point.
+
+It is probable that this habit of talking to one's self has a less sinister
+meaning than it superficially suggests. It may be due simply to the energy
+of one's thought and to a concentration of mind that completely shuts out
+the external world. In the case I have mentioned it was clear that the man
+was temporarily detached from all his surroundings, that he was so absorbed
+by his subject that his eyes had ceased to see and his ears to hear. He was
+alone with himself, or perhaps with his adversary, and he only came back to
+the present with the end of his dinner and the paying of his bill. He was
+like a man who had emerged from another state of consciousness, from a
+waking sleep filled with tumultuous dreams. Obviously he was unaware that
+he had been haranguing the room in quite an audible voice for half an hour,
+and I daresay that if he were told that he had the habit of talking to
+himself he would deny it as passionately as you (or I) would deny that you
+(or I) snore in our sleep. And he would deny it for precisely the same
+reason. He doesn't know.
+
+And here a dreadful thought assails me. What if I talk to myself, too? What
+if, like this man, I get so absorbed in the drama of my own mind that I
+cannot hear my own tongue going nineteen to the dozen? It is a disquieting
+idea. A strong conviction to the contrary, I see, amounts to nothing. This
+man, doubtless, had a strong conviction to the contrary--probably expressed
+an amused interest in any one talking to himself as he passed him in the
+street. And the fact that my friends have never told me of the failing goes
+for nothing also. They may think I like to talk to myself. More probably,
+they may know that I do not like to hear of my failings. I must watch
+myself. But, no, that won't do. I might as well say I would watch my dreams
+and keep them in check. How can the conscious state keep an eye on the
+unconscious? If I do not know that I am talking how can I stop myself
+talking?
+
+Ah, happy thought. I recall occasions when I have talked to myself, and
+have been quite conscious of the sound of my voice. They have been remarks
+I have made on the golf links, brief, emphatic remarks dealing with the
+perversity of golf clubs and the sullen intractability of golf balls. Those
+remarks I have heard distinctly, and at the sound of them I have come to
+myself with a shock, and have even looked round to see whether the lady in
+the red jacket playing at the next hole was likely to have heard me or
+(still worse) to have seen me.
+
+I think this is evidence conclusive, for the man who talks to himself
+habitually never hears himself. His words are only the echo of his
+thoughts, and they correspond so perfectly that, like a chord in music,
+there is no dissonance. It was thus with the art student I saw copying a
+picture at the Tate Gallery. "Ah, a little more blue," he said, as he
+turned from the original to his own canvas, and a little later: "Yes, that
+line wants better drawing." Several people stood by watching his work and
+smiling at his uttered thoughts. He alone was unconscious that he had
+spoken.
+
+There are, it is true, cases in which the conscious and unconscious states
+seem to mingle--in which the intentional word and the unintentional come
+out almost in the same breath. It was so with Thomas Landseer, the father
+of Sir Edwin. He was one day visiting an artist, and inspecting his work.
+"Ah, very nice, indeed!" he said to his friend. "Excellent colour;
+excellent!" Then, as if all around him had vanished, and he was alone with
+himself, he added: "Poor chap, he thinks he can paint!"
+
+And this instance shows that whether the habit is a mental weakness or only
+a physical defect it is capable of extremely awkward consequences, as in
+the case of the banker who was ruined by unwittingly revealing his secrets
+while walking in the street. How is it possible to keep a secret or conduct
+a bargain if your tongue is uncontrollable? What is the use of Jones
+explaining to his wife that he has been kept late at the office if his
+tongue goes on to say, entirely without his knowledge or consent, that had
+he declared "no trumps" in that last hand he would have been in pocket by
+his evening at the club? I see horrible visions of domestic complications
+and public disaster arising from this not uncommon habit.
+
+And yet might there not be gain also from a universal practice of uttering
+our thoughts aloud? Imagine a world in which nobody had any secrets from
+anybody--could have no secrets from anybody. I see the Kaiser, after
+consciously declaring that his only purpose is peace, unconsciously
+blurting out to the British Ambassador that the ultimatum to Serbia is a
+"plant"--that what Germany means is war, that she proposes to attack
+Belgium, and so on. And I see the British Ambassador, having explained that
+England is entirely free from commitments, adding dreamily, "But if there's
+a war we shall be in it." In the same way Jones, after making Smith a firm
+offer of L30 for his horse, would say, absentmindedly, "Of course it would
+be cheap at L50, and I might spring L55 if he is stiff about it."
+
+It would be a world in which lies would have no value and deception would
+be a waste of time--a world in which truth would no longer be at the bottom
+of the well, but on the tip of every man's tongue. We should have all the
+rascals in prison and all the dishonest traders in the bankruptcy court.
+Secret diplomacy would no longer play with the lives of men, for there
+would be no secrets. Those little perverse concealments that wreck so many
+lives would vanish. You, sir, who find it so easy to nag at home and so
+difficult to say the kind thing that you know to be true, would be
+discovered to your great advantage and to the peace of your household.
+
+Yes, I think the world would go very well if we all had tongues that told
+our true thoughts in spite of us. But what a lot of us would be found out.
+My own face crimsons at the thought. So, I think, does yours.
+
+
+
+
+ON BOSWELL AND HIS MIRACLE
+
+
+As I passed along Great Queen Street the other evening, I saw that
+Boswell's house, so long threatened, is at last falling a victim to the
+housebreaker. The fact is one of the by-products of the war. While the Huns
+are abroad in Belgium the Vandals are busy at home. You may see them at
+work on every hand. The few precious remains we have of the past are
+vanishing like snows before the south wind.
+
+In the Strand there is a great heap of rubbish where, when the war began,
+stood two fine old houses of Charles II.'s London. Their disappearance
+would, in normal times, have set all the Press in revolt. But they have
+gone without a murmur, so preoccupied are we with more urgent matters. And
+so with the Elizabethan houses in Cloth Fair. They have been demolished
+without a word of protest. And what devastation is afoot in Lincoln's Inn
+among those fine reposeful dwellings, hardly one of which is without some
+historic or literary interest!
+
+In the midst of all this vandalism it was too much perhaps to hope that
+Boswell's house would escape. Bozzy was not an Englishman; his residence in
+London was casual, and, what is more to the point, he has only a reflected
+greatness. Macaulay's judgment of him is now felt to be too harsh, but even
+his warmest advocate must admit that his picture of himself is not
+engaging. He was gross in his habits, full of little malevolences (observe
+the spitefulness of his references to Goldsmith), and his worship of
+Johnson was abject to the point of nausea.
+
+He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and treasured the dirt that
+came from the great man's heavy boots. No insult levelled at him was too
+outrageous to be recorded with pride. "You were drunk last night, you dog,"
+says Johnson to him one morning during the tour in the Hebrides, and down
+goes the remark as if he has received the most gracious of good mornings.
+"Have you no better manners?" says Johnson on another occasion. "There is
+_your want_." And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub together with
+his apologies. And so when he has been expressing his emotions on hearing
+music. "Sir," said Johnson, "I should never hear it if it made me such a
+fool."
+
+Once indeed he rebelled. It was when they were dining with a company at Sir
+Joshua Reynolds's. Johnson attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that
+he kept away from him for a week. His story of the reconciliation is one of
+the most delightful things in that astonishing book:
+
+"After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of the room and we were by
+ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine and said, in a tone of
+conciliatory courtesy, 'Well, how have you done?' Boswell: 'Sir, you have
+made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua
+Reynolds's. You know, my dear sir, no man has a greater respect or
+affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you.
+Now, to treat me so--' He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I
+assured him was not the case; and proceeded, 'But why treat me so before
+people who neither love you nor me?' Johnson: 'Well I am sorry for it. I'll
+make it up to you in twenty different ways, as you please.' Boswell: 'I
+said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you _tossed_ me sometimes,
+I don't care how often or how high he tosses me when only friends are
+present, for then I fall upon soft ground; but I do not like falling upon
+stones, which is the case when enemies are present. I think this is a
+pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I ever
+have heard.'"
+
+Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff and Bardolph, or Don
+Quixote and Sancho Panza? Indeed, Bardolph's immortal "Would I were with
+him wheresoe'er he be, whether in heaven or in hell," is in the very spirit
+of Boswell's devotion to his hero.
+
+It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the
+miracle. His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his
+love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much
+to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal
+memory, and his doglike fidelity. I have said that his greatness is only
+reflected. But that is hardly just. It might even be more true to say that
+Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell. What of him would remain to-day
+but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by
+licking the boot that kicked him? Who now reads _London_, or _The Vanity of
+Human Wishes_, or _The Rambler_? I once read _Rasselas_, and found it
+pompous and dull. And I have read _The Lives of the Poets_, and though they
+are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the
+essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came
+out of Grub Street.
+
+But _The Life_! What in all the world of books is there like it? I have
+been reading it off and on for more than thirty years, and still find it
+inexhaustible. It ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems to
+be a record of my own experiences. I have dined so often with Johnson at
+the Mitre and Sir Joshua's and Langton's and the rest that I know him far
+better than the shadows I meet in daily life. I seem to have been present
+when he was talking to the King, and when Goldsmith sulked because he had
+not shared the honour; when he met Wilkes, and when he insulted Sir Joshua
+and for once got silenced; when he "downed" Robertson, and when, for want
+of a lodging, he and Savage walked all night round St. James's Square, full
+of high spirits and patriotism, inveighing against the Minister and
+resolving that "they would _stand by their country_."
+
+And at the end of it all I feel very much like Mr. Birrell, who, when asked
+what he would do when the Government went out of office, replied, "I shall
+retire to the country, and really read Boswell." Not "finish Boswell," you
+observe. No one could ever finish Boswell. No one would ever want to finish
+Boswell. Like a sensible man he will just go on reading him and reading
+him, and reading him until the light fails and there is no more reading to
+be done.
+
+What an achievement for this uncouth Scotch lawyer to have accomplished! He
+knew he had done a great thing; but even he did not know how great a thing.
+Had he known he might have answered as proudly as Dryden answered when some
+one said to him that his _Ode to St. Cecilia_ was the finest that had ever
+been written. "Or ever will be," said the poet. Dryden's ode has been
+eclipsed more than once since it was written; but Boswell's book has never
+been approached. It is not only the best thing of its sort in literature:
+there is nothing with which one can compare it.
+
+Boswell's house is falling to dust. No matter! His memorial will last as
+long as the English speech is spoken and as long as men love the immortal
+things of which it is the vehicle.
+
+
+
+
+ON SEEING OURSELVES
+
+
+A friend of mine who is intimate enough with me to guess my secrets, said
+to me quizzingly the other day: "Do you know 'Alpha of the Plough?'"
+
+"I have never seen the man," I said promptly and unblushingly. He laughed
+and I laughed.
+
+"What, never?" he said.
+
+"Never," I said. "What's more, I never shall see him."
+
+"What, not in the looking-glass?" said he.
+
+"That's not 'Alpha of the Plough,'" I answered. "That is only his
+counterfeit. It may be a good counterfeit, but it's not the man. The man I
+shall never see. I can see bits of him--his hands, his feet, his arms, and
+so on. By shutting one eye I can see something of the shape of his nose. By
+thrusting out the upper lip I can see that the fellow wears a moustache.
+But his face, as a whole, is hidden from me. I cannot tell you even with
+the help of the counterfeit what impression he makes on the beholder. Now,"
+I continued, pausing and taking stock of my friend, "I know what you are
+like. I take you all in at one glance. You can take me in at a glance. The
+only person we can none of us take in at a glance is the person we should
+most like to see."
+
+"It's a mercy," said he.
+
+I am not sure that he was right. In this matter, as in most things in this
+perplexing world, there is much to be said on both sides. It is lucky for
+some of us undoubtedly that we are condemned to be eternal strangers to
+ourselves, and that not merely to our physical selves. We do not know even
+the sound of our own voices. Mr. Pemberton-Billing has never heard the most
+sepulchral voice in the House of Commons, and Lord Charles Beresford does
+not know how a foghorn sounds when it becomes articulate. I have no idea,
+and you have no idea, what sort of impression our manner makes on others.
+If we had, how stricken some of us would be! We should hardly survive the
+revelation. We should be sorry we had ever been born.
+
+Imagine, for example, that eminent politician, Mr. Sutherland Bangs, M.P.,
+meeting himself out at a dinner one evening. Mr. Sutherland Bangs cherishes
+a comfortable vision of himself as a handsome, engaging fellow, with a gift
+for talk, a breezy manner, a stylish presence, and an elegant accent. And
+seated beside himself at dinner he would discover that he was a pretentious
+bore, that his talk was windy commonplace, his breezy manner an offence,
+his fine accent an unpleasant affectation. He would say that he would never
+want to see that fellow again. And, realising that that was Mr. Sutherland
+Bangs as he appears to the world, he would return home as humble and abject
+as Mr. Tom Lofty in _The Good-Natured Man_ was when his imposture was found
+out. "You ought to have your head stuck in a pillory," said Mr. Croaker.
+"Stick it where you will," said Mr. Lofty, "for by the lord, it cuts a poor
+figure where it sticks at present." Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like
+that.
+
+But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of
+surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well.
+Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines:
+
+    O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
+      To see oursels as others see us:
+    It wad frae monie a blunder free us
+      An' foolish notion.
+
+We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as our
+discomfiture. You, sir, might find that the talent for argument on which
+you pride yourself is to me only irritating wrong-headedness, and I might
+find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired.
+Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only
+made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and
+Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a
+hedgehog. It would do us all good to get this objective view of ourselves.
+
+It is not necessarily the right view or the complete view. You remember
+that ingenious fancy of Holmes' about John and Thomas. They are talking
+together and don't quite hit it off, and Holmes says it is no wonder since
+six persons are engaged in the conversation. "Six!" you say, lifting your
+eyebrows. Yes, six, says he. There is John's ideal John--that is, John as
+he appears to himself; Thomas's ideal John--that is, John as Thomas sees
+him; and the real John, known only to his Maker. And so with Thomas, there
+are three of him engaged in the talk also. Now John's ideal John is not a
+bit like Thomas's ideal John, and neither of them is like the real John,
+and so it comes about that John and Thomas--that is, you and I--get at
+cross purposes.
+
+If I (John) could have your (Thomas's) glimpse of myself, my appearance, my
+manner, my conduct, and so on, it would serve as a valuable corrective. It
+would give that faculty of self-criticism which most of us lack. That
+faculty is simply the art of seeing ourselves objectively, as a stranger
+sees us who has no interest in us and no prejudice in our favour. Few of us
+can do that except in fleeting flashes of illumination. We cannot even do
+it in regard to the things we produce. If you paint a picture, or write an
+article, or make a joke, you are pretty sure to be a bad judge of its
+quality. You only see it subjectively as a part of yourself--that is, you
+don't see it at all. Put the thing away for a year, come on it suddenly as
+a stranger might, and you will perhaps understand why Thomas seemed so cool
+about it. It wasn't because he was jealous or unfriendly, as you supposed:
+it was because he _saw_ it and you didn't.
+
+Even great men have this blindness about their own work. How else can we
+account for a case like Wordsworth's? He was one of the three greatest
+poets this country has produced, and also an acute critic of poetry, yet he
+wrote more flat-footed commonplace than any man of his time. Apparently he
+didn't know when he was sublime and when he was merely drivelling. He
+didn't know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.
+
+I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, "What do they know of
+England, who only England know?" It is the watchword of a shallow
+Imperialism. But I felt a certain truth in it once. I was alone in the
+Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the
+return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like
+Richard, "towards England." In that moment I seemed to see it
+imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the
+years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its
+mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its
+squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the
+horizon. I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it
+as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never
+loved it before. I found that I had left England to discover it.
+
+That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally. We need to take a
+journey from our self-absorbed centre, and see ourselves with a fresh eye
+and an unprejudiced judgment.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
+
+
+I have seen no story of the war which, within its limits, has pleased me
+more than that which Mr. Alfred Noyes told in the newspapers in his
+fascinating description of his visit to the Fleet. It was a story of the
+battle of Jutland. "In the very hottest moment of this most stupendous
+battle in all history," he says, "two grimy stokers' heads arose for a
+breath of fresh air. What domestic drama they were discussing the world may
+never know. But the words that were actually heard passing between them,
+while the shells whined overhead, were these: 'What I says is, 'e ought to
+have married 'er.'"
+
+If you don't enjoy that story you will never understand the English spirit.
+There are some among us who never will understand the English spirit. In
+the early days of the war an excellent friend of mine used to find a great
+source of despair in "Tipperary." What hope was there for a country whose
+soldiers went to battle singing "Tipperary" against a foe who came on
+singing "Ein' feste Burg"? Put that way, I was bound to confess that the
+case looked black against us. It seemed "all Lombard Street to a China
+orange," as the tag of other days would put it. It is true that, for a
+music-hall song, "Tipperary" was unusually fresh and original. Contrast it
+with the maudlin "Keep the home fires burning," which holds the field
+to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street
+organ without a certain pleasure--a pleasure mingled with pain, for its
+happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those
+unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of
+song in the throat of death.
+
+But it was only a music-hall song after all, and to put it in competition
+with Luther's mighty hymn would be like putting a pop-gun against a 12-inch
+howitzer. The thunder of Luther's hymn has come down through four
+centuries, and it will go on echoing through the centuries till the end of
+time. It is like the march of the elements to battle, like the heaving of
+mountains and the surge of oceans. In nothing else is the sense of Power so
+embodied in the pulse of song. And the words are as formidable as the tune.
+Carlyle caught their massive, rugged strength in his great translation:
+
+    A safe stronghold our God is still,
+    A trusty shield and weapon;
+    He'll help us clear from all the ill
+    That hath us now o'ertaken....
+
+Yes, on the face of it, it seemed a poor lookout for "Tipperary" against
+such a foe. But it wasn't, and any one who knew the English temperament
+knew it wasn't. I put aside the fact that for practical everyday uses a
+cheerful tune is much better than a solemn tune. "Tipperary" quickens the
+step and shortens the march. Luther's hymn, so far from lightening the
+journey, would become an intolerable burden. The mind would sink under it.
+You would either go mad or plunge into some violent excess to recover your
+sanity. It is the craziest of philosophy to think that because you are
+engaged in a serious business you have to live in a state of exaltation,
+that the bow is never to be unstrung, that the top note is never to be
+relaxed. You will not do your business better because you wear a long face
+all the time; you will do it worse. If you are talking about your high
+ideals all day you are not only a nuisance: you are either dishonest or
+unbalanced. We are not creatures with wings. We are creatures who walk. We
+have to "foot it" even to Mount Pisgah, and the more cheerful and jolly and
+ordinary we are on the way the sooner we shall get over the journey. The
+noblest Englishman that ever lived, and the most deeply serious, was as
+full of innocent mirth as a child and laid his head down on the block with
+a jest. Let us keep our course by the stars, by all means, but the
+immediate tasks are much nearer than the stars--
+
+    The charities that soothe and heal and bless
+    Are scattered all about our feet--like flowers.
+
+It is just this frightful gravity of the German mind that has made them
+mad. They haven't learned to play; they haven't learned to laugh at
+themselves. Their sombre religion has passed into a sombre irreligion. They
+have grown gross without growing light-hearted. The spiritual battle song
+of Luther has become a material battle song, and "the safe stronghold" is
+no longer the City of God but the City of Krupp. They have neither the
+splendid intellectual sanity of the French, nor the homely humour of the
+English. It is this homely humour that has puzzled Europe. It has puzzled
+the French as much as the Germans, for the French genius is declamatory and
+needs the inspiration of ideas and great passions greatly stated. It was
+assumed that, because the British soldier sang "Tipperary," moved in an
+atmosphere of homely fun, indulged in no heroics, never talked of "glory,"
+rarely of patriotism or the Fatherland, and only joked about "the flag,"
+there was no great passion in him. Some of our frenzied people at home have
+the same idea. They still believe we are a nation of "slackers" because we
+don't shriek with them.
+
+The truth, of course, is that the English spirit is distrustful of emotion
+and display. It is ashamed of making "a fuss" and hates heroics. The
+typical Englishman hides his feelings even from his family, clothes his
+affections under a mask of indifference, and cracks a joke to avoid "making
+a fool of himself." It is not that he is without great passions, but that
+he does not like talking about them. He is too self-conscious to trust his
+tongue on such big themes. He might "make an exhibition of himself," and he
+dreads that above all things. This habit of reticence has its unlovely
+side; but it has great virtues too. It keeps the mind cool and practical
+and the atmosphere commonplace and good-humoured. It gives reserves of
+strength that people who live on their "top notes" have not got. It goes on
+singing "Tipperary" as though it had no care in life and no interest in
+ideas or causes. And then the big moment comes and the great passion that
+has been kept in such shamefaced secrecy blazes out in deeds as glorious as
+any that were done on the plains of windy Troy. Turn to those stories of
+the winning of the V.C., and then ask yourself whether the nation whose
+sons are capable of this noble heroism deserves to have the whip of Zabern
+laid across its shoulders by any jack-in-office who chooses to insult us.
+
+Those two stokers, putting their heads out for a breath of fresh air in the
+midst of the battle, are true to the English type. Death was all about
+them, and any moment might be their last. But they were so completely
+masters of themselves that in the brief-breathing space allowed them they
+could turn their minds to a simple question of everyday conduct. "What I
+says is, 'e ought to have married 'er." That is not the stuff of which
+heroics are made; but it is the stuff of which heroism is made.
+
+
+
+
+ON FALLING IN LOVE
+
+
+Do not, if you please, imagine that this title foreshadows some piquant
+personal revelation. "Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir." I
+have not fallen in love for quite a long time, and, looking in the glass
+and observing what Holmes calls "Time's visiting cards" on my face and
+hair, I come to the conclusion that I shall never enjoy the experience
+again. I may say with Mr. Kipling's soldier that
+
+    That's all shuv be'ind me
+    Long ago and fur away.
+
+But just as poetry, according to Wordsworth, is emotion recalled in
+tranquillity, so it is only when you have left the experience of falling in
+love behind that you are really competent to describe it or talk about it
+with the necessary philosophic detachment.
+
+Now of course there is no difficulty about falling in love. Any one can do
+that. The difficulty is to know when the symptoms are true or false. So
+many people mistake the symptoms, and only discover when it is too late
+that they have never really had the true experience. Hence the overtime in
+the Divorce Court. Hence, too, the importance of "calf love," which serves
+as a sort of apprenticeship to the mystery, and enables you to discriminate
+between the substance and the shadow.
+
+And in "calf love" I do not include the adumbrations of extreme childhood
+like those immortalised in _Annabel Lee_:--
+
+    I was a child and she was a child
+    In that kingdom by the sea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    But we loved with a love that was more than love,
+    I and my Annabel Lee.
+
+I know that love. I had it when I was eight. "She" was also eight, and she
+had just come from India. She was frightfully plain, but then--well, she
+had come from India. She had all the romance of India's coral strand about
+her, and it was India's coral strand that I was in love with. Moreover, she
+was a soldier's daughter, and to be a soldier's daughter was, next to being
+a soldier, the noblest thing in the world. For that was about the time
+when, under the inspiration of _The Story of the Hundred Days_, I had set
+out with a bag containing a nightshirt and a toothbrush to enlist in the
+Black Watch. (It was a forlorn adventure that went no further than the
+railway station.) Finally she had given me, as a token of her love, _Poor
+Little Gaspard's Drum_, wherein I read of Napoleon and the Egyptian desert,
+and, above all, of the Mamelukes. How that word thrilled me! "The
+Mamelukes!" What could one do but fall in love with a girl who used such
+incantations?
+
+But this is not the true calf love. That comes with the down upon the lip.
+People laugh at "calf love," but one might as well laugh at the wonder of
+dawn or the coming of spring. When David Copperfield fell in love with the
+eldest Miss Larkins, he was really in love with the opening universe, and
+the eldest Miss Larkins happened to be the only available lightning
+conductor for his emotion.
+
+The important thing is that you should contract "calf love" while you are
+young. It is like the measles, which is harmless enough in childhood, but
+apt to be dangerous when you are grown up. The "calf love" of an elderly
+man is always a disaster. Hence the saying, "There's no fool like an old
+fool." An elderly man should not _fall_ in love. He should walk into it. He
+should survey the ground carefully as Mr. Barkis did. That admirable man
+took the business of falling in love seriously:
+
+"'So she makes,' said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of reflection, 'all
+the apple parsties, and does all the cooking, do she?'
+
+"I replied that such was the fact.
+
+"'Well, I'll tell you what,' said Mr. Barkis. 'P'raps you might be writin'
+to her?'
+
+"'I shall certainly write to her,' I rejoined.
+
+"'Ah!' he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me. 'Well! If you was
+writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis was willin',
+would you?'"
+
+This is a model of caution in the art of middle-aged love-making. The
+mistake of the "Northern Farmer" was that he applied the same middle-aged
+caution to youth. "Doaent thou marry for munny; but goae wheer munny is," he
+said to his son Sammy, who wanted to marry the poor parson's daughter. And
+he held up his own love-making as an inspiration for Sammy:
+
+    And I went wheer munny wor, and thy moother coom to and
+    Wi' lots o' munny laaeid by, and a nicetish bit o' land.
+    Maybe she worn'd a beauty: I nivver giv' it a thowt;
+    But worn'd she as good to cuddle and kiss as a lass as an't nowt?
+
+I have always hoped that Sammy rejected his father's counsel and stuck to
+the poor parson's daughter.
+
+There is no harm of course in marrying money. George Borrow said that there
+were worse ways of making a fortune than marrying one. And perhaps it is
+true, though I don't think Borrow's experience was very convincing. I have
+known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and
+rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such
+a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr.
+Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a
+milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds
+in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he
+had gone "dirt cheap." "Only two months to-morrow," he said. "It seems a
+age."
+
+Those who believe in "love at first sight" take the view that marriages are
+made in heaven and that we only come to earth to fulfil our destiny.
+Johnson, who was an excellent husband to the elderly Mrs. Porter, scoffed
+at that view and held that love is only the accident of circumstance. But
+though that is the sensible view, there are cases like those of Dante and
+Beatrice and Abelard and Heloise, in which the passion does seem to touch
+the skies. In those cases, however, it rarely ends happily. A more hum-drum
+way of falling in love seems better fitted to earthly conditions. The
+method of Sir Thomas More was perhaps the most original on record. He
+preferred the second of three sisters and was about to marry her when it
+occurred to him--But let me quote the words in which Roper, his son-in-law,
+records the incident:
+
+"And all beit his mynde most served him to the seconde daughter, for that
+he thoughte her the fayrest and best favoured, yet when he considered that
+it woulde be bothe great griefe and some shame alsoe to the eldest to see
+her yonger sister in mariage preferred before her, he then of a certeyn
+pittye framed his fancye towardes her, and soon after maryed her."
+
+It was love to order, yet there was never a more beautiful home life than
+that of which this most perfect flower of the English race was the centre.
+
+In short, there is no formula for falling in love. Each one does it as the
+spirit moves.
+
+
+
+
+ON A BIT OF SEAWEED
+
+
+The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from
+North Wales. It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found
+it contained a bit of seaweed. The thought that prompted the sender was
+friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea,
+and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us
+for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to
+economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to
+extravagance could not be dodged. "Oh, how it smells of Sheringham," said
+one whose vote is always for the East Coast. "No, there is the smack of
+Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume," said another, whose
+passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon. And so on, each finding, as
+he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to
+the foam of summer seas. And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide
+of recollection--memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on
+the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward
+for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the
+careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore. All awakened
+by the smell of a bit of seaweed.
+
+It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of
+intimacies and confidences. There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower
+that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some
+hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance. We open a drawer
+by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering
+perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to
+the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:--
+
+    We tread the path their feet have worn.
+    We sit beneath their orchard trees,
+    We hear, like them, the hum of bees,
+    And rustle of the bladed corn.
+
+Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of
+spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The
+memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the
+assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of
+nature, and with the immortals of our kind--with Wordsworth watching them
+in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet
+image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them
+"in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.
+
+And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is
+infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a
+personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they
+all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual
+and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness
+that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of
+us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says
+to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I
+am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated
+soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays
+from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should
+honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me,
+together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and
+the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in
+the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of
+nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree
+bursting into blossom always unveils it again.
+
+It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its
+poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains
+they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true
+harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and
+indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the
+essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of
+the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is
+like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over
+the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the
+solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of
+Father Thames--everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no
+other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain.
+Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words
+and actions, and our intercourse with men touches but the surface of
+ourselves. The rest is "as intangible and indescribable as the tints of
+morning and evening." It was one of the most companionable of men, William
+Morris, who said:
+
+    That God has made each one of us as lone
+    As He Himself sits.
+
+That is why, in moments of exaltation, our only refuge is silence, and the
+world of memory within answers the world of suggestion without.
+
+"And what does the seaweed remind you of?" said one, as I looked up after
+smelling it. "It reminds me," I said, "of all the seas that wash our
+shores, and of all the brave sailors who are guarding these seas day and
+night, while we sit here secure. It reminds me also that I have an article
+to write, and that its title is 'A Bit of Seaweed.'"
+
+
+
+
+ON LIVING AGAIN
+
+
+A little group of men, all of whom had achieved conspicuous success in
+life, were recently talking after dinner round the fire in the smoking-room
+of a London club. They included an eminent lawyer, a politician whose name
+is a household word, a well-known divine, and a journalist. The talk
+traversed many themes, and arrived at that very familiar proposition: If it
+were in your power to choose, would you live this life again? With one
+exception the answer was a unanimous "No." The exception, I may remark, was
+not the divine. He, like the majority, had found one visit to the play
+enough. He did not want to see it again.
+
+The question, I suppose, is as old as humanity. And the answer is old too,
+and has always, I fancy, resembled that of our little group round the
+smoking-room fire. It is a question that does not present itself until we
+are middle-aged, for the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, and
+life then stretches out in such an interminable vista as to raise no
+question of its recurrence. It is when you have reached the top of the pass
+and are on the downward slope, with the evening shadows falling over the
+valley and the church tower and with the end of the journey in view, that
+the question rises unbidden to the lips. The answer does not mean that the
+journey has not been worth while. It only means that the way has been long
+and rough, that we are footsore and tired, and that the thought of rest is
+sweet. It is nature's way of reconciling us to our common lot. She has
+shown her child all the pageant of life, and now prepares him for his
+"patrimony of a little mould"--
+
+      Thou hast made his mouth
+    Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
+    All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
+    All beauty, and all starry majesties,
+    And dim transtellar things;--even that it may,
+    Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
+    Confess--"It is enough."
+
+Yes, it is enough. We accept the verdict of mortality uncomplainingly--nay,
+we would not wish it to be reversed, even if that were possible.
+
+Now this question must not be confounded with that other, rather foolish,
+question, "Is Life worth living?" The group round the smoking-room fire
+would have answered that question--if they had troubled to answer it at
+all--with an instant and scornful "Yes." They had all found life a great
+and splendid adventure; they had made good and wholesome use of it; they
+would not surrender a moment of its term or a fragment of its many-coloured
+experience. And that is the case with all healthy-minded people. We may,
+like Job, in moments of depression curse the day when we were born; but the
+curse dies on our lips. Swift, it is true, kept his birthday as a day of
+mourning; but no man who hates humanity can hope to find life endurable,
+for the measure of our sympathies is the measure of our joy in living.
+
+Even those who take the most hopeless view of life are careful to keep out
+of mischief. A friend of mine told me recently of a day he had spent with a
+writer famous for the sombre philosophy of his books. In the morning the
+writer declared that no day ever passed in which he did not wish that he
+had never been born; in the afternoon he had a most excellent opportunity
+of being drowned through some trouble with a sailing boat, and he rejected
+the chance with almost pathetic eagerness. Yet I daresay he went on
+believing that he wished he had never been born. It is not only the
+children who live in the world of "Let us make pretend."
+
+No, we are all glad to have come this way once. It is the thought of a
+second journey over the same ground that chills us and gives us pause.
+Sometimes you will hear men answer, "Yes, if I could have the experience I
+have had in this life." By which they mean, "Yes, if I could come back with
+the certainty of making all the short cuts to happiness that I now see I
+have missed." But that is to vulgarise the question. It is to ask that life
+shall not be a splendid mystery, every day of which is
+
+            an arch wherethrough
+    Gleams the untravelled world;
+
+but that it shall be a thoroughly safe three per cent. investment into
+which I can put my money with the certainty of having a good time--all
+sunshine and no shadows. But life on those terms would be the dreariest
+funeral march of the marionettes. Take away the uncertainty of life, and
+you take away all its magic. It would be like going to the wicket with the
+certainty of making as many runs as you liked. No one would trouble to go
+to the wicket on those preposterous terms. It is because I may be out first
+ball or stay in and make a hundred runs (not that I ever did any such
+heroic thing) that I put on the pads with the feverish sense of adventure.
+And it is because every dawn breaks as full of wonder as the first day of
+creation that life preserves the enchantment of a tale that is never told.
+
+Moreover, how would experience help us? It is character which is destiny.
+If you came back with that weak chin and flickering eye, not all the
+experience of all the ages would save you from futility.
+
+No, if life is to be lived here again it must be lived on the same unknown
+terms in order to be worth living. We must come, as we came before, like
+wanderers out of eternity for the brief adventure of time. And, in spite of
+all the fascinations of that adventure, the balance of our feeling is
+against repeating it. For we know that every thing that makes life dear to
+us would have vanished with all the old familiar faces and happy
+associations of our former pilgrimage, and there is something disloyal in
+the mere thought of coming again to form new attachments and traverse new
+ways. Holmes once wrote a poem about being "Homesick in heaven"; but it
+would be still harder to be homesick on earth--to be wandering about among
+the ghosts of old memories, and trying to recapture the familiar atmosphere
+of things. We should make new friends; but they would not be the same. They
+might be better; but we should not ask for better friends: we should yearn
+for the old ones.
+
+There is a fine passage in Guido Rey's noble book on the "Matterhorn" which
+comes to my mind as a fitting expression of what I think we feel. He was on
+his way to climb the mountain, when, on one of its lower slopes, he saw
+standing lonely in the evening light the figure of a grey-headed man. It
+was Whymper, the conqueror of the Matterhorn--Whymper grown old, standing
+there in the evening light and gazing on the mighty rock that he had
+vanquished in his prime. His climbing days were done, and he sought no more
+victories on the mountains. He had had his day and was content to stand
+afar off, alone with his memories, leaving the joy of battle to the young
+and the ardent. There was not one of those memories that he would be
+without--save, of course, that terrible experience in the hour of his
+victory over the Matterhorn. But had you asked him if he was still avid for
+those topless grandeurs and starry majesties he would have said, "It is
+enough."
+
+
+
+
+TU-WHIT, TU-WHOO!
+
+
+There are two voices that are most familiar to me on this hillside. One is
+the voice of the day, the other of the night. Throughout the day the robin
+sings his song with unflagging spirit. It is not a very brilliant song, but
+it is indomitably cheerful. Wet or fine, warm or cold, it goes on through
+the November day from sunrise to sunset. The little fellow hops about, in
+his bright red waistcoat, from tree to tree. He flutters to the fence, and
+from the fence to the garden path, and so to the door and into the kitchen.
+If you will give him decent encouragement he will come on to your hand and
+take his meal with absolute confidence in your good faith. Then he will
+trip away and resume his song on the fence.
+
+There are some people who say hard things about the robin--that he is
+selfish and "gey ill to live wi'" and so on--but to me he seems the most
+cheerful and constant companion in nature. He is a bringer of good
+tidings--a philosopher who insists that we are masters of our fate and that
+winter is just the time when there is some sense in being an optimist.
+Anybody, he seems to say, can be an optimist when the days are long and the
+air is warm and worms are plentiful; but it is just when things are looking
+a little black and the other fellows begin to grouse that I put on my
+brightest waistcoat, tune up my best whistle, and come and tell you that
+the unconquerable soul is greater than circumstance.
+
+The other voice comes when night has descended and the valley below is
+blotted out by the darkness. Then from the copse beyond the orchard there
+sounds the mournful threnody of the owl. The day is over, he says, and all
+is lost. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I only am left to tell the end of all things.
+"Tu-whit, tu-whoo." I've told it all before a thousand times, but you
+wouldn't believe me. "Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Now, you can't deny it, for the
+night is dark and the wind is cold and all the earth is a graveyard.
+"Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where are the songs of spring and the leaves of summer?
+"Tu-whit, tu-whoo." Where the red-cheeked apple that hung on the bough and
+the butterfly that fluttered in the sunshine? All, all are gone. "Tu-whit,
+tu-whoo ... Tu-whit, tu-whoo ... Tu-whit, tu-whoo...."
+
+A cheerless fellow. Some people find him an intolerable companion. I was
+talking at dinner in London a few nights ago to a woman who has a house in
+Sussex, and I found that she had not been there for some time.
+
+"I used to find the owl endurable," said she, "but since the war I have
+found him unbearable. He hoots all night and makes me so depressed that I
+feel that I shall go mad."
+
+"And so you come and listen to the owl in London?" I said.
+
+"The owl in London?" she asked.
+
+"Yes," I said, "the owl that hoots in Carmelite Street and Printing House
+Square."
+
+"Ah," she said, "but he is such an absurd owl. Now the owl down in the
+country is such a solemn creature."
+
+    "He says a very foolish thing
+    In such a solemn way,"
+
+I murmured.
+
+"Yes, but in the silence and the darkness there doesn't seem any answer to
+him."
+
+"Madame," I said, "if you will look up at the stars you will find a very
+complete answer."
+
+I confess that I find the owl not only tolerable but stimulating. I like to
+hear the pessimist really let himself go. It is the nameless and unformed
+fears of the mind that paralyse, but when my owl comes along and states the
+position at its blackest I begin to cheer up and feel defiant and
+combative. Is this the worst that can be said? Then let us see what the
+best is, and set about accomplishing it. "The thing is impossible," said
+the pessimist to Cobden. "Indeed," said that great man. "Then the sooner we
+set about doing it the better." Oh, oh, say I to my owl, all is lost, is
+it? You wait till the dawn comes, and hear what that little chap in the red
+waistcoat has to say about it. He's got quite another tale to tell, and
+it's a much more likely tale than yours. I shall go to bed and leave you to
+Gummidge in the trees until the sun comes up and tells you what a dismal
+fraud you are.
+
+"Tu-whit, tu-whoo," hoots the owl back at me.
+
+Yes, my dear sir, but you said that last night, and you have been saying it
+every night I have known you, and always the sun comes up and the spring
+comes round again and the flowers bloom, and the fields are golden with
+harvest.
+
+"Tu-whit, tu-whoo."
+
+Oh, bother you. You ought to be a _Daily Mail_ placard.
+
+No doubt the owl is quite happy in his way. Louis XV. expressed the owlish
+philosophy when he said, "Let us amuse ourselves by making ourselves
+miserable." I have no doubt the wretched creature did amuse himself after
+his fashion. I have always thought that, secretly, Mrs. Gummidge had a
+roaring time. She really enjoyed being miserable and making everybody about
+her miserable. I have known such people, and I daresay you have known them,
+too--people who nurse unhappiness with the passion of a miser. They are
+having the time of their lives now. They go about saying, "Tu-whit,
+tu-whoo! The Russians are beaten again, or if they are not beaten they will
+be. Tu-whit, tu-whoo! We're slackers and slouchers and the Germans are too
+many for us. Tu-whit, tu-whoo. They're on the way to India and Egypt, and
+nothing will stop them. All, all is lost." But I notice that they enjoy a
+beef-steak as much as anybody, and do not refuse their soup though they
+salt it with their tears.
+
+I like that story of Stonewall Jackson and the owl. The owl was a general,
+and he rushed up to Jackson in the crisis of the first battle of Bull's
+Run, crying "All is lost! We're beaten!" "Oh," said Jackson, "if that's so
+I'd advise you to keep it to yourself." Half-an-hour later the charge of
+Jackson's brigade had won the battle. I do not know what happened to the
+owl, but I daresay he went on "Tu-whit-ing" and "Tu-whoo-ing" to the end.
+The owl can't help being an owl.
+
+Ah, there is little red waistcoat singing on the fence. Let us find a worm
+for the philosopher....
+
+
+
+
+ON POINTS OF VIEW
+
+
+As I sat in the garden just now, with a writing-pad on my knee and my mind
+ranging the heavens above and the earth beneath in search of a subject, my
+eye fell on a tragedy in progress at my elbow. A small greenfly had got
+entangled in a spider's web, and was fluttering its tiny wings violently to
+effect an escape. The filaments of the web were so delicate as to be hardly
+visible, but they were not too delicate to bear the spider whom I saw
+advancing upon his prey with dreadful menace. I forgot my dislike of
+greenflies, and was overcome with a fierce antagonism for the fat fellow
+who had the game so entirely in his hands. Here, said I, is the Hun
+encompassing the ruin of poor little Belgium. What chance has the weak and
+the innocent little creature against the cunning of this rascal, who hangs
+out his gossamer traps in the breeze and then lies in hiding until his
+victim is enmeshed and helpless? What justice is there in nature that
+allows this unequal combat?
+
+By this time the spider had reached the fly and thrown a new filament round
+him. Then at frightful speed he raced to the top of his web and disappeared
+in the woodwork of the arbour, drawing the new filament tight round the
+victim, which continued its flutterings for a little time and then gave up
+the ghost. At this moment I was called in to lunch, and at the table I told
+the story of the spider and the fly with undisguised hostility to the
+spider. "That," said Robert, home from the front--"that is simply a
+sentimental point of view. My sympathies as a practical person are all with
+the spider. He is the friend of man, the devourer of insects, the scavenger
+of the gardens. He helps in the great task of keeping the equilibrium of
+nature. Moreover," said he, "I have seen you kill greenflies yourself. You
+killed them because you knew they were a nuisance. Why should you object to
+the spider doing the same useful work for a living?"
+
+"Ah," said I weakly, "I suppose it is because he does it for a living. Now
+I ..." "Now, you," interrupted the other, "do it for a living, too, because
+you want your fruit trees to bear fruit, and your roses to thrive, and your
+cabbages to prosper. Who more merciless than you on slugs and other pests
+that fly or crawl? No, no, we are all out for a living, you as much as the
+spider, the spider as much as the fly." "We are all Huns," said I. "What a
+detestable world it is." "Not at all," said he. "It's a very jolly world. I
+drink to the health of the spider."
+
+"And you have no pity for the fly?" I said. "Not a little bit." he replied.
+"I am on the side of right." "Whose side is that?" I asked. "Mine," said
+he. "We must all act according to our point of view. That's what the
+greenfly does. That's what the spider does. We shall never in this world
+get all the points of view in accord. We shall go on scrambling for a
+living to the end. Sometimes the greenfly will be on top, sometimes the
+spider. Look at that cherry-tree in the orchard. A month ago its branches
+were laden with fruit. Now there is not a cherry to be seen. The blackbirds
+and the starlings have stripped the tree as clean as a bone. Their point of
+view is that the cherries are provided for them, and they are right. They
+know nothing of the laws of property which man makes for his own
+protection. It's no use going out to them and asking them to look at your
+title-deeds, and reminding them of the policeman and the laws against
+larceny. Our moral code is for us, not for them.
+
+"We are all creatures of our own point of view," he went on. "Before Jones
+next door bought a motor-car he had very bitter feelings about
+motorists--used to call them road-hogs, said he would tax these
+'land-torpedoes' out of existence, and was full of sympathy and pity for
+the poor children coming from school. Now he drives a car as hard as
+anybody; blows the hoggiest of horns; and says it's disgraceful the way
+parents allow their children to play about in the streets. Nothing has
+changed except his point of view. He has shifted round to another position,
+and sees things from a new angle of vision. Samuel Butler hit the comedy of
+the thing off long ago:--
+
+    What makes all doctrine plain and clear?
+    About two hundred pounds a year.
+    And that which was proved true before
+    Prove false again? Two hundred more."
+
+"Are our points of view then all dictated by our selfish motives as those
+of your friend the spider, who has probably by this time gobbled my friend
+the greenfly?" "No, I do not say that. I think that, comprehending all our
+private points of view, there is an absolute motive running through human
+society, call it the world spirit, the mind of the race, or what you will,
+that is something greater and better than we. The collective motion of
+humanity is, except in very rare cases, nobler than its individual
+manifestations. I respond and you respond to an abstract justice, an
+abstract righteousness, which is purer and better than anything we are
+capable of. We are all at the bottom, I think, better than our actions
+paint us, better than our limited points of view permit us to be, and in
+our illuminated moments we catch a glimpse of that Jacob's ladder that
+Francis Thompson saw, with ascending angels, at Charing Cross. Some one
+called Shelley 'an ineffectual angel.' I think most of us are ineffectual
+angels. Take this tragedy that is filling the world with horror to-day. We
+are fighting like tigers for our own points of view, but in our hearts we
+are ashamed of the spectacle, and know that humanity is better than its
+deeds. One day, perhaps, the ineffectual angel will find his wings and
+outsoar the spider point of view.... And, by the way, suppose we go and
+see how the spider is getting on."
+
+We went out into the garden and found the web. But the little green corpse
+had gone, and the spider was digesting his meal somewhere out of sight.
+
+_(Note._--This article should be read in connection with that entitled "On
+the Downs.")
+
+
+
+
+ON BEER AND PORCELAIN
+
+
+I was reading an American journal just now when I came across the remark
+that "one would as soon think of drinking beer out of porcelain as of
+slapping Nietzsche on the back." Drinking beer out of porcelain! The phrase
+amused me, and set me idly wondering why you don't drink beer out of
+porcelain. You drink it (assuming that you drink it at all) with great
+enjoyment out of a thick earthenware mug or a pewter pot or a vessel of
+glass, but out of china, never. If you were offered a drink of beer out of
+a china basin or cup you would feel that the liquor had somehow lost its
+attraction, just as, if you were offered tea out of a pewter pot, you would
+feel that the drink was degraded and unpleasant. The explanation that the
+one drink is coarse and the other fine does not meet the case. People drink
+beer out of glass, and the finer the glass the better they like it. But
+there is something fundamentally discordant between beer and porcelain.
+
+It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality
+of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the
+association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no
+longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and
+inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we
+get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most
+elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse
+things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By
+what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that
+apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the
+Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for
+whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?
+
+Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials
+out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light
+new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of
+the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that
+discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and
+out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist
+sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a
+symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes
+the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric
+for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this
+passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small,
+spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those
+who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that
+immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children
+into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and
+capturing for us that
+
+      Sense sublime
+    Of something far more deeply interfused,
+    Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+    And the round ocean and the living air,
+    And the blue sky and in the mind of man;
+
+Botticelli weaving the magic lines of the _Madonna of the Magnificat_ into
+a harmony that, once deeply felt, seems to dwell in the heart for ever. And
+you and I, though we are not captains in the adventure, all have our
+glimpses--glorious moments when the mind sings in tune with circumstance,
+when the beauty of the world, or the sense of fellowship with men or the
+anthem of incommunicable things seems to open out the vision of something
+that we would fain possess and are meant to possess.
+
+"A mirage," you say, being a cynical person--"a mirage just to keep us
+going through the desert--a sort of carrot held before the nose of that
+donkey, man." Well, looking at the world to-day, it does rather seem that,
+if harmony is the main concern of the adventure, humanity had better give
+up the enterprise. In the light of the events in which we live, man is not
+merely the most discordant creature on earth: he is also the most ferocious
+animal that exists. Dryden's famous lines read like a satire:--
+
+    From harmony, from heavenly harmony.
+    This universal frame began;
+    From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the
+        notes it ran,
+    The diapason closing full in man.
+
+If Dryden could see Europe to-day he might at least find one flaw in that
+ode of which he had so exalted an opinion.
+
+But the story of man is a long story, and we cannot see its drift from any
+episode, however vast and catastrophic. We are still only in the turbulent
+childhood of our career, and frightful as our excesses are, there is a
+motive behind them that makes them profoundly different from the wars of
+old. That motive is the idea of human liberty, the sanctity of public law,
+the right of every nation, small or great, to live its life free from the
+terrorism of force. When, in the ancient or mediaeval world, was there
+fought a war for a world idea like this? Despotism then had it all its own
+way. Even the Peace of Rome was only the peace of universal subjugation,
+not the peace of universal liberty based on law which the world is fighting
+to establish to-day. Never before has embattled democracy challenged the
+principle of tyranny for the possession of the world....
+
+Ah, I know what you are thinking as you run your mind over the Allies.
+Liberty! Does Russia stand for liberty? Yes, in the circumstances of
+to-day, even Russia stands for liberty, for do not forget that this is not
+a war of the Russian bureaucracy, but a war sustained by the passion of the
+Russian people. And, Russia apart or Russia included, who can doubt that
+the cause of human freedom is in our hands, and the cause of ancient
+tyranny is in the hands of our enemy? May we not see in these baleful fires
+the Twilight of the Gods--of those old gods of blood and iron that have
+held the world in subjection through the long centuries of its travail? May
+we not see even in the midst of this discord and carnage, this hell of
+death and destruction, the new birth of humanity--the promise of a world
+set free?
+
+Perhaps in that distant time when the tragedy of to-day is only an old
+chapter in the story of the human race it will be seen that Dryden, after
+all, was not guilty of a grim jest, but that this mighty discord was the
+announcement of that final harmony for which all that is best in us yearns.
+It may seem a hard vision to cherish to-day. But we must cherish it, or
+accept the hideous alternative that this is, after all, in very truth the
+madhouse of the universe. Can you live with that idea? Would it be worth
+while living with that idea? If not, then the other holds the field, and it
+is for all of us in our several ways, small or great, to work so that it
+may possess the field.
+
+I have wandered somewhat far from the question of the beer and the
+porcelain, and yet I think you will find that the sequence is not lacking,
+and that the little window commands a large landscape.
+
+
+
+
+ON A CASE OF CONSCIENCE
+
+
+It was raining when Victor Crummles stepped out into the street. But he did
+not notice the fact. True, he put his umbrella up, but that was mere force
+of habit. He was not aware that he had put it up. His mind was far too
+engaged with the ordeal before him to permit any consciousness of external
+things to creep into it. He was "up against it and no mistake," he observed
+to himself. There was the paper in his pocket telling him the time and
+place at which he was to present himself for medical examination. He put
+his hand in his pocket. It was there all right. Kilburn. Twelve o'clock.
+
+Yes, he was fairly up against it. Not, as he hastened to assure himself,
+that he objected.... Not at all.... He had always been a patriot, and
+always would be. He'd love to have a smack at the Huns. He'd give them what
+for.... He wished he'd been a bit younger--that's what he wished. If he'd
+been a bit younger he'd have gone like a shot. That's what he'd have
+done--he'd have gone like a shot. No fetching him--if he'd been a bit
+younger. But a chap at thirty-eight ... well....
+
+Here was the "Golden Crown." Yes, he thought he'd better have "just one."
+It would pull him together and give the doctors a chance. He ought to give
+them a chance whatever the consequence to himself. A whisky-and-soda would
+just put him "in the pink."
+
+There, that was better. Now he could face anything. Now for Kilburn. How
+should he go? It was two miles at least ... a good two miles. There was No.
+16--he could take that. And there was the Tube--he could take that.
+
+Or he could walk. There was plenty of time.... Yes, on the whole he thought
+he ought to walk. There was that varicose vein. The doctors ought to know
+about that. It wouldn't be fair to them or to the country that they
+shouldn't know about it. Varicose veins were very serious affairs indeed.
+He knew because he'd looked the subject up in the dictionary. It had made
+such a deep impression on him-that he could repeat what it said:--
+
+"The dilation and thickening of the veins with lengthening and tortuosity,
+and projection of certain points in the form of knots or knobs, in which
+the blood coagulates, fibrin is deposited, and in the centre sometimes even
+osseous matter; in addition the coats of the veins are diseased."
+
+There was more about it than that. It looked a very black case indeed. Many
+a man had been turned down for varicose veins, and--and--well, the doctors
+ought to know about it. That was all.... They ought to know about it.... He
+oughtn't to go there and pass himself off under false pretences.... Mind
+you, he wanted to fight the Germans all right. He wanted to do his
+bit--nobody more so. But was it fair not to let the doctors see what was
+the matter with him? He certainly had those knots and knobs when he walked
+very hard. Who knew? Perhaps there was "fibrin" and "osseous matter" there.
+At any rate, the doctors ought to see his leg under fair conditions....
+
+He didn't hold with allowing your patriotism to make you deceive your
+country. It wasn't fair to the country to let it spend a heap of money on a
+fellow who might "crock up" in the first week or two. It wasn't fair to the
+fellow either. Not that he was thinking about himself.... Not at all. It
+was the country he was thinking of. A fellow must think about the country
+sometimes. It was his duty to put his own feelings, as it were, under the
+tap. He wanted to go to the war as much as any man, but he didn't want the
+country to lose by him....
+
+Yes, it was his duty to walk. It was his duty not to conceal those knots
+and knobs. He hoped they wouldn't be a fatal objection. But he was going to
+play a straight bat with the country whatever happened.... He was not the
+man to palm himself for what he wasn't. He would show the doctor quite
+plainly what his varicose vein was like.
+
+When Victor Crummles entered the room he was feeling a bit tired, but
+courageous. He had taken another "stiffener" at the "Spread Eagle" and felt
+equal to any fate. There were two doctors in the room--one sitting at a
+table, the other standing by the window.
+
+"Anything the matter with you?" said he at the table.
+
+"Not that I know," said Victor with the air of a man who meant business.
+Then, as if unwillingly dragging the truth out of himself he added, "I have
+got a bit of a varicose vein, but it's hardly worth mentioning."
+
+"Oh, don't worry about that," said the doctor. "We've got past that stage.
+Now strip."
+
+Don't worry about that! Got past that stage! What did it mean?... Well, he
+had done his duty.... If there was fibrin and osseous matter in his veins
+he had given them fair warning. It was the country that would suffer. These
+doctors,... well, there....
+
+"Stripped? Now, let's have a look at you."
+
+The doctor examined him carefully. Perhaps that varicose vein would
+surprise him after all. He'd walked two miles and it ought to be ... not
+that he wanted it to be; but if it was--well, it was only fair they should
+know.
+
+"What did you say your age was?"
+
+"Thirty-eight, sir."
+
+"Thirty-eight! Thirty-eight ... um ... Come here, Jeffkins."
+
+Jeffkins came from the window and joined his colleague, and together the
+two doctors took stock of Victor. They were taking no notice of his leg.
+Well, it was their look out. He wouldn't be to blame if he broke down.
+
+"You can dress." And the two doctors went to the window and consulted in
+low tones.
+
+Then the first came back.
+
+"Well, my man, it won't do," he said. "We like your spirit.... Very
+creditable, very creditable indeed. But (laughing) thirty-eight! Come,
+come."
+
+Light was breaking in on Victor. Was he really being rejected?... And
+because he was too old?... Oh, the scandal, the shame.... And he dying to
+get at those Huns....
+
+"But upon my oath...." He was really in earnest now.
+
+"There, there, we understand," said the doctor. "You've done your best. And
+it's very creditable to you--very. But thirty-eight! Come, come.... Now,
+good morning."
+
+Outside, Victor's anguish and indignation were too bitter to be borne
+unaided. He turned into the "Spread Eagle."
+
+
+
+
+ON THE GUINEA STAMP
+
+
+My eye was caught as I passed along the street just now by an advertisement
+on a hoarding which announced that Mr. Martin Harvey was appearing in a new
+cinema play entitled _The Hard Way_, which was described as
+
+A FINE STORY BY A PEER.
+
+I confess that I took an objection to that play on the spot. It may be a
+good play. I don't know. I never shall know, for I shall never see it. But
+why should it be assumed that you and I will run off to the pay box to see
+a new play "by a peer"? Suppose the anonymous playwright had been a lawyer,
+or a journalist, or a pork-butcher, or a grocer. Would the producer have
+thought it helpful to announce a new play by a pork-butcher, or a lawyer,
+or a grocer, or a journalist? He certainly would not. He would have left
+the play to stand or fall on its merits.
+
+Why, then, does he think that the fact that it is by a peer will bring us
+all crowding to his doors? You may, of course, take it as a reflection on
+the peerage. You may be supposed to think it such a miraculous thing that a
+peer should be able to write a play that you may be expected to go and see
+it as you would go to Barnum's to see a two-headed man or a bearded woman?
+We may be invited to see it merely as a marvel, much as we used to be
+invited to go and see the horse that could count or the monkeys that could
+ride bicycles.
+
+If it were so I should feel it was unjust to the peerage which is certainly
+not below the average in intellectual capacity. But it is not so. It is
+something much more serious than that. It is not intended to be a
+reflection on the peerage. It is an unconscious reflection on the British
+public. The idea behind the announcement is not that we shall go to see the
+play in a spirit of curiosity, as if it had been written by an
+ourang-outang, but that we shall go to see it in a spirit of flunkeyism, as
+if it had been written by a demi-god. We are conceived sitting in hushed
+wonder that a visitor from realms far above our experience should stoop
+down to amuse us.
+
+I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public.
+It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public. The most
+splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their
+freedom from flunkeyism. The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish
+out of their souls for ever. It gave them the sublime conception of
+citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social
+fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common
+inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from
+shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth
+in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of
+the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation
+have seen, that
+
+    The rank is but the guinea stamp:
+      The man's the gowd, for a' that.
+
+It is this fact which has made France the standard-bearer of human ideals.
+It is this fact which puts her spiritually at the head of all the nations.
+
+I am afraid it must be admitted that we are still in the flunkey stage. We
+are still hypnotised by rank and social caste. I saw a crowd running
+excitedly after a carriage near the Gaiety Theatre the other day, and found
+it was because Princess So-and-So was passing. Our Press reeks with the
+disease, and loves to record this sort of thing:--
+
+THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT IN NEW YORK.
+
+    While strolling down Fifth Avenue the
+    Duke of Connaught accidentally collided
+    with a messenger boy carrying a parcel,
+    whereupon he turned round and begged the
+    boy's pardon.
+
+You see the idea behind such banalities. It is that we are stricken with
+respectful admiration that people with titles should act like ordinary
+decent human beings. It is an insult to them, and it ought to be an insult
+to the intelligence of the reader. But the newspaper man knows his public
+as well as the cinema producer. He knows we have the souls of flunkeys. I
+am no better than the rest. When I knew Mr. Kearley, the grocer, I looked
+on him as a man and an equal. When he blossomed into Lord Devonport I felt
+that he had taken wings and flown beyond my humble circle. I feel the
+flunkey strong in me. I hate him, but I cannot kill him.
+
+It is not the fact that inferior people get titles which should give us
+concern. It is not even that they get them so often by secret gifts, by
+impudent touting, by base service. These things are known, and they are no
+worse to-day than they have always been. Every honours list makes us gape
+and smile. If we see a really distinguished name in it we feel surprise and
+a certain sorrow. What is he doing in that galley? I confess I have never
+felt the same towards J.M. Barrie since he allowed a tag to be stuck on to
+a great name. What did he want with a tag that any tuft hunter in public
+life can get? It is only littleness that can gain from titles. Greatness is
+always dishonoured by them. Fancy Sir Charles Dickens, or Lord Dickens, or
+Lord Darwin, or Lord Carlyle, or Lord Shakespeare, or John Milton
+masquerading as the Marquis of Oxfordshire. Yes, Tennyson became a lord and
+was the smaller man for the fact. Who does not recall Swinburne's scornful
+comment:
+
+    Stoop, Chaucer, stoop;
+    Keats, Shelley, Burns bow down.
+
+And who did not share the feeling of Mark Pattison at the pitiful
+anti-climax? "There certainly is something about Tennyson," he said, "that
+you find in very few poets; in saying what he says in the best words in
+which it can be said, he is quite Sophoclean. But this business of the
+peerage! It is really so sad that I hardly like to speak of it. Compare
+that with Milton's ending and mark the difference."
+
+But it is the corrupting effect of titles on the national currency that is
+their real offence. They falsify our ideals. They set up shams in place of
+realities. They turn our minds from the gold to the guinea stamp and make
+us worship the false idols of social ambition. Our thinking as a people
+can't be right when our symbols are wrong. We can't have the root of
+democracy in our souls if the tree flowers into coronets and gee-gaws.
+France has the real jewel of democracy and we have only got the paste. Do
+not think that this is only a small matter touching the surface of our
+national character. It is a poison in the blood that infects us with the
+deadly sins of servility and snobbery. And already it is permeating even
+the free life of the Colonies. If I were an Australian or a Canadian I
+would fight this hateful taint of the old world with all my might. I would
+make it a criminal offence for a Colonial to accept a title. As for us, I
+know only one remedy. It is to make a title a money transaction. Let us
+have a tariff for titles. If American millionaires, like Lord Astor, want
+them let them pay for them at the market rate. It would be at least a more
+wholesome method than the present system. And it would bring the whole
+imposture into contempt. Nobody would have a title when everybody knew what
+he had paid for it. It is a poor way of getting rid of the abomination
+compared with the French way, but then we are some centuries behind the
+French people in these things.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE DISLIKE OF LAWYERS
+
+
+"I have spent a large part of my life in advising business men how to get
+out of their difficulties," said Mr. Asquith the other day. It was a
+statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the
+familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our
+affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the
+cackle about a "business Government" and the pestilence of lawyers.
+
+I am not a lawyer, and have no particular affection for lawyers. I keep out
+of their professional reach as much as possible. But it is as foolish to
+ban them as a class as it would be to assume that a grocer or a tailor is a
+great statesman because he is a successful grocer or tailor. Running an
+empire is quite a different job from running a grocery establishment, and
+it is folly to suppose that because a man has been successful in buying and
+selling bacon and butter for his own profit he can _ipso facto_ govern a
+nation with wisdom and prudence. Who are the most distinguished grocers of
+to-day? They are Lord Devonport and Sir Thomas Lipton. Both excellent men,
+I've no doubt. But would you like to hand over the Premiership to either of
+them? Now, would you?
+
+The great statesman has to prove himself a great statesman just as the
+great grocer has to prove himself a great grocer. He has to prove it by the
+qualities of statesmanship exercised in the full glare of publicity. If the
+grocer makes a howler in his trade the world knows nothing about it. If the
+statesman makes a howler all the world knows about it. He has to emerge to
+the front in the most public of all battles, and you may be sure that no
+one comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of
+the fiercest trials. He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer.
+Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of
+nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to
+survive it. No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, "Yah! nailmaker," or to Mr.
+Balfour, "Yah! landlord," thinking he had disposed of them. Why should you
+suppose that when you have said "Yah! lawyer" to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd
+George you have disposed of them?
+
+Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people--brewers, or
+soap boilers, or bankers? I doubt it. They are just the average, and
+include good and bad like any other class. Judge Jeffreys was a monster;
+but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who
+largely saved the liberties of this country. I doubt whether the world has
+ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln. And
+he was a lawyer. I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such
+financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made. He had a practice at the Bar
+which, I believe, brought him in L10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself
+to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he
+gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought
+him more than L5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable
+seat on the Woolsack and L10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the
+House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman.
+Ah, you say, but look at the glory. Well, look at it. I would, as Danton
+said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of
+men. It is the most ungrateful calling on earth. And, whatever other
+defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing
+as glory is not one of them. You will discover more passion for glory in
+Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five
+years. And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.
+
+But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis. It is an
+old dislike. You remember that remark of Johnson's when he was asked on a
+certain occasion who was the man who had left the room: "I don't like
+saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; _but I believe he is
+an attorney."_ And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a
+barrister as "a loaded blunderbuss "--if you bought him he blew your
+opponent's brains out; if your opponent bought him he blew yours out. His
+weapon is the law, but his object is not justice. As often as not he aims
+at defeating justice, and the more skilful a lawyer he is the more
+injustice he succeeds in doing. It is this detachment from the merits of a
+case, this deliberate repudiation of conscience in his business relations
+that makes him so suspect. Of course he has a very sound reply. "It is my
+business to put my client's case, and my opponent's business to put his
+client's case. And it is the business of the judge and jury to see that
+justice is done as between us." That is true, but it does not get rid of
+the suspicion that attaches to a man who fights for the guilty or the
+innocent with equal fervour.
+
+And then he deals in such a tricky article. When Sancho Panza was Governor
+of the Island of Barataria he administered justice. If he had been the
+Governor of the Island of Britain he would have administered the law, and
+his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same
+relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were
+put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a
+rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by
+the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no
+love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look
+askance at those who practice them. You may be the greatest rascal of your
+time, but if you study the law and keep within its letter the strong lance
+of justice cannot reach you. No, law which is the servant of justice often
+betrays his master.
+
+But do not let us be unjust. If law to-day is more nearly the instrument of
+justice than it has ever been, it is the great lawyers to whom we chiefly
+owe the fact. There are Dodsons and Foggs in the law, but there are also
+Pyms and Pratts who have upheld the liberties of this country in the teeth
+of tyrant kings and servile Parliaments.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE BLIND
+
+
+I was coming off a Tube train last evening when some one said to me: "Will
+you please give this gentleman an arm to the lift? He is blind." I did so,
+and found, as I usually find in the case of the blind, that my companion
+was uncommonly talkative and cheerful. This gaiety of the blind is a
+perpetual wonder to me. It is as though the outer light being quenched an
+inner light of the spirit illuminates the darkness. Outside the night is
+black and dread, but inside there is warmth and brightness. The world is
+narrowed to the circle of one's own mind, but the very limitation feeds the
+flame of the spirit, and makes it leap higher. It was the most famous of
+blind Englishmen who in the days of his darkness made the blind Samson
+say:--
+
+    He that hath light within his own clear breast
+    May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day.
+
+And it has been remarked in many cases in which men have gone blind that
+their cheerfulness so far from being diminished has by some miracle gained
+a new strength. In no case of which I have had any knowledge has it
+apparently had the contrary effect. The zest of living seems heightened.
+Not long ago Mr. Galsworthy wrote to the _Times_ a letter in which he spoke
+with pity of the unhappiness of the blind, and there promptly descended on
+him an avalanche of protest from the blind themselves. I suppose there was
+never a man who seemed to have a more intense pleasure in life than the
+late Dr. Campbell, the founder of the Normal School for the Blind, who
+worked wonders in extending the range of the activities of the blind, and
+himself did such apparently impossible things as riding a bicycle and
+climbing mountains.
+
+Nor was the case of Mr. Pulitzer, the famous proprietor of the _New York
+World_, less remarkable. Night came down on him with terrible suddenness.
+He was watching the sunset from his villa in the Mediterranean one evening
+when he said: "How quickly the sun has set." "But it has not set," said his
+companion. "Oh, yes, it has; it is quite dark," he answered. In that moment
+he had gone stone blind. But I am told by those who knew him that his
+vivacity of mind was never greater than in the years of his blindness.
+
+My friend Mr. G.W.E. Russell has a theory that the advantage of the blind
+over the deaf and dumb in this matter of cheerfulness is perhaps more
+apparent than real. He points out that it is in company that the blind is
+least conscious of his misfortune, and that the deaf and dumb is most
+conscious of it. That is certainly the case. In conversation the sightless
+are on an equality with the seeing, while the deaf and dumb are shut up in
+a terrible isolation. The fact that they see is not their gain but their
+loss. They watch the movement of the lips and the signs of laughter, but
+this only adds to the bitterness of the prison of soundlessness in which
+they dwell. Hence the appearance of gloom. On the other hand, in solitude
+the deaf and dumb has the advantage. All the colour and movement of life is
+before him, while the blind is not only denied that vision of the outside
+world, but has a restriction of movement that the other does not share. Mr.
+Russell's conclusion, therefore, is that while the happiest moments of the
+blind are those when he is observed, the happiest of the deaf and dumb are
+when he is not observed.
+
+There is some measure of truth in this, but I believe, nevertheless, that
+the common impression is right, and that, judged by the test of the
+cheerful acceptance of affliction, the loss of sight is less depressing
+than the loss of hearing and speech. And this for a very obvious reason.
+After all, the main interest in life is in easy, familiar intercourse with
+our fellows. I love to watch a golden sunset, to walk in the high beech
+woods in spring--or, for that matter, in summer or autumn or winter--to see
+the apples reddening on the trees, and the hedgerows thick with
+blackberries. But this is the setting of my drama--the scenery of the play,
+not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity
+and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the
+cheerful interplay of mind with mind. In that interplay the blind man has
+full measure and brimming over. His very affliction intensifies his part in
+the human comedy and gives him a peculiar delight in homely intercourse. He
+is not merely at his ease in the human family: he is the centre of it. He
+fulfils Johnson's test of a good fellow: he is "a clubbable man."
+
+And even in the enjoyment of the external world it may be doubted whether
+he does not find as much mental stimulus as the deaf-and-dumb. He cannot
+see the sunset, but he hears the shout of the cuckoo, the song of the lark,
+"the hum of bees, and rustle of the bladed corn." And if, as usually
+happens, he has music in his soul, he has a realm of gold for his
+inheritance that makes life a perpetual holiday. Have you heard Mr. William
+Wolstenholme, the composer, improvising on the piano? If not, you have no
+idea what a jolly world the world of sounds can be to the blind. Of course,
+the case of the musician is hardly a fair test. With him, hearing is life
+and deafness death. There is no more pathetic story than that of Beethoven
+breaking the strings of the piano in his vain efforts to make his immortal
+harmonies penetrate his soundless ears. Can we doubt that had he been
+afflicted with blindness instead of deafness the tragedy of his life would
+have been immeasurably relieved? What peace, could he have heard his Ninth
+Symphony, would have slid into his soul. Blind Milton, sitting at his
+organ, was a less tragic figure and probably a happier man than Milton with
+a useless ear-trumpet would have been. Perhaps without the stimulus of the
+organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his
+grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal
+beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken,
+flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."
+
+It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible
+affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual
+effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to
+involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one
+affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual
+intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said:
+"I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The
+one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from
+life."
+
+
+
+
+ON TAXING VANITY
+
+
+That quaint idea of Sir Edward Clarke's that, as a revenue expedient in
+time of war, we should impose a tax on those who have names as well as
+numbers on their garden gates has a principle in it which is capable of
+wide extension. It is the principle of taxing us on our vanities. I am not
+suggesting that there is not also a practical point in Sir Edward's idea.
+There is no doubt that this custom of giving our houses names is the source
+of much unnecessary labour and irritation to other people--postmen,
+tradesmen, debt collectors, and errand boys. Mr. Smythe--formerly Smith--of
+236, Belinda Avenue, is easily discoverable, but what are you to do about
+Mr. Smythe, of Chatsworth House, Belinda Avenue, on a dark night? How are
+you to find him? There are 350 houses in Belinda Avenue, all as like as two
+peas, and though Mr. Smythe has a number, he never admits it. Chatsworth
+House is where he lives, and if you want him it's Chatsworth House that you
+have to find.
+
+The other night a friend of mine was called to the door at a late hour. It
+was dark and raining and dismal. At the door stood a coal-heaver. "Please,
+sir," he said, "can you tell me where Balmoral is? I've got a load of coal
+to take there, and I've been up and down this road in the dark twice, and
+can't make out where it is." "It's the fourth house from here to the
+right," said my friend, and the coal-heaver thanked him and went away. That
+illustrates the practical case for a tax on house names.
+
+But it was not that case which was in Sir Edward's mind. His view is that
+we ought to pay for the innocent vanity of living at Chatsworth House
+instead of 236, Belinda Avenue. Now if that principle is carried into
+effect, I see no end to its operation. I am not sure that Sir Edward
+himself would escape. I have often admired his magnificent side-whiskers. I
+doubt whether there is a pair of side-whiskers to match them in London.
+That he is proud of them goes without saying. Nobody could possibly have
+whiskers like them without feeling proud of them. I feel that if I had such
+whiskers I should never be away from the looking-glass. And consider the
+pleasurable employment they give in idle moments. Satan, it is said, has
+mischief still for idle hands to do. But no one with such streamers as Sir
+Edward's can ever have idle hands. When you have nothing else to do with
+them you stroke your whiskers and purr. Certainly they are worth paying
+for. I think they would be dirt cheap at a tax of L1 a side.
+
+And then there are white spats. I don't know how you regard white spats,
+but I never see them without feeling that something ought to be done about
+it. I daresay the people who wear them are quite nice people, but I think
+they ought to suffer in some way for the jolt they give to the
+sensibilities of humbler mortals who could no more wear white spats than
+they could stand on their head in the middle of Fleet Street. I am aware
+that white spats are often only a sort of business advertisement. I have
+known careers founded on a pair of white spats. There is Simpkins, for
+example. I remember quite well when he first came to the club in white
+spats. We all smiled and said it was like Simpkins. He was pushful, meant
+to get on, and had set up white spats as a part of his stock-in-trade. We
+knew Simpkins, of course, and discounted the white spats; but they made a
+great impression on his clients, and he forged ahead from that day. Now he
+wears a fur-lined coat, drives his own motor-car, and has a man in livery
+to receive you at the door. But the foundation of his fortunes were the
+white spats. He understood that maxim of Rochefoucauld that "to succeed in
+the world you must appear to have succeeded already," and the white spats
+did the trick. I think he ought to pay for them--L2 a spat is my figure.
+
+Most of us, too, I think, will agree that, if vanity is to be taxed, the
+wearing of an eyeglass cannot be overlooked. It is impossible to dissociate
+vanity from the use of the monocle. There are some people, it is true, who
+wear an eyeglass naturally and unaffectedly, as though they were really
+born with it and had forgotten that it was there. I saw a lady in a bus the
+other day who used an eyeglass and yet carried it so well, with such simple
+propriety and naturalness, that you could not feel that there was any
+vanity in the matter. But that is an exception. Ordinarily the wearing of a
+monocle seems like an announcement to the world that you are a person of
+consequence. Disraeli knew that. His remark, when Chamberlain made his
+first appearance in the House, that "at least he wore his eyeglass like a
+gentleman," showed that he knew that, in general, it was an affectation. It
+was so in his own case, of course. I hope Sir Edward Clarke will agree that
+L5 is a reasonable tariff for an eyeglass.
+
+There are a thousand other vanities more or less innocent, that will occur
+to you in looking round. I should put a very stiff tax on painted cheeks
+and hair-dyes. Any lady dyeing her hair once would be taxed L5 for the
+privilege. If, growing tired of auburn, she decided to change again to a
+raven hue, she would pay L10. The tax, in fact, might be doubled for every
+change of colour. If rather than pay the tax Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones
+resolves to wear her hair as nature arranged that she should, life will be
+simplified for me. The first time I met Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones she had
+black hair. A year later I met her husband with a lady with chestnut hair.
+He introduced me to her as his wife, and she said we had met before. I said
+I thought she was mistaken, and it was not until we had parted that I
+realised that it was the same lady with another head of hair and another
+system of coloration altogether.
+
+The weak point about Sir Edward's idea as a financial expedient is that so
+few of our vanities would survive the attention of the tax-collector.
+Personally, I should have the name-plate off my gate at once. Indeed, I'm
+not sure I'll not have it off as it is. It was there when I came, and I
+have always been a little ashamed of its foppery, and have long used only
+the number. Now the name seems rather more absurd than ever. Its
+pretentiousness is out of tune with these times. I think many of us are
+getting ashamed of our little vanities without the help of the
+tax-collector.
+
+
+
+
+ON THOUGHTS AT FIFTY
+
+
+Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little
+girl--or was it a boy?--of his acquaintance. The child was fond of
+birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have
+any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that
+indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I
+remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium
+of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas,
+Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up
+against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a
+nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one
+has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the
+occasion.
+
+But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday
+without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's
+limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an
+impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow
+leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and
+see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty
+years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those
+days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty
+was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an
+antiquity.
+
+And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I
+feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that
+when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad
+longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be
+tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part
+in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the
+boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.
+What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the
+contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket
+than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented
+acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young
+fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet
+eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is
+something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet
+eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its
+manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had
+grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson,
+with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young
+fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of
+spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?
+
+Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul.
+You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade
+at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:--
+
+    I am ashes where once I was fire.
+      And the soul in my bosom is dead;
+    What I loved I now merely admire,
+      And my heart is as grey as my head.
+
+Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always
+dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as
+indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that
+triumphant envoi of _Asolando_ as his last expression of the eternal youth
+of the soul.
+
+In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay
+with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the
+spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy
+spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened--glowing not
+with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager
+spirit cries for the moon.
+
+    We look before and after,
+      And pine for what is not.
+
+But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the
+moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is
+not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that
+matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been
+avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the
+spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach.
+And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another
+discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs"
+themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.
+
+But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if
+ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his
+half-century. Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present
+Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a
+practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days
+associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over
+eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned
+the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the
+Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly
+changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic
+like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the
+question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep
+my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts
+live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."
+
+The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests.
+Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been
+for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I
+thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred
+my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round
+enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune
+to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty.
+And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is
+not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the
+cool of the evening has come.
+
+
+
+
+THE ONE-EYED CAT
+
+
+"There's Peggy with that horrid cat again--the one-eyed cat from over the
+fence." I looked out as I heard the ejaculation, and there in truth coming
+down the garden path was Peggy bearing affectionately in her arms the
+one-eyed cat from over the fence. Peggy likes the animal in spite of its
+one eye. I am not sure that she does not like it all the more because of
+its one eye. I think she has an idea that if she nurses the cat it forgets
+that it has only one eye and recovers its happiness. She has a passion for
+all four-legged creatures. I have seen her spend a whole day picking
+handfuls of grass in the orchard and running with them to the donkey or the
+horse standing patiently in the neighbour's paddock, and when she hasn't
+animals to play with she will put a horseshoe on each hand and each foot,
+and then you will hear from above the plod-plod-plod of a horse going its
+daily round. But while she has a comprehensive affection for all
+four-legged things, her most fervent love is reserved for the halt and the
+blind.
+
+It is only among children that we find the quality of charity sufficiently
+strong to forgive deformity. The natural instinct is to turn away from any
+physical imperfection. It is the instinct of the race for the preservation
+of its forms. We call these forms beauty and the departure from them
+ugliness, and it is from "beauty's rose," as Shakespeare says, that "we
+desire increase." If you shudder at the touch of a withered hand or at the
+sight of a one-eyed cat, it is because you feel that they are a menace to
+the established forms of life. You are unconsciously playing the part of
+policeman for nature. You are the guardian of its traditions when you blush
+at the glance of two eyes and shudder at the glance of one.
+
+And yet it is not impossible to fall in love with the physically defective
+and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident
+mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play
+with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he
+liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory
+that gave a glamour to deformity and made it beautiful. The squint brought
+back to him the memory of the Golden Age, and through the mist of that
+memory it was transmuted into loveliness.
+
+Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle. Intellectual sympathy
+will do it, too. Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that,
+given half an hour's start, he would win the smiles of any woman against
+any competitor. And when one of his lady admirers, engaged in defending
+him, was reminded that he squinted badly, she replied: "Of course he does;
+but he doesn't squint more than a man of his genius ought to squint." Nor
+was it women alone whom the fellow fascinated. Who can forget the scene
+when Tom Davies brought him into the company of Dr. Johnson, who hated
+Wilkes' Radicalism, and would never willingly have consented to meet him?
+For a time Johnson refused to unbend, but at last he could hold out no
+longer, and fell a victim to the charm of Wilkes' talk.
+
+In the same way, Johnson believed his wife to be a woman of perfect beauty.
+To the rest of the world she was extraordinarily plain and commonplace, but
+to Johnson she was the mirror of beauty. "Pretty creature," he would say
+with a sigh in referring to her after her death.
+
+And there, I fancy, we touch the root of the matter. The sense of beauty is
+in one respect an affair of the soul, and only superficially an aesthetic
+quality. We start with a common prejudice in favour of certain physical
+forms. They are the forms with which nature has made us familiar, and we
+seek to perpetuate them. But if the conventionally beautiful form is allied
+with spiritual ugliness it ceases to be beautiful to us, and if the
+conventionally ugly form is allied with spiritual beauty that beauty
+irradiates the physical deficiency. The soul dominates the senses. Francis
+Thompson expresses the idea very beautifully when he says:--
+
+    I cannot tell what beauty is her dole,
+    Who cannot see her features for her soul.
+    As birds see not the casement for the sky.
+
+But there is another sense in which beauty is the most matter-of-fact
+thing. I can conceive that if the human family had developed only one eye,
+and that planted in the centre of the forehead, the appearance of a person
+with two eyes would be as offensive to our sense of beauty as a hand that
+consisted not of fingers but of thumbs. We should go to the show to see the
+two-eyed man with just the same feelings as we go now to see the bearded
+woman. We should not go to admire his two eyes, any more than we go to
+admire the beard; we should go to enjoy a pleasant sense of disgust at his
+misfortune and a comfortable satisfaction at the fact that we had not been
+the victims of such a calamity. We should roll our single eye with a proud
+feeling that we were in the true line of beauty, from which the two-eyed
+man in front was a hideous and fantastic departure.
+
+Beauty, in short, is only a tribute which we pay to necessity. In equipping
+itself for the struggle for existence humanity has found that it is
+convenient to have two eyes and a stereoscopic vision, just as it is
+convenient to have four fingers on the hand and one thumb instead of five
+thumbs. Our members have been developed in the manner best fitted to enable
+us to fight our battle. And the more perfectly they fulfil that supreme
+condition the more beautiful we declare them to be. Our ideas of beauty,
+therefore, are not absolute; they are conditional. They are the humble
+servants of our necessity. Two eyes are necessary for us to get about our
+business, and so we fall in love with two eyes, and the more perfect they
+are for their work the more we fall in love with them, and the more
+beautiful we declare them to be.
+
+I think that Peggy, nursing her one-eyed cat there in the sun, has not yet
+accepted our creed of beauty. She will be as conventional as the rest of us
+when her frocks are longer.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HATS
+
+
+The other day I went into a hatter's to get my hat ironed. It had been
+ruffled by the weather, and I had a reason for wishing it to look as new
+and glossy as possible. And as I waited and watched the process of
+polishing, the hatter talked to me on the subject that really interested
+him--that is, the subject of hats and heads.
+
+"Yes," said he, in reply to some remark I had made; "there's a wonderful
+difference in the shape of 'eads _and_ the size. Now your 'ead is what you
+may call an ord'nary 'ead. I mean to say," he added, no doubt seeing a
+shadow of disappointment pass across my ordinary face, "I mean to say, it
+ain't what you would call extry-ord'nary. But there's some 'eads--well,
+look at that 'at there. It belongs to a gentleman with a wonderful
+funny-shaped 'ead, long and narrer and full of nobbles--'stror'nary 'ead 'e
+'as. And as for sizes, it's wonderful what a difference there is. I do a
+lot of trade with lawyers, and it's astonishing the size of their 'eads.
+You'd be surprised. I suppose it's the amount of thinking they have to do
+that makes their 'eads swell. Now that 'at there belongs to Mr. ------
+(mentioning the name of a famous lawyer), wonderful big 'ead 'e
+'as--7-1/2--that's what 'e takes, and there's lots of 'em takes over 7.
+
+"It seems to me," he went on, "that the size of the 'ead is according to
+the occupation. Now I used to be in a seaport town, and I used to serve a
+lot of ships' captains. 'Stror'nary the 'eads they have. I suppose it's the
+anxiety and worry they get, thinking about the tides and the winds and the
+icebergs and things...."
+
+I went out of the shop with my ord'nary 'ead, conscious of the fact that I
+had made a poor impression on the hatter. To him I was only a 6-7/8 size,
+and consequently a person of no consequence. I should have liked to point
+out to him that it is not always the big heads that have the jewel in them.
+Of course, it is true that great men often have big heads. Bismarck's size
+was 7-1/4, so was Gladstone's, so was Campbell-Bannerman's. But on the
+other hand, Byron had a small head, and a very small brain. And didn't
+Goethe say that Byron was the finest brain that Europe had produced since
+Shakespeare? I should not agree in ordinary circumstances, but as a person
+with a smallish head, I am prepared in this connection to take Goethe's
+word on the subject. As Holmes points out, it is not the size of the brain
+but its convolutions that are important (I think, by the way, that Holmes
+had a small head). Now I should have liked to tell the hatter that though
+my head was small I had strong reason to believe that the convolutions of
+my brain were quite top-hole.
+
+I did not do so and I only recall the incident now because it shows how we
+all get in the way of looking at life through our own particular peep-hole.
+Here is a man who sees all the world through the size of its hats. He
+reverences Jones because he takes 7-1/2; he dismisses Smith as of no
+account because he only takes 6-3/4. In some degree, we all have this
+restricted professional vision. The tailor runs his eye over your clothes
+and reckons you up according to the cut of your garments and the degree of
+shininess they display. You are to him simply a clothes-peg and your merit
+is in exact ratio to the clothes you carry. The bootmaker looks at your
+boots and takes your intellectual, social and financial measurement from
+their quality and condition. If you are down-at-the-heel, the glossy
+condition of your hat will not alter his opinion about you. The hat does
+not come in his range of vision. It is not a part of his criteria.
+
+It is so with the dentist. He judges all the world by its teeth. One look
+in your mouth and he has settled and immovable convictions about your
+character, your habits, your physical condition, your position, and your
+mental attributes. He touches a nerve and you wince. "Ah," says he to
+himself, "this man takes too much alcohol and tobacco and tea and coffee."
+He sees the teeth are irregular. "Poor fellow," he says, "how badly he was
+brought up!" He observes that the teeth are neglected. "A careless fellow,"
+he says. "Spends his money on follies and neglects his family I'll be
+bound." And by the time he has finished with you he feels that he could
+write your biography simply from the evidence of your teeth. And I daresay
+it would be as true as most biographies--and as false.
+
+In the same way, the business man looks at life through the keyhole of his
+counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his
+neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When
+one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left
+only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was
+quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a
+million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in
+_Vanity Fair_:--
+
+"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry
+and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account.
+Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a
+better man than I was, this day twenty years--a better man I should say by
+twenty thousand pounds."
+
+I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am
+disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in
+the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he
+"sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer
+comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality
+of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and
+the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you
+among the commonplace.
+
+In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own
+tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours
+by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private
+arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of
+seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so
+many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.
+
+
+
+
+ON SEEING LONDON
+
+
+I see that the _Spectator_, in reviewing a new book on the Tower, says
+that, whilst visitors to London usually visit that historic monument,
+Londoners themselves rarely visit it. There is, I suppose, a good deal of
+truth in this. I know a man who was born in London, and has spent all his
+working life in Fleet Street, who confesses that he has never yet been
+inside the Tower. It is not because he is lacking in interest. He has been
+to St. Peter's at Rome, and he went to Madrid largely to see the Prado. If
+the Tower had been on the other side of Europe, I think he would probably
+have made a pilgrimage to it, but it has been within a stone's-throw of him
+all his life, and therefore he has never found time to visit it.
+
+It is so, more or less, with most of us. Apply the test to yourself or to
+your friends who live in London, and you will probably be astonished at the
+number of precious things that you and they have not seen--not because they
+are so distant, but because they are so near. Have you been to the Record
+Office, for example? I haven't, although it is within a couple of hundred
+yards of where I work and although I know it is rich in priceless
+treasures. I am always going, but "never get," as they say in Lancashire.
+It is too handy.
+
+I was talking the other day to a City merchant who lives at Sydenham, and
+who has never seen Hampstead Heath. He had been travelling from Sydenham to
+the City for a quarter of a century, and has worn the rut so deep that he
+cannot get out of it, and has hardly more likelihood of seeing the Northern
+Heights than of visiting the mountains of the moon. Yet Hampstead Heath,
+which he could see in a morning for the cost of a threepenny ride in the
+Tube, is one of the incomparable things of Nature. I doubt whether there is
+such a wonderful open space within the limits of any other great city. It
+has hints of the seaside and the mountain, the moor and the down in most
+exquisite union, and the Spaniards Road is as noble a promenade as you will
+find anywhere.
+
+This incuriousness is not a peculiarity of Londoners only. It is a part of
+that temporising habit that afflicts most of us. If a thing can be done at
+any time, then that is just the thing that never gets done. If my Fleet
+Street friend knew that the Tower was going to be blown to pieces by a
+Zeppelin to-morrow he would, I am sure, rush off to see it this afternoon.
+But he is conscious that he has a whole lifetime to see it in, and so he
+will never see it. We are most of us slackers at the bottom, and need the
+discipline of a timetable to keep us on the move. If I could put off
+writing this article till to-morrow I should easily convince myself that I
+hadn't time to write it to-day.
+
+The point is very well expressed in that story of the Pope who received
+three American visitors in turn. "How long are you staying?" he said to the
+first. "Six months, your Holiness," was the reply. "You will be able to see
+something of Rome in that time," said the Pope. The second was staying
+three months. "You will see a great deal of Rome in three months," said the
+Pope. The third was only staying three weeks. "You'll see all there is to
+be seen in Rome in three weeks," was the Pope's comment. He was a good
+judge of human nature.
+
+But if we Londoners are no worse than most people we certainly miss more,
+for there is no such book of revelation as this which we look at so
+differently. I love to walk its streets with those who know its secrets.
+Mr. John Burns is such a one. The very stones begin to be eloquent when he
+is about. They pour out memories at his invitation as the rock poured out
+water at the touch of Moses. The houses tell you who built them and who
+lived hi them and where their stone came from. The whole pageant of history
+passes before you, and you see the spot where Julius Caesar crossed the
+river at Battersea--where else should he cross?--you discover, it may be
+for the first time, the exquisite beauty of Waterloo Bridge, and learn what
+Canovas said about it. York Gate tells you of the long past when the
+Embankment was not, and when great nobles came through that archway to take
+the boat for Westminster or the Tower. He makes you dive out of the Strand
+to see a beautiful doorway, and out of Fleet Street to admire the Henry
+room. Every foot of Whitehall babbles its legends; you see Tyburn as our
+forefathers saw it, and George Fox meeting Cromwell there on his return
+from Ireland. In Westminster Hall he is at his best. You feel that he knew
+Rufus and all the masons who built that glorious fabric. In fact, you
+almost feel that he built it himself, so vividly does its story live in his
+mind and so strong is his sense of possession.
+
+If I were a Dictator I would make him the Great Showman of London. I would
+have him taking us round and inspiring us with something of his own delight
+in our astonishing City. We should no longer look upon London then as if it
+were a sort of Bradshaw's Guide: we should find it as fascinating as a
+fairy tale, as full of human interest as a Canterbury Pilgrimage. We should
+never go to Snow Hill without memories of Fagin, or to Eastcheap without
+seeing Falstaff swaggering along its pavements. Bread Street would resound
+to us with the tread of young Milton, and Southwark with the echoes of
+Shakespeare's voice and the jolly laughter of the Pilgrims at the Tabard.
+Hogarth would accompany us about Covent Garden, and out of Bolt Court we
+should see the lumbering figure of Johnson emerging into his beloved Fleet
+Street. We would sit by the fountain in the Temple with Tom Pinch, and take
+a wherry to Westminster with Mr. Pepys. We should see London then as a
+great spiritual companionship, in which it is our privilege to have a
+fleeting part.
+
+
+
+
+ON CATCHING THE TRAIN
+
+
+Thank heaven! I have caught it.... I am in a corner seat, the compartment
+is not crowded, the train is about to start, and for an hour and a half,
+while we rattle towards that haven of solitude on the hill that I have
+written of aforetime, I can read, or think, or smoke, or sleep, or talk, or
+write as I choose. I think I will write, for I am in the humour for
+writing. Do you know what it is to be in the humour for writing--to feel
+that there is a head of steam somewhere that must blow off? It isn't so
+much that you have something you want to say as that you must say
+something. And, after all, what does the subject matter? Any peg will do to
+hang your hat on. The hat is the thing. That saying of Rameau fits the idea
+to perfection. Some one was asking that great composer if he did not find
+difficulty in selecting a subject. "Difficulty? A subject?" said Rameau.
+"Not at all. One subject is as good as another. Here, bring me the _Dutch
+Gazette_."
+
+That is how I feel now, as the lights of London fade in our wake and the
+fresh air of the country blows in at the window. Subject? Difficulty? Here
+bring me the _Dutch Gazette_. But while any subject would serve there is
+one of particular interest to me at this moment. It came into my mind as I
+ran along the platform just now. It is the really important subject of
+catching trains. There are some people who make nothing of catching trains.
+They can catch trains with as miraculous an ease as Cinquevalli catches
+half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their
+sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or
+office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying.
+Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do
+not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that
+there's plenty of room they manifest no surprise.
+
+I have in mind a man with whom I once went walking among the mountains on
+the French-Italian border. He was enormously particular about trains and
+arrangements the day or the week before we needed them, and he was
+wonderfully efficient at the job. But as the time approached for catching a
+train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured. He began to take his time
+over everything and to concern himself with the arrangements of the next
+day or the next week, as though he had forgotten all about the train that
+was imminent, or was careless whether he caught it or not. And when at last
+he had got to the train, he began to remember things. He would stroll off
+to get a time-table or to buy a book, or to look at the engine--especially
+to look at the engine. And the nearer the minute for starting the more
+absorbed he became in the mechanism of the thing, and the more animated was
+his explanation of the relative merits of the P.L.M. engine and the
+North-Western engine. He was always given up as lost, and yet always
+stepped in as the train was on the move, his manner aggravatingly
+unruffled, his talk pursuing the quiet tenor of his thought about engines
+or about what we should do the week after next.
+
+Now I am different. I have been catching trains all my life, and all my
+life I have been afraid I shouldn't catch them. Familiarity with the habits
+of trains cannot get rid of a secret conviction that their aim is to give
+me the slip if it can be done. No faith in my own watch can affect my
+doubts as to the reliability of the watch of the guard or the station clock
+or whatever deceitful signal the engine-driver obeys. Moreover, I am
+oppressed with the possibilities of delay on the road to the station. They
+crowd in on me like the ghosts into the tent of King Richard. There may be
+a block in the streets, the bus may break down, the taxi-driver may be
+drunk or not know the way, or think I don't know the way, and take me round
+and round the squares as Tony Lumpkin drove his mother round and round the
+pond, or--in fact, anything may happen, and it is never until I am safely
+inside (as I am now) that I feel really happy.
+
+Now, of course this is a very absurd weakness. I ought to be ashamed to
+confess it. I am ashamed to confess it. And that is the advantage of
+writing under a pen name. You can confess anything you like, and nobody
+thinks any the worse of you. You ease your own conscience, have a gaol
+delivery of your failings--look them, so to speak, straight in the face,
+and pass sentence on them--and still enjoy the luxury of not being found
+out. You have all the advantages of a conviction without the nuisance of
+the penalty. Decidedly, this writing under a pen name is a great easement
+of the soul.
+
+It reminds me of an occasion on which I was climbing with a famous rock
+climber. I do not mind confessing (over my pen name) that I am not good on
+rocks. My companion on the rope kept addressing me at critical moments by
+the name of Saunders. My name, I rejoice to say, is not Saunders, and he
+knew it was not Saunders, but he had to call me something, and in the
+excitement of the moment could think of nothing but Saunders. Whenever I
+was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian
+instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or
+lower down. And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it
+was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders. I seemed to see him as
+a laborious, futile person who would have been better employed at home
+looking after his hens. And so in these articles, I seem again to be
+impersonating the ineffable Saunders, of whom I feel at liberty to speak
+plainly. I see before me a long vista of self-revelations, the real title
+of which ought to be "The Showing Up of Saunders."
+
+But to return to the subject. This train-fever is, of course, only a
+symptom. It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common
+and incurable an affliction. The complaint has been very well satirised by
+one who suffered from it. "I have had many and severe troubles in my life,"
+he said, "_but most of them never happened_." That is it. We people who
+worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative
+disaster. The heavens are always going to fall on us. We look ahead, like
+Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they
+are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest,
+but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.
+
+And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless.
+Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to
+pass, but the things of which we do not dream. The bolt comes from the
+blue. We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the
+small of the back. We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn
+to see Europe in flames. Cowper put the case against all "fearful saints"
+(and sinners) when he said:
+
+    The clouds ye so much dread
+    Are big with mercy, and will break
+    With blessings on your head.
+
+It is the clouds you don't dread that swamp you. Cowper knew, for he too
+was an apprehensive mortal, and it is only the apprehensive mortal who
+really knows the full folly of his apprehensiveness.
+
+Now, save once, I have never lost a train in my life. The exception was at
+Calais when the Brussels express did, in defiance of the time-table, really
+give me and others the slip, carrying with it my bag containing my clothes
+and the notes of a most illuminating lecture. I chased that bag all through
+Northern France and Belgium, inquiring at wayside stations, wiring to
+junctions, hunting among the mountains of luggage at Lille.
+
+It was at Lille that---But the train is slowing down. There is the slope of
+the hillside, black against the night sky, and among the trees I see the
+glimmer of a light beckoning me as the lonely lamp in Greenhead Ghyll used
+to beckon Wordsworth's Michael. The night is full of stars, the landscape
+glistens with a late frost: it will be a jolly two miles' tramp to that
+beacon on the hill.
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF CHESS
+
+
+I sometimes think that growing old must be like the end of a tiring day.
+You have worked hard, or played hard, toiled over the mountain under the
+burning sun, and now the evening has come and you sit at ease at the inn
+and ask for nothing but a pipe, a quiet talk, and so to bed. "And the
+morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet." You have had your fill of
+adventure for the day. The morning's passion for experience and possession
+is satisfied, and your ambitions have shrunk to the dimensions of an easy
+chair.
+
+And so I think it is with that other evening when the late blackbird is
+fluting its last vesper song and the toys of the long day are put aside,
+and the plans of new conquests are waste-paper. I remember hearing Sir
+Edward Grey saying once how he looked forward to the time when he would
+burn all his Blue-books and mulch his rose-trees with the ashes. And Mr.
+Belloc has given us a very jolly picture of the way in which he is going to
+spend his evening:
+
+    If I ever become a rich man,
+      Or if ever I grow to be old,
+    I will build a house with deep thatch
+      To shelter me from the cold,
+    And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
+      And the story of Sussex told.
+    I will hold my house in the high woods
+      Within a walk of the sea,
+    And the men that were boys when I was a boy
+      Shall sit and drink with me.
+
+There is Mr. Birrell, too, who, as I have remarked elsewhere, once said
+that when he retired he would take his modest savings into the country "and
+really read Boswell."
+
+These are typical, I suppose, of the dreams that most of us cultivate about
+old age. I, too, look forward to a cottage under the high beech woods, to a
+well-thumbed Boswell, and to a garden where I shall mulch my rose-trees and
+watch the buds coming with as rich a satisfaction as any that the hot
+battle of the day has given me. But there is another thing I shall ask for.
+On the lower shelf of the bookcase, close to the Boswell, there will have
+to be a box of chessmen and a chessboard, and the men who were boys when I
+was a boy, and who come and sit with me, will be expected after supper to
+set out the chessmen as instinctively as they fill their pipes. And then
+for an hour, or it may be two, we shall enter into that rapturous realm
+where the knight prances and the bishop lurks with his shining sword and
+the rooks come crashing through in double file. The fire will sink and we
+shall not stir it, the clock will strike and we shall not hear it, the pipe
+will grow cold and we shall forget to relight it.
+
+Blessed be the memory of him who gave the world this immortal game. For the
+price of a taxicab ride or a visit to the cinema, you may, thanks to that
+unknown benefactor, possess a world of illimitable adventures. When Alice
+passed through the Looking Glass into Wonderland, she did not more
+completely leave the common day behind than when you sit down before the
+chessboard with a stout foe before you and pass out into this magic realm
+of bloodless combat. I have heard unhappy people say that it is "dull."
+Dull, my dear sir or madam? Why, there is no excitement on this earth
+comparable with this kingly game. I have had moments at Lord's, I admit,
+and at the Oval. But here is a game which is all such moments, where you
+are up to the eyes in plots and ambuscades all the time, and the fellow in
+front of you is up to his eyes in them, too. What agonies as you watch his
+glance wandering over the board. Does he suspect that trap? Does he see the
+full meaning of that offer of the knight which seems so tempting?... His
+hand touches the wrong piece and your heart thumps a Te Deum. Is he?... yes
+... no ... he pauses ... he removes his hand from the piece ... oh,
+heavens, his eye is wandering back to that critical pawn ... ah, light is
+dawning on him ... you see it illuminating his face as he bends over the
+board, you hear a murmur of revelation issuing from his lips ... he is
+drawing back from the precipice ... your ambuscade is in vain and now you
+must start plotting and scheming all over again.
+
+Nay, say it is anything you like, but do not say it is dull. And do not,
+please, suggest that I am talking of it as an old man's game only. I have
+played it since I was a boy, forty years ago, and I cannot say at what age
+I have loved it best. It is a game for all ages, all seasons, all sexes,
+all climates, for summer evenings or winter nights, for land or for sea. It
+is the very water of Lethe for sorrow or disappointment, for there is no
+oblivion so profound as that which it offers for your solace. And what
+satisfaction is there comparable with a well-won "mate"? It is different
+from any other joy that games have to offer. There is a swift delight in a
+late "cut" or a ball that spread-eagles the other fellow's wicket; there is
+a delicate pleasure in a long jenny neatly negotiated, in a drive that
+sails straight from the tee towards the flag on the green, in a hard return
+that hits the back line of the tennis court. But a perfect "mate"
+irradiates the mind with the calm of indisputable things. It has the
+absoluteness of mathematics, and it gives you victory ennobled by the sense
+of intellectual struggle and stern justice. There are "mates" that linger
+in the memory like a sonnet of Keats.
+
+It is medicine for the sick mind or the anxious spirit. We need a means of
+escape from the infinite, from the maze of this incalculable life, from the
+burden and the mystery of a world where all things "go contrairy," as Mrs.
+Gummidge used to say. Some people find the escape in novels that move
+faithfully to that happy ending which the tangled skein of life denies us.
+Some find it in hobbies where the mind is at peace in watching processes
+that are controllable and results that with patience are assured. But in
+the midst of this infinity I know no finite world so complete and
+satisfying as that I enter when I take down the chessmen and marshal my
+knights and squires on the chequered field. It is then I am truly happy. I
+have closed the door on the infinite and inexplicable and have come into a
+kingdom where justice reigns, where cause and effect follow "as the night
+the day," and where, come victory or come defeat, the sky is always clear
+and the joy unsullied.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE DOWNS
+
+
+We spread our lunch on the crown of one of those great billows of the downs
+that stand along the sea. Down in the hollows tiny villages or farmsteads
+stood in the midst of clumps of trees, and the cultivated lands looked like
+squares of many-coloured carpets, brown carpets and yellow carpets and
+green carpets, with the cloud shadows passing over them and moving like
+battalions up the gracious slopes of the downs beyond. A gleam of white in
+the midst of one of the brown fields caught the eye. It seemed like a patch
+of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly
+it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white
+that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous
+cry that seems to have in it all the unsatisfied hunger of the sea.
+
+In this splendid spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly
+diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a
+ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over
+the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to
+another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate the
+faint suggestions into known terms. At first it seems that, save for the
+larks that spring up here and there with their cascades of song, the whole
+of this immense vacancy is soundless. But listen. There is "the wind on the
+heath, brother." And below that, and only audible when you have attuned
+your ear to the silence, is the low murmur of the sea.
+
+You begin to grow interested in probing the secrecies of this great
+stillness. That? Ah, that was the rumble of some distant railway train
+going to Brighton or Eastbourne. But what was that? Through the voices of
+the wind and the sea that we have learned to distinguish we catch another
+sound, curiously hollow and infinitely remote, not vaguely pervasive like
+the murmur of the sea, but round and precise like the beating of a drum
+somewhere on the confines of the earth.
+
+"The guns!"
+
+Yes, the guns. Across fifty miles of sea and fifty miles of land the sound
+is borne to us as we sit in the midst of this great peace of earth and sky.
+When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air
+it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the
+beating of a pulse--baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin
+counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own,
+speculating as to the course of the battle.
+
+We have become spectators of the great tragedy, and the throb of the guns
+touches the scene with new suggestions. Those cloud shadows drifting across
+the valley and up the slopes of the downs on the other side take on the
+shapes of massed battalions. The apparent solitude does not destroy the
+impression. There is no solitude so complete to the outward eye as that
+which broods over the country when the armies face each other in the grips
+of death. I have looked from the mountain of Rheims across just such a
+valley as this. Twenty miles of battle front lay before me, and in all that
+great field of vision there was not a moving thing visible. There were no
+cattle in the fields and no ploughmen following their teams. Roads marched
+across the landscape, but they were empty roads. It was as though life had
+vanished from the earth. Yet I knew that all over that great valley the
+earth was crawling with life and full of immense and sinister
+secrecies--the galleries of the sappers, the trenches and redoubts, the
+hiding-places of great guns, the concealed observations of the watchers.
+Yes, it was just such a scene as this. The only difference was that you had
+not to put your ear to the ground to catch the thunder of the guns.
+
+But the voice of war that has broken in upon our peace fades when we are
+once more on the move over the downs, and the visions it has brought with
+it seem unreal and phantasmal in their serene and sunlit world. The shadows
+turn to mere shadows again, and we tread the wild thyme and watch the
+spiral of the lark with careless rapture. We dip down into a valley to a
+village hidden among the trees, without fear or thought of bomb-proof
+shelters and masked batteries, and there in a cottage with the roses over
+the porch we take rest and counsel over the teacups. Then once more on to
+the downs. The evening shadows are stretching across the valleys, but on
+these spacious heights the sunshine still rests. Some one starts singing
+that jolly old song, "The Farmer's Boy," and soon the air resounds to the
+chorus:
+
+    "To plough and sow, to reap and mow,
+    And be a farmer's boy-o-o-o-oy,
+      And be a farmer's boy."
+
+No one recalls the throbbing of the guns or stops to catch it from amidst
+the murmurs of the air. This--this is the reality. That was only an echo
+from a bad dream from which we have awakened.
+
+And when an hour or two later we reach the little village by the sea we
+rush for the letters that await us with eager curiosity. There is silence
+in the room as each of us devours the budget of news awaiting us. I am
+vaguely conscious as I read that some one has left the room with a sense of
+haste. I go up to my bedroom, and when I return the sitting-room is empty
+save for one figure. I see at a glance that something has happened.
+
+"Robert has been killed in battle," he says. How near the sound of the guns
+had come!
+
+
+
+
+ON SHORT LEGS AND LONG LEGS
+
+
+A day or two ago a soldier, returned from the front, was loudly inveighing
+in a railway carriage against the bumptiousness and harshness of the
+captain under whom he had served. "Let me git 'im over 'ere," he said, "and
+I'll lay 'im out--see if I don't. I've 'ad enough of 'is bullyin'. It ain't
+even as if 'e was a decent figure of a man. 'E don't stand more'n
+five-feet-two. I could knock 'im out with one 'and, and I'd 'ave done it
+before now only you mustn't out there. If you did you'd get a pound o' lead
+pumped into you."
+
+Now, I dare say little five-feet-two deserved all that was said of him, and
+all he will get by way of punishment; but the point about the remark that
+interests me is the contempt it revealed for the man of small stature.
+There's no doubt that a little man starts with a grievance, with an
+aggravating sense of an inferiority that has nothing to do with his real
+merits. I know the feeling. For myself, I am just the right height--no
+more, no less. I am five-feet-nine-and-a-half, and I wouldn't be a shade
+different either way. I dare say that is the general experience. Every one
+feels that his own is really the ideal standard. It is so in most things.
+Aristotle said that a man ought to marry at thirty-eight. I think he said
+it because he himself married at thirty-eight. Now, I married at
+twenty-three, and my opinion is that the right age at which to get
+married--if you are of the marrying sort--is twenty-three. In short,
+whatever we do or whatever we are, we have a deep-rooted conviction that we
+are "it." And it is well that it should be so. Without this innocent
+self-satisfaction there would be a lot more misery in the world.
+
+But though I am the perfect height of five-feet-nine-and-a-half, I always
+feel depressed and out-classed in the presence of a man, say of
+six-feet-two. He may be an ass, but still I have to look up to him in a
+physical sense, and the mere act of looking up seems to endow him with a
+moral advantage. I feel a grievance at the outrageous length of the fellow,
+and find I want to make him fully understand that though I am only
+five-feet-nine-and-a-half in stature, my intellectual measurement is about
+ten feet, and that I am looking down on him much more than he is looking
+down on me.
+
+It is this irksome self-consciousness that is the permanent affliction of
+the physically small man. Indeed, it is the affliction of any one who has
+any physical peculiarity--a hare-lip, for example. Byron raged all his life
+against his club-foot, and doubtless that malformation was largely the
+cause of his savage contempt for a world that went about on two
+well-matched feet. I am sure that if I had a strawberry mark on the face I
+should never think about anything else. If I talked to any one I should
+find him addressing his words to my strawberry mark. I should feel that he
+was deliberately and offensively dwelling on my disfigurement, saying to
+himself how glad he was he hadn't a strawberry mark and what a miserable
+chap I must be with such an article. He would not be doing anything of the
+sort, of course. He would probably be doing his best to keep his eyes off
+the strawberry mark. But I shouldn't think so, for I should be in that
+unhealthy condition of mind in which the whole world would seem to revolve
+around my strawberry mark.
+
+And so with the small man. He lives in perpetual consciousness that the
+world is talking over his head, not because there is less sense in his head
+than in other heads, but simply because his legs are shorter than the
+popular size of legs. He is either overlooked altogether, or he is looked
+down upon, and in either case he is miserable. Occasionally his shortage
+lays him open to public ridicule. A barrister whom I knew--a man with a
+large head, a fair-sized body, and legs not worth mentioning--once rose to
+address a judge before whom he had not hitherto appeared. He had hardly
+opened his mouth when the judge remarked severely: "It is usual for counsel
+to stand in addressing the Court." "My lord," said the barrister, "I am
+standing."
+
+Now can you imagine an agony more bitter than that to a sensitive man? I
+daresay he lost his case, for he must certainly have lost his head. You
+cannot cross-examine a witness effectively when you are thinking all the
+time about your miserable legs. And even if he won his case it probably
+gave him no comfort, for he would feel that the jury had given their
+verdict out of pity for the "little 'un." It is this self-consciousness
+that is the cause of that assertiveness and vanity that are often
+characteristic of the little man. He is probably not more assertive or more
+vain than the general run of us, but we can keep those defects dark, so to
+speak. He, on the other hand, has to go through life on tip-toe, carrying
+his head as high as his neck will lift it, and saying, as it were: "Hi! you
+long-legged fellows, don't forget me!" And this very reasonable anxiety to
+have "a place in the sun" gives him the appearance of being aggressive and
+vain. He is only trying to get level with the long-legged people, just as
+the short-sighted man tries to get level with the long-sighted man by
+wearing spectacles.
+
+The discomfort of the very tall man is less humiliating than that of the
+small man, but it is also very real. He is just as much removed from
+contact with the normal world, and he has the added disadvantage of being
+horribly conspicuous. He can never forget himself, for all heads look up at
+him as he passes. He doesn't fit any doorway; he can't buy ready-made
+clothes; if he sleeps in a strange bed he has to leave his feet outside;
+and in the railway carriage or a bus he has to tie his legs into
+uncomfortable knots to keep them out of the way. In short, he finds himself
+a nuisance in a world made for people of five-feet-nine-and-a-half. But he
+has one advantage over the small man. He does not have to ask for notice.
+The result is that while the little man often seems vain and pushful, the
+giant usually is very tame, and modest, and unobtrusive. The little man
+wants to be seen: the giant wants not to be seen.
+
+And so it comes about that our virtues and our failings have more to do
+with the length of our legs than we think.
+
+
+
+
+ON A PAINTED FACE
+
+
+The other day I met in the street a young lady who, but yesterday, seemed
+to me a young girl. She had in the interval taken that sudden leap from
+youth to maturity which is always so wonderful and perplexing. When I had
+seen her last there would have been no impropriety in giving her a kiss in
+the street. Now I should as little have thought of offering to kiss her as
+of whistling to the Archbishop of Canterbury if I had seen that dignitary
+passing on the other side of the road. She had taken wing and flown from
+the nest. She was no longer a child: she was a personage. I found myself
+trying (a little clumsily) to adapt my conversation to her new status, and
+when I left her I raised my hat a trifle more elaborately than is my
+custom.
+
+But the thing that struck me most about her, and the thing that has set me
+writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and
+powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a
+painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is
+a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to
+give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There
+is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows
+it as willingly or unwillingly as you or I follow our respective callings.
+At the moment, for example, I would do anything to escape writing this
+article, for the sun is shining in the bluest of April skies and the bees
+are foraging in the orchard, and everything calls me outside to the woods
+and hills. But I must bake my tale of bricks first with as much pretence of
+enjoying the job as possible. And in the same way, and perhaps sometimes
+with the same distaste, the Juliet of middle age puts on the bloom of the
+Juliet of seventeen.
+
+But that any one, not compelled to do it for a living, should paint the
+face or dye the hair is to me unintelligible. It is like attempting to pass
+off a counterfeit coin. It is either a confession that one is so ashamed of
+one's face that one dare not let it be seen in public, or it is an attempt
+to deceive the world into accepting you as something other than you are. It
+has the same effect on the observer that those sham oak beams and uprights
+that are so popular on the front of suburban houses have. They are not real
+beams or uprights. They do not support anything, or fill any useful
+function. They are only a thin veneer of oak stuck on to pretend that they
+are the real thing. They are a detestable pretence, and I would rather live
+in a hovel than in a house tricked out with such vulgar deceits that do not
+deceive.
+
+And in the same way the paint on the face and the dye on the hair never
+really achieve their object. If they did they would not cease to be a sham,
+but at least they would not be a transparent sham. There are, of course,
+degrees of failure. Mrs. Gamp's curls were so obviously false that they
+could not be said to be intended to deceive. On the other hand, the great
+lady who employs the most scientific face-makers in order to defeat the
+encroachments of Time does very nearly succeed. But her failure is really
+more tragic than that of Mrs. Gamp. How tragic I realised one day when I
+was introduced to a distinguished "society" woman, whose youthful beauty
+was popularly supposed to have survived to old age. At a distance she did
+indeed seem to be a miracle of girlish loveliness. But when I came close to
+her and saw the old, bleared eyes in the midst of that beautifully
+enamelled face, the shock had in it something akin to horror. It was as
+though Death himself was peeping out triumphantly through the painted mask.
+And in that moment I seemed to see all the pitiful years of struggle that
+this unhappy woman had devoted to the pretence of never growing older. Her
+pink and white cheeks were not a thing of beauty. They were only a grim
+jest on herself, on her ambitions, her ideals, her poor little soul.
+
+Why should we be so much afraid of wrinkles and grey hairs? In their place
+they can be as beautiful as the freshest glow on the face of youth. There
+is a beauty of the sunrise and a beauty of the sunset. And of the two the
+beauty of the sunset is the deeper and more spiritual. There are some faces
+that seem to grow in loveliness as the snows fall around them, and the acid
+of Time bites the gracious lines deeper. The dimple has become a crease,
+but it is none the less beautiful, for in that crease is the epic of a
+lifetime. To smooth out the crease, to cover it with the false hue of
+youth, is to turn the epic into a satire.
+
+And if the painted face of age is horrible the painted face of youth is
+disgusting. It is artistically bad and spiritually worse. It is the mark of
+a debased taste and a shallow mind. It is like painting the lily or adding
+a perfume to the violet, and has on one the unpleasant effect that is made
+by the heavy odours in which the same type of person drenches herself, so
+that to pass her is like passing through a sickly fog. These things are the
+symptom of a diseased mind--a mind that has lost the healthy love of truth
+and nature, and has taken refuge in falsities and shams. The paint on the
+face does not stop at the cheeks. It stains the soul.
+
+
+
+
+ON WRITING AN ARTICLE
+
+
+I was putting on my boots just now in what the novelists call "a brown
+study." There was no urgent reason for putting on my boots. I was not going
+out, and my slippers were much more comfortable. But something had to be
+done. I wanted a subject for an article. Now if you are accustomed to
+writing articles for a living, you will know that sometimes the difficulty
+is not writing the article, but choosing a subject. It is not that subjects
+are few: it is that they are so many. It is not poverty you suffer from,
+but an embarrassment of riches. You are like Buridan's ass. That wretched
+creature starved between two bundles of hay, because he could not make up
+his mind which bundle to turn to first. And in that he was not unlike many
+human beings. There was an eighteenth-century statesman, for example, who
+used to find it so difficult to make a choice that he would stand at his
+door looking up the street and down the street, and finally go inside
+again, because he couldn't decide whether to go up or down. He would stay
+indoors all the morning considering whether he should ride out or walk out,
+and he would spend all the afternoon regretting that he had done neither
+one nor the other.
+
+I have always had a great deal of sympathy with that personage, for I share
+his temperamental indecision. I hate making up my mind. If I go into a shop
+to choose a pair of trousers my infirmity of purpose grows with every new
+sample that is shown me, and finally I choose the wrong thing in a fit of
+desperation. If the question is a place for a holiday, all the artifices of
+my family cannot extract from me a decided preference for any place in
+particular. Bournemouth? Certainly. How jolly that walk along the sands by
+Poole Harbour to Studland and over the hills to Swanage. But think of the
+Lake District ... and North Wales ... and Devon ... and Cornwall ... and
+... I do not so much make decisions as drift into them or fall into them. I
+am what you might call an Eleventh Hour Man. I take a header just as the
+clock is about to strike for the last time.
+
+This common failing of indecision is not necessarily due to intellectual
+laziness. It may be due, as in the case of Goschen, to too clear a vision
+of all the aspects of a subject. "Goschen," said a famous First Sea Lord,
+"was the cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty, and the worst
+administrator. He saw so many sides to a question that we could never get
+anything done." A sense of responsibility, too, is a severe check on
+action. I doubt whether any one who has dealt with affairs ever made up his
+mind with more painful questionings than Lord Morley. I have heard him say
+how burdensome he found the India Office, because day by day he had to make
+irrevocable decisions. A certain adventurous recklessness is necessary for
+the man of affairs. Joseph Chamberlain had that quality. Mr. Churchill has
+it to-day. If it is controlled by high motives and a wide vision it is an
+incomparable gift. If it is a mere passion for having one's own way it is
+only the gift of the gambler.
+
+But, you ask, what has this to do with putting on my boots? It is a
+reasonable question. I will tell you. For an hour I had paced my room in my
+slippers in search of a subject. I had looked out of the window over the
+sunlit valley, watched the smoke of a distant train vanishing towards the
+west, observed the activities of the rooks in a neighbouring elm. I had
+pared my nails several times with absent-minded industry, and sharpened
+every pencil I had on me with elaborate care. But the more I pared my nails
+and the more I sharpened my pencils the more perplexed I grew as to the
+theme for an article. Subjects crowded on me, "not single spies, but in
+battalions." They jostled each other for preference, they clamoured for
+notice as I have seen the dock labourers clamouring for a job at the London
+docks. They held out their hands and cried, "Here am I: take me." And,
+distracted by their importunities and starving in the midst of plenty, I
+fished in my pocket for a pencil I had not sharpened. There wasn't one
+left.
+
+It was at this moment that I remembered my boots. Yes, I would certainly
+put on my boots. There was nothing like putting on one's boots for helping
+one to make up one's mind. The act of stooping changed the current of the
+blood. You saw things in a new light--like the man who looked between his
+legs at Bolton Abbey, and cried to his friend: "Oh, look this way; it's
+extraordinary what a fresh view you get." So I fetched my boots and sat
+down to put them on.
+
+The thing worked like a charm. For in my preoccupied condition I picked up
+my right boot first. Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left
+boot. "Now why," said I, "did I do that?" And then the fact flashed on me
+that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first. If you had asked
+me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that
+there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit
+so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like
+the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate. The thing couldn't be done. The
+whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint. I became interested. How,
+I wondered, do I put on my jacket? I rose, took it off, found that my right
+arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process,
+discovered that it was as difficult as an unfamiliar gymnastic operation.
+Why, said I, I am a mere bundle of little habits of which I am unconscious.
+This thing must be looked into. And then came into my mind that fascinating
+book of Samuel Butler's on _Life and Habit_. Yes, certainly, here was a
+subject that would "go." I dismissed all the importunate beggars who had
+been clamouring in my mind, took out a pencil, seized a writing pad, and
+sat down to write on "The Force of Habit."
+
+And here I am. I have got to the end of my article without reaching my
+subject. I have looked up and down the street so long that it is time to go
+indoors.
+
+
+
+
+ON A CITY THAT WAS
+
+
+I saw in a newspaper a few days ago some pictures of the ruins of the Cloth
+Hall and the Cathedral at Ypres. They were excellent photographs, but the
+impression they left on my mind was of the futility even of photography to
+convey any real sense of that astonishing scene of desolation which was
+once the beautiful city of Ypres. We talk of Ypres as if it were still a
+city in being, in which men trade, and children play, and women go about
+their household duties. In a vague way we feel that it is so. In a vague
+way I felt that it was so myself until I entered it and found myself in the
+presence of the ghost of a city.
+
+How wonderful is the solitude and the silence in the midst of which it
+stands like the ruin of some ancient and forgotten civilisation. Far behind
+you have left the hurry and tumult of the great armies--every village
+seething with a strange and tumultuous life, soldiers bargaining with the
+women for potatoes and cabbages in the marketplace, boiling their pots in
+the fields, playing football by the way side, mending the roads, marching,
+camping, feeding, sleeping; officers flying along the roads on horseback or
+in motorcars, vast processions of lorries coiling their way over the
+landscape, or standing at rest with their death-dealing burdens while the
+men take their mid-day meal; giant "caterpillars" dragging great guns along
+the highway. Everywhere the sense of a fearful urgency, everywhere the
+feeling of a brooding and awful presence that overshadows the heavens with
+a cosmic menace. It is as though you are living on the slopes of some vast
+volcano whose eruptions may at any moment submerge all this phantasmal life
+in a sea of molten lava. And, hark! through the sounds of the roads and the
+streets, the chaffering of the market-place, the rush of motor-cars, the
+rhythmic tramp of men, there comes a dull, hollow roar, as from the mouth
+of a volcano itself.
+
+As you advance the scene changes. The movement becomes more feverish, more
+intense. The very breath of the volcano seems to fan your cheek, and the
+hollow roar has become near and plangent. It is no longer like the breaking
+of great seas on a distant shore: it is like thunder rending the sky above
+you. A little further, and another subtle change is observable. On either
+hand the land has become solitary and unkempt. All the life of the fields
+has vanished and the soldiers are in undisputed possession. Then even the
+soldiers seem left behind, and you enter the strange solitude where the war
+is waged. Before you rises the great mound of Ypres. In the distance it
+looks like a living city with quaintly broken skyline, but as you approach
+you see that it is only the tomb of a city standing there desolate and
+shattered in the midst of a universal desolation.
+
+It is midday as you pass through its streets, but there is no moving thing
+visible amidst the ruins. The very spirit of loneliness is about you--not
+the invigorating loneliness of the mountain tops, but the sad loneliness of
+the grave. I have stood upon the ruins of Carthage, but even there I did
+not feel the same sense of solitude that I felt as I walked the streets of
+Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat
+beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems
+blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their
+contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons,
+roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or
+hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of
+the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household
+treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the
+table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last
+fire.
+
+And in the centre of this scene of utter misery the Cathedral and the Cloth
+Hall, still towering above the general desolation, sublime even in their
+ruin, the roofs gone, the interiors a heap of rubbish--the rubbish of
+priceless things--the outer walls battered and broken, but standing as they
+have stood for centuries. Most wonderful of all, as I saw it, a single
+pinnacle of the Cloth Hall still standing above the wreck, slender and
+exquisitely carven, pointing like an accusing finger to the eternal
+tribunal. For long the Germans had been shelling that Finger of Ypres. They
+shelled it the afternoon I was there and filled the market-place with great
+masses of masonry from the walls. But they shelled it in vain, and as I
+left Ypres in the twilight, when the thunder of the guns had ceased, and
+looked back on the great mound of "the city that was," I saw above the
+ruins the finger still pointing heavenward.
+
+But if the solitude of Ypres is memorable, the silence is terrible. It is
+the silence of imminent and breathless things, full of strange secrets,
+thrilling with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering
+voices that speak and then are still--voices that seem to come out of the
+bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant,
+the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the
+roar of "Mother," that sounds like an invisible express train thundering
+through the sky above you. The solitude and the silence assume an
+oppressive significance. They are only the garment of the mighty mystery
+that envelops you. You feel that these dead walls have ears, eyes, and most
+potent voices, that you are not in the midst of a great loneliness, but
+that all around the earth is full of most tremendous secrets. And then you
+realise that the city that is as dead as Nineveh to the outward eye is the
+most vital city in the world.
+
+One day it will rise from its ashes, its streets will resound once more
+with jest and laughter, its fires will be relit, and its chimneys will send
+forth the cheerful smoke. But its glory throughout all the ages will be the
+memory of the days when it stood a mound of ruins on the plain with its
+finger pointing in mute appeal to heaven against the infamies of men.
+
+
+
+
+ON PLEASANT SOUNDS
+
+
+The wind had dropped, and on the hillside one seemed to be in a vast and
+soundless universe. Far down in the valley a few lights glimmered in the
+general darkness, but apart from these one might have fancied oneself alone
+in all the world. Then from some remote farmstead there came the sound of a
+dog barking. It rang through the night like the distant shout of a friend.
+It seemed to fill the whole arch of heaven with its reverberations and to
+flood the valley with the sense of companionship. It brought me news from
+the farm. The day's tasks were over, the cattle were settled for the night,
+the household were at their evening meal, and the watch-dog had resumed his
+nocturnal charge. His bark seemed to have in it the music of immemorial
+things--of labour and rest, and all the cheerful routine and comradeship of
+the fields.
+
+It is only in the country that one enjoys the poetry of natural sounds. A
+dog barking in a suburban street is merely a disturber of the peace, and I
+know of nothing more forlorn than the singing of a caged bird in, let us
+say, Tottenham Court Road. Wordsworth's Poor Susan found a note of
+enchantment in the song of the thrush that sang at the corner of Wood
+Street, off Cheapside. But it was only an enchantment that passed into
+deeper sadness as the vision of the green pastures which it summoned up
+faded into the drab reality:
+
+                 ... they fade,
+    The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
+    The stream will not flow and the hill will not rise,
+    And the colours have passed away from her eyes.
+
+There is something in the life of towns which seems to make the voices of
+the country alien and sorrowful. They are lost in the tumult, and, if
+heard, sound only like a reproach against a fretful world, an echo from
+some Eden from which we have been exiled.
+
+In the large silence of the countryside sounds have a significance and
+intimacy that they cannot have where life is crowded with activities and
+interests. In a certain sense life here is richer because of its
+poverty--because of its freedom from the thousand distractions that exhaust
+its emotion and scatter its energies. Because we have little we discover
+much in that little.
+
+Take the sound of church bells. In the city it is hardly more pleasing than
+the song of the bird in Tottenham Court Road. It does not raise my spirits,
+it only depresses them. But when I heard the sound of the bells come up
+from the valley last evening, it seemed like the bringer of a personal
+message of good tidings. It had in it the rapture of a thousand
+memories--memories of summer eves and snowy landscapes, of vanished faces
+and forgotten scenes. It was at once stimulating and calming, and spoke
+somehow the language of enduring and incommunicable things.
+
+It is, I suppose, the associations of sounds rather than their actual
+quality which make them pleasant or unpleasant. The twitter of sparrows is,
+in itself, as prosaic a sound as there is in nature, but I never hear it on
+waking without a feeling of inward peace. It seems to link me with some
+incredibly remote and golden morning, and with a child in a cradle waking
+for the first time to light and sound and consciousness.
+
+And so with that engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has
+no more music in its voice than a tin kettle; but what jollier sound is
+there on a late February morning than the splendid hubbub of a rookery when
+the slovenly nests are being built in the naked and swaying branches of the
+elms? Betsy Trotwood was angry with David Copperfield's father because he
+called his house Blunderstone Rookery. "Rookery, indeed!" she said. It is
+almost the only point of disagreement I have with that admirable woman. Not
+to love a rookery is _prima facie_ evidence against you. I have heard of
+men who have bought estates because of the rookery, and I have loved them
+for their beautiful extravagance. I am sure I should have liked David
+Copperfield's father from that solitary incident recorded of him. He was
+not a very practical or business-like man, I fear; but people who love
+rookeries rarely are. You cannot expect both the prose and the poetry of
+life for your endowment.
+
+How much the feeling created by sound depends upon the setting may be
+illustrated by the bagpipes. The bagpipes in a London street is a thing for
+ribald laughter, but the bagpipes in a Highland glen is a thing to stir the
+blood, and make the mind thrill to memories of
+
+    Old, unhappy, far off things.
+    And battles long ago.
+
+It is so even with the humble concertina. That instrument is to me the last
+expression of musical depravity. It is the torture which Dante would
+provide for me in the last circle of Hell. But the sound of a concertina on
+a country road on a dark night is as cheerful a noise as I want to hear.
+But just as Omar loved the sound of a _distant_ drum, so distance is an
+essential part of the enchantment of my concertina.
+
+And of all pleasant sounds what is there to excel the music of the hammer
+and the anvil in the smithy at the entrance to the village? No wonder the
+children love to stand at the open door and see the burning sparks that fly
+and hear the bellows roar. I would stand at the open door myself if I had
+the pluck, for I am as much a child as any one when the hammer and the
+anvil are playing their primeval music. It is the oldest song of humanity
+played with the most ancient instruments. Here we are at the very beginning
+of our story--here we stand in the very dawn of things. What lineage so
+noble as that of the smith? What task so ancient and so honourable? With
+such tools the first smith smote music out of labour, and began the
+conquest of things to the accompaniment of joyous sounds. In those sounds I
+seem to hear the whole burden of the ages.
+
+I think I will take another stroll down to the village. It will take me
+past the smithy.
+
+
+
+
+ON SLACKENING THE BOW
+
+
+I was in a company the other evening in which the talk turned upon the
+familiar theme of the Government and its fitness for the job in hand. The
+principal assailant was what I should call a strenuous person. He seemed to
+suggest that if the conduct of the war had been in the hands of
+earnest-minded persons--like himself, for example--the business would have
+been over long ago.
+
+"What can you expect," he said, the veins at the side of his forehead
+swelling with strenuousness, "from men who only play at war? Why, I was
+told by a man who was dining with Asquith not long ago that he was talking
+all the time about Georgian poetry, and that apparently he knew more about
+the subject than anybody at the table. Fiddling while Rome is burning, I
+call it."
+
+"Did you want him to hold a Cabinet Council over the dinner-table?" I
+asked. The strenuous person killed me with a look of scorn.
+
+But all the same, so far from being shocked to learn that Mr. Asquith can
+talk about poetry in these days, the fact, if it be a fact, increases my
+confidence in his competence for his task. I should suffer no pain even if
+I heard that he took a hand of cards after dinner, and I hope he takes care
+to get a game of golf at the week-end. I like men who have great
+responsibilities to carry their burdens easily, and to relax the bow as
+often as possible. The bigger the job you have in hand the more necessary
+it is to cultivate the habit of detachment. You want to walk away from the
+subject sometimes, as the artist walks away from his canvas to get a better
+view of his work. I never feel sure of an article until I have put it away,
+forgotten it, and read it again with a fresh mind, disengaged from the
+subject and seeing it objectively rather than subjectively. It is the
+affliction of the journalist that he has to face the light before he has
+had time to withdraw to a critical distance and to see his work with the
+detachment of the public.
+
+There is nothing more mistaken than the view that because a thing is
+serious you must be thinking about it seriously all the time. If you do
+that you cease to be the master of your subject: the subject becomes the
+master of you. That is what is the matter with the fanatic. He is so
+obsessed by his idea that he cannot relate it to other ideas, and loses all
+sense of proportion, and often all sense of sanity. I have seen more
+unrelieved seriousness in a lunatic asylum than anywhere else.
+
+The key to success is to come to a task with a fresh mind. That was the
+meaning of the very immoral advice given by a don to a friend of mine on
+the day before an examination. "What would you advise me to read to-night?"
+asked my friend, anxious to make the most of the few remaining hours. "If
+I were you," said the don, "I shouldn't read anything. I should get drunk."
+He did not mean that the business was so unimportant that it did not matter
+what he did. He meant that it was so important that he must forget all
+about it, and come to it afresh from the outside. And he used the most
+violent illustration he could find to express his meaning.
+
+It is with the mind as with the soil. If you want to get the best out of
+your land you must change the crops, and sometimes even let the land lie
+fallow. And if you want to get the best out of your mind on a given theme
+you must let it range and have plenty of diversion. And the more remote the
+diversion is from the theme the better. I know a very grave man whose days
+are spent in the most responsible work, who goes to see Charlie Chaplin
+once or twice every week, and laughs like a schoolboy all the time. I
+should not trust his work less on that account: I should trust it all the
+more. I should know that he did not allow it to get the whip hand of him,
+that he kept sane and healthy by running out to play, as it were,
+occasionally.
+
+I think all solemn men ought to take sixpenny-worth of Charlie Chaplin
+occasionally. And I'm certain they ought to play more. I believe that the
+real disease of Germany is that it has never learned to play. The bow is
+stretched all the time, and the nation is afflicted with a dreadful
+seriousness that suggests the madhouse by its lack of humour and gaiety.
+The oppressiveness of life begins with the child. Germany is one of The two
+countries in the world where the suicide of children is a familiar social
+fact. Years ago when I was in Cologne I christened it the City of the
+Elderly Children, and no one, I think, can have had any experience of
+Germany without being struck by the premature gravity of the young. If
+Germany had had fewer professors and a decent sprinkling of cricket and
+football grounds perhaps things might have been different. I don't
+generally agree with copybook maxims, but all work and no play does make
+Jack (or, rather, Hans) a dull boy.
+
+Perhaps it is true that we play too much; but I'm quite sure that the
+Germans have played too little, and if there must be a mistake on one side
+or the other, let it be on the side of too much play.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE INTELLIGENT GOLF BALL
+
+
+I read the other day an article by my colleague "Arcturus" which I thought
+was a little boastful. It referred to a bull-dog. Now I cannot tell what
+there is about a bull-dog that makes people haughty, but it is certain that
+I have never known a case in which the companionship of that animal has not
+had this effect. The man who keeps a bull-dog becomes after a time only fit
+for the company of a bull-dog. He catches the august pride of the animal,
+seems to think like a bulldog, to talk in the brief, scornful tones of a
+bulldog, and even to look fat and formidable like a bull-dog. That,
+however, is not an uncommon phenomenon among those who live with animals.
+Go to a fat stock show and look at the men around the cattle pens. Or
+recall the pork butchers you have known and tell me----. But possibly you,
+sir, who read these lines, are a pork butcher and resent the implication.
+Sir, your resentment is just. You are the exception, sir--a most notable
+exception.
+
+But my object here is not merely to warn "Arcturus" of the perilous company
+he is keeping. I refer to his bull-dog panegyric also to justify me in
+enlarging on my own private vanity. If he is permitted to write to the
+extent of a column on a bull-dog, I can at least claim the same latitude in
+regard to a sensible subject like golf. And I have this advantage over him,
+that I have a real message. I have a hint to offer that will mean money in
+pocket to you.
+
+And first let me say that I have nothing to teach you in the way of play. I
+am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility. When I get a
+good stroke I stare after it as stout Cortez stared at the Pacific, "with a
+wild surmise." But it is because I am a bad player that I feel I can be
+useful to you. For most of my time on the links is spent in looking for
+lost balls. Now, I do not object to looking for balls. I rather enjoy it.
+It is a healthy, open-air occupation that keeps the body exercised and the
+mind fallow. There are some people who think the spectacle of a grown-up
+man (with a family) looking in an open field for a ball that isn't there is
+ridiculous. They are mistaken. It is really, seen from the philosophic
+angle, a very noble spectacle. It is the symbol of deathless hope. It is
+part of the great discipline of the game. It is that part of the game at
+which I do best. There is not a spinney over the whole course that I do not
+know by heart. There is not a bit of gorse that I have not probed and been
+probed by. I must have spent hours in the ditches, and I have upon me the
+scars left by every hedgerow. And the result is that, while I am worthless
+as a golfer, I think I may claim to be quite in the first class at finding
+lost balls.
+
+Now all discoveries hinge upon some sudden illumination. I had up to a
+certain point been a sad failure in recovering balls. I watched them fall
+with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk
+blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not
+there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced
+itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that
+could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately
+hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it,
+it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let
+the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its
+guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works like a
+charm.
+
+The method is quite simple. You lose the ball, of course, to begin with.
+That is easy enough. Then you search for it, and the longer you search the
+deeper grows the mystery of its vanishing. Your companions come and help
+you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you
+have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having
+clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take
+another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.
+
+So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost,
+and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way
+that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not
+going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some
+new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so
+natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure
+enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously
+obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so
+industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect
+that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden
+behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out
+from its hole.
+
+I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence
+accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the
+"fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty
+of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies
+to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I
+go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the
+garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to
+decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly
+undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the
+morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It
+is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that
+Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:
+
+    Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
+      Of things for ever speaking,
+    That nothing of itself will come,
+      But we must still be seeking?
+
+And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy
+the game.
+
+
+
+
+ON A PRISONER OF WAR
+
+
+There are still a few apples on the topmost branches of the trees in the
+orchard. They are there because David, the labourer, who used to come and
+lend us a hand in his odd hours--chiefly when the moon was up--is no longer
+available. You may remember how David opened his heart to me about
+enlisting when he stood on the ladder picking the pears last year. He did
+not like to go and he did not like to stay. All the other chaps had gone,
+and he didn't feel comfortable like in being left behind, but there was his
+mother and his wife and his Aunt Jane, and not a man to do a hand's turn
+for 'em or to dig their gardens if he went. And there was the
+allotment--that 'ud run to weeds. And ...
+
+Well, the allotment has run to weeds. I passed it to-day and looked over
+the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession.
+For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier,"
+we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and
+watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station.
+"The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully
+to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day
+mingling their tears in the "parlour"--that apartment sacred to Sundays,
+funerals, and weddings. "Poor boy, what'll he do without his comfortable
+bed?" moaned his mother.
+
+But by May there came news that David was in France. By June he was in the
+trenches, and woe sat heavy on the three women to whom the world without
+David was an empty place.
+
+Then came silence. The postman comes up the lane on his bicycle to our
+straggling hamlet on the hillside twice a day, and after David had gone his
+visits to the cottages of the three women had been frequent. Sometimes he
+put his bicycle at the mother's gate, sometimes at David's gate, less often
+at Aunt Jane's gate. For David was an industrious correspondent, even
+though his letters were a laborious compromise between crosses and "hoping
+you are well as it leaves me at present."
+
+But in August the postman ceased to call. Long before his hour you could
+see the three women watching for his coming. I think the postman got to
+dread turning the corner and facing the expectant women with empty hands.
+He could not help feeling that somehow he was to blame. At first he would
+stop and point out elaborately the reasons for delay in the post. Then,
+when this had become thin with time, he adopted the expedient of riding
+past the cottages very hard with eyes staring far ahead, as though he was
+going to a fire or was the bearer of an important dispatch.
+
+But at the end of a fortnight or so he came round the corner one morning
+more in the old style. The women observed the change and went out to meet
+him. But their faces fell as they looked at the letter and saw that the
+handwriting was not David's. And the contents were as bad as they could be.
+The letter was from a lad in the valley who had "joined up" with David. He
+wrote from a hospital asking for news of his comrade, whom he had seen
+"knocked over" in the advance in which he himself had been wounded.
+
+For the rest of the day, it was observed, the cottage doors were never
+opened. Nor did any one venture to break in on the misery of the women
+inside. The parson's wife came up in her gig from the valley, having heard
+the news, but she did not call. She only talked to the neighbours, who had
+had the details from the postman. Every one felt the news like a personal
+blow, and even the widow Wigley, who lives down in the valley, was full of
+sympathy. She had never quite got over her resentment at the funeral of
+David's father. Her own husband had been carried to his grave on a
+hand-bier, but at the funeral of David's father there was a horse-drawn
+hearse and a carriage for the mourners. "They were always _such_ people for
+show," said Mrs. Wigley. And the memory had rankled. But now it was buried.
+
+Next day we saw the mother and the wife set out down the lane for the
+village post-office, and thereafter daily they went to await the arrival of
+letters, returning each day silent and hopeless. At last, in reply to
+inquiries which had been made at the War Office, there came the official
+statement that David had been reported "wounded and missing." We learned
+that this usually meant that the man was dead, but the women did not know
+this.
+
+And, curiously enough, David's mother, who had been the most despairing of
+women, and seemed to regard David as dead even before he started, now
+discovered a genius for hopefulness. She had heard of a case from a
+neighbouring village of a man who had been reported dead, and who
+afterwards wrote from a prison camp in Germany, and she clung to this
+precedent with a confident tenacity that we did not try to weaken. It was
+foolish, of course, we said. She was pinning her faith to a case in a
+thousand; but the hope gave the women something to live for, and the wound
+would heal the better for the illusion.
+
+And, after all, she was right. This morning we saw the postman call at the
+cottage. He handed a post card to the wife, and it was evident that
+something wonderful and radiant had happened. The women fell on each other
+"laughing happy." No more going into the house to shut the door on the
+world. They came out to share the great tidings with their neighbours.
+"David is alive! David is a prisoner in Germany.... He's wounded.... But
+he's going on all right.... He can't write yet.... But he will."
+
+Yes, there was the post card all right. The English was not very good and
+the script was German, but the fact that David was alive in hospital shone
+clear and indisputable.
+
+"It's as though he's raised from the dead," cried the wife through her
+tears.
+
+The joy of the old mother was touched with solemnity. She is a great
+chapel-goer, and her utterance is naturally coloured by the Book with which
+she is most familiar.
+
+"My son was dead, and is alive again," she said simply; "he was lost and is
+found."
+
+When I went out into the orchard and saw the red-cheeked apples still
+clinging to the topmost branches I thought, "Perhaps David will be able to
+lend me a hand with those trees next autumn after all."
+
+
+
+
+ON THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
+
+
+In one of those charming articles which he writes in _The New Statesman_,
+Mr. J. Arthur Thomson tells of the wonderful world of odours to which we
+are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more
+upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had
+a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less
+atrophied.
+
+    Fee, fie, fo, fum,
+    I smell the blood of an Englishman,
+
+said the Giant in the story. But that was long ago. If we were left to the
+testimony of our noses we could not tell an Englishman from a hippopotamus.
+To the bee, on the other hand, with its two or three thousand olfactory
+pores, the world is primarily a world of smell. If we could question that
+wonderful creature we should find that it thought and talked of nothing but
+the odours of the field. We should find that it had a range of experience
+in that realm beyond our wildest imaginings. We should find that there are
+more smells in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
+
+We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience.
+But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our
+comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our
+finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the
+scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went
+into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me
+forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it
+hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of
+earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world
+too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite
+perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their
+comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power
+beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly
+wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by
+some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond
+the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.
+
+And it is not only the worlds which are peculiar to the myriad creatures of
+diverse instincts and faculties which are so strangely separate. We
+ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety. I do not mean the social
+and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is
+not one but many. There is not much in common between the world as it
+appears to Sarah Ellen, who "runs" four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed
+during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns
+herself in Mayfair.
+
+But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private
+thought and emotions. My world is not your world, nor yours mine. We sit
+and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange
+confidences and share our laughter and our experiences. But ultimately we
+can neither of us understand the world of the other--that world which is
+the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as
+air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour
+and sound, attachments and antipathies often so obscure that we cannot even
+explain them to ourselves. We may feel a collective emotion under the
+impulse of some powerful event or personality. We may ebb and flow as a
+tide to the rhythm of a great melody or to the incantation of noble
+oratory. The news of a great victory in these days would move us to our
+common centre and bring all our separate worlds into a mighty chorus of
+thanksgiving. But even in these common emotions there are infinite shades
+of difference, and when they have passed we subside again into the world
+where we dwell alone.
+
+Most of us are doomed to go through life without communicating the
+mysteries of our experience.
+
+    Alas for those who never sing.
+    But die with all their music in them.
+
+It is the privilege of the artist in any medium to enrich the general life
+with the consciousness of the world that he alone has experienced. He gives
+us new kingdoms for our inheritance, makes us the sharers of his visions,
+opens out wider horizons, and floods our life with richer glories.
+
+I entered such a kingdom the other afternoon. I turned out of the Strand,
+which was thronged and throbbing with the news of the great advance,--it
+was the first day of the battle of the Somme--and entered the Aldwych
+Theatre. As if by magic, I passed from the thrilling drama of the present
+into a realm
+
+    Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing--
+
+into a sunlit world, where the zephyrs fan your cheek like a benediction
+and the brooks tinkle through the gracious landscape and melody is on every
+bough and joy and peace are all about you--the idyllic world where the
+marvellous child, Mozart, reigns like an enchanter. What though the tale of
+_The Magic Flute_ is foolish beyond words. Who cares for the tale? Who
+thinks of the tale? It is only the wand in the hand of the magician. Though
+it be but a broomstick, it will open all the magic casements of earth and
+heaven, it will surround us with the choirs invisible, and send us forth
+into green pastures and by the cool water-brooks.
+
+That was Mozart's vision of the world in his brief but immortal journey
+through it. Perhaps it was only a dream world, but what a dream to live
+through! And to him it was as real a world as that of Mr. Gradgrind, whose
+vision is shut in by what Burns called "the raised edge of a bawbee." We
+must not think that our world is the only one. There are worlds outside our
+experience. "Call that a sunset?" said the lady to Turner as she stood
+before the artist's picture. "I never saw a sunset like that." "No, madam,"
+said Turner. "Don't you wish you had?" Perhaps your world and mine is only
+mean because we are near-sighted. Perhaps we miss the vision not because
+the vision is not there, but because we darken the windows with dirty
+hangings.
+
+
+
+
+"I'M TELLING YOU"
+
+
+The other day I went into the Law Courts to hear a case of some interest,
+and I soon became more interested in the counsel than in the case. They
+offered a curious contrast of method. One was emphatic and dogmatic. "I'm
+not asking you," he seemed to say to the judge and jury, "I'm telling you."
+The other was winning and conciliatory. He did not thrust his views down
+the jury's throats; he seemed to offer them for their consideration, and
+leave it at that. He was not there to dictate to them, but to hold his
+client's case up to the light, as it were, just as a draper holds a length
+of silk up before his customer. Now, as a matter of fact, I think the
+dogmatic gentleman had the better case and the stronger argument, but I
+noticed next day that the verdict went against him. He won his argument and
+lost his case.
+
+That is what commonly happens with the dogmatic and argumentative man. He
+shuts up the mind to reason. He changes the ground from the issue itself to
+a matter of personal dignity. You are no longer concerned with whether the
+thing is right or wrong. You are concerned about showing your opponent that
+you are not to be bullied by him into believing what he wants you to
+believe. Even Johnson, who was, perhaps, the most dogmatic person that ever
+lived, knew that success in the argument was often fatal to success in the
+case. Dr. Taylor once commended a physician to him, and said: "I fight many
+battles for him, as many people in the country dislike him." "But you
+should consider, sir," replied Johnson, "that by every one of your
+victories he is a loser; for every man of whom you get the better will be
+very angry, and resolve not to employ him; whereas if people get the better
+of you in argument about him, they'll think, 'We'll send for Dr. ----,
+nevertheless.'"
+
+But Johnson fought not to convince, but for love of the argumentative
+victory. A great contemporary of his, whom he never met, and whom, if he
+had met, he would probably have insulted--Benjamin Franklin, to
+wit--preferred winning the case to winning the argument. While still a boy,
+he tells us, he was fascinated by the Socratic method, and instead of
+expressing opinions asked leading questions. He ceased to use words like
+"certainly," "undoubtedly," or anything that gave the air of positiveness
+to an opinion, and said "I apprehend," or "I conceive," a thing to be so
+and so.
+
+"This habit," he says, "has been of great advantage to me when I have had
+occasion to inculcate my opinions and persuade men into measures that I
+have been engaged from time to time in promoting. And as the chief ends of
+conversation are to _inform_ or to be _informed_, to _please_ or to
+_persuade_, I wish well-meaning and sensible men would not lessen their
+power of doing good by a positive assuming manner, that seldom fails to
+disgust, tends to create opposition and to defeat most of those purposes
+for which speech was given us. In fact, if you wish to instruct others, a
+positive dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may occasion
+opposition and prevent a candid attention. If you desire instruction and
+improvement from others, you should not at the same time express yourself
+fixed in your present opinions. Modest and sensible men, who do not love
+disputation, will leave you undisturbed in the possession of your errors."
+
+It is really, I suppose, our old friend "compulsion" again. We hate
+Prussianism in the realm of thought as much as in the realm of action. If I
+tell you you've got to believe so-and-so, your disposition is to refuse to
+do anything of the sort. It was the voluntary instinct that breathes in all
+of us that made Falstaff refuse to give Prince Hal reasons: "I give thee
+reasons? Though reasons were as plenty as blackberries I would not give
+thee reasons _on compulsion_--I."
+
+I was once talking to a member of Parliament, who was lamenting that he had
+failed to win the ear of the House. He was puzzled by the failure. He was a
+fluent speaker; he knew his subject with great thoroughness, and his
+character was irreproachable; and yet when he rose the House went out. He
+was like a dinner-bell. He couldn't understand it. Yet everybody else
+understood it quite well. It was because he was always "telling you," and
+there is nothing the House of Commons dislikes so much as a schoolmaster.
+Probably the most successful speaker, judging by results, who ever rose in
+the House of Commons was Cobden. He was one of the few men in history who
+have changed a decision in Parliament by a speech. He did it because of his
+extraordinarily persuasive manner. He kept the minds of his hearers
+receptive and disengaged. He did not impress them with the fact that he was
+right and they were wrong. They forgot themselves when they saw the subject
+in a clear, white light, and were prepared to judge it on its merits rather
+than by their prejudices.
+
+One of the few persuasive speakers I have heard in the House of Commons in
+recent years is Mr. Harold Cox. Many of his opinions I detest, but the
+engaging way in which he presents them makes you almost angry with yourself
+at disagreeing with him. You feel, indeed, that you must be wrong, and that
+such open-mindedness and such a friendly conciliatory manner as he shows
+must somehow be the evidence of a right view of things. As a matter of
+fact, of course, he is really a very dogmatic gentleman at the bottom--none
+more so. As indeed Franklin was. But he has the art to conceal the emphasis
+of his opinions, and so he makes even those who disagree with him listen to
+his case almost with a desire to endorse it.
+
+It is a great gift. I wish I had got it.
+
+
+
+
+ON COURAGE
+
+
+I was asked the other day to send to a new magazine a statement as to the
+event of the war which had made the deepest impression on me. Without
+hesitation I selected the remarkable Christmas demonstrations in Flanders.
+Here were men who for weeks and months past had been engaged in the task of
+stalking each other and killing each other, and suddenly under the
+influence of a common memory, they repudiate the whole gospel of war and
+declare the gospel of brotherhood. Next day they began killing each other
+again as the obedient instruments of governments they do not control and of
+motives they do not understand. But the fact remains. It is a beam of light
+in the darkness, rich in meaning and hope.
+
+But if I were asked to name the instance of individual action which had
+most impressed me I should find the task more difficult. Should I select
+something that shows how war depraves, or something that shows how it
+ennobles? If the latter I think I would choose that beautiful incident of
+the sailor on the _Formidable_.
+
+He had won by ballot a place in one of the boats. The ship was going down,
+but he was to be saved. One pictures the scene: The boat is waiting to take
+him to the shore and safety. He looks at the old comrades who have lost in
+the ballot and who stand there doomed to death. He feels the passion for
+life surging within him. He sees the cold, dark sea waiting to engulf its
+victims. And in that great moment--the greatest moment that can come to any
+man--he makes the triumphant choice. He turns to one of his comrades.
+"You've got parents," he says. "I haven't." And with that word--so heroic
+in its simplicity--he makes the other take his place in the boat and signs
+his own death warrant.
+
+I see him on the deck among his doomed fellows, watching the disappearing
+boat until the final plunge comes and all is over. The sea never took a
+braver man to its bosom. "Greater love hath no man than this ..."
+
+Can you read that story without some tumult within you--without feeling
+that humanity itself is ennobled by this great act and that you are, in
+some mysterious way, better for the deed? That is the splendid fruit of all
+such sublime sacrifice. It enriches the whole human family. It makes us
+lift our heads with pride that we are men--that there is in us at our best
+this noble gift of valiant unselfishness, this glorious prodigality that
+spends life itself for something greater than life. If we had met this
+nameless sailor we should have found him perhaps a very ordinary man, with
+plenty of failings, doubtless, like the rest of us, and without any idea
+that he had in him the priceless jewel beside which crowns and coronets are
+empty baubles. He was something greater than he knew.
+
+How many of us could pass such a test? What should I do? What would you do?
+We neither of us know, for we are as great a mystery to ourselves as we are
+to our neighbours. Bob Acres said he found that "a man may have a deal of
+valour in him without knowing it," and it is equally true that a man may be
+more chicken-hearted than he himself suspects. Only the occasion discovers
+of what stuff we are made--whether we are heroes or cowards, saints or
+sinners. A blustering manner will not reveal the one any more than a long
+face will reveal the other.
+
+The merit of this sailor's heroism was that it was done with
+calculation--in cold blood, as it were, with that
+"two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage" of which Napoleon spoke as the real
+thing. Many of us could do brave things in hot blood, with a sudden rush of
+the spirit, who would fail if we had time, as this man had, to pause and
+think, to reckon, to doubt, to grow cold and selfish. The merit of his deed
+is that it was an act of physical courage based on the higher quality of
+moral courage.
+
+Nor because a man fails in the great moment is he necessarily all a coward.
+Mark Twain was once talking to a friend of mine on the subject of courage
+in men, and spoke of a man whose name is associated with a book that has
+become a classic. "I knew him well," he said, "and I knew him as a brave
+man. Yet he once did the most cowardly thing I have ever heard of any man.
+He was in a shipwreck, and as the ship was going down he snatched a
+lifebelt from a woman passenger and put it on himself. He was saved, and
+she was drowned. And in spite of that frightful act I think he was not a
+coward. I know there was not a day of his life afterwards when he would not
+willingly and in cold blood have given his life to recall that shameful
+act."
+
+In this case the failure was not in moral courage, but in physical courage.
+He was demoralised by the peril, and the physical coward came uppermost. If
+he had had time to recover his moral balance he would have died an
+honourable death. It is no uncommon thing for a man to have in him the
+elements both of the hero and the coward. You remember that delightful
+remark of Mrs. Disraeli, one of the most characteristic of the many quaint
+sayings attributed to that strange woman. "Dizzy," she said, "has wonderful
+moral courage, but no physical courage. I always have to pull the string of
+his shower bath." It is a capital illustration of that conflict of the
+coward and the brave man that takes place in most of us. Dizzy's moral
+courage carried him to the bath, but there his physical courage failed him.
+He could not pull the string that administered the cold shock. The bathroom
+is rich in such secrets, and life teems with them.
+
+The true hero is he who unites the two qualities. The physical element is
+the more plentiful. For one man who will count the cost of sacrifice and,
+having counted it, pay the price with unfaltering heart, there are many who
+will answer the sudden call to meet peril with swift defiance. The courage
+that snatches a comrade from under the guns of the enemy or a child from
+the flames is, happily, not uncommon. It is inspired by an impulse that
+takes men out of themselves and by a certain spirit of challenge to fate
+that every one with a sporting instinct loves to take. But the act of the
+sailor of the _Formidable_ was a much bigger thing. Here was no thrill of
+gallantry and no sporting risk. He dealt in cold certainties: the boat and
+safety; the ship and death; his life or the other's. And he thought of his
+comrade's old parents at home and chose death.
+
+It was a great end. I wonder whether you or I would be capable of it. I
+would give much to feel that I could answer in the affirmative--that I
+could take my stand on the spiritual plane of that unknown sailor.
+
+
+
+
+ON SPENDTHRIFTS
+
+
+While every one, I suppose, agrees that Lady Ida Sitwell richly deserves
+her three months' imprisonment, there are many who will have a sneaking
+pity for her. And that not because she is a woman of family who will suffer
+peculiar tortures from prison life. On the contrary, I have no doubt that a
+spell of imprisonment is just what she needs. In fact, it is what most of
+us need, especially most of those who live a life of luxurious idleness. To
+be compelled to get up early, to clean your cell, to wear plain clothes, to
+live on plain food, to observe regular hours, and do regular duties--this
+is no matter for tears, but for thankfulness. It is the sort of discipline
+that we ought to undergo periodically for our spiritual and even bodily
+health.
+
+No, the sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is
+commonly felt for the spendthrift--for the person who, no matter what his
+income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no
+friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as
+though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no
+cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends,
+and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand
+crowns. There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was
+once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt.
+And Charles Surface and Micawber--who can deny them a certain affection? I
+have no doubt that Mrs. Micawber's papa, who "lived to bail Mr. Micawber
+out many times until he died lamented by a wide circle of friends," loved
+the fellow as you and I love him. I should deem it a privilege to bail out
+Micawber. But Elwes, the miser--ugh! the very name chills the blood.
+
+The difference, I suppose, proceeds from the idea that while the miser is
+the soul of selfishness, the spendthrift is at bottom a good-natured fellow
+and a lover of his kind. No doubt the vice of the spendthrift has a touch
+of generosity, but it is often generosity at other people's expense, and is
+not seldom as essentially selfish as the vice of the miser. It is rather
+like the generosity of the man who, according to Sydney Smith, was so
+touched by a charity sermon that he picked his neighbour's pocket of a
+guinea and put it in the plate. I have no doubt that Lady Ida if she had
+got Miss Dobbs's money would have scattered it about with a very free hand,
+and would have contributed to the collection plate quite handsomely. But
+she was selfish none the less. It was her form of selfishness to enjoy the
+luxury of spending money she hadn't got, just as it was Elwes's form of
+selfishness to enjoy the luxury of saving money that he had got.
+
+The point was very well stated by a famous miser whose son has since been
+in Parliament (I will not say on which side). The old man had accumulated a
+vast fortune, but, in the Scotch phrase, would have grudged you "the smoke
+off his porridge." (He died, by the way, properly enough, through walking
+home in the rain because he was too mean to take a cab.) He was once asked
+why he was so anxious to increase his riches, since his son would probably
+squander them, and he replied, "If my son gets as much pleasure out of
+squandering my money as I have had out of saving it, I shall not mind."
+Both the hoarding and the spending, you see, were in his view equally a
+matter of mere selfish pleasure.
+
+But I admit that the uncalculating spirit that lands people in debt is a
+more engaging frailty than the calculating spirit of the miser. I know a
+delightful man who seems to have no more knowledge of the relation of
+income and expenditure than a kitten. If he gets L100 unexpectedly he does
+not look at it in relation to his whole needs. He does not remember rent,
+rates, taxes, baker, butcher, tailor. No. On the strength of it, he will
+order a new piano in the morning, buy his wife a sealskin jacket in the
+afternoon, and by the next day be deeper in the mire than ever, and wonder
+how he got there. And there is Jones's young wife, a charming woman, who is
+dragging her husband into debt with the same kittenish irresponsibility.
+She will leave Jones on the pavement with a remark that suggests that she
+is going into the shop to buy some pins, and will come out with a request
+for L10 for some "perfectly lovely" thing that has caught her eye. And
+Jones, being elderly, and still a little astonished at having won the
+affection of such a divinity, has not the courage to say "No."
+
+To the people afflicted with these loose spending habits I would commend
+the lesson of a little incident I saw in a tram on the Embankment the other
+evening. There entered and sat beside me a working man, carrying his "kit"
+in a handkerchief, and wearing a scarf round his neck, a cloth cap, and
+corduroy trousers--obviously a labourer earning perhaps 25s. a week. He
+paid his fare, and then he took from his pocket a packet tied up in a
+handkerchief. He untied the knot, and there came forth a neat pocket-book
+with pencil attached. He opened it, and began to write. My curiosity was
+too much for my manners. Out of the tail of my eye I watched the motion of
+his fingers, and this is what he wrote: "Tram 1-1/2 _d_." In a flash I
+seemed to see the whole orderly life of that poor labourer. He had an
+anchorage in the tossing seas of this troublesome world. He had got hold of
+a lesson that Lady Ida Sitwell ought to try and learn during the next three
+months. It is this: Watch your spendings.
+
+For it is the people who are more concerned about getting money than about
+how they spend it who come to grief. A very acute observer once told me
+that the principal difference between the Scotch people and the Lancashire
+people was that the former thought most about how they spent, and the
+latter most about how much they got. And the difference, he said, was the
+difference between a thrifty and an unthrifty people. I think that is true.
+Nothing is more common than to find people worse off as they get better
+off. They have learned the art of getting money and lost the art of
+spending it wisely. They pay their way on L200 a year and get hopelessly
+into debt on L500. They are safe in a rowing boat, but capsize in a sailing
+boat.
+
+Here is an axiom which I offer to all spendthrifts: We cannot command our
+incomings; but we can control outgoings.
+
+
+
+
+ON A TOP-HAT
+
+
+A few days ago I went to a christening to make vows on behalf of the
+offspring of a gallant young officer now at the front. I conceived that the
+fitting thing on such an occasion was to wear a silk hat, and accordingly I
+took out the article, warmed it before the fire, and rubbed it with a hat
+pad until it was nice and shiny, put it on my head, and set out for the
+church. But I soon regretted the choice. It had no support from any one
+else present, and when later I got out of the Tube and walked down the
+Strand I found that I was a conspicuous person, which, above all things, I
+hate to be. My hat, I saw, was observed. Eyes were turned towards me with
+that mild curiosity with which one remarks any innocent oddity or vanity of
+the streets.
+
+I became self-conscious and looked around for companionship, but as my eye
+travelled along the crowded pavement I could see nothing but bowlers and
+trilbys and occasional straws. "Ah, here at last," said I, "is one coming."
+But a nearer view only completed my discomfiture, for it was one of those
+greasy-shiny hats which go with frayed trousers and broken boots, and which
+are the symbol of "better days," of hopes that are dead, and "drinks" that
+dally, of a social status that has gone and of a suburban villa that has
+shrunk to a cubicle in a Rowton lodging-house. I looked at greasy-hat and
+greasy-hat looked at me, and in that momentary glance of fellowship we
+agreed that we were "out of it."
+
+I put my silk hat away at night with the firm resolution that nothing short
+of an invitation to Buckingham Palace, or some similar incredible disaster,
+should make me drag it into the light again. For the truth is that the war
+has given the top-hat a knock-out blow. It had been tottering on our brows
+for some time. There was a very hot summer a few years ago which began the
+revolution. The tyranny of the top-hat became intolerable, and quite
+"respectable" people began to be seen in the streets with Panamas and
+straws. But these were only concessions to an irresponsible climate, and
+the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City
+civilisation. And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to
+becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches. It is almost
+as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet
+Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear
+it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a
+splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.
+
+It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a
+result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember
+that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was
+that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that
+might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig
+returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in
+_The Rivals_ there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was
+never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it
+began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not
+a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which
+set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of
+the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When
+Lady Percy in _Henry IV._ is lamenting Hotspur she says:--
+
+        ... he was, indeed, the glass
+    Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.
+    He had no legs that practised not his gait;
+    And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,
+    Became the accents of the valiant;
+    For those that could speak low and tardily,
+    Would turn their own perfection to abuse.
+    To seem like him.
+
+In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of
+the war. The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things
+and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the
+top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield. I don't
+think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there
+were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But,
+perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war
+as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had
+better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable
+change. Let us enjoy it without boasting.
+
+Our enjoyment may be short-lived. We must not be surprised if this
+incredible hat returns in triumph with peace. It has survived the blasts of
+many centuries and infinite changes of fashion. It is, I suppose, the most
+ancient survival in the dress that men wear. There is in the Froissart
+collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth
+century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the
+Barbary corsairs. And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour.
+They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats! And it may be
+that when Macaulay's New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that
+broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he will sit
+under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.
+
+There must be some virtue in a thing that is so immortal. If the doctrine
+of the survival of the fittest applies to dress, it is the fittest thing we
+have. Trousers are a thing of yesterday with us, but our top-hat carries us
+back to the Wars of the Roses and beyond. It is not its beauty that
+explains it. I have never heard any one deny that it is ugly, though custom
+may have blunted our sense of its ugliness. It is not its utility. I have
+never heard any one claim that this strange cylinder had that quality. It
+is not its comfort It is stiff, it is heavy, it is unmanageable in a wind
+and ruined by a shower of rain. It needs as much attention as a peevish
+child or a pet dog. It is not even cheap, and when it is disreputable it is
+the most disreputable thing on earth. What is the mystery of its strange
+persistence? Is it simply a habit that we cannot throw off or is there a
+certain snobbishness about it that appeals to the flunkeyism of men? That
+is perhaps the explanation. That is perhaps why it has disappeared when
+snobbishness is felt to be inconsistent with the world of stern realities
+and bitter sorrows in which we live. We are humble and serious and out of
+humour with the pretentious vanity of our top-hat.
+
+
+
+
+ON LOSING ONE'S MEMORY
+
+
+The case of the soldier in the Keighley Hospital who has lost his memory in
+the war and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a
+Yorkshireman, and so on is one of the most singular personal incidents of
+the war. On the face of it it would seem impossible that a mother should
+not know her own son, or a brother his brother. Yet in this case it is
+clear that some of the claimants are mistaken. The incident is not, of
+course, without precedent. The most notorious case of the sort was that of
+Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in his
+imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In
+that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity
+that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud.
+
+But, generally speaking, our memory of other faces is extremely vague and
+elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have
+known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this
+moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable
+account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of
+his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details, and if he were to
+meet me to-morrow with a blank stare and a shaven upper lip I should pass
+him without a thought of recognition.
+
+Memory, in fact, is largely reciprocal, and when one of the parties has
+lost his power of response the key is gone. If the lock won't yield to the
+key, you are satisfied that the key is the wrong one, no matter how much it
+looks like the right one. I think I could tell my dog from a thousand other
+dogs; but if the creature were to lose his memory and to pass me in the
+street without answering my call, I should pass on, simply observing that
+he bore a remarkable likeness to my animal.
+
+Most of us, I suppose, have experienced in a momentary and partial degree a
+sudden stoppage of the apparatus of memory. You are asked, let us say, to
+spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or
+in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the
+wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort
+them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you
+meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith.
+You know her as well as you know your own mother, but the fact that you
+have got to introduce her by her name forthwith sends her name flying into
+space. The passionate attempt to capture it before it escapes only makes
+its escape more certain, and you are reduced to the pitiful expedient of
+mumbling something that is inaudible.
+
+The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the
+midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London
+hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me
+that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as
+though an immense loneliness descended on me. I saw the audience before me,
+but apart from vision I seemed bereft of all my faculties. If I had in that
+instant been asked for my name I am doubtful whether I could have got
+anywhere near it. Happily some one in a front row, thinking I was pausing
+for a word, threw out a suggestion. It was like magic. I felt the machine
+of memory start again with an almost audible "puff, puff," and I went on to
+the end quite comfortably. The pause had seemed terribly long to me, but I
+was surprised afterwards to find that it had been so brief as to be
+generally unnoticed or regarded as an artful way of emphasising a point. I
+let it go at that, but I knew myself that in that moment I had lost my
+memory.
+
+Even distinguished and expert orators have been known to suffer from this
+absolute lapse of memory. The Rosebery incident--was it in the Chesterfield
+speech?--is perhaps the best known, but I once heard Mr. Redmond, the
+calmest and most assured of speakers, come to an _impasse_ in the House of
+Commons that held him up literally for minutes.
+
+We are creatures of memory, and when, as in the Keighley case, memory is
+gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope.
+The more fundamental functions of memory, the habits of respiration, of
+walking and physical movement, of mastication, and so on, remain. The
+Keighley man still eats and walks with all the knowledge of a lifetime. He
+probably preserves his taste for tobacco. But these things have nothing to
+do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions
+that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your
+life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear
+the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret
+music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that
+response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so
+everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences
+which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An
+old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a
+tone of voice, a curve in the path--everything comes to us weighted with
+its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember
+facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience.
+Macaulay could recite _Paradise Lost_, while Rossetti was a little doubtful
+whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round the sun. I once met
+an American elocutionist who could recite ten of Shakespeare's plays, and
+he showed me the wonderful system of mnemonics by which he achieved the
+miracle. But he was a mere recording machine--a dull fellow. The true
+argosy of memory is not facts, but a perfume compounded of all the sunsets
+we have ever seen, all the joys and friendships, pleasures and sorrows we
+have ever known, all the emotions we have felt, all the brave and mean
+things we have done, all the broken hopes we have suffered. To have lost
+that argosy is to be dead, no matter how healthy an appetite we retain.
+
+
+
+
+ON WEARING A FUR-LINED COAT
+
+
+A friend of mine--one of those people who talk about money with an air of
+familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef
+in their back-gardens--said to me the other day that I ought to buy a
+fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined
+coat or a sealskin jacket, said he. What with the war, and the "sales," and
+the tradesmen's need of cash, they were simply being thrown at you. You
+could have them almost for the trouble of carrying them away. A trifle of
+fifteen or twenty pounds would buy one a coat that would be cheap at sixty
+guineas. And, remember, there was wear for twenty years in it. And think of
+the saving in doctor's bills--for you simply can't catch colds if you wear
+a fur coat. In short, not to buy a fur coat at this moment was an act of
+gross improvidence, a wrong to one's family, a ... a ... And then he
+looked, with the cold disapproval of a connoisseur, at the coat I was
+wearing. And in the light of that glance I saw for the first time that it
+was ... yes ... certainly, it was not what it had been.
+
+Now I am not going to pretend that I have a soul above fur-lined coats. I
+haven't; I love them. And by fur coats I don't mean those adorned with
+astrakhan collars, which I abominate. A man in an astrakhan coat is to me a
+suspicious character, a stage baron, one who is probably deep in treasons,
+stratagems, and spoils. The suspicion is unjust to the gentleman in the
+astrakhan coat, of course. Most suspicions are unjust. And if you ask me to
+give reasons for this unreasoning hostility to astrakhan, I do not know
+that I could find them. Perhaps it is the dislike I have for artificial
+curls; perhaps it is that the astrakhan collar reminds me of those unhappy
+pet dogs who look as though they had been put in curl papers overnight and
+sent out into the streets by their owners as a poor jest. Yes, I think it
+must be that sense of artificiality which is at the root of the dislike. No
+doubt the curls are natural. No doubt the woolly sheep of Astrakhan do wear
+their coats in these little heaven-sent ringlets. But ... well ... "I do
+not like thee, Doctor Fell."
+
+But fur-lined coats, with fine fur collars, are quite another affair. If I
+had the "magic nib," I could grow lyrical over them. I could, indeed. In
+place-of this article I would write an ode to a fur-lined coat. I would
+sing of the Asian wilds from whence it came, of its wondrous lines and its
+soft and silken texture, of its generous warmth and its caressing touch. I
+would set up such a universal hunger for fur coats that the tradesmen in
+Oxford Street and Regent Street would come and offer me a guinea a word to
+write advertisements for them.
+
+And yet I shall not buy a fur-lined coat, and I will tell you why. A fur
+coat is not an article of clothing: it is a new way of life. You cannot say
+with reckless prodigality, "Here, I will have a fur coat and make an end of
+this gnawing passion." The fur coat is not an end: it is a beginning. You
+have got to live up to it. You have got to take the fur-coat point of view
+of your relations to society. When Chauncey Depew, as a boy, bought a
+beautiful spotted dog at a fair and took it home, the rain came down and
+the spots began to run into stripes. He took the dog back to the man of
+whom he had bought it and demanded an explanation. "But you had an umbrella
+with that dog," said the man. "No," said the boy. "Oh!" said the man,
+"there's an umbrella goes with that dog."
+
+And so it is with the fur-lined coat. So many things "go with it." It is in
+this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of
+paternal weakness--or after a lucky stroke in rubber. The old furniture,
+which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the
+presence of this princely affair. You wanted new chairs and rugs and
+hangings to make the piano accord with its setting. Even the house fell
+under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day
+that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a
+new way of life just beyond your modest means.
+
+If I bought a fur-lined coat I know that I should want to buy a motor-car
+to keep it company. It is possible, of course, to wear a fur coat in a
+motor-bus, but if you do you will assuredly have a sense that you are a
+little over-dressed, a trifle conspicuous, that the fellow-passengers are
+mentally remarking that such a coat ought to have a carriage of its own. It
+would provoke the comment that I heard the other night as two ladies in
+evening dress left a bus in a pouring rain. "Well," said one of the other
+lady passengers--a little enviously I thought, but still pertinently--"if I
+could afford to wear such fine clothes I think I would take a Cab." Yes,
+decidedly, the fur-lined coat would not be complete without the motor-car.
+
+And then consider how it limits your freedom and raises the tariff against
+you. The tip that would be gratefully received if you were getting into
+that modest coat that you have discarded would be unworthy of the fur-lined
+standard that you have deliberately adopted. The recipient would take it
+frigidly, with a glance at the luxurious garment into which he had helped
+you--a glance that would cut you to the quick. Your friends would have to
+be fur-lined, too, and your dinners would no longer be the modest affairs
+of old, but would soar to the champagne standard. It would not be possible
+to slip unnoticed into your favourite little restaurant in Soho to take
+your simple chop, or to go in quest of that wonderful restaurant of Arne's
+of which "Aldebaran" keeps the secret. The modesty of Arne's would make you
+blush for your fur-lined coat.
+
+"The genteel thing," said Tony Lumpkin's friend, "is the genteel thing at
+any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation according-ly."
+That is it. The fur-lined coat is a genteel thing; but you have to be "in a
+concatenation according-ly." And there's the rub. It is not the coat, but
+its trimmings, so to speak, that give us pause. When you put on the coat
+you insensibly put off your old way of life. You set up a new standard, and
+have got to adapt your comings and goings, your habits and your expenditure
+to it. I once knew a man who had a fur-lined coat presented to him. It was
+a disaster. He could not live "in a concatenation according-ly." He lost
+his old friends without getting new ones. And his end ... Well, his end
+confirmed me in the conviction of the unwisdom of wearing a fur-lined coat
+before you are able, or disposed, to mould your life to the fur-lined
+standard.
+
+
+
+
+IN PRAISE OF WALKING
+
+
+I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a
+Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when
+I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be
+only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about
+enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in
+itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you
+are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind
+the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper
+pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary
+consultation over the map--that is enough for the way.
+
+At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to
+the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our
+burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we
+enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no
+cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour,
+but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is
+the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave
+of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if
+you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is
+for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and
+Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the
+path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your
+wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts
+as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way
+again singing:--
+
+    Bed in the bush with the stars to see.
+    Bread I dip in the river--
+    There's the life for a man like me.
+    There's the life for ever.
+
+What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world,
+you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life
+you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide
+sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will
+outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life--the whistle
+of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep--add to the sense of
+primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and
+ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the
+waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have
+passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day.
+There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have
+startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with
+wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision
+of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk
+hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into
+these wild fastnesses of the mountains.
+
+And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you
+are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are
+getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of
+an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands
+wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale,
+or--yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld
+Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New
+Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on
+the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of
+"The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:
+
+    I'm not a climber, not a climber,
+    Not a climber now,
+    My weight is going fourteen stone--
+    I'm not a climber now.
+
+We shall not find Gaspard there to-night--Gaspard, the gay and intrepid
+guide from the Dauphine, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at
+Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the
+rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the
+shepherd, will be there--Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a
+town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man
+in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody--only when he is in a good
+humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we
+shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?"
+Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down
+the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from
+afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.
+
+To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our
+rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in
+going a journey is the early start. Have the whip-hand of the day, and then
+you may loiter as you choose. If it is hot, you may bathe in the chill
+waters of those tarns that lie bare to the eye of heaven in the hollows of
+the hills--tarns with names of beauty and waters of such crystal purity as
+Killarney knows not. And at night we will come through the clouds down the
+wild course of Rosset Ghyll and sup and sleep in the hotel hard by Dungeon
+Ghyll, or, perchance, having the day well in hand, we will push on by Blea
+Tarn and Yewdale to Coniston, or by Easedale Tarn to Grasmere, and so to
+the Swan at the foot of Dunmail Raise. For we must call at the Swan. Was it
+not the Swan that Wordsworth's "Waggoner" so triumphantly passed? Was it
+not the Swan to which Sir Walter Scott used to go for his beer when he was
+staying with Wordsworth at Rydal Water? And behind the Swan is there not
+that fold in the hills where Wordsworth's "Michael" built, or tried to
+build, his sheepfold? Yes, we will stay at the Swan whatever befalls.
+
+And so the jolly days go by, some wet, some fine, some a mixture of both,
+but all delightful, and we forget the day of the week, know no news except
+the changes in the weather and the track over the mountains, meet none of
+our kind except a rare vagabond like ourselves--with rope across his
+shoulder if he is a rock-man, with rucksack on back if he is a tourist--and
+with no goal save some far-off valley inn where we shall renew our strength
+and where the morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet.
+
+I started to write in praise of walking, and I find I have written in
+praise of Lakeland. But indeed the two chants of praise are a single
+harmony, for I have written in vain if I have not shown that the way to see
+the most exquisite cabinet of beauties in this land is by the humble path
+of the pedestrian. He who rides through Lakeland knows nothing of its
+secrets, has tasted of none of its magic.
+
+
+
+
+ON REWARDS AND RICHES
+
+
+We have all been so occupied with the war in Europe that few of us, I
+suppose, have even heard of another war which has been raging in the law
+courts for 150 days or so between two South African corporations over some
+question of property. It seems to have been marked by a good deal of
+frightfulness. In the closing scenes Mr. Hughes, one of the counsel,
+complained that he had been called a fool, a liar, a scoundrel, and so on
+by his opponent, and the judge lamented that the case had been the occasion
+of so much barristerial bitterness.
+
+But it was not the light which the case threw on the manners of counsel
+that interested me. After all, these things are part of the game. They have
+no more reality than the thumping blows which the Two Macs exchange in the
+pantomime. I have no doubt that after their memorable encounter in the
+Bardell _v_. Pickwick case, Serjeant Buzfuz and Serjeant Snubbin went out
+arm-in-arm, and over their port in the Temple (where the wine is good and
+astonishingly cheap) made excellent fun of the whole affair. The wise
+juryman never takes any notice of the passion and tears, the heroics and
+the indignation of counsel. He knows that they are assumed not to enlighten
+but to darken his mind. I always recall in this connection the remark of a
+famous lawyer who rose to great eminence by the exercise of his emotions.
+He was standing by the graveside of a departed friend and observed that one
+of the mourners, a fellow--lawyer, was shedding real tears. "What a waste
+of raw material," he remarked in a whisper to his neighbour. "Those tears
+would be worth a guinea a drop before a jury."
+
+What interested me in the case was the statement that the legal costs had
+been L150,000, and that Mr. Upjohn, K.C., alone had had a retainer of
+L1000, and had been kept going with a "refresher" of L100 a day. I like
+that word "refresher." It has a fine bibulous smack about it. Or perhaps it
+is a reminiscence of "the ring." Buzfuz feels a bit pumped by the day's
+round. He has perspired his L100, as it were, and is doubtful whether he
+can come up to the scratch without a refresher. And so he is taken to his
+corner by his client and dosed with another L100. Then all his ardour
+returns. He sees the thing as clear as daylight--the radiant innocence of
+the plaintiff, the black perfidy of the defendant. To-morrow evening the
+vision will have faded again, but another L100 will make it as plain as
+ever. Yes, it is a good word--"refresher"--a candid word, an honest word.
+It puts the relation on a sound business footing. There is no sham
+sentiment about it. Give me another refresher, says Buzfuz, and I'll shed
+another pailful of tears for you, and blacken both the defendant's eyes for
+him.
+
+But as I read of these princely earnings I could not help thinking of what
+an irrational world this is in the matter of rewards. Here are a couple of
+lawyers hurling epithets and "cases" at each other at L100 a day. At the
+end a verdict is given for this side or that, and outside the people
+concerned no one is a penny the better or worse. And not many miles away
+hundreds of thousands of men are living in the mud of rat-infested
+trenches, with the sky raining destruction upon them, and death and
+mutilation the hourly incident of their lives. They have no retaining fee
+and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them
+20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind
+conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You
+die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is
+perspiring for his client at L100 a day.
+
+This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of
+drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the
+eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and
+never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that
+Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns
+L130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that
+Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry
+which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble
+nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp
+distributor to keep him in bread and butter.
+
+Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme
+off on you. And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves
+of these things. It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy
+talk about "equality of sacrifice," and so much easy forgetfulness of the
+inequality of rewards. It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches
+have no necessary relation to service. The genius for getting money is an
+altogether different thing from the genius for service. I suppose the
+Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland. And I
+suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest. But who will dare apply the
+money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity--the
+one fabulously rich by brewing the "black stuff," as they call it in
+Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a
+thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the
+full tide of his powers? Which means the more to the world? Perhaps one
+effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these
+things--will teach us to look behind the money and title to the motives
+that get the money and the title. It is not the money and title we should
+distrust so much as the false implications attaching to them.
+
+And, after all, we exaggerate the importance of the material rewards. They
+must often be very much of a bore. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, a
+man doesn't sleep any better because he has a choice of forty bedrooms in
+his house. He can only take one ride even though he has fifty motor-cars.
+He cannot get more joy out of the sunshine than you or I can. The birds
+sing and the buds swell for all of us, and in the great storehouse of
+natural delights there is no money taken and no price on the goods. Mr.
+Rockefeller's L100 a minute (if that is his income) is poor consolation for
+his bad digestion, and the late Mr. Pierpoint Morgan would probably have
+parted with half his millions to get rid of the excrescence that made his
+nose an unsightly joke. We cannot count our riches at the bank--even on the
+material side, much less on the spiritual. As I came along the village this
+morning I saw Jim Squire digging up his potatoes in the golden September
+light. I hailed him, and inquired how the crop was turning out. "A
+wunnerful fine crop," he said, "and thank the Lord, there ain't a spot o'
+disease in 'em." And as he straightened his back, pointed to the tubers
+strewn about him, and beamed like the sun at his good fortune, he looked
+the very picture of autumn's riches.
+
+
+
+
+ON TASTE
+
+
+I was in a feminine company the other day when the talk turned on war
+economies, with the inevitable allusion to the substitution of margarine
+for butter. I found it was generally agreed that the substitution had been
+a success. "Well," said one, "I bought some butter the other day--the sort
+we used to use--and put it on the table with the margarine which we have
+learned to eat. My husband took some, thinking it was margarine, made a wry
+face, and said, 'It won't do. This margarine economy is beyond me. We must
+return to butter, even if we lose the war.' I explained to him that he was
+eating butter, _the_ butter, and he said, 'Well, I'm hanged!' Now, what do
+you think of that?"
+
+I said I thought it showed that taste was a matter of habit, and that
+imagination played a larger part in our make-up than we supposed. We say of
+this or that thing that it is "an acquired taste," as though the fact was
+unusual, whereas the fact would seem to be that we dislike most things
+until we have habituated ourselves to them. As a youth I abominated the
+taste of tobacco. It was only by an industrious apprenticeship to the herb
+that I overcame my natural dislike and got to be its obedient servant. And
+even my taste here is unstable. I needed a certain tobacco to be happy and
+thought there was no other tobacco like it. But I discovered that was all
+nonsense. When the war tax sent the price up, I determined that my
+expenditure should not go up with it, and I tried a cheaper sort. I found
+it distasteful at first, but now I prefer it to my old brand, just as the
+lady's husband finds that he prefers the new margarine to the old butter.
+
+And it is not only gastronomic taste which seems so much the subject of
+habit. That hat that was so absolute a thing last year is as dowdy and
+impossible to-day as if it had been the fashion of the Babylonians. It has
+always been so. "We had scarce worn cloth one year at the Court," says
+Montaigne, "what time we mourned for our King Henrie the Second, but
+certainly in every man's opinion all manner of silks were already become so
+vile and abject that was any man seen to wear them he was presently judged
+to be some countrie fellow or mechanical man." And you remember that in
+Utopia gold was held of so small account by comparison with iron that it
+was used for the baser purposes of the household.
+
+We are adaptable creatures, and easily make our tastes conform to our
+environment and our customs. There are certain savage tribes who wear rings
+through their noses. When Mrs. Brown, of Tooting, sees pictures of them she
+remarks to Mr. Brown on the strange habits of these barbarous people. And
+Mr. Brown, if he has a touch of humour in him, points to the rings hanging
+from Mrs. Brown's ears, and says: "But, my dear, why is it barbarous to
+wear a ring in the nostril and civilised to wear rings in the ears?" The
+dilemma is not unlike that of the savage tribe whom the Greeks induced to
+give up cannibalism. But when the cannibals, who had piously eaten their
+parents, were asked instead to adopt the Greek custom of burning the bodies
+they were horrified at the suggestion. They would cease to eat them; but
+burn them? No. I can imagine Mrs. Brown's savages agreeing to take the
+rings out of their noses, but refusing blankly to put them in their ears.
+
+I have no doubt that the long-haired Cavaliers used to regard the short
+hair of the Puritans as the "limit" in bad taste, but the man who today
+dares to walk down the Strand with hair streaming down his back is looked
+at as a curiosity and a crank, and we all join in that delightful addition
+to the Litany which Moody invented: "From long-haired men and short-haired
+women, Good Lord, deliver us." But who shall say that our children will not
+reverse the prayer?
+
+Even in my own brief span I have seen men's faces pass through every
+hirsute change under the Protean influence of "good taste." I remember
+when, to be really a student of good form, a man wore long side-whiskers of
+the Dundreary type. Then "mutton chops" and a moustache were the thing;
+then only a moustache; now we have got back to the Romans and the clean
+shave. But where is the absolute "good taste" in all this? Or take
+trousers. If you had lived a hundred years ago and had dared to go about in
+trousers instead of knee-breeches you would have been written down a vulgar
+fellow. Even the great Duke of Wellington in 1814 was refused admittance to
+Almack's because he presented himself in trousers. Now we relegate
+knee-breeches to fancy dress balls and Court functions.
+
+But sometimes the canons of good taste are astonishingly irrational. Who
+was it who set Christendom wearing black, sad, hopeless black as the symbol
+of mourning? The Roman ladies, who had never heard of the doctrine of the
+Resurrection, clothed themselves in white for mourning. It is left for the
+Christian world, which looks beyond the grave, to wear the habiliments of
+despair. If I go to a funeral I am as conventional as anybody else, for I
+have not the courage of a distinguished statesman whom I saw at his
+brother's funeral wearing a blue overcoat, check trousers, and a grey
+waistcoat, and carrying a green umbrella. I can give you his name if you
+doubt me--a great name, too. And he would not deny the impeachment. I am
+not prepared to endorse his idea of good taste; but I hate black. "Why
+should I wear black for the guests of God?" asked Ruskin. And there is no
+answer. Perhaps among the consequences of the war there will be a
+repudiation of this false code of taste.
+
+
+
+
+ON A HAWTHORN HEDGE
+
+
+As I turned into the lane that climbs the hillside to the cottage under the
+high beech woods I was conscious of a sort of mild expectation that I could
+not explain. It was late evening. Venus, who looks down with such calm
+splendour upon this troubled earth in these summer nights, had disappeared,
+but the moon had not yet risen. The air was heavy with those rich odours
+which seem so much more pungent by night than by day--those odours of
+summer eves that Keats has fixed for ever in the imagination:--
+
+    I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.
+      Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs;
+    But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
+      Wherewith the seasonable month endows
+    The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
+      White hawthorn....
+
+Ah, that was it. I remembered now. A fortnight ago, when I last came up
+this lane by night, it was the flash of the white hawthorn in the starlight
+that burst upon me with such a sudden beauty. I knew the spot. It was just
+beyond here, where the tall hedgerow leans over the grass side-track and
+makes a green arbour by the wayside. I should come to it in a minute or
+two, and catch once more that ecstasy of spring.
+
+And when I reached the spot the white hawthorn had vanished. The arbour was
+there, but its glory had faded. The two weeks I had spent in Fleet Street
+had stripped it of its crown, and the whole pageant of the year must pass
+before I could again experience that sudden delight of the hedgerows
+bursting into foam. I do not mind confessing that I continued my way up the
+lane with something less than my former exhilaration. Partly no doubt this
+was due to the fact that the hill at this point begins its job of climbing
+in earnest, and is a stiff pull at the end of a long day's work and a
+tiresome journey--especially if you are carrying a bag.
+
+But the real reason of the slight shadow that had fallen on my spirit was
+the vanished hawthorn. Poor sentimentalist, you say, to cherish these idle
+fancies in this stern world of blood and tears. Well, perhaps it is this
+stern world of blood and tears that gives these idle fancies their
+poignancy. Perhaps it is through those fancies that one feels the
+transitoriness of other things. The coming and the parting in the round of
+nature are so wonderfully mingled that we can never be quite sure whether
+the joy of the one triumphs over the regret for the other. It is always
+"Hail" and "Farewell" in one breath. I heard the cuckoo calling across the
+meadows to-day, and already I noticed a faltering in his second note. Soon
+the second note will be silent altogether, and the single call will sound
+over the valley like the curfew bell of spring.
+
+Who, I thought, would not fix these fleeting moments of beauty if he could?
+Who would not keep the cuckoo's twin shout floating for ever over summer
+fields and the blackbird for ever fluting his thanksgiving after summer
+showers? Who can see the daffodils nodding their heads in sprightly dance
+without sharing the mood of Herrick's immortal lament that that dance
+should be so brief:--
+
+    Fair daffodils, we weep to see
+    You haste away so soon;
+    As yet the early-rising sun
+    Has not attain'd its noon.
+    Stay, stay.
+    Until the hasting day
+    Has run
+    But to the evensong;
+    And, having prayed together, we
+    Will go with you along.
+
+Yes, I think Herrick would have forgiven me for that momentary lapse into
+regretfulness over the white hawthorn. He would have understood. You will
+see that he understood if you will recall the second stanza, which, if you
+are the person I take you for, you will do without needing to turn to a
+book.
+
+It is the same sense of the transience of beauty that inspired the "Ode to
+a Grecian Urn" on which pastoral beauty was fixed in eternal rapture:--
+
+    Ah, happy, happy boughs I that cannot shed
+    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu.
+
+And there we touch the paradox of this strange life. We would keep the
+fleeting beauty of Nature, and yet we would not keep it. The thought of
+those trees whose leaves are never shed, and of that eternal spring to
+which we never bid adieu, is pleasant to toy with, but after all we would
+not have it so. It is no more seriously tenable than the thought that
+little Johnny there should remain for ever at the age of ten. You may feel
+that you would like him to remain at the age of ten. Indeed you are a
+strange parent if you do not look back a little wistfully to the childhood
+of your children, and wish you could see them as you once saw them. But you
+would not really have Johnny stick at ten. After five years of the
+experience you would wish little Johnny dead. For life and its beauty are a
+living thing, and not a pretty fancy sculptured on a Grecian urn.
+
+And so with the pageant of Nature. If the pageant stopped, the wonder
+itself would stop. I should have no sudden shock of delight at hearing the
+first call of the cuckoo in spring or seeing my hawthorn hedge burst into
+snowy blossoms. I should no longer remark the jolly clatter of the rooks in
+the February trees which forms the prologue of spring, nor look out for the
+coming of the first primrose or the arrival of the first swallow. I should
+cease, it is true, to have the pangs of "Farewell," but I should cease also
+to have the ecstasy of "Hail." I should have my Grecian urn, but I should
+have lost the magic of the living world.
+
+By the time I had reached the gate I had buried my regrets for the vanished
+hawthorn. I knew that to-morrow I should find new miracles in the
+hedgerows--the wild rose and the honeysuckle, and after them the
+blackberries, and after these again the bright-hued hips and haws. And
+though the cuckoo's note should fail him, there would remain the thrush,
+and after the thrush that constant little fellow in the red waistcoat would
+keep the song going through the dark winter days.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pebbles on the Shore
+by Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
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