Many furrows

By "Alpha of the Plough"

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Title: Many furrows

Author: "Alpha of the Plough"

Release date: August 12, 2024 [eBook #74243]

Language: English

Original publication: London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1924

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANY FURROWS ***







[Frontispiece: (priests singing to man in window)]




  THE WAYFARER'S LIBRARY


  MANY FURROWS


  "Alpha of the Plough"
  (Alfred George Gardiner)



  LONDON & TORONTO
  J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.




  _All rights reserved_



  FIRST PUBLISHED ... 1924
  FIRST PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES ... 1927



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




  TO
  MY WIFE




PREFACE

When Benedick said that he would die a bachelor he did not know, as
he observed later, that he would live to be married.  In the same
way, I have to confess that when in my preface to _Windfalls_ I
hinted that it would be the last of these little books, I did not
think that there would be another.

Mr. Dent has convinced me of my mistake.  This is the fourth
collection I have made and, warned of the danger of forecasting the
future, I will say no word in prejudice of a fifth.  The essays, like
those in the previous volumes, have appeared in _The Star_, many of
them also in the _Manchester Evening News_ and some in the _Glasgow
Citizen_.




  CONTENTS

  Dream Journeys
  On Coming Home
  A Log Fire
  On Saying "Please"
  Billitch at Lord's
  On Shop Windows
  A Day with the Bees
  On Shaking Hands
  On a Finger-Post
  The Open Window
  On an Unposted Letter
  A Note on Dress
  Farewell to Hampstead
  On Plagiarism
  The Case of Dean Inge
  A Tale of Fleet Street
  On the Top Note
  Tea and Mr. Bennett
  On Buying and Selling
  On Big Words
  Do We Buy Books?
  Other People's Jobs
  Why I Don't Know
  On Anti-Climax
  The Unknown Warrior
  Naming the Baby
  The Cult of the Knife and Fork
  A Soliloquy in a Garden
  A Night's Lodging
  Those People Next Door
  How We Spend Our Time
  A Sentence of Death
  On an Elderly Person
  Taming the Bear
  Ourselves and Others
  An Offer of £10,000
  In a Lumber-Room
  Our Neighbour the Moon
  On Smiles
  When in Rome...
  The Jests of Chance
  In Defence of "Skipping"
  An Old English Town
  On People with One Idea
  To an Unknown Artist
  On Living for Ever
  On Initials
  Planting a Spinney
  On Wearing an Eyeglass
  A Man and His Watch
  Youth and Old Age
  The Golden Age
  The Top of the Ladder
  On Faces--Past and Present
  In Praise of Maiden Aunts
  October Days




MANY FURROWS


[Illustration: Many Furrows headpiece]


DREAM JOURNEYS

I had a singular dream last night.  I found myself on Robinson
Crusoe's Island and, curiously enough, in Robinson Crusoe's rôle.  In
the bright sunshine, by the sea-shore.  I was turning over the stores
of eatables, chiefly bags of potatoes, it seemed to me, that were
lying about.  There was abundance to go on with and I did not feel at
all disturbed at the prospect of not being called for for many a long
day.  I was alone, but without the sense of solitude.  Indeed, I was
entirely happy and free from care.  I feel, even now that I am awake,
the glow of the warm sunshine and the peace of the sands and the sea.
Most dreams are easily traceable to some waking circumstance, and
this quite enjoyable spiritual experience was, I suppose, due to a
conversation I had had about Honolulu and my regret that I was never
likely to see the islands of the Pacific.  The friendly spirit who
has charge of my dreams evidently took the hint and wafted me away to
Juan Fernandez.  I am half-disposed, so pleasant is the memory, to
regret that he did not leave me there, wrapped in immortal dreams of
plenty, peace and sunshine.

I shall repeat the experiment of nudging my amiable djinn into
agreeable activity.  I have a great many schemes to put before him,
and if my friends discover that I am talking with enthusiasm about
Pizarro they will know that I am putting in a plea with the director
of dreams for a trip to Peru, and that if I am unusually concerned,
even distressed, about the fate of Mummery, or the importance of
conquering Mount Everest, I have in mind the possibility of a
climbing excursion in the Himalayas.  It is an excellent way of
filling up the blanks in one's experience.

As we get on in years we become conscious of those blanks.  We feel
that we are in danger of missing much of the show we came to see.
While we are young, say, up to fifty, we are not troubled.  There
seems plenty of time still to do everything worth doing, and see
everything worth seeing.  But after fifty the horizon shrinks most
alarmingly, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it expands most
alarmingly, and we find that, not only is Heaven, as Hood said,
farther off than it seems in childhood, but that the desirable places
of the earth have become more inaccessible.  When I was a boy and had
my imagination stirred by tales of the backwoods and Russell's songs
about

                            The land of the free
  Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea,

I had no doubt that I should one day roll down with it, probably in a
canoe, with a friendly Indian.  Everything seemed possible then.
Life was so enormously long an affair that the only disturbing
thought was how you would be able to fill it up, and you had no more
idea of missing a trip up the Amazon or seeing the Rockies and
Niagara and the Grand Cañon when you grew up than of not being
privileged to smoke a pipe or to have a latchkey or to go to Lord's
or the Oval and see Grace whenever you felt inclined.

In this comfortable conviction that we shall do everything in good
time we jog along doing nothing in particular, getting more and more
like the donkey we used to see at Carisbrooke Castle years ago,
tramping round and round its tread-mill without ever reaching
anywhere.  We are not disquieted.  We feel that any day in the
infinite days before us we shall be threading the Thousand Islands or
climbing the Heights of Abraham, or seeing the sunrise in the
Oberland or the sunset in Venice, or the dawn coming up like thunder
on the road to Mandalay, or standing in the Coliseum at Rome or among
the ruins of Carthage or Timgad, or sailing among the isles of Greece
or catching the spicy breezes that, according to the hymn of the good
Bishop Heber, whom we could not suspect of romancing, come from
Ceylon's favoured isle.

And so with other things.  One day, assuredly, we shall take to
horse-riding, and canter gaily round Rotten Row, or we shall go
yachting in the Mediterranean or shooting in Scotland.  And think of
the books we shall read in the enormous leisure that lies before us.
There is that fellow Karl Marx, for example.  He certainly must be
read--some day.  It is absurd not to know what he said, when all the
world goes on babbling so learnedly about him.  No doubt he is a dull
fellow, but we cannot, of course, leave the world without knowing why
he created such a hubbub.  And there are a lot of other high-brows
that we shall become acquainted with in good time.  We shall really
study those categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant, and the
monism of Spinoza, and the _Leviathan_ and the _Novum Organum_, and a
score of other solemn books that ought to be read and must be
read--some day.  We are not worried about these things.  We have
years and years before us, and shall need some stout fellows like
these to make the time pass by.

That is how we drift until, somewhere in the fifties, we begin to
suspect that we are cutting it rather fine, and that all those riches
of experience that we confidently expected to enjoy and those
intellectual conquests that we intended to make are slipping beyond
our grasp.  Karl Marx is still joyfully unthumbed, the _Novum
Organum_ still beckons us unavailingly from the abode where the
eternal are, and we are still hazy about the categorical imperatives
of the illustrious Kant.  The call of the mighty Missouri falls faint
on our ears, and Ceylon's spicy breezes we have to take at
second-hand from the saintly Heber.  We are chained to the No. 16 bus
to Cricklewood or the tube to Shepherd's Bush, and when we break
loose we find ourselves on the pier at Brighton or heroically scaling
Beachy Head.  We pass our dreams of adventure on to hopeful and
undazzled youth, browsing greedily in the breathless pages of
Prescott.  We are not even sure that we want to go now, so habituated
have we become to the familiar tread-mill.  I daresay the Carisbrooke
donkey would have been broken-hearted at the idea of a trip to Cowes.
We are like Johnson when he was asked if he would not like to see
Giant's Causeway.  "Sir, I should like to see it, but I should not
like _to go to see it_."

It would be pleasant if we could educate our dreams to spirit us away
without all the trouble of tickets and luggage and travel to the
sights and experiences we have missed.  Do not tell me it would be an
idle illusion.  There was no illusion in my island.  I can see it in
my mind as clearly as any place I ever visited in the flesh, and if I
had the skill I could draw its hills and paint its tranquil sea and
sunny sands for you.  To-night I hope to spend with Mummery in the
Alps.




ON COMING HOME

A friend of mine found himself the other day on the platform of a
country station in the south of Scotland near the sea-coast.  A
middle-aged couple were the only people visible, and they sat
together on the single form provided for waiting passengers.  They
did not speak, but just sat and gazed at the rails, at the opposite
platform, at the fields beyond, at the clouds above, at anything, in
fact, within the range of vision.  My friend went and sat beside them
to wait for his train.  Presently another person, a woman, appeared,
and advancing to the other two, addressed them.  She wondered what
train the couple were waiting for.  Was their holiday over?

"Oh no," said the woman.  "We've another week yet."

"Then maybe ye're waiting for a friend?" speired the other.

"No," replied the woman.  "We're juist sitting.  We like to come here
in the evening and see the trains come in and out.  It's a change,
and it makes us think of home.  Eh," she said, with a sudden fervour
that spoke of inward agonies, "you do miss your home comforts on a
holiday."

I fancy this excellent woman, sitting on the platform to watch the
trains go homewards, and yearning for the day to come when she will
take a seat in one of them, disclosed a secret which many of us
share, but few of us have the courage to confess.  She was bored by
her holiday.  It was her annual Purgatory, her time of exile by the
alien waters of Babylon.  There she sat while the commonplaces of her
home life, her comfortable bed, the mysteries of her larder, the
gossip of her neighbours, the dusting of the front parlour, the
trials of shopping, her good man's going and returning, the mending
of the children's stockings, and all the little
somethings-and-nothings that made up her daily round, assumed a
glamour and a pathos that familiarity had deadened.  She had to go
away from home to discover it again.  She had to get out of her rut
in order to find that she could not be happy anywhere else.  Then she
could say with Touchstone, "So this is the forest of Arden: well,
when I was at home I was in a better place."

It does not follow that her holiday was a failure.  It was a most
successful holiday.  The main purpose of a holiday is to make us
home-sick.  We go to the forest of Arden in order that we may be
reconciled to No. 14, Beulah Avenue, Peckham.  We sit and throw
stones on the beach in the sunshine until we get sick of doing
nothing in particular, and dream of the 8.32 from Tooting as the
children of Israel dreamed of the fat pastures of Canaan.  We climb
the Jungfrau and explore the solitudes of the glaciers so that we can
recover the rapture of Clapham Common and the felicities of Hampstead
Heath.  We endure the dreary formalities of hotel life and the petty
larcenies of the boarding-house in order that we may enjoy with
renewed zest the ease and liberties of our own fireside.

In short, we go on a holiday for the pleasure of coming back.  The
humiliating truth is, of course, providentially concealed from us.
If it were not, we should stay at home and never see it afresh
through the pleasant medium of distance and separation.  But no
experience of past disillusions dims the glow of the holiday emotion.
I have no doubt that the couple on the platform set out from Auld
Reekie with the delight of children let out from school.  We all know
the feeling.  "Behold ... Beyond ..." cried young Ruskin when the
distant vision of the snowy battlements of the Oberland first burst
on his astonished eyes.  "Behold ... Beyond," we cry as we pile up
the luggage and start on the happy pilgrimage.  And the emotion is
worth having, even though we know it will end in a sigh of relief
when we reach No. 14, Beulah Avenue again and sink into the familiar
arm-chair and mow the bit of lawn that has grown shaggy in our
absence, and exchange reminiscences with No. 13 over the fence, and
feel the pleasant web of habit enveloping us once more.

It is when the holiday is over that we begin to enjoy it.  Then we
come, as Gissing says, under the law that wills that the day must die
before we can enjoy to the full its light and odour.  We are never,
by the perversity of our nature, quite so happy as we think we were
after the event had become a memory, and no doubt by next spring the
couple who sat on the station platform watching the homeward-bound
trains with longing eyes will recall the gay holiday they had without
a suspicion that they welcomed the end of it as children welcome
release from school.  The illusion will only mean that they are a
little sick of home again, and that they need the violent medicine of
a holiday to make them home-sick once more.




A LOG FIRE

I came in from the woods with a settled purpose.  I would spend the
evening in exalting the beauty of these wonderful November days in
the country.  The idea presented itself to me not merely as a
pleasure but as a duty.  Long enough had November been misjudged and
slandered, usually by Cockney poets like Tom Hood, who looked at it
through the fogs of a million coal fires.  Bare justice demanded that
the truth should out, that the world should be told of this beautiful
though aged spinster of the months who clothed the landscape in such
a radiant garment of sunshine, carpeted the beech-woods with such a
glow of gold and russet, filled the hedgerows with the scarlet of the
hips and haws, the wine-red of the blackthorn, and the yellow of the
guelder rose, and awoke the thrushes from their late summer silence.

This fervour for my Lady November is no new passion.  There are
certain things about which I have never made up my mind, and about
which, I suppose, I never shall make up my mind.  That is to say I
make it up, and then unmake it, after which I remake it, like the
child on the sea-shore who sees his sand-castle swept away by one
tide, and returns to build it for another tide to sweep away.  Thus,
if I say that I prefer Bach's Concerto for Two Violins to any piece
of music I have ever heard, I do not guarantee that a year hence I
may not be found swearing by the Londonderry air, or a Hebridean song
(the _Island Shieling Song_, for example), or the _Magic Flute_, or
something from Schumann.  A year later I may be round to the
intertwined loveliness of the two violins again.  And if I affirm
that the _Brothers Karamazov_ is the greatest achievement of the
imagination since Shakespeare, I do not promise not to say the same
thing of something else, _David Copperfield_ or _Les Miserables_,
when, after a due interval, I express my view again.  And so with
pictures and authors and towns and trees and flowers--in short, all
the things that appeal to the changing emotions or to that vague and
unstable thing called taste.

So it is in regard to the merits of the months.  I have been trying
all my life to come to a final decision on this great question.  It
seems absurd that one should spend, as I have spent, fifty or sixty
years doing little else but sample the months without arriving at a
fixed and irrevocable conclusion as to which I like best.  But that
is the case.  I am a mere Don Juan with the months.  I go flirting
about from one to the other, swearing that each is more beautiful
than her rivals.  When I am with June it seems absurd that there
should be anything else than June, and when I am with August I would
not sacrifice August with its waving cornfields and its sound of the
reaper for half the calendar.  But then comes September, and I chant
Swinburne to her as though I had never loved another:

  September! all glorious with gold as a king
    In the raiment of triumph attired,
  Outlightening the summer, outsweetening the spring,
  It broods o'er the woodlands with limitless wing,
    A presence of all men desired.

I do not doubt that I have declared that October, ruddy October,
chill October, is the pick of the bunch, and I know that on the first
bright day in February, when I see the snowdrops peeping out and hear
the rooks in the elms, I shall be found declaring that this is the
choicest moment of the year.  And April--April with the trees
bursting into green and the meadows "smo'ered wi' new grass," as they
say in the dales, and the birds coming up from the south bringing
tidings of the summer--well, what can one say of April, Shakespeare's
April, Shakespeare's "sweet o' the year," except that there is none
like her?

But I know that when May comes in and the orchards burst into foam,
and the lilac, laburnum and pink hawthorn make every suburban street
lyrical with colour and the beech-woods are clothed in that first
tender green that seems to make the sunlight sing as it streams
through and dapples the golden carpet of last year's leaves with
light and shade, and the bees are humming like an orchestra in the
cherry and damson trees and the birds are singing as though they are
divinely drunk, and the first brood of young swallows are making
their trial flights from the nest in the barn and

  When nothing that asks for bliss
    Asking aright is denied,
  And half of the world a bridegroom is
    And half the world a bride.

--then I know that I shall desert even My Lady April and give the
palm to the undespoiled splendour of May, singing meanwhile with
Francis Thompson:

  By Goddés fay, by Goddés fay,
    It is the month, the merry month,
  It is the merry month of May.


In this shameless wandering of the affections I have come round once
more to November, and I marvel, as I have marvelled many a year
before, that the poets have left unsung the elderly beauties of this
month, the quietude of its tones, the sombre dignity of its
landscape, the sense of a noble passing, the fading colours, the
falling leaves, the winds changing to a note of requiem among the
dismantled branches--

  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.


And lamenting this neglect I resolved to pay my tribute.  But first I
must make up the fire, for though my Lady November is beautiful she
is austere.  She has frozen the pump and the grass is thick with
hoar-frost, and to be just to her one must be warm.  So I piled on
the logs and prepared to be warm and enthusiastic.

Then I did a foolish thing, I sat down in an armchair and surrendered
myself to the fire's comfortable companionship.  There is nothing
more friendly or talkative than a fire.  Even a coal fire, if you
look at it steadfastly, will become as communicative as a maiden
aunt.  It knows all the gossip of the family, especially the gossip
about old, forgotten things.  It will talk to you of events so remote
that they seem to belong to the country of dreams.  It will bring out
faded portraits, and sing old songs, and burst into laughter that you
have not heard perhaps for forty years, and revive antique jokes, and
hand round steaming elderberry wine o' Christmas nights, and make
shadowgraphs on the wall as if you were a little boy again, and send
you sliding and skating under the glittering stars.  It forgets
nothing about you, and it tells its memories so cheerfully and
serenely that it leaves nothing for tears.  All this, even a
coal-fire will do when it is really in the vein and you have time to
sit and listen.

But a wood fire has a magic beyond this.  Its very smell is an
intoxication as rapturous as romance, compounded of all you have read
of the backwoods, of memories of the charcoal-burners, and of Coal
Munk Peter, of tales of the woodlands, Tristan and Iseult, and Robin
Hood, and Good King Wenceslaus, and the Children of the New Forest,
of Giles Winterbourne and Marty South, and all the delightful people
with whom the mind loves to go a-gypsying far away from this foolish
world.  Of course, you have to be something of a sentimentalist or a
romantic to feel all this--such a person as I once walked with for a
month in the Black Forest, to whom the smell of the woodlands was as
exciting as wine, and the sight of a charcoal-burner's camp a sort of
apocalyptic vision.  How well I remember those summer nights when,
leaving the forest inn, we would plunge into the woodlands, he
singing that haunting air Der Mai ist gekommen and interrupting it
with a shout as he saw the glimmer of the charcoal-burner's fire
through the boles of the pine trees....

But a wood fire is not only an idyll.  It is an occupation.  With a
coal fire it is different.  You put on a shovel of coals, and there's
an end of it.  But a wood fire will furnish light and pleasing
employment for a whole evening.  And by a wood fire I do not mean
those splinters of wood that you buy in towns, but thumping
logs--beech or apple or fir, as the case may be--a yard or two long
and with the bark intact that you lay across the fire-dogs and turn
round and round until they are burned through at the centre and fall
into the embers beneath in a glorious blaze, sending out such a
generous warmth as only comes from a wood fire.  Once or twice I drew
myself away from this seductive task and sat down at the table,
determined to write such a moving panegyric on November as would make
it the haughtiest month of the year.  Once I even went outside to get
inspiration from the stars and the moon that was flooding the valley
with a mystic light and the hoar-frost that lay like a white garment
over the orchard.  I heard the hoot of the owl in the copse near by
and the sound of the wind in the trees and the barking of a distant
dog and came back to my task with a stern resolve to see it through.
But the struggle was in vain.  Always there was some nice
readjustment of the logs necessary to call me to the charmed circle
of the wood fire; always at the end I found myself planted in the
arm-chair watching the changing scenery of the glowing embers.

So the article was not written after all.  Perhaps it was as well,
for I do not think I have the brush to do justice to My Lady
November.  It may be that that is why the wood fire had so easy a
triumph.




ON SAYING "PLEASE"

The young lift-man in a City office who threw a passenger out of his
lift the other morning and was fined for the offence was undoubtedly
in the wrong.  It was a question of "Please."  The complainant,
entering the lift, said, "Top."  The lift-man demanded,
"Top--please," and this concession being refused he not only declined
to comply with the instruction, but hurled the passenger out of the
lift.  This, of course, was carrying a comment on manners too far.
Discourtesy is not a legal offence, and it does not excuse assault
and battery.  If a burglar breaks into my house and I knock him down
the law will acquit me, and if I am physically assaulted it will
permit me to retaliate with reasonable violence.  It does this
because the burglar and my assailant have broken quite definite
commands of the law.  But no legal system could attempt to legislate
against bad manners, or could sanction the use of violence against
something which it does not itself recognise as a legally punishable
offence.  And whatever our sympathy with the lift-man, we must admit
that the law is reasonable.  It would never do if we were at liberty
to box people's ears because we did not like their behaviour, or the
tone of their voices, or the scowl on their faces.  Our fists would
never be idle, and the gutters of the City would run with blood all
day.

I may be as uncivil as I please and the law will protect me against
violent retaliation.  I may be haughty or boorish and there is no
penalty to pay except the penalty of being written down an
ill-mannered fellow.  The law does not compel me to say "Please" or
to attune my voice to other people's sensibilities any more than it
says that I shall not wax my moustache or dye my hair or wear
ringlets down my back.  It does not recognise the laceration of our
feelings as a case for compensation.  There is no allowance for moral
and intellectual damages in these matters.

This does not mean that the damages are negligible.  It is probable
that the lift-man was much more acutely hurt by what he regarded as a
slur upon his social standing than he would have been if he had had a
kick on the shins, for which he could have got legal redress.  The
pain of a kick on the shins soon passes away, but the pain of a wound
to our self-respect or our vanity may poison a whole day.  I can
imagine that lift-man, denied the relief of throwing the author of
his wound out of the lift, brooding over the insult by the hour, and
visiting it on his wife in the evening as the only way of restoring
his equilibrium.  For there are few things more catching than bad
temper and bad manners.  When Sir Anthony Absolute bullied Captain
Absolute, the latter went out and bullied his man Fag, whereupon Fag
went downstairs and kicked the page-boy.  Probably the man who said
"Top" to the lift-man was really only getting back on his employer
who had not said "Good morning" to him because he himself had been
hen-pecked at breakfast by his wife, to whom the cook had been
insolent because the housemaid had "answered her back."  We infect
the world with our ill-humours.  Bad manners probably do more to
poison the stream of the general life than all the crimes in the
calendar.  For one wife who gets a black eye from an otherwise
good-natured husband there are a hundred who live a life of martyrdom
under the shadow of a morose temper.  But all the same the law cannot
become the guardian of our private manners.  No Decalogue could cover
the vast area of offences and no court could administer a law which
governed our social civilities, our speech, the tilt of our eyebrows
and all our moods and manners.

But though we are bound to endorse the verdict against the lift-man,
most people will have a certain sympathy with him.  While it is true
that there is no law that compels us to say "Please," there is a
social practice much older and more sacred than any law which enjoins
us to be civil.  And the first requirement of civility is that we
should acknowledge a service.  "Please" and "Thank you" are the small
change with which we pay our way as social beings.  They are the
little courtesies by which we keep the machine of life oiled and
running sweetly.  They put our intercourse upon the basis of a
friendly co-operation, an easy give-and-take, instead of on the basis
of superiors dictating to inferiors.  It is a very vulgar mind that
would wish to command where he can have the service for asking, and
have it with willingness and good-feeling instead of resentment.

I should like to "feature" in this connection my friend the polite
conductor.  By this discriminating title I do not intend to suggest a
rebuke to conductors generally.  On the contrary, I am disposed to
think that there are few classes of men who come through the ordeal
of a very trying calling better than bus conductors do.  Here and
there you will meet an unpleasant specimen who regards the passengers
as his natural enemies--as creatures whose chief purpose on the bus
is to cheat him, and who can only be kept reasonably honest by a loud
voice and an aggressive manner.  But this type is rare--rarer than it
used to be.  I fancy the public owes much to the Underground Railway
Company, which also runs the buses, for insisting on a certain
standard of civility in its servants, and taking care that that
standard is observed.  In doing this it not only makes things
pleasant for the travelling public, but performs an important social
service.

It is not, therefore, with any feeling of unfriendliness to
conductors as a class that I pay a tribute to a particular member of
that class.  I first became conscious of his existence one day when I
jumped on to a bus and found that I had left home without any money
in my pocket.  Everyone has had the experience and knows the feeling,
the mixed feeling, which the discovery arouses.  You are annoyed
because you look like a fool at the best, and like a knave at the
worst.  You would not be at all surprised if the conductor eyed you
coldly as much as to say, "Yes, I know that stale old trick.  Now
then, off you get."  And even if the conductor is a good fellow and
lets you down easily, you are faced with the necessity of going back,
and the inconvenience, perhaps, of missing your train or your
engagement.

Having searched my pockets in vain for stray coppers, and having
found I was utterly penniless, I told the conductor with as honest a
face as I could assume that I couldn't pay the fare, and must go back
for money.  "Oh, you needn't get off: that's all right," said he.
"All right," said I, "but I haven't a copper on me."  "Oh, I'll book
you through," he replied.  "Where d'ye want to go?" and he handled
his bundle of tickets with the air of a man who was prepared to give
me a ticket for anywhere from the Bank to Hong Kong.  I said it was
very kind of him, and told him where I wanted to go, and as he gave
me the ticket I said, "But where shall I send the fare?"  "Oh, you'll
see me some day all right," he said cheerfully, as he turned to go.
And then, luckily, my fingers, still wandering in the corners of my
pockets, lighted on a shilling, and the account was squared.  But
that fact did not lessen the glow of pleasure which so good-natured
an action had given me.

A few days after my most sensitive toe was trampled on rather heavily
as I sat reading on the top of a bus.  I looked up with some anger
and more agony, and saw my friend of the cheerful countenance.
"Sorry, sir," he said.  "I know these are heavy boots.  Got 'em
because my own feet get trod on so much, and now I'm treading on
other people's.  Hope I didn't hurt you, sir."  He had hurt me but he
was so nice about it that I assured him he hadn't.  After this I
began to observe him whenever I boarded his bus, and found a curious
pleasure in the constant good-nature of his bearing.  He seemed to
have an inexhaustible fund of patience and a gift for making his
passengers comfortable.  I noticed that if it was raining he would
run up the stairs to give someone the tip that there was "room
inside."  With old people he was as considerate as a son, and with
children as solicitous as a father.  He had evidently a peculiarly
warm place in his heart for young people, and always indulged in some
merry jest with them.  If he had a blind man on board it was not
enough to set him down safely on the pavement.  He would call to Bill
in front to wait while he took him across the road or round the
corner, or otherwise safely on his way.  In short, I found that he
irradiated such an atmosphere of good-temper and kindliness that a
journey with him was a lesson in natural courtesy and good manners.

What struck me particularly was the ease with which he got through
his work.  If bad manners are infectious, so also are good manners.
If we encounter incivility most of us are apt to become uncivil, but
it is an unusually uncouth person who can be disagreeable with sunny
people.  It is with manners as with the weather.  "Nothing clears up
my spirits like a fine day," said Keats, and a cheerful person
descends on even the gloomiest of us with something of the
benediction of a fine day.  And so it was always fine weather on the
polite conductor's bus, and his own civility, his conciliatory
address and good-humoured bearing, infected his passengers.  In
lightening their spirits he lightened his own task.  His gaiety was
not a wasteful luxury, but a sound investment.

I have missed him from my bus route of late; but I hope that only
means that he has carried his sunshine on to another road.  It cannot
be too widely diffused in a rather drab world.  And I make no
apologies for writing a panegyric on an unknown bus conductor.  If
Wordsworth could gather lessons of wisdom from the poor
leech-gatherer "on the lonely moor," I see no reason why lesser
people should not take lessons in conduct from one who shows how a
very modest calling may be dignified by good-temper and kindly
feeling.

It is a matter of general agreement that the war has had a chilling
effect upon those little every-day civilities of behaviour that
sweeten the general air.  We must get those civilities back if we are
to make life kindly and tolerable for each other.  We cannot get them
back by invoking the law.  The policeman is a necessary symbol and
the law is a necessary institution for a society that is still
somewhat lower than the angels.  But the law can only protect us
against material attack.  Nor will the lift-man's way of meeting
moral affront by physical violence help us to restore the civilities.
I suggest to him that he would have had a more subtle and effective
revenge if he had treated the gentleman who would not say "Please"
with elaborate politeness.  He would have had the victory, not only
over the boor, but over himself, and that is the victory that counts.
The polite man may lose the material advantage, but he always has the
spiritual victory.  I commend to the lift-man a story of
Chesterfield.  In his time the London streets were without the
pavements of to-day, and the man who "took the wall" had the driest
footing.  "I never give the wall to a scoundrel," said a man who met
Chesterfield one day in the street.  "I always do," said
Chesterfield, stepping with a bow into the road.  I hope the lift-man
will agree that his revenge was much more sweet than if he had flung
the fellow into the mud.




BILLITCH AT LORD'S

Of course, there were others there besides Bill.  There were twenty
thousand people there.  There was the whole Oval crowd there.  I was
there--I always try to put in a day at Lord's when the Oval crowd
charges across the river with its jolly plebeian war-cries and swarms
into the enclosure at St. John's Wood like a crowd of happy children.
It makes me feel young again to be caught in that tide of fresh
enthusiasm.  I know that is how I used to feel in the good old days
of the 'eighties when I used to set out with my lunch to the Oval to
see Walter Read and Lohmann and K. J. Key and M. P. Bowden and Abel
and Lockwood and Tom Richardson and all the glorious company who
filled the stage then.  What heroes they were!  What scenes we saw!
What bowling, what batting, what fielding!  I daresay the heroes of
to-day are as heroic as those of whom I speak; but not for me.

Cricket, to the ageing mind, is never what it used to be; it is
always looking back to some golden age when it flourished, like
chivalry, in a pure and unsullied world.  My father used to talk to
me with fervour about the heroic deeds of Caffyn and Julius Cæsar,
and I talk to young people about the incomparable skill of Grace and
Steel and Lohmann, and they no doubt will be eloquent to their
children about Hobbs and Gregory.  And so on.  Francis Thompson
explained the secret of the golden age when he sang:

  Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow long ago.

That is it.  It is that "long ago" that makes our giants so
gigantesque.  Cricketers, as the old gentleman said of the peaches,
are not so fine as they were in our young days.  How could they be?
Why have we lived all these years if we are not allowed to have seen
greater things than these youngsters who are shouldering us out of
the way have ever seen?  Of course, they don't believe in "our
Hornbys and our Barlows long ago" any more than I believed when a boy
that Caffyn and Julius Cæsar could hold a candle to W. G. or Walter
Read, and they will find that their children will think lightly of
Hobbs in comparison with some contemporary god of their idolatry.

But whatever change has taken place in cricket--or in me--I swear
there is no change in the jolly Oval crowd.  It is, as it has always
been, the liveliest, most intense, most good-humoured mob that ever
shouted itself hoarse at cricket.  It is as different from the Lord's
crowd as a country fair is from the Church Congress.  At Lord's we
take our cricket as solemnly as if we were at a prayer-meeting.  We
sit and smoke and knit our brows with portentous gravity.  Sometimes
we forget ourselves and say: "Well run, sir!" or "Missed.  By Jove!"
Then we turn round to see if anybody has heard us.  We have even been
known to clap; but these extravagances are rare.  Generally we end by
falling asleep.

But we were done out of our sleep on Monday.  There's no possibility
of sleep when the Oval crowd is about and when they have brought
Billitch with them.  At Lord's we never have a popular hero or a
comic figure.  Cricket is far too serious a thing to turn to fun.  If
Little Tich came and played at Lord's, we should not smile.  We
should take him very seriously, and call him Mr. William Tich if he
came out of the front-door of the pavilion, and Tich (W.) if he came
out of the side-door.  On Monday we had several bad shocks to our
sense of the solemnities of cricket.  For example, we saw Fender, the
Surrey captain, lead the "gentlemen" members of his team to the
professionals' quarters and bring his team out to the field in a
body, just for all the world as though they were all one flesh and
blood.  It was a painful sight, and many of us closed our eyes rather
than look upon it.  We felt that Bolshevism had invaded our sanctuary
at last.

And then there was that unseemly enthusiasm for Billitch.  I don't
know what there is about Bill that makes him such an idol of the Oval
crowd; but there it is.  If Bill went on to bowl the ring shouted,
"Good ole Bill"; if he went off bowling it said that, "Ole Bill wants
a rest"; if he hit a ball it said, "That's one for ole Bill"; if he
missed a ball it said, "Ole Bill let that go by"; if he tapped the
wicket with his bat it was confident that "Ole Bill had found a
narsty spot"; if he made a short run it shouted, "Brayvo, ole Bill."
I think that if he had stopped to blow his nose the crowd would have
blown its nose too, for the pleasure of keeping him company.

It is not that Billitch is a comic figure, as Johnny Briggs used to
be.  Nor an incomparable cricketer, as Lohmann used to be.  Nor of
home product from Mitcham Common, for I think he comes from
Lancashire.  But he has a certain liveliness, a sense of enjoying
everything he does, and putting his whole heart into it, that gives a
lusty spirit to the game and touches the affections of the Oval
crowd, which always mixes up its affections with its cricket.  And
his name does the rest.  It is an irresistible name.  You can go on
saying Billitch all day without growing weary.  It will suit any
circumstances and go to any rhythm.  What jolly verses old Craig
would weave about it if he could come back and hawk poems to us on
sunny afternoons.  But it needed the Oval crowd to discover the
riches of that name.  If Billitch had come to Lord's he would not
have been Billitch at all.  He would have been Hitch (W.) and as
solemn as all the rest of us.  I wish we were as merry at Lord's as
they are at the Oval.




ON SHOP WINDOWS

It is one of the consolations of being unemployed that one has time
to look in the shop windows.  When I was among the employed I never
looked in shop windows.  I was shot like a shuttle in a loom from
home to office and from engagement to engagement, and had no time to
saunter along and "stand and stare."  It was not merely that I had no
time for shop windows: I thought I had no taste for shop windows.  If
I walked down Regent Street with Jane I was sensible of a certain
impatience when she made a sudden left-wheel and stood transfixed
before some brilliant idea of the window-dresser.  I declined to
wheel to the left.  I stood implacably in the middle of the pavement,
looking severely ahead or around or above.  I wanted to be getting on
with the war.  I was a serious person, with a soul above the
frivolities of shop windows.  No doubt there was something of a pose
in this behaviour.  There is usually something of a pose in us when
we feel superior.

But with the inheritance of leisure I have become more humble-minded.
I not only wheel to the left when Jane wheels, but I wheel to the
left on my own account.  I am becoming a student of shop windows.  I
find them as interesting as a hedgerow in the country.  I can tell
you the price of things.  I can discuss with you the relative merits
of Marshall and Snelgrove and Peter Robinson, and the name of Mr.
Selfridge falls trippingly from my tongue.  There is not a tailor's
shop between the Law Courts and Marble Arch that I have not peered
into, and if you want to know where a good line in boots is to be had
or where motor-cars are cheap to-day or precious stones should be
sought I am worth consulting.  No longer does Jane regard a walk down
Regent Street with me as an affliction.  I am a companion after her
own heart--if not an expert, at least an intelligent amateur.  A
touch on my arm, and I wheel to the left with military precision and
line up in front of the window and discuss the contents in no
unenlightened spirit.  My opinion is regarded.  I am asked questions.
I am listened to with respect.  My taste in hats is becoming a
proverb, and it is allowed that I have a good eye for colour.

In this new-found diversion I am catholic in my tastes.  You may see
me lost in thought before a furniture shop or a fruit shop, or
examining trombones or Kodaks, or looking at old colour prints or old
books, or studying old china, or simply standing amused among a crowd
of other idlers watching the kittens at play in the naturalist's shop
window.  There is no covetousness in all this.  I am conscious of no
yearnings for unattainable things.  On the contrary, I am astonished
at the number of things I can do without.

Nor am I tempted to go inside the shops.

                May day seldom looks
  Up in the country as it does in books.


And I know that shop windows are no more like the inside of shops
than a company prospectus is like the company's balance-sheet.  You
see, let us say, a pair of shoes in the window at twenty-five
shillings.  It would be a crime to let that pair of shoes go, you
say.  It is what you have been looking for--something "good-cheap,"
as the old English phrase went.  You go inside and allude falteringly
to that cheap line in the window.  The salesman observes the falter.
He speaks coldly of that attractive-looking bait.  You feebly insist,
and he tries it on, making you sensible the while that a person like
you would be dishonoured by such footwear, that he is surprised you
should think that a person of your obvious quality can appear abroad
in such inferior leathers.  Moreover, aren't they a leetle tight
across the instep?  And unfortunately he hasn't the next size in
stock....  Now here is a perfect shoe, best box-calf, soft as kid,
durable as brass, last a lifetime....  The price?  The fellow looks
inside as though the question of price had not occurred to him, as
though it had no relation to the subject....  Fifty-five shillings.
And as you leave the shop worsted, wearing the shoes, you fancy you
hear a slight chuckle of derision from the victor.

There are, of course, people who love shopping and whose life is
irradiated by victories at the counter.  They are chiefly women, but
I have known men who had gifts in this line of no mean order.  They
could march into a shop as boldly as any woman and have the place
turned upside down and go away without spending a copper, carrying
their heads as high and haughtily as you please.  But men of this
heroic mould are rare.  Men are usually much too mean-spirited, too
humble, too timid to be fit to go into a shop to buy anything.
Perhaps I ought to say they are too proud.  They would slink out, if
they could do so unobserved.  They would decline to buy what they
don't want to buy if their vanity would permit them.  But they cannot
face the ordeal.  They cannot leave the impression that they are not
rolling in riches and are not able to buy anything in the shop,
whether they want it or not.  And it is only fair to us to say that
sometimes we fall from compassion.  We buy because the lady has been
so attentive--or has such an agreeable presence--that we have not the
courage to disappoint her or, less creditably, to lose her favourable
opinion.

Now women, of course, are afflicted with none of these handicaps.
The trouble with men as shoppers is that they are incurable amateurs
and sentimentalists.  They not only do not know the ropes; they do
not know that there are any ropes to know.  They are just babes and
sucklings at the business.  You can see the Delilah behind the
counter smiling pityingly and even contemptuously to herself as they
approach with their mouths wide open to receive the hook.  She
chooses her bait under the poor simpletons' noses, and lands them
without a struggle.  She knows that they will take any old thing at
any old price.  But a woman marches to the attack as the soldier
marches to battle.  She is for the rigour of the game.  The shop is
her battlefield, and she surveys it with the eye of the professional
warrior.  And Delilah prepares to receive her as an enemy worthy of
her steel.  All her faculties are aroused, all her suspicions are
awakened.  She expects no quarter, and she will give none.

Here is Pamela, for example, accompanied by Roderick, halting rather
shamefacedly in the rear.  Roderick has never seen Pamela on the
warpath before, and it is a terrifying revelation.  He had thought
she was so kind-hearted and genial that everybody must love her, but
he grows crimson as he sees the progress of the duel.  This is not
the Pamela he knew: this is a very Amazon of a woman, armed to the
teeth, clothed in an icy disapproval of everything, riding down her
foe with Prussian frightfulness.  And all over a matter of a handbag.
The counter is piled with handbags, and Pamela examines each with
relentless thoroughness and increasing dissatisfaction.  She must
have more handbags.  And Delilah with darkening brows ransacks the
store for the last handbag.  She understands the game, but she is
helpless, and when at the end of the battle Pamela coldly remarks
that they are not what she wants, and that she will just take one of
those tops, Delilah knows that she has been defeated.  "I only wanted
a top, you see," says Pamela to Roderick sweetly as they leave the
shop, "but I wanted to see how the bags were fitted to them."

Or to understand the gulf that separates men and women in the art and
science of shopping, see my Lady Bareacres at the mantlemaker's,
accompanied by a lady companion.  All the riches of the establishment
are displayed before her, and she parades in front of the mirror in
an endless succession of flowing robes.  She gives the impression of
inexhaustible good intentions, but she finds that there is nothing
that suits her, and she goes away to repeat the performance
elsewhere.  And as she goes Delilah looks daggers at the companion
who has come with her ladyship to get hints for the garment that she
is to make for her.  The man has not been born who could play so high
a hand as that.  Whether his inferiority in the great art of shopping
is to be accounted to him as a virtue or a shame may be left to the
moralists to discuss; but the fact is indisputable enough.  He knows
his weakness, and rarely goes into a shop except in the last
extremity or under the competent guardianship of a woman.  He can
look in shop windows if he have firmness of mind and can say,
"Danton, no weakness!" with the assurance that Danton will not bolt
inside.  But there is one sort of shop window before which the least
of us are safe.  And it transcends all shop windows in interest.  It
is the window through which you look into the far places of the
earth.  Canada and Queensland, British Columbia and New Zealand.  The
Strand is lit up with glimpses of these distant horizons--landscapes
waving with corn, landscapes flowing with milk and honey, bales of
fleecy wool, sugar-canes like scaffold poles, peaches that make the
mouth water, pumpkins as large as the full moon, prodigious trout
that would make the angler's heart sing, snow mountains and
climbing-boots, a thousand invitations to come out into the wide
spaces of the earth, where plenty and freedom and the sunshine await
you.  I daresay it is an illusion.  I daresay the wide spaces of the
earth are very unlike these wonderful windows.  But I love to look in
them and to feel that they are true.  They almost make me wish that I
were young again--young enough to set out

  For to admire and for to see.
  For to behold the world so wide.




A DAY WITH THE BEES

There is a prevalent notion that the country is a good place to work
in.  The quiet of the country, so runs the theory, leaves the mind
undistracted, calm and able to concentrate on the task in hand.  It
is a plausible theory, but it is untrue.  In town the movement, noise
and ceaseless unrest form a welter of sound that has no more personal
significance than the lapping of the waves on the sea-shore.  It does
not disturb--it rather composes the mind.  It is the irrelevant
babble of the world, enormous but signifying nothing, in the midst of
which the mind is at ease and self-contained.  But in the country
every sound has an individual meaning that breaks in upon the quiet
and demands attention.  It is not general; it is particular.  Take
to-day, for example.  I had sat down after breakfast, determined to
traverse the Sahara on which I am engaged and to reach the oasis of a
chapter-ending by nightfall.

But I had hardly begun when a bumble bee flew in at the open door on
one side of the room and made for the closed window on the other
side.  The buzz of a bumble bee in the open air makes a substantial
volume of sound.  But inside the room this turbulent fellow sounded
like an aeroplane as he roared against the window-panes in his
frantic efforts to get through.  Give him time, I thought.  He will
discover that there is no thoroughfare by the window and will return
by the way he came in.  Let me get on with my work.  But the bumble
bee has as little sense in the matter of exits and entrances as the
wasp has, and my visitor kept up such a thunder against the
window-panes that I was compelled to surrender, got up, opened the
window, and with a judicious thrust with a newspaper piloted the
fellow out into the open air.

It was a bad beginning for the journey across the Sahara; but I sat
down, composed myself afresh, and started again, ignoring the thrush
who was calling his hardest to me just outside the window to come out
and see what a glorious sunshiny day we had got at last.  But I was
hardly launched again on my journey when I became conscious of
unusual sounds in the garden.  I looked out and saw the odd man, who
had been banking up the potatoes, shielding himself as if from a
storm and uttering strange cries.  I left the desert again and rushed
out.  Everybody else in the house I found was rushing out.  There,
swirling like a cloud of dust across the garden, was a swarm of bees
which had swept down from the hills and across the meadow land behind
us and were evidently on the point of settling.  They passed by the
house with the boom of ten thousand wings and came to rest in a
hawthorn bush on the road below.  It was no business of mine.  The
expert was out with veil and gloves on for the fray and could very
well manage without my help; but no amount of familiarity makes me
able to resist the call of a swarm of bees, and I forgot all about
Sahara until we returned triumphantly with a branch bearing a vast
coagulated mass of bees and succeeded in housing them in a spare hive.

Then I remembered Sahara and, like Mr. Snodgrass (the exercise having
warmed me unduly), I took off my coat and announced to myself that
"Now I am about to begin."  A ring at the telephone bell!  A swarm of
bees had settled on the roof of a house a mile or two away, and would
we be so kind as to take them away.  Off went the expert as fast as
petrol could carry her, and I returned to my lonely plough and the
desert sands.  But this day was doomed for me by the warm sun that
had set all the surplus population of the hives for miles round
trekking to new quarters.  The cold Spring and the wet May and early
June had kept the bee world quiescent.  Looking in the hives we could
see all the preparations for swarming in progress, but the weather
had been unpropitious and now with this sudden burst of summer all
the tide of repressed life was released, and it seemed that the whole
countryside was alive with bees in flight from their crowded homes to
new lodgings.  Before the expert returned there was sensation once
more in the garden.  No. 5 had swarmed, and down between the
spruce-trees and the hedge the air was thick with the migrants.
Usually our swarms settle in the hedge while the couriers fly far and
wide to reconnoitre for suitable quarters.  And it is in this
interval of waiting that they are hived afresh.  But this swarm
neither settled in the hedge nor flew away with that sudden
inspiration which sometimes seizes them.  They swirled round and
round like a tornado that had lost its way.  Then they were observed
to be returning to the hive they had left.

Here was a mystery indeed.  Had the queen changed her mind and gone
back, or had she by some miracle eluded her enormous family?  The
arrival of the expert, with her new capture, relieved us of
responsibility in the matter.  She opened the hive and took out the
frames on which the bees were massed, but the queen, discoverable by
her larger size, was not to be seen.  At last, outside on the path,
we saw a group of bees and in the midst of them the queen.  The
adventure had been too much for her powers, or perhaps she had
defective wings.  She was put back in the hive, and what the workers
thought about the flight that failed I shall never know.  But a new
home to which the queen had no need to fly was soon at their disposal.

By this time the day was far advanced, but my journey across Sahara
had hardly begun, and even now the interruptions from the bees were
not at an end.  For the third time there was commotion in the garden;
on this occasion the note was tragedy.  One of the hens, which had
had some accident, was confined in a coop as a sort of convalescent
home.  Its water-supply was outside and thither the bees had gone to
drink.  One of them, objecting to the beak that came out of the coop,
stung the hen near the eye, and the smell of the acid infuriated its
fellows and soon the unhappy hen was enveloped in a cloud of bees
each stabbing it in its vulnerable spot.  When its plight was
discovered the poor creature was insensible and apparently dying.
With difficulty the assailants were driven off and the victim was put
out of its misery.

When night came I was still ploughing my lonely furrow with no hope
of reaching the goal for which I had started out so hopefully in the
morning.  No, the country is too exciting a place to work in.  Give
me the solitude of London, where there are no bees to swarm and no
thrushes to keep telling one what a fine day it is in the garden.




ON SHAKING HANDS

If there is one custom that might be assumed to be beyond criticism
it is the custom of shaking hands; but it seems that even this
innocent and amiable practice is upon its trial.  A heavy indictment
has been directed against it in the Press on hygienic grounds, and we
are urged to adopt some more healthy mode of expressing our mutual
emotion when we meet or part.  I think it would need a pretty stiff
Act of Parliament and a heavy code of penalties to break us of so
ingrained a habit.  Of course, there are many people in the world who
go through life without ever shaking hands.  Probably most people in
the world manage to do so.  The Japanese bows, and the Indian
salaams, and the Chinese makes a grave motion of the hand, and the
Arab touches the breast of his friend at parting with the tips of his
fingers.

By comparison with these modes of salutation it may be that our
Western custom of shaking each other by the hand seems coarse and
bucolic, just as our custom of promiscuous kissing seems an
unintelligible indecency to the Japanese, to whom osculation has an
exclusive sexual significance that we do not attach to it.  In the
matter of kissing, it is true, we have become much more restrained
than our ancestors.  Everyone has read the famous passage in Erasmus'
letters in which he describes how people used to kiss in Tudor
England, and how, by the way, that learned and holy man enjoyed it.
He could not write so of us to-day.  And there is one connection in
which kissing has never been a common form of salutation with us.
Masculine kissing is an entirely Continental habit, chiefly
cultivated among the Russians.  The greatest display of kissing I
have ever witnessed was at Prince Kropotkin's house--he was then
living at Brighton--on his seventieth birthday.  A procession of aged
and bearded Russian patriarchs came to bring greetings, and as each
one entered the room he rushed at the sage, flung his arms about his
neck, and gave him a resounding smack on each whiskered cheek, and
Kropotkin gave resounding smacks in return.

This is carrying heartiness too far for our austerer tastes.  I do
not think that Englishmen could be bribed to kiss each other, but I
cannot conceive that they will ever be argued out of shaking hands
with each other.  A greeting which we really feel without a grip of
the hand to accompany it would seem like a repulse, or a sacrilege.
It would be a bond without the seal--as cold as a stepmother's
breath, as official as a typewritten letter with a typewritten
signature.  It would be like denying our hands their natural office.
They would revolt.  They would not remain in our pockets or behind
our backs or toying with a button.  We should have to chain them up,
so instinctive and impetuous is their impulse to leap at a brother
hand.

No doubt the custom has its disadvantages.  We all know hands that we
should prefer not to shake, warm, clammy hands, listless, flaccid
hands, bony, energetic hands.  The horror and loathing with which
Uriah Heep filled our youthful mind was conveyed more through the
touch of his hand than by any other circumstance.  It was a cold,
dank hand that left us haunted with the sense of obscene and creepy
things.  I know the touch of that hand as though it had lain in mine,
and whenever I feel such a hand now the vision of a cringing, fawning
figure damns the possessor of it in my mind beyond reprieve.  It may
be unjust, but the hand-clasp is no bad clue to moral as well as
physical health.  "There is death in that hand" was Coleridge's
remark after parting from Keats, and there are times when we can say
with no less confidence that there is pollution, or dishonesty, or
candour, or courage "in that hand."

Some personalities seem to resolve themselves into a hand-shake.  It
is so eloquent that it leaves nothing more to be discovered about
them.  There is Peaker, the publisher, for example, who advances with
outstretched hand and places it in yours as though it is something he
wants to get rid of.  It is a cold pudding of a hand, or a warm
pudding of a hand, according to the weather, but, cold or warm, it is
equally a pudding.  What are you to do with it?  It obviously doesn't
belong to Peaker, or he would not be so anxious to get rid of it.
You can't shake it, for it is as unresponsive as a jelly-fish, and no
one can shake hands heartily with a jelly-fish.  Hand-shaking must be
mutual, or it is not at all.  So you just hold it as long as civility
demands, and then gently return it to Peaker, who goes and tries to
get someone else to take it off his hands, so to speak.

And at the other extreme is that hearty fellow Stubbings, the sort of
man who

        Hails you "Tom" or "Jack,"
  And proves by thumping on your back
    How he esteems your merit.

But he does not thump you on the back.  He takes your hand--if you
are foolish enough to lend it to him--and crushes it into a jumble of
aching bones and shakes your arm well-nigh out of its socket.  That's
the sort of man I am, he seems to say.  Nothing half-hearted about
me, sir.  Yorkshire to the backbone.  Jannock right through, sir.
(Oh, torture!)  And I'm glad to see you, sir.  (Another jerk.)  He
restores your hand, a mangled pain, and you are careful not to trust
him with it again at parting.  And there is the limp and lingering
hand that seems so overcharged with affection that it does not know
when to go, but lies in your palm until you feel tempted to throw it
out of the window.  But though there are hands that make you shudder
and hands that make you writhe, the ritual is worth the occasional
penalty we have to pay for it.  It is the happy mean between the
Oriental's formal salaam and the Russian's enormous hug, and if it
has less dignity than the Arab's touch with the finger-tips, which is
like a benediction, it has more warmth and more of the spirit of
human comradeship.  We shall need a lot of medical evidence before we
cease to say with the most friendly of all poets:

  Then here's a hand, my trusty frien'.
    And gie's a hand o' thine.




ON A FINGER-POST

At the end of the orchard, where the road that climbs up the hillside
from the valley crosses the old British track that had ambled along
the slopes of the hills for thousands of years, stands a finger-post.
One of its hands has fallen with age, and the other two are hardly
legible, though with difficulty you may see that one of them directs
the wayfarer to Dunstable.  I have never seen anyone consult it, and
on a moonlight night it looks the most gaunt and solitary thing on
earth, for ever pointing a minatory finger over the glimmering
landscape, like a prophet vainly directing a naughty and unheeding
world to the land of Beulah.  Nobody takes any notice of it.

But it has its moments of consequence.  On high-days and holidays in
the summer, days such as these, happy picnickers from afar, mostly
school-children out for their annual treat, come to a halt at the old
finger-post on their way to the summit of the hill.  The horses are
unhitched from the waggonette and are left to graze while the
children spread their lunch or their tea on the Icknield Way, which
here resumes the character of a green-ride over which the centuries
have passed without record of change.  But no one ever seems to want
to go to Dunstable.  I do not want to go to Dunstable myself.  In
time I suppose the poor old finger-post will tire of telling the
world to go to Dunstable and will drop its second arm in weariness
and despair.

I have no desire to go to Dunstable, because I like the name so much
that I do not want to spoil the emotion of pleasure it gives me by
any earthly contacts.  I should as soon think of going to Dunstable
as of going to Ashby-de-la-Zouch.  I would not destroy the poetry
that hangs about that name for anything the place could give me.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch belongs to the realm of dreams, where high romance
is always afoot and you may see any day some splendid knight in the
tournament charging down upon his foe, while the beautiful heroine
drops her handkerchief to show that she can bear no more.  Why should
I desecrate this agreeable fancy by discovering that
Ashby-de-la-Zouch is (perhaps) a grubby little place with one frowsy
tea-shop and a tin tabernacle?  I do not say that that is what
Ashby-de-la-Zouch is like.  It may be a very nice place with a
boulevard and a bandstand.  I shall never know.  But it could not
possibly be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch.  Nothing could be like my
Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

It is so with Bideford in Devon.  It may be that if one went to
Bideford in Devon one would find it very much like Southend-on-Sea,
or Skegness or Blackpool or any other popular resort.  It may have a
pier and half-a-dozen cinemas and a "Ham and Eggs" Parade like New
Brighton.  It may be a wilderness of stuffy lodging-houses, with

  "APARTMENTS"

in every window, and touts who salute you at every step.  But to the
imagination Bideford in Devon is something quite different from that.
It is the gateway of adventure, the arch wherethrough gleams the
untravelled world.  On the shore you may meet Grenville or Drake in
buff jerkin and silken hose, and Salvation Yeo telling tales to a
crowd of open-mouthed youths and blowing clouds of tobacco before
their astonished eyes.  And in the harbour you may see the little
_Revenge_ herself, waiting for her crew of "men from Bideford in
Devon" who are to share in the immortal exploit that hangs like an
imperishable halo over this Devon shore.

I once knew a man who came from Bideford.  I don't suppose he was
really better than if he had come from Chowbent, or Wigan, or
Coggeshall.  I fancy he was quite an ordinary man; but to me he came
trailing clouds of glory from afar.  He seemed to waft breezes from
the Spanish Main before him, and in his pockets I fancied I heard the
chink of doubloons that had come from a treasure-ship in Nombre Dios
Bay.  I could not regard him as a man.  I regarded him as a romance.
What else could one do with a man who came from Bideford in Devon?  I
was very young then, but I doubt whether years have wrought any
difference.  I doubt whether I could do business with any success
with a man who had come from Bideford.  I should be as wax in his
hands or as clay to the potter.  But much as I love the sound of its
name, no finger-post will ever tempt me to Bideford in Devon.  I will
preserve the vision.  I will not break the spell.

Now, it is different with places like those Essex villages, Messing
and Mucking.  Anyone might go to Messing or to Mucking and have quite
a pleasant surprise.  I have not been to them myself, but I should
not be afraid to go to them.  If Messing (or Mucking) should turn out
to be no better than its name I should rejoice in its blunt honesty,
and if on the contrary it should prove a country idyll, all ivy and
parish pumps and village greens and thatched cottages, with perhaps
the ancient pound in one field and the old village stocks in another,
a ghost haunting the Tudor manor-house and an owl keeping its nightly
vigil in the church tower--if, I say, Messing (or Mucking) should be
like this one, one would have the sensation which Mr. Birrell had
when he picked up a first edition of Gray's _Elegy_ on a threepenny
barrow.  Yes, decidedly, if that finger-post pointed to Messing or
Mucking I would go there.  But not to Dunstable.

Places with beautiful or suggestive names are like the heroes of our
fancy: they ought not to be seen.  Who ever saw a man who had become
a myth to him without disappointment?  I remember when I was a boy
and saw W. G. Grace for the first time what a sense of disillusion I
suffered.  He had become a fable to me.  I used to see him in
imagination descending from Olympus, with all nature celebrating his
advent.  The clouds would clap their hands at his approach and the
earth would assuredly tremble with joy.  And instead he just walked
about and talked like any other man, and got out on the same plane of
frail mortality.  It was my first lesson in the brutal realism of
things.

It was such a shock that Stevenson records in _Across the Plains_.
Who is there who has not felt the beauty of that word "Wyoming"?  It
is a name that would almost make one forget the toothache.  It is the
very stuff of poetry, a balm for the troubled spirit, an anodyne for
the jangled nerves.  I could imagine a doctor prescribing that a
patient should repeat "Wyoming" half a dozen times every hour as a
cure for neurasthenia or something like that.  That was how Stevenson
felt about it until he had the misfortune to see it.


To cross such a plain (Nebraska) is to grow homesick for the
mountains.  I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we
were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring.  Alas!
and it was a worse county than the other.  All Sunday and Monday we
travelled through these sad mountains or over the main ridge of the
Rockies, which is a fair match to them in misery of aspect.  Hour
after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our
onward path....


But get down the book and read the whole passage.  It is as beautiful
a piece of descriptive prose as you will find anywhere.  But when you
have read it you will be glad that you have not been to Wyoming and
that you can still soothe the toothache with the sound of its magic
name.

I shared the disenchantment which Stevenson felt in Wyoming when not
long ago I travelled by the Ohio.  I had been a captive since
childhood to those bewitching vowels.  However dull the world seemed,
it could be brightened by the thought of the Ohio.  I saw that
shining river flowing through the landscape of fancy to the Southern
seas, to the accompaniment of negro melodies and the song of the
mocking-bird.  Its waters were crystal like the river of Bunyan's
vision, and as they went they sang of the old legends of the Kentucky
Shore and Tennessee.  Now the vision is shattered.  I know that the
Ohio (in winter at all events) is as yellow as pea-soup and as thick,
flowing by rank, dishevelled shores, slopping over its banks and
leaving great messy pools along its borders.  I travelled by it and
across it for the best part of a day, and I left it behind as
gratefully as Stevenson left behind the Black Hills of Wyoming.  It
was a warning to me to leave the cloud palaces of the mind unvisited.
If I ever see a finger-post pointing to Wyoming, I shall ignore it as
I ignore the hand that, from the corner of the orchard, points me to
Dunstable.




THE OPEN WINDOW

I entered a railway-carriage at a country station the other morning
and found myself in a compartment containing five people.  I took a
vacant seat between a man in the corridor corner and a lady dressed
in handsome furs in the window corner.  A girl whom I took for the
lady's daughter sat opposite to her, and a gentleman whom I took to
be the lady's husband sat next the girl, while another man occupied
the remaining corner by the corridor.  These people had all evidently
been in the train some time, and on entering I was vaguely sensible
of having broken in upon a drama which was unfinished.  The
atmosphere seemed charged with feelings whose expression had only
been suspended, and I was not surprised when, the train being in
motion, hostilities were resumed.

The window by which the lady sat was half-open, and as the train
gathered speed the wind, which was blowing from the east, came in
like a whip-lash.  It missed the lady in her wraps, but hit me in the
face and curled round the neck of the man in the corridor corner.  He
leaned forward and asked, with the air of having made the request
before, that the window should be closed.  "Certainly not!" said the
lady.  I glanced at her and, so far as her face was visible above the
billowing furs that enveloped her, saw she was a person who was not
to be trifled with.  Her lips were tight pressed and her nostrils
swelled with battle.

The man in the corner addressed himself to the husband, who had
buried himself in his newspaper in the obvious hope of being
overlooked.  The man explained with what deadly aim the wind came
into his corner, and how if the window were shut and the corridor
door was opened they could have plenty of air without discomfort.
Dragged thus into the fighting-line, the husband lowered his paper
and looked over his glasses timidly in the direction of his wife.
She had a copy of a picture paper in her hands, and without looking
at her husband she emitted a little snort and turned the pages as if
she were wringing their necks.  The husband, who had a kindly face
and looked as though he had long since laid down his arms in an
unequal battle, knew the symptoms.  He uttered no word to the
terrific woman by the window, but turning to the man and still
looking benignly over his glasses, offered to take the post of peril
in the corner.  The man said No, he was quite comfortable in his
corner if the window were closed.  He put on his hat, turned up his
coat collar, held up his paper against the gale and fell silent.

The husband, with one more furtive glance at his wife, resumed
reading.  As I watched him I thought of the story of the old parson,
who, driving with his wife in a country lane, met a farmer in his
cart.  There was no room to pass, and the law of the road made the
parson the offender.  It was his business to "back" to a wide place
in the lane to allow the farmer's cart to pass.  But the parson's
wife would not let him do so.  The farmer must get out of the way.
The poor parson was in tears between his duty and terror of his wife.
"Don't worry, parson; don't worry," said the farmer.  "I'll go back.
I've just such a old varmint as her myself at home."

And that was how the battle over the window ended.  The man in the
corner made one brief rally.  He flung the corridor door open in the
hope of diverting the draught or, perhaps, making things unpleasant
for his foe.  But she was invulnerable to attack.  She only stabbed
the pages of her picture paper a little more viciously.  The man then
fled from the field.  He went out and found seats for himself and his
companion in another compartment, and returning removed his luggage.
The lady's victory was complete.  She was left unchallenged mistress
of the compartment.  She gave her paper a final comprehensive stab,
commanded her husband to close the corridor door which her defeated
antagonist had shamelessly left open, and sat up to enjoy her triumph.

As I looked from her to the nice, kindly, hen-pecked husband now
again absorbed in his newspaper, I felt pity for so afflicted a
fellow-creature.  Poor fellow!  What a life!




ON AN UNPOSTED LETTER

I took a bundle of old letters out of a jacket pocket this morning to
look for a document which I wanted, and which I thought might be
there.  It was not there.  I was not in the least surprised.  I am
never surprised when I do not find things in my pockets.  Long
experience has taught me not to expect to find what I want in my
pockets and what ought to be there.  But, on the other hand, I rarely
fail to find things I do not want, things that simply refuse to be
lost, negligible things, tiresome things, old bills, old envelopes of
vanished letters, notes I have made about matters long since dead,
sometimes startling things that make me leap up with ejaculations
only wrung from me in moments of sudden dismay.

It was so this morning.  For though I did not find the document I
wanted, I found a couple of letters, written a fortnight ago, put in
envelopes, addressed and stamped--but not posted.  One of them was of
little consequence: the other was of much consequence.  It was to a
person who, I knew, expected to hear from me on an important matter,
and from whom I had expected to hear in reply.  I had wondered why he
had not replied, and why when he saw me at a club a few days ago he
rather obviously avoided me.  I felt puzzled, for there had been
nothing in my letter at which he could take offence--yet obviously he
had taken offence.  Now I knew why he had taken offence.  He was
annoyed at not receiving a letter from me which he had expected to
receive, and I was annoyed at not receiving a reply to a letter I had
not sent.

And in this little incident I saw an illustration of most of the
personal differences which afflict us in our journey through this
troublesome life.  Take a common example.  A is talking to B as they
walk along the street on a subject of absorbing interest to him when
C passes them.  A knows C quite well, and in ordinary circumstances
would give him a cordial greeting, but he is so full of his argument
with B that he is only dimly conscious of C's propinquity and he
passes with a vague air of having seen him in another world.  A has
no intention of being rude or even distant, and goes on without the
least idea that he has given C offence.  Indeed, he is not aware that
he has seen C, so deep was he in thought about other things.  But C
is a proud fellow, ready to feel an affront, and resolute in paying
it back.  The next time they meet C is stiff and remote and A goes
away wondering why the fellow cut him and determined to be something
of an iceberg himself when the occasion arises.  And so from this
trivial incident A and C drift into an attitude of hostility and
aloofness which a moment's candour on either side would show to have
no shadow of foundation.

Most of the actions of other people which give us annoyance spring
from causes that have nothing to do with the motives we assign to
them.  Othello smothers Desdemona through a misunderstanding about a
handkerchief that five minutes' quiet talk would have cleared up,
with disastrous results to the villain, Iago.  It is an excellent
rule to distrust our reading of facts, still more our reading of
other people's motives in relation to them.  It is wrong in nine
cases out of ten.  I can hardly recall a case in which my first
conclusion as to why So-and-So did this or that has not, on fuller
knowledge, turned out to be absurdly wide of the mark.  How can it be
otherwise?  How, for example, can that excellent person who avoided
me at the club know that I have not been guilty of an act of wilful
discourtesy towards him?  He does not know that the nice letter I
wrote to him has been lying in one of my pockets for a fortnight.  I
did not even know it myself.  Yet the knowledge of that fact is
essential to a true understanding of my conduct towards him.  He has
doubtless smothered me under the pillow, Othello-fashion, as a rude
fellow.  It is a mistake.  I am only a careless fellow who ought not
to be trusted with such treacherous things as pockets.

I think the moral of it all is summed up in the remark which an
intrepid lady, whose name has of late become a household word, once
made to me.  "I never allow misunderstandings to go unexplained," she
said.  "If a friend 'cuts' me I ask her why she cut me, and I usually
find it is for a reason that does not exist.  If I don't understand
the action of a friend I ask for an explanation, and I generally find
it clears the air."  It is a good rule.  If we were not too proud to
explain ourselves or to ask explanations of others most of the
misunderstandings of life would disappear, and many of our worries
with them.

In the meantime, I have posted that letter, with a covering note of
explanation.  That will remove one misunderstanding from my own
encumbered path.




A NOTE ON DRESS

I read a sensational article in a newspaper the other evening.  It
was an article which set forth Fourteen Commandments to men on how to
be dressy.  I call it sensational because of its novelty.  Every day
in almost any paper you turn to, you will find a page or half-page
about women's dress, usually adorned by amazing drawings of
impossible women dressed in impossible clothes, and standing in
impossible attitudes, who all seem alike in their vacuity and
futility.  But never before do I remember to have seen in a daily
newspaper an article addressed to men, telling them what clothes they
should wear and how to wear them.  I daresay there have been such
articles, but I have not seen them, and certainly they are so
infrequent that they may be said to be unknown.

I shall be curious to see whether the innovation has come to stay,
for it has been a subject of mild speculation with me why all the
literature of dress should be confined to women.  On the face of it
we might suppose that it was only women who wore clothes at all, and
certainly only women who cared what clothes they wore or made a
science of wearing them.  No doubt this is largely true.  Every woman
has a serious interest in dress.  "There was never fair woman but she
made mouths in a glass," says the poet, and there was never woman of
any sort, fair or plain, that could refuse at least the tribute of a
glance at a well-dressed milliner's window.  You will hear women
discuss dress on the bus as earnestly and continuously as their boys
discuss cricket, or their husbands discuss stocks and shares, or
motor-cars, or golf, or the iniquities of politicians.  I have never
yet heard two men discuss dress in the abstract for two minutes.  You
might sit in any smoking-room in any men's club in London for a year
without hearing a remark on the fashion in ties or trousers, or a
single comment on the fact that this or that person was well- or
ill-dressed.  If dress is mentioned at all, it is mentioned in an
ironical vein, as a matter fitting, perhaps, for a light jest among
friends, but nothing more.

This must not be taken to mean, I think, that men are wholly
indifferent to dress.  It does not fill anything like the place in
their mind that it fills in the mind of women, and I fancy there is
an unwritten convention among them that it is bad form almost
bordering on the improper to talk about clothes.  It would smack of
vanity in regard to one's personal appearance.  Women can talk about
clothes without this sense of personal vanity.  They talk about it in
a detached, abstract way, as they might talk about pictures, or
music, or any other æsthetic subject.  They are interested in it
objectively as an art.  They like to see pretty dresses, even though
they cannot hope to wear them.  They throng to a wedding, not so much
from interest in the principals as from the desire to see the clothes
the bride wears.  They like to see them much as they might like to
hear a beautiful performance on the violin, although they themselves
can never hope to play the violin.  Even women who dress dowdily
themselves and affect to have souls above the follies of their sex,
secretly love a display of fashions and like to read about the
garments of women they do not know and do not want to know.

Men are certainly not like this.  They are not interested in dress as
an art.  If their newspaper, describing a political meeting, informed
them that the chairman was dressed in a frock-coat, with three
buttons and a full skirt, that he wore trousers with a tendency to
bell-bottoms, and patent leather shoes with pointed toes, and white
gaiters--if they were told this they would wonder what the joke was
about.  Where a man is keenly interested in dress, he is interested
in his own dress.  His concern is his own personal appearance.  He is
particular about the crease in his trousers and the cut of his coat
where his wife, perhaps, is only interested in the objective beauty
of gowns and toques, and can enjoy the sight of them on other people
as well as in her own mirror.

Are we to conclude that men are superior to women in having none of
this disinterested enthusiasm for dress as an art?  It is a nice
question.  I should not wish to see the subject fill so large a place
in their thought as it does in the case of women; but they ought not
to be above it, or pretend that they are above it.  After all, to be
well-dressed--not "dressy"--nor necessarily fashionable--is as proper
a wish in man as in woman.  Dress has its spiritual and moral
reactions.  It may seem absurd, but it is true that we are in a real
sense the creatures of our clothes.  We are better men, more
civilised men, in a well-fitting garment than in an ill-made garment.
Baggy knees dispirit the mind.  Slovenliness does not stop at the
clothes, but infects the soul.  That is why a clean-up in the evening
and a change of clothes is a good moral tonic for anyone.  The case
was well put by an Australian squatter to a friend of mine who
visited him on his estate far away in the wilds of the interior.  My
friend asked him why, in so remote a place, he made it a practice to
"dress" for dinner.  "I do it," said the squatter, "to avoid losing
my self-respect.  If I did not dress for dinner I should end by
coming in to dinner in my shirt-sleeves.  I should end by not
troubling to wash.  I should sink down to the level of the cattle.  I
dress for dinner, not to make myself pretty, but as a spiritual
renovation."




FAREWELL TO HAMPSTEAD

In the house there are portents of impending change.  A feeling of
clearance is in the air.  There is a going-away aspect about the
furniture, pictures are down and in odd passages and corners there
are bundles and boxes of books piled up for removal.  Most conclusive
of all, there is beside the gate a board bearing in large red letters
the word "Sold."  It is the announcement to the world that I am on
the march to fresh woods and pastures new.  They are beautiful woods
and desirable pastures.  I have no doubt I shall be as happy amidst
them as a very variable temper permits me to be in this very variable
world of ours.  And yet I confess that the sight of that word "Sold"
over the gate gives me an orphaned feeling.  It translates itself in
my mind into "Finis"--the end of a chapter, the completion of another
long stage in a journey that seems now unconscionably short, the cold
epitaph of irrevocable things.  Taking farewell of a house that has
become as familiar to you as your own shadow is like taking leave of
something of your spiritual self.  It is no longer a thing of bricks
and mortar.  It is compact of dreams and babbles of a thousand
forgotten things that were and will not be again.  That is so of any
house where you have lived long and seen happy days; but when that
house is at Hampstead, a bow-shot from the Heath, the twinge of
parting is peculiarly sharp.

I daresay there are as pleasant places under the sun as Hampstead.  I
do not know them, but I am willing to believe that there are.
Pleasanter places, I think, there cannot be.  It was Happy Hampstead
in the far-off days when the Abbot and monks of Westminster used to
come hawking and hunting up its breezy heights and down into the
Forest of Middlesex beyond; it was Happy Hampstead when the gallants
and fine ladies of two hundred years ago came to Well Walk to drink
the waters and dance and philander in the greenwood, and it is Happy
Hampstead still, the hill of vision and the inexhaustible playground
of the city that spreads, vast and mysterious, at its foot.  Here on
this sandy spit, with its ponds and its hollows, its birch woods and
its hawthorn bushes, its wide vistas and secret places, its sense of
the seashore and its feeling of the mountains, is the land where it
is always afternoon.  Romance clings to it like an odour and mirth is
in its very atmosphere.  It is the idyll of London.

And what a wealth of memories swarm around its hillsides, peopling
its quaint courts and ways, and the very gorse bushes, with the
shadows of the past.  There is hardly a foot of its soil that is
without its story--Dick Turpin riding on moonlit nights over the
swarthy heath; Dick Steele taking refuge from his creditors in the
lonely cottage on Haverstock Hill, where Sir Charles Sedley had lived
before him; the famous Kit-Cat Club with Addison and all the wits of
the day holding its summer sessions hard by the Whitestone Pond;
Charles Lamb hunting among the gorse bushes for the snuff-box that he
had thrown away the day before in a mood of renunciation after a
visit with Home to the "Bull and Bush"; Shelley carrying a poor woman
whom he had found lying in the snow to Leigh Hunt's house in the Vale
of Health; Sir Harry Vane coming out of his house on Rosslyn Hill on
his last journey to the Tower; Constable's pines by the Spaniards'
Road, and the gibbet tree on which the highwaymen were hanged in
chains, that still lies where it fell above the road at North End;
Wordsworth walking up the hill to visit Joanna Baillie; and Pope
hobnobbing with Arbuthnot; Johnson, in the days of his poverty,
tramping up from Fleet Street to see his ailing wife at Frognal; the
tales of the Spaniards' Inn, where Mrs. Bardell had her party, and
where the rioters assembled for their attack on Mansfield at Ken
Wood; the great Pitt, in his madness at Pitt House; Romney nursing
his gloomy spirit at Holly Hill; Keats attending his dying brother in
Well Walk and writing his immortal odes in Wentworth Place; Crabbe----

But no, the shadows crowd too thick and fast to be recorded.  I walk
amongst them with the feeling that I, too, seem about to become a
shadow, and as I leave the Heath where the children are playing
hide-and-seek among the hawthorn trees and the dogs are splashing in
the Leg of Mutton Pond and turn into a road where the one brazen word
"Sold" seems to fill the landscape, I have a vague sense of attending
a funeral.  Fortunately it is my own funeral--the funeral of twenty
happy years on this sunny eminence--and not the funeral of Happy
Hampstead.  Men may come and men may go, but neither time nor change
can touch the spirit of this enchanted hill.

Jane says that she will never have the heart to return to it.  I feel
a bit like that myself.  I feel that I shall not want to disturb the
dream into which those Hampstead days are fading.  It will be enough
to remember that I too once dwelt in Arcady.




ON PLAGIARISM

I have had many literary enthusiasms, some of them transient, some of
them lasting, but Pope was never one of them.  He seems to me to
dwell in a walled-in garden, very perfectly kept, amazingly neat and
tidy with the box-hedges trimmed to a nicety and shaped here and
there into cocks and other fantasies; but airless and stuffy.  I like
to take a stroll down his trim couplets now and then, but I am soon
content to pass out to the landscapes where the Miltons and Shelleys
and Wordsworths and Shakespeares fill the lungs with the great winds
and feast the eye with the great spaces.  I do not therefore feel any
particular horror at Professor Karl Pearson's discovery that Pope is
a plagiarist.  I should not be disturbed if he proved he was a bad
plagiarist.  He has not done that, but he has found that Pope's
aphorism, "The proper study of mankind is Man," is lifted from Pierre
Charron--"La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homme c'est
l'Homme."  It seems to me a rather poor, pedestrian thing to
steal--so commonplace indeed as to defy paternity.  Anybody might
have said it without feeling that he had said something that anybody
else could not have said as well.

If this were the worst charge of plagiarism that could be brought
against Pope--and I shall show presently that it is not--few
illustrious poets would have so clean a record.  If we damned him for
so trivial a theft as this, what sort of punishment would be left for
the colossal borrowings of a Shakespeare or a Burns?  Take, for
example, that most exquisite of Burns's songs, "O, my luve is like a
red, red rose."  There is not a single stanza that is not lifted from
old ballads and chapbooks.  Compare, as an illustration, the third
stanza:

  Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
    And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
  And I will luve thee still, my dear.
    While the sands o' life shall run.

with this from _The Young Man's Farewell to his Love_ in the
Motherwell collection of chapbooks:

  The seas they shall run dry,
    And rocks melt into sands;
  Then I'll love you still, my dear,
    When all those things are done.


Even the fine change from "melt into sands" to "melt wi' the sun" is
traceable to another source.  Wordsworth and Milton, proud and
austere though they were, were not above enriching their verse with
borrowed thoughts.  Milton's borrowings from Dante are abundant, but
they are done in the grand manner, as of a prince taking a loan from
an equal, not because he needs it, but as a token of their high
companionship and their starry discourse.  To be plagiarised by
Milton would be no grievance, but a crowning distinction.  It would
be a title-deed for immortality.  The two most beautiful lines in the
poem on the daffodils by Ullswater are Dorothy Wordsworth's, and in
sending _The Ettrick Shepherd_ to the _Athenœum_ for publication
Wordsworth acknowledged that in the lines:

  Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits
  Or waves that own no curbing hand.

he was indebted to a now unknown poet, G. Bell, who in speaking of
Skiddaw said, "Yon dark cloud _rakes_ and shrouds its noble brow."
One can imagine G. Bell being famous in the Elysian Fields as the man
from whom Wordsworth once borrowed a thought.

The indebtedness of Keats to others is indebtedness for words rather
than ideas, but it is an immense debt.  You can almost trace his
reading by the perfumed words that he has ravished from other
gardens, and to which he has given a new and immortal setting.  When
he writes: "Oh Moon! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee," we know that
he has been dipping into Beaumont and Fletcher, and so we may track
him through Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Sandys'
_Ovid_ and Thomson's _Seasons_, and a score of other luxuriant
gardens of long ago.  But this plucking of verbal flowers can hardly
come within the scope of plagiarism.  For that accusation to hold
there must be some appropriation of ideas or at least of rhythm and
form.  Often the appropriation may be so transfigured as to rob it of
any element of discredit.  Thus, Tennyson's:

  Our little systems have their day.
    They have their day and cease to be;
  They are but broken lights of Thee,
  And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

is clearly traceable to the magnificent image in Shelley's _Adonais_:

  The One remains; the many change and pass;
    Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
    Stains the white radiance of eternity
    Until Death tramples it to fragments.


In both we have the idea of Heaven's light streaming down upon the
"broken lights" of our earthly tabernacle, and being splintered into
many-coloured fragments, but the later poet's employment of the idea,
however inferior, is sufficiently original and fresh to warrant the
spoliation.  And, indeed, Shelley himself must have had a great
phrase of St. Augustine's in mind when he wrote his immortal stanza.

Often the apparent plagiarism is unintended, even unconscious.  Some
minds are tenacious of good things and quite honestly forgetful of
the source.  I don't refer to cases like that of the late Canon
Fleming, who preached and published a sermon of Dr. Talmage's as his
own, and when exposed declared that he had been so impressed by it
that he had written it out and then forgotten it was not his own.
Nor do I refer to such thefts as that of Disraeli from Thiers.  In
that case Disraeli, like Fleming, explained that he had copied the
passage into his commonplace book and mistaken it for his own.  But
as Thiers did not speak English, the explanation, as Herbert Paul
remarks, was not felt to be explanatory.  I refer to honourable men
who would not stoop to these depths of brazen effrontery.  In the
instance I have quoted from Tennyson, it is of course obvious that
the poet knew the source.  He probably knew Adonais by heart, and he
would certainly not have been shocked to find that others had noted
the similarity.  He quite deliberately invited criticism and
comparison.  In another case in which he appropriated a picturesque
image from Shakespeare, it is difficult to suppose that he was
unconscious of what he was doing.  "Heigho! an it be not four by the
day, I'll be hanged," says the Carrier, calling up the sleepy ostler
in _Henry IV._, "Charles's Wain is over the new chimney and yet our
horse not packed.  What, ostler!"  In the _May Queen_ we read:

  And we danced about the maypole and in the hazel copse
  Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney tops.

But, to take a recent instance, I do not imagine that Rupert Brooke
was conscious of any indebtedness to Thoreau when he wrote:

  Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
    Think each in each, immediately wise;
  Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
    What this tumultuous body now denies;
  _And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
    And see, no longer blinded by our eyes._

Yet I do not think it would be possible to deny to these lines an
indisputable echo of Thoreau's:

  _I hearing get who had but ears,
    And sight, who had but eyes before;_
  I moments live, who lived but years,
    And truth discern who had but learning's lore.

It is conceivable that Brooke had not read Thoreau, though not
probable.  What is probable is that he had read the lines and that
their vivid comparison of physical and spiritual apprehension had
taken seed in his fertile mind and germinated in due season.

It would not be easy for a man who wrote much to escape reminiscences
of this sort.  Even if he read nothing he would still inevitably hit
on many ideas, similes, images, that others had used before him.  The
charge of plagiarism is only valid where the borrowing is deliberate
and employed without creating new thought and new effects.  Perhaps
the most familiar illustration is that of Macaulay's New Zealander in
the essay on Ranke's _History of the Popes_.  It has been traced to
many sources.  It is found in Mrs. Barbauld and in Volney's _Ruins of
Empires_.  But the most exact parallel is this from Shelley's
introduction to _Peter Bell the Third_:


Hoping that the immortality you have given to the Fudges you will
receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London is an
habitation of bitterns; when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall
stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled
marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of
islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their
broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator,
etc.


There is the whole vision complete, done in the spirit of comedy a
generation before Macaulay dressed it in the pomp of his martial
prose.  Of course, Macaulay was familiar with the passage, and I
assume he would have said that the idea was so exploited that it was
common property which anybody was entitled to use who had a need and
a use for it.  And that is the best excuse that can be urged for most
plagiarisms which are not mere cases of brazen theft or sheer
desecration.  It is the latter offence which is the more inexcusable.
Honest stealing may be defended; but to steal and to degrade is past
forgiveness.  What adequate punishment could one devise for that
queer ornament of the Church, Warburton, who in his _Enquiry into the
Causes of Prodigies and Miracles_ could, half a century after the
publication of the _Areopagitica_, write thus:


Methinks I see her, like a mighty eagle, renewing her immortal youth
and purging her opening sight at the unobstructed benign meridian Sun
who some pretend to say had been dazzled and abused by an inglorious
pestilential meteor; while the ill-affected birds of night would with
their envious hootings prognosticate a length of darkness and decay.


If this banal nonsense is compared with Milton's original it will not
be easy to deny it the distinction of being the most clumsy example
of plagiarism on record.  And Pope himself could not only plagiarise
but belittle his plunder, as witness his appropriation of Jonson's
fine lines:

  What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
  Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?

which he converts into:

  What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
  Invites my steps and points to yonder glade?

Mr. Kipling, who is not himself, I think, much given to borrowing
from others, is the most unequivocal advocate of free trade in
plagiarism:

  When 'Omer smote his bloomin' lyre,
    'E 'eard men sing by land and sea.
  And what 'e thought 'e might require
    'E went and took--the same as me.

  Men knew he stole; 'e knew they knowed.
    They never made no noise or fuss,
  But winked at 'Omer down the road,
    And 'e winked back--the same as us.

That may be the lawless law for the Olympians, but it will not serve
humbler folk.  You must be a big man to plagiarise with impunity.
Shakespeare can take his "borrowed plumes" from whatever humble bird
he likes, and, in spite of poor Greene's carping, his splendour is
undimmed, for we know that he can do without them.  Burns can pick up
a lilt in any chapbook and turn it to pure gold without a "by your
leave."  These gods are beyond the range of our pettifogging meums
and tuums.  Their pockets are so rich that a few coins that do not
belong to them are no matter either way.  But if you are a small man
of exiguous talents and endeavour to eke out your poverty from the
property of others you will discover that plagiarism is a capital
offence, and that the punishment is for life.  In
literature--whatever the case may be in life--there is one law for
the rich and another for the poor, and "that in the captain's but a
choleric word which in the soldier is flat blasphemy."




THE CASE OF DEAN INGE

We now know, from his own lips, what is wrong with Dean Inge.  Nature
has denied him the sense of music.  He can neither sing nor make a
joyful noise.  He knows but two tunes, _God Save the King_ and _John
Peel_, and even these he, apparently, only recognises from afar.  All
the rest of the universe of harmony is just a jumble of strange
noises to him.  The pealing of the organ and the thrilling song of
the choristers convey nothing to his imprisoned soul as he sits in
his stall at St. Paul's.  The release of the spirit, that feeling of
getting clear of the encumbering flesh and escaping to a realm where
all the burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world seem like
a rumour from afar, a tale of little meaning, never comes to him.
Let us assume that the escape is an illusion.  But what an illusion!
What an experience to have missed!  Can we wonder that the Dean is a
sad man and utters mournful sounds?

Perhaps Shakespeare, with his passion for song, overshot the mark
when he said that the man who has not music in his soul

  Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

But there is a measure of truth in the axiom.  We like complete
men--men with all their spiritual limbs as well as all their physical
limbs.  We like them to have humour as well as gravity, to be able to
sing as well as sigh, to love work and to love play, and not to be
shut off from any part of the kingdom of the mind.  No doubt the Dean
will point out that many very eminent men have shared his affliction,
and we shall be bound to agree that it is dangerous to generalise in
this matter, as in most things.  I could conceive him making out a
very good case for the non-musical brotherhood.  There is, of course,
the leading instance of that most human and beautiful of spirits,
Charles Lamb, who was even more deficient than the Dean, for he did
not know _God Save the King_.  But then, unlike the Dean, he had the
desire to sing.  The spirit was there, but it could find no
utterance.  He had tried for years, he tells us, to learn _God Save
the King_, humming it to himself in quiet corners and solitary
places, without, according to his friends, coming "within several
quavers of it."  No, I do not think, on second thoughts, that we can
allow the Dean to claim St. Charles.  He was a trier, like Mr.
Chesterton.  No one would suggest that Mr. Chesterton was musical,
but he has the spirit of song in him and in a chorus he is splendid.
He emits an enormous and affable rumble that suggests an elephant
doing a cake-walk, or large lumps of thunder bumping about
irrelevantly in the basement of the harmony.

But the Dean may have Southey.  He is surrendered freely and
ungrudgingly.  He certainly had no feeling for music and no desire to
feel it.  "You are alive to know what follows," he says, describing a
play, "and lo!--down comes the curtain and the fiddles begin their
abominations."  The fiddles begin their abominations!  Take Bob
Southey out, good Dean, and relieve us of his unctuous presence.  And
I am afraid we must let the Dean have Scott, too, though I part with
him with sorrow.  "I do not know and cannot utter a note of music,"
wrote Sir Walter; "and complicated harmonies seem to me a babble of
confused though pleasing sounds."  Pleasing, you observe.  I am not
sure that we cannot snatch Sir Walter from the Dean's clutches after
all.  We must part with Tennyson and Ruskin, neither of whom had the
sense of music, and with Macaulay, who could only recognise one
tune--_The Campbells are Coming_.  But we cannot let the Dean have
Coleridge, for though he disclaimed any understanding of complicated
harmonies, he admits that he loved to hear Beethoven, and the man who
could appreciate Beethoven a hundred years ago must not go in the
Dean's gloomy galley.

Nor shall old Sam Johnson go there, though he confessed that he was
insensible to the power of music.  "I told him," says Boswell, "that
it affected me to such a degree as to agitate my nerves painfully,
producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so
that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution, so that I
was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle.  'Sir,'
said he, 'I should never hear it if it made me such a fool.'"  But I
claim Samuel on the ground that during the tour in the Hebrides he
heard with rapt attention the performance of the _Lament of the
Scalded Cat_, and still more because at Ashbourne he listened
patiently to a great number of tunes on the fiddle, and desired to
have _Let ambition fire thy mind_ played over again.  It is a small
thing, I own--a trivial ground on which to claim him.  I have never
heard _Let ambition fire thy mind_, but the incident shows that
Johnson had the root of the matter in him.  Would the Dean, or Bob
Southey, have asked to have _Let ambition fire thy mind_ played over
again?  Would they have listened with rapt attention to _The Lament
of the Scalded Cat_?  Not they.

But even in the case of the Dean there is one pale, watery gleam of
light in the general gloom.  He knows _John Peel_.  In his sombre
heart that jolly song perhaps wakens some latent emotion of joy.  It
may be that with that key to the prison he might yet be rescued from
his dungeon and turned into a happier man.  Why should not the choir
of St. Paul's try to convert him?  Let them step across the
Churchyard at night to the Dean's recess and ask in resonant chorus--

  D'ye ken John Peel wi' his coat so grey?
  D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
  D'ye ken John Peel when he's far, far away
    With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

and go on asking until the Dean comes to the window with the
response--

  Yes, I ken John Peel, and Ruby too.
  Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True,
  From a find to a check, from a check to a view.
    From a view to a death in the morning.

And now, gentlemen, the chorus, if you please-- all together:

  For the sound of his horn called me from my bed, etc.

It would be a great night in St. Paul's Churchyard, and it might do
the Dean good.  And we should all rejoice to hear him make a joyful
noise for a change, even though it could not be called music.




A TALE OF FLEET STREET

No doubt there were greater things in Sir James Barrie's speech to
the undergraduates at St. Andrews than the story of his conquest of
Fleet Street; but for me, as for many others, there was nothing so
interesting.  It touched old chords of memory.  There are many who
have shared Sir James's youthful struggles without sharing his
dazzling triumphs.  My own thoughts went back more than forty years
ago, about the time when Barrie came to London to try his luck in the
enchanted street.  I recalled two brothers--I knew them well--living
in a country town, whose eyes were fixed on the starry realm of Fleet
Street from afar.  What a remote, impossible, golden world it seemed!
Once they had known a fellow that had gone into it.  He had been as
one of themselves, familiar, companionable, ordinary; but one
incredible day he had flown away to Fleet Street as naturally as a
bird flies home to its nest, and they remained behind to imagine the
sea of glory into which he had passed.

Then one day something happened.  The younger of the two boys,
Jonathan, noticed that the family copy of the _Standard_ (that fine
old paper that perished so lamentably of Tariff Reform) had been cut.
An article, a column in length, had disappeared from the leader page.
His curiosity was awakened.  There was only one person in the
household who was likely to have done this thing, and that was his
brother, Geoffrey.  But to ask Geoffrey about it was impossible.  He
was a reticent person, who did not throw his confidences about, least
of all among younger brothers.  But Jonathan knew that he had been
writing in the privacy of his bedroom late at night, and suspected
that something had come of it.  So he went out and purchased another
copy of the _Standard_, turned to the column that had been missing,
and there saw an article:

  ON A COUNTRY CORN EXCHANGE

  _From a Correspondent_


Ah! so he had done it, thought Jonathan.  He had got his foot in the
famous street with the golden pavements.  That night he observed
Geoffrey with a new feeling of importance, and saw him retire early
to his bedroom with the delightful sense of sharing his great secret
without his knowledge.

After that he waited for the _Standard_, as eagerly as Geoffrey.  He
came to know the symptoms of an approaching event, and when he saw
his brother cling to the _Standard_ at breakfast and disappear with
it into the garden, he knew that it was not the cricket news
only--important as that was to both of them in those days--that made
the paper so absorbing, and that when it fell to him there would be a
gap in its contents.  Then he noticed that other papers began to have
occasional gaps, and life became a thrilling pursuit of Geoffrey's
adventures in Fleet Street.

But the pursuit was not enough.  It whetted his appetite for
adventures of his own, and he too began to retire to his bedroom
early and write long and late, until the door opened and a gentle
voice would say, "Child, you ought to be in bed."  I fancy it was
poor stuff that Jonathan wrote, and Fleet Street showed a cold
indifference to it.  There was one article on _A Harvest Home_ that
grew worn and crumpled by many transits through the post.  But the
struggle was not in vain.  One unforgettable day he opened an evening
paper, and there--Lo!  Behold! ... And next morning the postman
brought a letter from the editor of the paper, stating--could he
believe his eyes?--that he would be glad to receive further articles
of the same character from his contributor.  The sun shone with
extraordinary splendour that day, and the birds sang more joyously
than they had ever sung before.  Jonathan walked on air--with the
astonishing letter in his pocket--and he felt that Nature was
rejoicing with him.

It is an old tale of far-off, forgotten things, called to mind by the
recollections of Sir James Barrie.  Perhaps it is worth telling, for
the encouragement of other youths whose eager eyes are turned, wisely
or unwisely, towards Fleet Street.  I have lost sight of one of the
brothers for many years; but he came to some prominence, edited a
famous paper, and told me that when he went into the office he found,
seated at a humble desk, the youth whose wonderful translation to
Fleet Street had once filled him with envy and longing.  The other
brother still writes.  I fancy I recognise his hand sometimes in
articles that still have the note of that much-travelled manuscript
of the _Harvest Home_.




ON THE TOP NOTE

A pleasant-looking young lady (whose name I think was Pamela) sitting
opposite me in the bus was complaining to her companion that Reginald
was so dead-alive.  You couldn't get him excited about anything.  He
was most _frightfully_ clever, of course--a B.Sc. and all that sort
of thing, don't you know; but, oh, so _awfully_ icy.  You went to a
theatre with him, and you got most _tremendously_ thrilled, and he
would say, "Yes, quite nice."  Or you got him to read a book that was
simply ripping and that you had _wallowed_ in most terrifically, and
he would say, "Quite nice."  She liked people to be enthusiastic.  It
was most horribly disappointing when you were _simply boiling_ with
excitement to hear someone say, "Yes, quite nice."  It made you feel
_most awfully_ done in, don't you know.  If people enjoyed
themselves, why shouldn't they say they enjoyed themselves and let
themselves "go" a bit?  She always let herself go.

I felt that I agreed with her on the main issue.  Reginald was
aggravating.  I felt that I knew Reginald.  I saw him going through
life more than a little bored with everything.  There's nothing new
and nothing true, and no matter, he seems to say.  Man delights him
not, nor woman neither.  He is astonished at nothing, amused by
nothing, cheered by nothing.  His mind has disciplined his emotions
so effectually that they have ceased to have anything to do.  He is
superior to tears or laughter, and would refuse to be surprised even
if he saw the lions by the Nelson Column suddenly stand up and roar
for their dinner.  As a moderately enthusiastic person, I sympathised
with the young lady opposite about Reginald.  I wished Reginald would
let himself go a bit.

But then it seemed to me that a mist passed before my vision and that
Reginald himself was sitting in the seat opposite talking to a friend
about Pamela.  He liked Pamela very much, he said, but really her
gush got on his nerves.  She was always on her top note.  Everything
was most frightfully good or most awfully jolly or most hideously
bad.  Why couldn't people express themselves reasonably and use words
with some respect for their meaning?  He wished someone would tell
Pam not to shriek every time she opened her mouth.  It was such a
pity, because she really had a pretty mouth and was a nice girl.

And hearing (imaginatively) Reginald's view of the matter, I was
bound to admit that he had a case too.  For I share his dislike of
these extravagances of speech with which our Pamelas express the
warmth of their feelings and the poverty of their minds.  I should
like to remind Pamela of the caution which Johnson gave to Boswell.
He had accompanied Bozzy to Harwich to see him embark for Utrecht.  I
happened to say, says Boswell, it would be terrible if he should not
find a speedy opportunity of returning to London, and be confined in
so dull a place.

"Johnson: Don't, sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little
matters.  It would _not_ be _terrible_, though I _were_ to be
detained some time here."

It may have occurred to Boswell that Johnson was hardly the person to
rebuke the use of big words; but though Johnson loved long words he
did not use wrong words.  His sin was not the hysteria of speech, but
the pedantry of speech.  He liked the fine clothes of language and
dressed his thoughts up in full-bottomed wig and ruffles.  It was a
curious weakness for so great a man whose natural expression was
always simple and vigorous.  His big words were an after-thought of
the pedant imposed on the brief, energetic utterance that was natural
to him, as when commenting on some work he said that it "had not wit
enough to keep it sweet" and then, pulling himself together, blunted
the edge of that swift, keen criticism by saying that "it had not
vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."  But though
Johnson's big words blurred his thought, they did not misrepresent
it.  They deprived it of force, but not of precision.  His rebuke to
Boswell was in regard to the extravagance of the word for the
occasion.  It would have been annoying or inconvenient to be kept at
Harwich, but it would not have been terrible.

But the modern habit is not a mere matter of excess, as in the case
of Boswell.  In the attempt to be emphatic, Pamela murders speech.
If you pass her the mustard, she says "Thanks, awfully."  If she has
enjoyed her game of tennis, she says it has been "awfully jolly," and
if she approves of a book, she declares it to be "frightfully good."
I am old enough to remember when this verbal atrocity began to be
used, and I have lived to see it become the accepted coinage of a
certain kind of conversation.  It began as a piece of affectation,
and has ended as a desolating vulgarity.

I do not think that Reginald wants Pamela to be less enthusiastic.
He only wants her to preserve some proportion in regard to things.
He feels as Jamie Soutar, of Drumtochty, in Ian Maclaren's story,
felt.  Jamie had "a gift o' discreemination," and was distressed by
the purple adjectives of Mr. Hopps, the little Cockney.  When Mr.
Hopps raved about the sunset, Jamie observed that it was "no bad."

"No bad!" said Mr. Hopps.  "I call it glorious, and if it hisn't,
then I'd like to know what his."

"Man," replied Soutar austerely, "ye'll surely keep ae word for the
21st o' Reevelation."

Had any native used such words as "magnificent" in Drumtochty there
would have been an uneasy feeling in the glen; the man must be
suffering from wind in the head, and might upset the rotation of
crops, sowing his young grass after potatoes, or replacing turnip
with beet.

Reginald would not expect Pamela to put so harsh a bridle as this
upon her tongue.  He would only suggest that she should be sparing of
her superlatives and her enthusiasm, so that when she used them they
conveyed some sort of meaning and some sense of value.  And probably
Pamela would find that in curing herself she had cured Reginald.  He
would let himself "go" a little more if she let herself "go" a little
less.  For his iciness is probably an attempt to moderate her
tropical fervour.




TEA AND MR. BENNETT

I knew that my friend Mr. Arnold Bennett was a handy man.  It is his
foible to do many things, and he does most of them surprisingly well.
The villagers in the poem were left wondering how the schoolmaster's
small head "could carry all he knew"; and I have myself often idly
wondered how Mr. Bennett has managed to become an expert in so many
arts and crafts in the intervals of pouring out a stream of books and
plays that would alone seem the abundant occupation of all his waking
hours.  I suppose the explanation is, first, that he has in an
unusual degree an industrious habit under iron discipline and an
orderly mind that parcels out its minutes as a miser parcels out his
gold; and, second, that he has a devouring curiosity about life.

He is a taster of life.  He goes about like a country boy at a fair,
taking a shy at every Aunt Sally, a ride on every roundabout, a shot
at every shooting-range.  The bearded woman delights him, and Punch
and Judy hold him as the glittering eye of the ancient mariner held
the wedding guest.  He never grows tired of the show.  He keeps into
middle age the juvenile wonder which most of us lose when we lose our
youth--hence the unfailing freshness of his mind.  He is always
interesting, because he is always interested.  I would trust him to
get along on a desert island as comfortably as any living man.  He
would write his own books, pen his own criticisms, paint his own
pictures, make his own music, sail his own boat, take his own physic,
run his own farm, engross his own conveyance, drive his own car, cook
his own dinner--probably cut his own hair.  For he can explain to you
why the barbers of Italy are superior to the barbers of France and
wherein the Dutch barber fails to touch the highest pinnacle of his
calling.  And all these things he would do, not clumsily or
grudgingly as one driven into a corner by cruel circumstance, but
joyfully, as a boy on a picnic.  He would rejoice that at last he
could do things as they should be done, instead of having them done
for him by others in ways in which they should not be done.

For example, he would be able to have a cup of tea worth drinking.  I
did not know, but I am not surprised to learn, that he is an artist
with the tea-pot.  "I would undertake," he has just told the world,
"to make better tea than nineteen-twentieths of the housewives of
this country."  If it were anybody else, we should say this was
conceit; but Mr. Bennett without this note of childlike
self-assurance would not be the Mr. Bennett we love.  We should not
know him.  We should think he was just an ordinary man like the rest
of us, and pass him by in the crowd.  Moreover, when he tells us that
he is a master craftsman with the tea-pot, I have no doubt he is
speaking the truth.  He will, I am sure, have studied this great
subject as profoundly as he has studied the technique of play-writing.

And I daresay he would agree that it is at least as well worth
studying as play-writing.  Plays are only a very occasional affair in
our life, but tea flows on for ever.  At this moment I hear the
pleasant clatter of the tea-things in the next room, and I suppose
there is hardly a house in the land where the kettle is not boiling
and the cups are not tinkling.  When I went to see my lawyer
yesterday afternoon he rang for "another cup," and if I go to see my
publisher to-morrow afternoon he will ring for "another cup," too.
Next to the Russians, we are, I suppose, the greatest tea-topers in
the world.  Tea-drinking has ceased to be merely a custom and has
become a ritual as well.  It is what the pipe of reconciliation is to
the Indian or the eating of salt is to the Mussulman.

Yet though every day we drink enough tea to float the British Navy,
it is probably true, as Mr. Bennett suggests, that few of us know how
to make it.  I do not pretend to be one of the few.  But I delight in
the rare occasions on which I get the real article, and in a casual
way, quite different I am sure from Mr. Bennett's orderly
experiments, I have picked up the rudiments of a system from those
whose brews have pleased me.  Thus from one great artist of the
tea-pot, a fine old gentleman with a long white beard, who used to
sit and watch the kettle boiling as anxiously as the doctor feels the
pulse of his patient, I learned that the water should be poured on
the tea the moment it comes to the boil.  From another, a learned
scientist, I gathered that boiling water (from another kettle, I
fancy) should be poured in the pot before the tea is put in.  A
bachelor acquaintance of mine, on whom I called one afternoon,
indoctrinated me with the idea of washing the tea with a rapid drench
of boiling water drawn off instantly before pouring in the water
intended for the brew.  From another friend (this time a lady) I
picked up the fact that the way to weaken your tea is not to pour
more water into the tea-pot, but to dilute the beverage in the cup.

A small matter you say; but the art of making tea is composed of
these small delicacies.  What, for example, could seem a matter of
more indifference than that of the order in which you pour the milk
and the tea in the cup?  Yet it is a capital point.  Put the tea in
first, and the virtue seems to have gone out of the cup; put the milk
in first, and the subtle law of the art is observed.  And the
proportion of milk must be exact; you cannot add to it afterwards and
get the same effect.

I pass by such fundamental points as the selection of the right tea
for the water and the duty of pouring off the tea quickly so as to
catch the first fine rapture of the leaf.  But I hope I have said
enough to set tongues wagging on this fruitful subject, and enough to
win the respect (perhaps even the envy) of Mr. Arnold Bennett.  I
don't mind confessing that that is the reason I am writing this
article.  I am weary of the omniscience of Mr. Bennett.  I am
humiliated by the sense of the number of things I don't know or can't
do when I am in his presence or read his books.  If I did not love
him I should hate him.  I should write to the papers to denounce him
as a charlatan.  I should guy his pictures and scoff at his books and
make fun of his criticisms about this, that and the other and quote
slighting things about Jacks-of-all-trades and generally make myself
unpleasant.  But since I love him I content myself with saying firmly
and even defiantly, that I have ideas on the art and science of
tea-making, too.  True, I have never made it, but I could make it at
a pinch.




ON BUYING AND SELLING

Janet said that she had seen John Staunton in the village in his new
car.  He was very pleased with it, and apparently still more pleased
that he had sold his old car just before the big reduction in the
makers' prices was announced, with the result that he had got a new
car for an old of the same make, and was some pounds in pocket into
the bargain.  "I should be ashamed to gloat over such a transaction,"
she said.  Indeed, she was doubtful whether it was morally right to
benefit in such a way.

I agreed that it was perhaps indecent to "gloat" over such a stroke
of luck, but I could not agree that any reasonable moral
consideration had been outraged by the affair.  The question raised
the problem of what is fair in the way of deals of this sort.  What,
for example, ought one to say of the case of the eminent statesman of
these days, who, looking over the stock of a second-hand book-dealer,
saw a copy of the first edition of Gray's Elegy marked at a few
shillings, and bought it, took it away, and has probably got it
to-day.  He had got a prize worth, I think, in the neighbourhood of
two hundred pounds.  He knew its value, and apparently the bookseller
did not.  What was the "morality" in that case?  Ought he to have
summoned the bookseller and said, "My dear sir, are you aware that
this little book which you offer me at the ridiculous price of a few
shillings is worth a couple of hundred pounds?"  I think that would
be demanding too much of human nature.  Bookbuying and bookselling is
a business transaction like any other, and it is the bookseller's
business to know what his stock is worth.  All the same, I hope the
eminent statesman sent the bookseller a substantial Christmas box
without telling him what a fool he had been.

After all, the traffic in curiosities is a sort of sport in which
sometimes the seller and sometimes the buyer wins the trick.  I heard
the other day an amusing incident of a man who was fond of collecting
old furniture.  He was walking in a remote country district when the
rain came on, and he took shelter in a barn, at the door of which the
farmer was standing.  The collector noticed in a corner of the barn
an old chest containing fodder of some sort.  He looked at it, saw
that it was obviously very old, spoke to the farmer about it, found
he knew nothing of its value, and bought it for a comparatively small
sum.  Not long after a friend of his who knew of the bargain wandered
to the same farm in the hope of picking up something for himself.  He
went into the barn and there, behold! was another old chest,
containing some more old fodder.  Only it wasn't an old chest.  Like
the other, it was simply a modern-antique--a bait for hungry trout to
snap at.  The farmer was just an agent.  He did not invite people to
buy, and he did not pretend that the pieces were old.  He just sold
them at a price if they were asked for.  Was he morally culpable?
Was he more culpable than the buyer would have been if he had taken
advantage of the farmer's real instead of supposed ignorance?

If we applied the code of strict morality in these matters and
asserted that no one must benefit by another's lack of knowledge,
what would become of the Stock Exchange?  It would have to close its
doors forthwith.  Nearly every transaction between a buyer and a
seller is in the nature of a duel in which one backs his supposed
knowledge against the other's supposed ignorance.  If I have reason
to know, let me say, that salt-water has got into the Mexican oil
wells, is it wicked of me to sell out my shares in the company to
some innocent person who does not possess that piece of information?
After all, I may be wrong, and he may know more than I do.  He may
know that the menace was true, but he may have the later information
that it has been overcome.  Every transaction of this sort is
admittedly a competition in knowledge or calculation, and each side
takes the risk in the hope of taking the profit.

There are, of course, cases in which it would be dishonourable to
profit by private knowledge.  If I knew that a certain firm was going
bankrupt and sold my shares in it to a man who could not possibly
know and from whom I deliberately concealed my own absolute knowledge
on the point, I should be guilty of an act which would not be morally
distinguishable from theft.  Or if I went into a remote house of a
poor peasant, found a First Folio Shakespeare--think of it!--the
market price of which is now over five thousand pounds, discovered
that the peasant was ignorant of its value, and took it away for a
pound or two, I should be morally, though not legally, a thief.
Fortunately I shall never have such a temptation thrust on me.  I
wonder what I should do if I had.

The difference between such a case and that of the Gray's _Elegy_ is
that the seller in the latter case was a business man setting his
knowledge against the buyer's, and in the other he would be an
innocent who was being rooked.  In the matter of John Staunton I see
no question of impropriety.  One chanced to sell luckily and the
other to buy unluckily.  That is all.  But I agree with Janet that
John oughtn't to have "gloated" openly over the transaction.  He
should have purred to himself privately.




ON BIG WORDS

I was cutting down the nettles by the hedge with a bill-hook when a
small man with spectacles, a straw hat, a white alpaca jacket, and a
book under his arm came up, stopped, and looked on.  I said "Good
evening," and he said "Good evening."  Then, pointing to my
handiwork, he remarked:

"You find the nettles very difficult to eradicate?"

I said I found them hard to keep down.

"They disseminate themselves most luxuriantly," he said.

I replied that they spread like the dickens.

"But they have their utility in the economy of Nature," he said.

I replied that Nature was welcome to them as far as I was concerned.

He then remarked that it was most salubrious weather, and I agreed
that it had been a fine day.  But he was afraid, he said, that the
aridity of the season was deleterious to the crops, and I replied
that my potatoes were doing badly.  After that, I think it occurred
to him that we did not speak the same language, and with another
"Good evening" he passed on and I returned to the attack on the
nettles.

It is an excellent thing to have a good vocabulary, but one ought not
to lard one's common speech or everyday letters with long words.  It
is like going out for a walk in the fields with a silk hat, a
frock-coat, and patent leather boots.  No reasonable person could
enjoy the country in such a garb.  He would feel like a blot on the
landscape.  He would be as much out of place as a guest in a
smock-frock at a Buckingham Palace garden-party.  And familiar
conversation that dresses itself up in silk-hatted words is no less
an offence against the good taste of things.  We do not make a thing
more impressive by clothing it in grand words any more than we crack
a nut more neatly by using a sledge-hammer.  We only distract
attention from the thought to the clothes it wears.  If we are wise
our wisdom will gain from the simplicity of our speech, and if we are
foolish our folly will only shout the louder through big words.

Take for example that remark of Dr. Johnson's about the swallows.
"Swallows certainly sleep all the winter," he said.  "A number of
them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all
in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a
river."  It was a foolish belief, but it would be unfair to scoff at
Johnson for not being better informed than his contemporaries.  It is
that bumptious word "conglobulate" that does for him.  It looks so
learned and knowing that it calls attention to the absurdity like a
college cap on a donkey's ears.  A fine use of words does not
necessarily mean the use of fine words.  That was the mistake which
Humpty-Dumpty made in _Alice in Wonderland_.  He thought that
"impenetrability" was such a magnificent word that it would leave
Alice speechless and amazed.  Many writers are like that.  When the
reporter says that So-and-So "manipulated the ivories" (meaning that
he had played the billiard-balls into position), or that So-and-So
"propelled the sphere" (meaning that he had kicked the football), he
feels that he has got out of the rut of common speech when in fact he
has exchanged good words for counterfeit coin.  That is not the way
of the masters of language.  They do not vulgarise fine words.  They
glorify in simple words, as in Milton's description of the winged
host:

  Far off their coming shone...


Quite ordinary words employed with a certain novelty and freshness
can wear a distinction that gives them not only significance but a
strange and haunting beauty.  I once illustrated the point by showing
the effects which the poets, and particularly Wordsworth and Keats,
extract from the word "quiet."  Shakespeare could perform equal
miracles with the trivial word "sweet," which he uses with a subtle
beauty that makes it sing like a violin in the hands of a master.
Who can be abroad in the sunshine and singing of these spring days
without that phrase, "the sweet o' the year," carolling like a bird
in the mind?  It is not a "jewel five words long."  It is a dewdrop
from the very mint of Nature.  But Shakespeare could perform this
magic with any old word.  Take "flatter."  A plain, home-spun word,
you would say, useful for the drudgery of speech but nothing more.
Then Shakespeare takes it in hand, and it shines bright as Sirius in
the midnight sky:

  Full many a glorious morning have I seen
    Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye.


I once wanted to use for purposes of quotation a familiar stanza of
Burns, but one word, the vital word, escaped me.  I give the stanza,
with the word I lacked missing:

  To make a happy fireside clime
    For weans and wife---
  That's the true (_missing word(s)_) and sublime
    Of human life.


You, perhaps, know the missing word; but I could not recall it.  I
tried all the words that were serviceable, and each seemed banal and
commonplace.  I dare not, for shame, mention the words I tried to use
as patches for Burns.  When I turned up the poem and found that
poignant word "pathos," I knew the measure of my failure to draw the
poet's bow.

We carry big words in our head for the expression of our ideas, and
short words in our heart for the expression of our emotions.
Whenever we speak the language of true feeling, it is our mother
tongue that comes to our lips.  It is equal to any burden.  Take the
familiar last stanza of Wordsworth's: "Three years she grew in sun
and shower":

  Thus Nature spake--the work was done--
  How soon my Lucy's race was run!
      She died, and left to me
  This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
  The memory of what has been,
      And never more will be.

It is so simple that a child might have said it, and so charged with
emotion that a man might be forgiven if he could not say it.  _A
Shropshire Lad_ is full of this surge of feeling dressed in
home-spun, as when he says:

  Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
  What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
  The happy highways where I went
    And cannot come again.


Even in pictorial description the most thrilling effects, as in the
case I have quoted from Milton, are produced not by the pomp of words
but by the passion of words.  In two rapid, breathless lines:

  The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,
    With one stride comes the dark,

Coleridge flashes on the mind all the beauty and wonder of the tropic
night.  And though Shakespeare, like Milton and Wordsworth, could use
the grand words when the purpose was rhetorical or decorative, he did
not go to them for the expression of the great things of life.  Then
he speaks with what Raleigh calls the bare intolerable force of King
Lear's:

          Do not laugh at me,
  For as I am a man, I think this lady
  To be my child Cordelia.

The higher the theme rises the more simple and austere becomes the
speech, until the words seem like nerves bared and quivering to the
agony of circumstance:

  _Lear_.  And my poor fool is hanged!  No, no, no life!
    Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
    And thou no breath at all?  Thou'lt come no more,
    Never, never, never, never, never!
    Pray you, undo this button.  Thank you, sir.--
    Do you see this?  Look on her, look, her lips,--
    Look there, look there!  [_He dies._

  _Edgar_.  He faints!  My lord, my lord!--

  _Kent_.  Break, heart; I prithee, break!

  _Edgar_.  Look up, my lord.

  _Kent_.  Vex not his ghost: O let him pass! he hates him
    That would upon the rack of this tough world
    Stretch him out longer.

The force of words can no farther go.  And my friend in the white
alpaca jacket will notice that they are all very little ones.




DO WE BUY BOOKS?

I have recently been in the throes of a double removal, and in the
course of the operation comments were made by one person or another
concerned in it on the prominence of books in my belongings.  The
van-man, with a large experience of removals, paid the tribute of
astonishment at the spectacle, and the people who came to look at the
house gaped at the books as though they were the last thing they
expected to see in a decent suburban residence.  Hitherto I had been
rather ashamed of my library.  In the course of a longish life I have
accumulated some 2000 books.  There is not much rubbish among them,
for I have thinned them out periodically, but there are shameful
blanks that are unfilled, and it had never occurred to me to think
that they formed an unusual collection for a middle-class household.

But the inquiries I have made since lead me to the conclusion that
they do, and that in the average suburban home the last thing that is
thought about is the furnishing of a library.  People who will spend
many hundreds and even thousands of pounds in the course of years in
making their house beautiful never give a serious thought to books.
They will ransack London for suitable fittings, for rugs and
hangings, china and cut-glass, mirrors and what-nots, but the idea of
providing themselves with a moderate and well-selected library does
not occur to them.  If they gather books at all they gather them
haphazard and without thought.  A well-known publisher told me the
other day that he was recently asked to equip a library in a new
house in North London, and the instruction he received was to provide
books that would fit the shelves which had been fixed.  It was not
the contents of the books that mattered, but the size.

This was no doubt an exceptional case, but it does represent
something of the attitude of the average man to books.  People who
will spend one hundred and fifty pounds on a piano as a matter of
course will not spend ten pounds a year or even five pounds a year in
enriching their homes with all the best thought of all time.  Go into
any average provincial town and the last thing you will find is a
decent book-shop.  I recall more than one great industrial town of a
population of over a hundred thousand which has only one such shop,
and that is generally kept going by the sale of school-books.  It is
not because we cannot afford to buy books.  We spend two hundred
millions sterling a year on beer, and I doubt whether we spend two
hundred million pence on literature.  Many people can afford to buy
motor-cars at anything from two hundred pounds who would be aghast at
the idea of spending half a guinea occasionally on a book.  They
think so meanly of their minds as that.

Yet, merely as furniture, books are a cheaper and better decoration
than blue china or Chippendale chairs.  They are better because they
put the signature of individuality upon a house.  The taste for
Chippendale chairs and blue china may be a mere vanity, a piece of
coxcombry and ostentation, a fancy that represents, not a genuine
personal taste for beautiful things, but an artificial passion for
rare or expensive things.  But a row of books will give a house
character and meaning.  It will tell you about its owner.  It is a
window let into the landscape of his life.  When I go into a
stranger's library I wander round the bookshelves to learn what sort
of a person the stranger is, and when he comes in I feel that I know
the key to his mind and the range of his interests.  A house without
books is a mindless and characterless house, no matter how rich the
Persian rugs and how elegant the settees and the ornaments.  The
Persian rugs only tell you that the owner has got money, but the
books will tell you whether he has got a mind as well.  I was staying
not long ago in a Northern town with a man who had a great house and
fine grounds, two or three motor-cars, a billiard-room, and a
multitude of other luxuries.  The only thing he had not got was
books.  And the effect left on the mind by all his splendours was
that he was pauper.  "And where are your books?" asked a famous
bookman of my acquaintance who was being shown over a West-End palace
by the owner, who, in the last twenty years, had made a colossal
fortune.  "In the City," was the plutocrat's unblushing reply.  He
gloried in his poverty.

It is not a question of money.  I repeat that books are the cheapest
as well as the best part of the equipment of a house.  You can begin
your library with the expenditure of a couple of shillings.  Nearly
all the best literature in the world is at your command at two
shillings a volume.  For five pounds you can get a library of fifty
books which contain "riches fineless."  Even if you don't read them
yourself, they are a priceless investment for your children.  Holmes
used to say that it took three generations of sprawling in a library
to create a reading man; but I believe that any intelligent child who
stumbles upon, let us say, Herodotus or _Two Years Before the Mast_
or Prescott's _Conquest of Peru_, or any similar masterpiece, will be
caught by the glamour of books and will contract the reading habit
for life.  And what habit is there to compare with it?  What delight
is there like the revelation of books, the sudden impact of a
master-spirit, the sense of windows flung wide open to the universe?
It is these adventures of the mind, the joy of which does not pass
away, that give the adventure of life itself beauty and fragrance,
and make it

  Rich as the oozy bottom of the deep,
  With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries.




OTHER PEOPLE'S JOBS

I have been following with interest my friend Mr. Robert Lynd's quest
of a soft job in the columns of _The Daily News_.  I have been
following it with interest, not only because I never willingly miss
anything which that most witty and wise of writers pens, but also
because the subject is near my heart.  I say this without shame.
There is nothing discreditable in desiring an agreeable occupation,
light in labour and heavy in rewards.  I do not pretend to have any
passion for work, I know very few people who have, and I confess that
I find most of those few very undesirable companions.  If I were put
upon oath I think I should have to admit that my impulse to work is
the same humble one as Mr. Chesterton confessed to--

  When I myself perceived that I
  Must work or I should shortly die--

well, then he worked.  And when he had driven off the shadow of death
far enough to feel comfortable, no doubt he left off and did
something pleasant.  And so with most of us.  It is only our dislike
of the undertaker and all that he connotes that sucks us into the
tubes in the morning and spews us out at night, and keeps us in the
interval counting figures, serving out "sausage and mash," measuring
yards of silk, tapping typewriters, saying "Walk this way, ma'am,"
trying boots on other people's feet, shouting "Full up" on buses, and
"Stand clear of the gates" in lifts, and a thousand other things that
make you tired to think of--things that have to be done, but are not
a man's job to do.

Most of our work in this artificial civilisation of ours is like
that.  The shepherd who keeps sheep on the hillside and the labourer
who tills the soil are living a noble life compared with the tawdry
little things most of us are condemned to do in cities.  We have to
do them to keep the undertaker at bay, and we are not to be blamed if
we go about with Mr. Lynd looking at other people's jobs and wishing
we had got them.  Thus he stands in front of the motor show-room,
with his face glued to the window, envying the lucky salesman inside,
who only has one customer in an hour to attend to, makes a pot of
money out of him, and has all the rest of the day in which to smoke
and gossip at the door and think about things.  In the same way I
never pass down Charing Cross Road without pausing in front of the
book-shops and thinking what an agreeable time those fellows inside
have.  Why, my idea of happiness is to leave this tiresome world and
go into a library and be forgotten, and here are lucky fellows who
have to live in a library to earn their living.

But I daresay it is all an illusion.  It is an illusion, no doubt,
even in the case of postmen, for whom most of us retain a romantic
and indestructible affection.  They belong to the earliest of our
memories, and get entangled in the clouds of glory, which, according
to the poet, we trail into this world with us from afar.  The clouds
of glory fade, but the postman remains as a reminder that we once
lived in the Golden Age.  Next to the muffin-man, he seemed the most
entirely enviable and likeable creature in trousers.  The muffin-man,
of course, had advantages.  There were his muffins to begin with.
And there was his bell.  To have a bell of your own and to have the
privilege of going down any street you liked ringing it as hard as
you liked and scattering the good tidings of muffins put a man in a
class by himself.

But the postman, if on a lower plane than the muffin-man, had a more
continuous joy.  He had not a bell of his own, but he had the run of
other people's bells.  He could ring any bell he liked and bang any
knocker as hard as he chose without a thought of running away.  And
these delights he had every day and several times a day.  He could go
on ringing bells and knocking at doors till his arm ached.  Nobody
objected.  On the contrary, you looked out for him, hoping that he
would come and bang at your door in that breezy way of his.  The
longer he paused before banging, the better you liked him.  It
meant--it could only mean--that he had such a lot of letters for you
that it took him a long time to find them all.

And, of course, the more letters there were the more joy there must
be.  That is the miracle with the postman.  He brings bad news and
good news and indifferent news, but we only remember him by his good
news.  Like the sun-dial, he only records the sunny hours.  He is the
hope that springs eternal in the human breast.  He comes up the path,
probably with a handful of accounts you have not paid, income tax
demands, offers from kind gentlemen to lend you ten thousand pounds
on your note of hand, applications for subscriptions, and other
things that you would be pleased to do without.  But no experience of
the Barmecide feasts he is capable of offering you affects your faith
in him and his good intentions.  If he were to turn back in the
middle of the path you would be disappointed.  If he pass by your
gate you are not grateful that he has not brought you ill-news.  You
suspect that something pleasant has unaccountably gone astray.

That is as it should be.  When we have ceased to want to hear the
postman's knock we may conclude that we have seen the best of the
day, and that the demon of disillusion has us in thrall.  It is to
have given up hope that that legendary ship of our childhood will
ever come home.  It was that admirable vessel that made the future
such an agreeable prospect.  Everything would be possible when our
ship came home.  That it was a very rich ship and that it was on its
way we did not doubt, for we had the word of most responsible people,
mothers and aunts and grandmothers, on the subject.  We could not
understand why it tarried so long, but we did not suspect its _bona
fides_ any more than its seaworthiness.  Some day--it might be any
day, possibly even to-morrow--the postman would come and knock
lustily at the door and bring news that the ship was in port or, at
least, had been sighted from the shore.

And though we have since discovered that those responsible people
were talking less literally than we thought, and that that magic
ship, with its golden argosy, was a thing of the fancy, we still see
the postman turn in at the gate with a mild flutter of expectation.
He is himself a sort of ship, laden with merchandise from afar.  In
his bag there must be incredible things, and some of them may be for
us.  It might be assumed that men whose coming gives so much joy are
themselves joyful, that they love their calling so much that they
would not change with kings, but experience reveals to us the
melancholy truth that postmen are as afflicted with the discontents
of life as the common run of mortals.

I fancy that if that motor salesman had come to the door and opened
out his mind to Mr. Lynd he would have told him that selling motors
was all right, but that not selling them, which occupied about
nineteen hours out of twenty, was the most sickening job under the
sun, and that the thing he really yearned after was to be literary
critic, like that Mr. Robert Lynd, who wrote such stunning reviews in
the papers.  Now that was a job.  There he sat, in an arm-chair
before a ripping fire, surrounded by all the latest books, with his
feet on the mantel-piece and no reason to put on his boots from
morning to night, reading books and smoking his hardest, and then
taking the author up, as it were, between thumb and forefinger and
showing the world what an ugly guy of a fellow he was.  Fancy being
paid to read books and lamm the writers.  Fancy being paid for having
your name in the paper in big type that anybody could read half a
dozen yards away.  Yes, that was the sort of soft job he would like.
Motors ...

That is the way of things.  We are all apt to think we should be
happy if we were doing somebody else's work--the king's, for example.
Even the nursery rhyme inculcates in us the notion that kings are
happy as the day is long, yet no intelligent coal-heaver who knew the
blessings of liberty and obscurity would be able to endure the
boredom and routine of a calling which compels a man to live as
publicly as a bee in an observation hive.  I have known people even
envy a bishop's gaiters, but I should be surprised to learn that
there was a single bishop on the bench who did not wish he could go
about in trousers again, and take up a plain hum-drum occupation in
which he could be as good as he liked without announcing it about the
legs.  The truth probably is that all these dreams of soft jobs are
vanity and that the canker and the worm can gnaw at the heart of the
best of them.  I offer this modest reflection to Mr. Lynd in the hope
that he will not cease to write beautiful articles in order to be an
incompetent motor salesman or to mix drugs in a chemist's shop.  I do
not think he is the sort of man who could sell anything, and I fancy
he is just the sort of man who would mix the drugs more than they
ought to be mixed.




WHY I DON'T KNOW

I was asked the other day by one of those journals which love vast,
resounding themes with which to astonish their readers to write an
article on the most important man in the world.  I declined, partly
because I was busy and partly because I was lazy, but chiefly because
I had not a ghost of a notion of the answer.  Of course, it would
have been possible for me to have discussed the claims of this man
and that to pre-eminence, to have contrasted M. Poincaré with Mr.
Lloyd George, Mr. Bernard Shaw with Mr. Charlie Chaplin, M. Trotsky
with Signor Mussolini, Einstein with Rutherford, and so on; but I
should not have answered the question.  No one can answer the
question.  We can all guess; but one thing is pretty certain.  We
shall all guess wrong.  The most important man in the world is
somewhere, but he will not be known until he is dead, and we are all
dead with him; not until our posterity looks back upon this time and
says with one voice, "Behold, the man," as we to-day look back to the
great age of Elizabeth and say, "Lo!  Shakespeare."  No one said it
then, and no one thought it.  Nearly two centuries had to pass before
the true magnitude of this peak became visible and even then it had
to be discovered by observers from afar, by the critics of a foreign
land and a foreign tongue.

Was there ever a period in history when the world knew where to look
for its chief of men?  If ever it might have been expected to pick
him out with the certainty of being right it would have been when
Augustus Cæsar reigned at Rome over the whole known world.  He was so
supreme that he seemed less a man than a god.  But down in a little
province of his vast empire there was a Boy growing up who was
destined to change the whole face of the world and to outshine
Augustus as the sun outshines a rush-light.  The magnificence of
Augustus and his empire is an empty memory of nineteen centuries ago,
but Christianity is still the mightiest force in the affairs of men.

Or suppose you had been living in the year 1506 in Valladolid, and
had asked yourself who was the most important man alive.  You would
have said the Pope or the Emperor or Ferdinand, without knowing that
they were nothing compared with a poor old man who was dying in
poverty and neglect in a mean street of that famous city.  He did not
know himself how vast a thing he had done and how his name would
outlive and outsoar those of kings and warriors, poets and statesmen.
He did not know that he had not simply found a new way to the East
Indies, but had discovered a New World, and that all the vast
continent of America would be the everlasting memorial of his life of
struggle and disappointment.  One would like to think that the spirit
of Columbus "poised in the unapparent" has the satisfaction of
knowing what a resounding name he has left behind him.

Let us go on a few years.  I will imagine that in 1530 I am asked,
not by an editor--for that breed had not then been invented--but by
some other curious inquirer, to direct him to the king of men then
living.  I should probably have answered with some confidence.  It
was the day of the Great Kings.  I suppose three men of such
remarkable powers as Henry VIII., Charles V., and Francis I. never
reigned in Europe simultaneously.  It was only a question of which
was the greatest to decide who was the most important man in the
world.  I daresay I should have decided for Henry; but of course I
should have been wrong.  The most important man in the world was a
person of whom I should not then have heard--a wandering scientist
born on the Vistula, Copernicus by name, into whose profound mind
there had come the most stupendous conception that ever thrilled the
thought of man.  The earth was not, as had been supposed through all
the ages, the fixed centre of the universe around which the stars
moved in obedient subjection, but a little planet rushing with the
rest round its great over-lord, the sun.  With that terrific
discovery, the whole conception of the cosmos was changed, the earth
became a speck of dust in the unthinkable vast, religion assumed new
meanings, and man fell from his proud pre-eminence as the lord of
creation.  In its effects it was the most momentous thing that ever
happened in the secular history of man; but the point here is that if
you and I had been living then and had had Copernicus pointed out to
us in the street we should not have known that he was beyond all
comparison the most tremendous figure in the world.

Take another illustration.  The end of the eighteenth century was a
time of great men.  If we had guessed then who was the most important
man alive we should have been puzzled to decide between Pitt and
Burke, Johnson and Washington, Nelson and Napoleon, and a multitude
of others.  None of us would have thought of looking for him in the
person of a certain gentle, unassuming instrument-maker who filled a
modest position in Glasgow University.  Yet if the most important man
in the world is he who sets in motion the forces--whether of ideas or
physical powers--that most profoundly affect the life of men, then no
one living from, say, 1760 to 1800, was comparable with James Watt.
He inaugurated the Age of Steam.  He released the greatest power that
the ingenuity of man has ever invented, and the train that thunders
through the land, and the ship that ploughs the sea, and the engine
that drives a thousand looms are among the prolific children of his
genius.

And so I repeat that I do not know who is the most important man in
the world.  He may be a solitary thinker wrestling with some vast
conception that is destined to reshape all our thought.  He may be
some unknown scientist from whose laboratory there will emerge one
day a power that will shake the heavens.  He may be a prophet or a
teacher who will help us to solve the riddle of this unintelligible
world.  He may be a discoverer or even a poet.  I am sure he will not
be a soldier, and I don't think he will be a politician.  These
people make a great noise in the world, but they rarely do anything
that matters to posterity.  The most important man in the world is
probably making no noise at all.  His noise will come late like the
sound of a great gun heard from afar.  But it is a noise that will
echo down the ages.




ON ANTI-CLIMAX

The centenary of the birth of Coventry Patmore has produced many
handsome tributes to that once popular, but now little-read poet.
When I was a boy _The Angel in the House_ was as familiar as _In
Memoriam_, and Patmore was a more prominent figure in the literary
landscape than Browning.  He has long lost that eminence, but his
haughty genius, like that of Landor, will always command the
respectful, if slightly chilly, admiration of certain minds.  "I
shall dine late," said Landor, "but the rooms will be well-lighted
and the company fit, though few."

Patmore, who outlived his earlier reputation, felt the same assurance
about himself.  And rightly, for though it is probable that the dust
will be allowed to gather on the unthumbed _Angel in the House_, some
of his later poems have an energy and nobility that will keep them
alive.  _The Farewell_, for example, has the ring of deathlessness in
it as assuredly as Drayton's _Parting_, of which it is reminiscent,
or Browning's _Last Ride Together_.  He will not be forgotten, too,
for another reason.  Fine poet though he was, he could come to grief
badly, and the stanza with which he closed his most famous poem will
live as an example of anti-climax:

  But here their converse had its end;
    For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn,
  There came an ancient college-friend,
    Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan,
  Lifted his hat and bowed and smiled,
    And filled her kind large eyes with joy,
  By patting on the cheek her child,
    With, "Is he yours, this handsome boy?"

"Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan"!  Shades of Parnassus!  It is easy
to see how he came to grief.  He had carried his high theme to a
close, and wished to end his flight with composed wings and the
negligible twitter of the bird at rest.  But in the attempt to be
simple he stumbled, as much greater poets like Wordsworth have
stumbled, on the banal and the commonplace.  We suffer from it
something of the shock we receive from the historic greeting by
Stanley of Livingstone in the depths of the African forest, which is
an immortal example of anti-climax.  The expedition for the discovery
of Livingstone touched the epic note of grand adventure.  It held the
attention of the world, and the moment of the meeting was charged
with the high emotions of a sublime occasion.  And when they met (so
the record stands), Stanley held out his hand and said, "Dr.
Livingstone, I presume."  At that artificial word the epic collapses
to the dimensions of a suburban reception.  It is not easy to imagine
what salutation would have fitted the end of so mighty a quest, but
if Stanley had said, "Dr. Livingstone, I suppose," or preferably
simply the name, the feeling of the occasion would not have been
outraged, so slight are the things which separate the sublime from
the ridiculous.

A lack of humour as much as of taste is usually the source of the
anti-climax, as in the familiar example from the prize poem on the
Mayflower:

  And so, directed by the hand of God,
  They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.

The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a
mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a
very humourless person could have used in such a connection.
Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:

  Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War,
  Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,

the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have
been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of
poetry.

That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of
bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye.  I
like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:

  They did not know what blench meant.
  So they stayed in their entrenchment.

Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the
illustration.  It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an
entrenchment that requires courage.  Like the much greater Patmore,
Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the
simple and artless, as when he wrote:

  The spring time, O, the spring time,
    Who does not know it well--
  When the little birds begin to sing
    And the buds begin to swell.

Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with
which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom
of the flowers:

  Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,
    How can ye blume sae fair?
  How can ye chant, ye little birds,
    And I sae fu' o' care?

I suppose no poet was ever more royally regardless of the smaller
niceties of the poet's craft than Burns was, but it would not be easy
to find in all his work a case where he comes down with the broken
wing of anti-climax.




THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR[1]

[1] Written on the day of the interment of the Unknown Warrior in
Westminster Abbey.


We shall not know his name.  It will never be known, and we should
not seek to know it.  For in that nameless figure that is borne over
land and sea to mingle its dust with the most sacred dust of England,
we salute the invisible hosts of the fallen.  We do not ask his name
or whence he comes.  His name is legion and he comes from a hundred
fields, stricken with a million deaths.

Gaily or sadly, he went out to battle.  We see him, as in a vision,
streaming in by a thousand roads, down from the Hebrides and the
glens of the North, from the mines of Durham and the shipyards of the
Clyde and Tyne and the bogs of Ireland, out of the factories of
Lancashire and Yorkshire, up from the pastures of East Anglia and the
moors of Devon, over the seas from distant lands, whither he had gone
to live his life and whence he returns at the call of a duty that
transcends life.  In his speech we hear the echoes of a hundred
countrysides, from the strong burr of Aberdeen to the lilt of Dorset
and the broad-vowelled speech of Devon; but whatever the accent it
mingles in that song about Tipperary which, by the strangest of
ironies, lives in the mind with the sound of the tramp of millions to
battle.

He takes a thousand shapes in our minds.  We see him leaving the
thatched cottage in some remote village, his widowed mother standing
at the doorway and shading her eyes to catch the last glimpse of him
as he turns into the high-road that shuts him from her sight; we see
him throwing aside his books and bounding out of school or college
with the light of adventure in his eye; we see him closing his little
shop, laying aside his pen, putting down mallet and chisel, hammer
and axe.  We see him taking a million pitiful farewells, his young
wife hanging about his neck in an agony of grief, his little children
weeping for they know not what, with that dread foreboding that is
the affliction of childhood, the old people standing by with a sorrow
that has passed beyond the relief of tears.  Here he is the lover and
there the son and there the husband and there the brother, but
everywhere he is the sacrifice.  While others remain behind, perhaps
to win ignoble riches and rewards, he goes out to live in mud and
filth and die a lonely and horrible death far from his home and all
that he loved.

And he is chosen, not because he is the tainted wether of the flock,
meetest for sacrifice, but because he is the pride of the flock.  In
him we see the youth of England, all that is bravest and best and
richest in promise, brains that could have won the priceless
victories of peace, sinews that could have borne the burden of
labour, singers and poets and statesmen in the green leaf, the Rupert
Brookes, the Raymond Asquiths, the Gladstones, the Keelings, the
finest flower of every household, all offered as a sacrifice on the
insane and monstrous altar of war.

And with the mind's eye we follow him as he is swallowed up in the
furnace.  We see him falling on that desperate day at Suvla Bay,
perishing in the deserts of Mesopotamia, struck down in the snowstorm
on Vimy Ridge, dying on the hundred battlefields of the Somme,
disappearing in the sea of mud churned up at Passchendaele, falling
like autumn leaves in the deadly salient of Ypres, stricken in those
unforgettable days of March, when the Fifth Army broke before the
German onset.  His bones lie scattered over a thousand alien fields
from the Euphrates to the Scheldt and lie on the floor of every
wandering sea.  From the Somme to Zeebrugge his cemeteries litter the
landscape, and in those graves lie the youth of England and the
hearts of those who mourn.

Now one comes back, the symbol of all who have died and who will
never return.  He comes, unknown and unnamed, to take his place among
the illustrious dead.  And it is no extravagant fancy to conceive the
spirits of that great company, the Chathams and Drydens and Johnsons,
poets, statesmen and warriors, receiving him into their midst in the
solemn Abbey as something greater and more significant than they.
For in him they will see the emblem of the mightiest tribute ever
laid on the nation's altar.  In him we do reverence to that
generation of Britain's young menhood that perished in the world's
madness and sleeps for ever in foreign lands.

None of us will look on that moving scene without emotion.  But
something more will be required of us than a spasm of easy, tearful
emotion that exhausts itself in being felt.  What have we, the
living, to say to the dead who pass by in shadowy hosts?  They died
for no mean thing.  They died that the world might be a better and a
cleaner place for those who lived and for those who come after.  As
that unknown soldier is borne down Whitehall he will issue a silent
challenge to the living world to say whether it was worthy of his
sacrifice.  And if we are honest with ourselves we shall not find the
answer easy.




NAMING THE BABY

I take no responsibility in the matter.  It is true that I was
consulted, but only in a sort of Elder Statesman capacity.  I
happened to be the grandfather in the case, and my opinion was asked,
not as having any artistic merit, but as a tribute to my ancestral
status.  Moreover, I was to be the godfather, and could not be
decently left out of the discussion.

At this stage the current was running strong in favour of "Martin."

"Why Martin?" I asked.  "There has never been a Martin in the family,
and the only Martins I can recall are Martin Luther and Martin
Tupper.  But why commemorate them?"

"We aren't proposing to commemorate them.  We are not thinking of
them.  We are thinking of Martin on its merits.  There's a nice
clean, sharp quality about it.  It's not too unusual, and just
unusual enough--plain and not too plain.  It has distinction without
frills.  That's the case for Martin."

"But if you want a name with that sort of flavour," said I, "why not
Crispin?"

"Crispin, by Jove!  That's an idea.  Why, Sylvia, why didn't you
think of Crispin?  Of course, it's Crispin.  It fits him like a
glove.  Here, pass Crispin over to me.  What clarity!  What
austerity!  What a flavour of the antique world!  Henry the Fifth
before Agincourt, and all the rest of it.  It's like a beautiful
frosty morning--sunshine and a nip in the air, a clean wind and a
clear sky."

But when at the next conference the subject was resumed, Crispin had
passed under a cloud.  It was a little too chill--a little too much
of autumn about it.  And it called attention to itself.  Now
Philip--that had the smack of high summer.  It was round and full and
came trippingly from the tongue.  And as for its traditions, these
were abundant, Philip of Macedon and Philip Sidney.

"And Philip the Second," I said.

"Well, we must take the good with the bad.  And after all the name's
the thing."

"Have you thought of Christopher?"

"Yes, for one whole evening Christopher went like a gale of wind.  I
forget why we dropped it.  Why did we drop it, Sylvia?  There must
have been some reason, but I can't for the life of me think what it
was or what it could be.  Christopher....  Yes, I think we shall have
to reconsider Christopher, Sylvia."

That evening there was a ring on the telephone.  "It's all right,"
said the voice.  "We've had a brainwave.  We've decided on
Antony--A-n-t-o-n-y--no 'h' of course."

"You mean the sinner, not the saint.  I don't like Mark Antony.
Can't forgive him that affair of Cicero's head."

"Well, they all used to do things like that in those days."

"But why allude to the fellow?"

"We are not alluding to him."

"You can't help alluding to him.  It's the greatest one-man name in
the world.  Why not go for simplicity?  There's John.  Glorious name,
John--fits anybody--splendid traditions, John Milton, John Dryden,
John Bright, John Bunyan, John Donne----"

"Then you don't like Antony."

"I don't say that.  I said I didn't like Mark Antony."

When the jury met again, however, Antony, like Philip and
Christopher, was out of the running, and Martin had reappeared.
There was such a quietude about Martin, you know.  It was calm, it
was self-controlled, it was full of peace, and yet it wasn't dull.
There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with a fellow named Martin.

"Well," said I, "Martin Luther kicked up a tolerable dust in the
world, and Martin Tupper was as dull as an oyster.  Now Stephen----"

"Yes, Stephen is a fine name.  We've thought a lot about Stephen.  It
has just the right note of romance without being romantic.  I think
we turned it down because we thought it was rather 'defeatist' in
spirit.  There was Stephen who was stoned--wasn't he?--and King
Stephen who lost his crown--didn't he?--and Uncle Stephen who was
drowned, and things like that.  We don't want to start the boy with a
'defeatist' name.  But Stephen is beautiful, I think we shall have to
think about Stephen again, Sylvia."

And they did.  "We've settled on Stephen," was the eleventh-hour
bulletin from headquarters.

I was a little late when I reached the church, and the christening
group was already around the font with the clergyman in attendance.
The service proceeded at once, and reached the point at which the
clergyman demanded the name of "this child."

"Michael," came the astonishing reply.

I looked up and caught a mischievous glint in the maternal eye.
"Well, you see," she said afterwards, "we were quite exhausted with
the search, and fell on Michael in desperation.  And he was born on
St. Michael's Day.  And there was Michael Angelo, you know.  Anyhow,
it's done now, and can't be undone.  But I do hope Michael----"

"Mike," I said.

"No, no, it's to be Michael--I do hope Michael will like it."

* * * * * *

"How's Michael?" I asked a few days later when the father visited me.

"The baby is going on splendidly," he said.

"'The baby,'" I said.  "Why not Michael?"

"Oh, something's got to be done.  We can never leave the poor child
with that name tied to him.  We think of calling him Martin."

"Or Stephen," I said.




THE CULT OF THE KNIFE AND FORK

I was walking in the Chiltern Hills with a friend not long ago when
we turned into the inn at Chenies for lunch.  There were only two
people in the dining-room--a man and, I take it, his wife, who were
sitting at a table laden with a cold roast of beef, vegetables,
pickles, cheese and bread, and large tankards of beer.  The man was a
hefty person with red hair, a red face, and a "fair round belly."  He
took no notice of our entrance, and he took no notice of the timid
little woman in front of him.  He gave his undivided attention to his
knife and fork and the joint before him.  He cut and came again with
the steady gravity of a man who took his victuals seriously and had
no time for frivolous talk.  When at last the fury of his appetite
abated, he took a last deep draught from the tankard, drew his napkin
across his mouth, stretched himself, and, speaking for the first time
to the timid little woman in front of him, said:

"Well, we'd better be getting on if we're going to catch that train
to Rickmansworth" (two stations or so off).

"But what do we want to stop at Rickmansworth for?" ventured the
timid little woman.

"What do we want to stop at Rickmansworth for?" repeated the man in a
tone in which astonishment and indignation struggled for mastery.
"_Well, I suppose we've got to have tea!_"

He spoke as though the deepest feelings of his nature had been
wounded.  He was having a day's outing in the country, and here was
this insensible woman before him who actually wanted to know what
they were going to Rickmansworth for.  What had they come out for if
it was not to have lunch at Chenies and tea at Rickmansworth?  In his
mind Chenies lived as a place where you got lashings of cold beef and
pickles, washed down with good ale, at the inn, and Rickmansworth as
a place where you called to have tea and eggs and bread and butter
and jam.  I do not speak disrespectfully of those to whom the memory
of good food hangs like a halo round a place.  Hazlitt remembered
Llangollen, not merely because he first read the _New Eloise_ there,
but because he read it to the accompaniment of a bottle of sherry and
a cold chicken.  And again: "I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and
the turnips that day had the finest flavour imaginable," he says,
when referring to his first meeting with Coleridge.

Indeed, not the least of Hazlitt's charms is his hearty delight in
the table.  His adventures have a trick of ending in the cheerful
music of knife and fork.  Thus he tells how in his youthful days when
he was trying to live by art he painted a portrait of a Manchester
manufacturer, and being very hungry, having lived for the past
fortnight chiefly on coffee, he slurred over the painting of his
sitter's coat in order that he might hear the five guineas reward
jingling in his pocket.  Then, the guineas secure, he hurried to the
market-place and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes, "a noble dish
for strong stomachs; and while they were getting ready and I could
hear them hissing in the pan, I read a volume of _Gil Blas_
containing the account of the fair Aurora."

But with all the gusto of these and many similar allusions to food,
it will be observed that the pleasures of eating were incidental and
not primary.  It was the associations of the food that made it
memorable.  The sherry and the chicken, like Llangollen itself, were
irradiated by the spirit of Rousseau, and the Welsh mutton and the
turnips lingered on the palate of memory with the impression of
Coleridge's astonishing eloquence.  It was the intellectual zest of
the occasion that added a touch of poetry to the food.  The Welsh
mutton caught the rapture of the prophet, the sherry glowed with the
fire of new thought and the hissing of the sausages and mash in the
pan was mingled with the tale of the fair Aurora.  That is the way to
dignify the remembrance of our creature comforts.  It is no dishonour
even to the Finsteraarhorn to remember the noble bowl of steaming hot
soup that you had in the hut when the climb was done, and many a fine
walk is rounded off in retrospect by the fare that awaited us at the
inn.  Even bread and cheese and beer may be suffused with the glory
of a great adventure and Mr. George Saintsbury, who has as much zest
over his food as Hazlitt had, will grow lyrical even over sandwiches,
taken to the right accompaniment of time and place.

But to remember Chenies for its beef and pickles is to exalt beef and
pickles to too high a place in our affections.  I have known men who
have travelled much and who seem to have brought nothing back from
their travels but menu cards.  Such a one was coming up the other day
from Devonshire, whither he had been for a holiday.  I know no finer
country for a holiday, nor one better worth growing dithyrambic
about.  After much travelling and many affairs of the heart with the
English counties I think my verdict has gone finally to Devonshire.
Where shall we find such colour, such moorlands, such a variety of
coast-line, so warm and generous a feeling about Nature and man?  If
I had a second innings on earth and had my choice of birthplace I
think I should choose to be born a Devon man.  So I think would that
man in the railway-carriage, but for other reasons than mine.  He was
an amiable and gossipy man who babbled to the company about his
holiday experiences.  He had been to many places on the South Devon
coast, but so far as one could gather he had been eating all the
time.  Every place recalled some meal.  There was Dartmouth, for
example.  If you ever went to Dartmouth be sure to go to
such-and-such a tea-shop.  Top-hole it was.  Best place for tea in
the town.  You could have what they called "a light tea," and a very
nice tea it was, with home-made jam and Devonshire cream.  His face
glowed with the succulent thought.  Or you could have a heavy tea, a
sort of a high tea, the constituents of which he recited with great
precision, as a man might particularise his strokes at golf or his
hands at cards or the mountains he had climbed.

Then there was Teignmouth.  He went there and it was a fine place.
And if you ever went to Teignmouth he had one piece of advice to
give.  Don't miss having lunch at the "Boar's Head" or some such
place.  No end of a lunch.  And reasonable too.  Not cheap, mind you.
He was not a person who believed in cheapness.  But the quality!  And
with this introduction he travelled over the menu, the record of
which occupied quite a substantial part of the journey to London.
After this he continued the itinerary of his travels in quest of
meals.  He went up the Teign to Newton Abbot, and there or
thereabouts he struck a most wonderful cockle tea.  The cockles, it
seemed, came out of the river, and it was his solid conviction that
Newton Abbot was a place very well worth visiting if it was only to
know what cockles could be like when they came fresh out of the
water, and were taken to the accompaniment of the right sort of tea.

And so he babbled on about the places he had been to and the food he
had eaten in them until one might have thought that Devonshire was a
land strewn with tea-shops and restaurants.  I offer him as a
cautionary tale for those who take the cult of the knife and fork a
thought too seriously.




A SOLILOQUY IN A GARDEN

I spent this morning hoeing in a part of the garden which had run to
weeds very miserably.  Thistles, nettles, chickweed, and a multitude
of other undesirable growths had taken possession and extinguished
every decent inhabitant of the soil.  There are few more depressing
spectacles than a garden that has fallen on evil times and has become
a sort of slum of nature, where everything that is beautiful and
wholesome has been trampled out of existence and everything that is
coarse and worthless riots in profusion and triumph.  As I hoed the
weeds up I indulged in the familiar reflection on the prodigality
with which Nature looks after the weeds and the parsimony she shows
for the more delicate and beautiful of her children.  Lincoln said
that God must love the common people, or He would not have made so
many of them.  Nature must love the weeds, or she would not have made
them such sturdy fellows and given them such a lusty hold on life.

For the truth is that in the battlefield of the garden barbarism is
never suppressed.  All the cunning of the gardener is needed to keep
it in reasonable check.  Let the watchman sleep but a week and the
barbarian hosts will have begun to overrun the civilised population
that his labour and science have planted and nurtured.  Let him sleep
for a month and the work of a season will be undone.  The strawberry
bed will be a ruin, the vegetable garden will be yellow with charlock
and creeping buttercup, and white with sheep's parsley, and scarlet
with poppies, and the flower-beds will be a forlorn picture of rank
growths.  It is a familiar saying of the gardener that one year's
seeds means ten years' weeds, and it is certainly a slow business to
redeem soil that has once lapsed into foulness.

This train of thought took a wider circle as I proceeded with my
task.  The garden became a symbol that seemed to offer a not
inapposite comment on the problem that is disturbing so many minds at
this time.  Mankind has for some years made so shocking an exhibition
of itself that there seems nothing to be said in our defence.  On the
face of it, the argument is with the Dean Inges who regard the human
growth as incurably bad and progress as an idle illusion.  We just go
round and round in circles.  Sometimes we seem to be getting our
garden of life civilised and cultivated.  At last, we say, we have
got the weeds under.  Then suddenly we relapse into barbarism and all
our delicate cultures vanish before the onrush of the blind furies
and savageries that may be chained in us, but are never extinguished.
It is a depressing philosophy, and in the light of our recent
experience it would not be easy to entertain the dream of human
perfectibility which was so popular an idea with the philosophic
Radical of a century ago.  It would hardly be possible to claim that
human nature is better than it was a thousand or perhaps ten thousand
years ago.  Our garden is as full of potential weeds as ever it was,
and when they spring up they are as obscene and devastating as ever
they were.

If that were all we might despair.  But it is not less true that the
gardening has not been in vain.  Even in the presence of the terrific
reaction of these days it is possible to maintain that human society
has won great victories over the weeds of human nature.  Man may not
be better than he was ten thousand years ago, but the community of
men is better.  The laws under which we live are humaner laws than
ever obtained in the past.  There is more equity and justice in our
common relations, more respect for human life, more sense of human
rights and liberties.  We make war savagely, but we do not massacre
the women and children, and we do not enslave the defeated as the
Greeks did.

Contrast the position of women in the modern world with their
position in the Tudor world, or the treatment of children to-day with
their treatment in the not far distant days when Elizabeth Barrett
Browning wrote _The Cry of the Children_, and we have a measure of
real progress.  When Dr. Clifford was once interrupted by a "voice"
which denied that the world was growing better, he replied: "But I
know it is growing better.  I know that when I was a child of eight,
I was called at five o'clock in the morning to go to work in a
factory for twelve hours a day, and I know that to-morrow morning
there will not be a child in all the land who will suffer that
wrong."  Or to apply another test.  Turn to Plutarch's _Lives_ and
count the violent deaths that befell his subjects.  I doubt whether
one in four died a natural death.  To be famous in the ancient world
was to be doomed.  But there is little personal peril in being either
famous or infamous in these days.

And so I think the case is not quite so black as our pessimists paint
it.  We shall never subdue the old Adam that dwells in us, but we
have collectively developed a social conscience which does keep him
in check.  The gardening is not profitless.  The weeds are always
lurking in the soil ready to spring up and turn the garden to a
desolation, just as the germs of pneumonia are said to be in every
nostril waiting for the moment of weakness in the body to leap to the
attack.  The moral to be drawn from these desperate times is not the
futility of weeding, but the urgency of it.  We can easily be too
despairing about ourselves.  Perhaps after all we are only in the
infancy of our days, and though as men and women we may never achieve
perfectibility we need not despair of strengthening our social
defences against future collapses into barbarism.  Human nature may
be as bad as it seems, but it is still possible to say with Arnold
that there is a stream of tendency in us that makes for
righteousness.  So let us get on with our weeding.




A NIGHT'S LODGING

I awoke this morning with the sort of feeling a healthy child awakes
with on Christmas Day.  That is to say, I awoke with delight at the
idea of getting up.  I was in a strange bed in a strange city.  I had
arrived in the strange city late overnight, and had had to take what
lodging I could find.  Until I lay down in my bed I had no idea how
uncomfortable a bed could be.  It was as cold as charity and as hard
as a tax-gatherer.  The bolster was the shape of a large round
sausage, and the pillow was the shape of a sausage also.  They were a
relentless pair of ruffians, cold-hearted, passionless brutes, stolid
and unresponsive, deaf alike to appeal or rebuke.  I coaxed them with
the flat of my hand, and they scowled unmoved; I smote them with my
closed fist, and they took no more notice of it than if their name
had been Dempsey.

I did not know that I could hate any inanimate thing so much as I
hated that pillow and that bolster.  I did not know that such oceans
of blind anger were bottled up within me.  I banged them against each
other with savage joy.  I threw them on the floor and danced and
stamped on them.  I knelt on them; I sat on them; finally I kicked
them, not in the hope of doing them any good (hope had by this time
died within me), but for the simple delight of kicking the
abominations.

Then, warmed with these various exercises, I put the things back and
got into bed.  It was as I expected.  The mattress was a fit
companion for the pillow and bolster.  It lay like a newly ploughed
field, every furrow deeply graven, every ridge with the edge of a
dulled razor.  It was not a field of warm loam or generous greensand
that yielded to the touch.  It was a field of stubborn Essex clay,
cold and dank and merciless.  The expanse was enormous.  It seemed
that during that measureless night I travelled miles to and fro
across the field in search of a furrow into which I could wedge
myself.  I tried it on the east side, and I tried it on the west, and
I tried it all between.  I tried it longitudinally; I tried it
latitudinally; I tried it diagonally.  The way with a bed like this,
I said to myself, is not to get in the furrows, but to lie across the
ridges.  But when I did that I felt like a toad under the harrow,
when "ilka tooth gies him a tig," and I resumed my search for a
furrow that would give me a welcome.

In the intervals I slept and had wild dreams in which I met Apollyon
straddling across my path.  He came at me with fire belching from his
nostrils, but I gave him a mighty thwack with a bolster I happened to
be carrying, and he fell with an awful thud and split his head open
on a ridge of the ploughed field where the combat occurred.  I
daresay I slept more than I imagined, for I share Lord Granville's
view on the subject.  Believing that he was a victim of insomnia, he
took a house in Carlton House Terrace, within sound of Big Ben, and
was comforted to find that, in spite of nights which seemed to pass
without a wink of sleep, he only heard the great bell once or twice.

I did not do so well as that.  As I fought with the furrows I heard
all the night sounds of the strange city without--the ringing of tram
bells, the jolting of wagons, the songs of revellers, and so on--die
down until all was quiet.  I dozed and wakened and wakened and dozed,
praying for the dawn as fervently as ever Wellington prayed for
Blücher.  Once I dreamed that I had gone into Hell, and heard the
cries of the souls in torment, and waking I found that the strange
city without was coming to life again with a jangle of hoots and
whistles and screams.  Perhaps, I felt, my dream was not very far
wrong.  I lay and listened to the mad chorus.  I had never imagined
that there could be so many whistles whistling with such different
notes, high notes and low notes, clear notes and foggy notes,
shrieking and growling like a whole menagerie of wild beasts
hungering for blood.  Intermittent noises began to be heard in the
corridor.  People were moving about.  There was a swishing sound from
the next room.  A church clock outside began to strike, and I counted
the strokes as a miser counts his money--one, two three, four, five,
six, SEVEN.  It seemed too good to be true.  I punched the pillow to
make certain I was awake, and, under the comfortable assurance that
release was at hand, fell to sleep again in my furrowed field.  When
I woke next, the room was light.  I leapt from bed and kicked the
pillow joyfully across the room.  But the bolster I subjected to no
such indignity.  After all, it had done me a good turn with Apollyon,
and I called the account square.

Two hours later I am in the train fleeing from the strange city.  I
had never been to it before, and I daresay I shall never go to it
again.  But I shall always remember it as the City of Dreadful Night.
I feel now that I, too, have been with Æneas into Hell.  Perhaps it
is unfair to the strange city.  I daresay love and peace and beauty
dwell there as abundantly as in most places.  But I am content to
leave the discovery of them to others.




THOSE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR

The case which has occupied the courts recently of the man who beat a
tin can as a way of retaliating upon a neighbour who strummed the
piano touches one of the most difficult problems of urban life.  We
who live in the cities all have neighbours, and for the most part
"thin partitions do our realms divide."  It is true that, however
thin the walls, we seldom know our neighbours.  If the man who has
lived next door to me in a northern suburb for the last half-dozen
years stopped me in the Strand or came and sat down beside me in a
restaurant I should not, as the saying is, know him from Adam.  In
this vast whirlpool of London he goes his way and I go mine, and I
daresay our paths will not cross though we go on living beside each
other until one or other of us takes up a more permanent abode.

I do not know whether he is short or tall, old or young, or anything
about him, and I daresay he is in the same state of contented
ignorance about me.  I hear him when he pokes the fire on his side
late at night, and I suppose he hears me when I poke the fire on my
side.  Our intercourse is limited to the respective noises we make
with the fire-irons, the piano, and so on.  When he has friends to
visit him we learn something about him from the sounds they make, the
music they affect, and the time they go away (often unconscionably
late).  But apart from that vague intimation, my neighbour might be
living in Mars and I might be living in Sirius, for all we know, or
care, about each other.  Perhaps some day his house (or mine) will be
on fire, and then I daresay we shall become acquainted.  But apart
from some such catastrophe as this there seems no reason why we
should ever exchange a word on this side of the grave.

It is not pride or incivility on either side that keeps us remote
from each other.  It is simply our London way.  People are so
plentiful that they lose their identity.  By the Whitestone Pond at
Hampstead not long ago I met my old friend John O'Connor--"Long
John," as he was affectionately called in the House of Commons, of
which he was for so long one of the most popular members--and he
said, in reply to inquiries, that he was living in Frognal, had lived
there for years, "next door to Robertson Nicoll--not that I should
know him," he added, "for I don't think I have ever set eyes on him."
And I should have expected to find that Sir William was no better
informed about his neighbour than his neighbour was about him.  In
London men are as lonely as oysters, each living in his own shell.
We go out into the country to find neighbours.  If the man next door
took a cottage a mile away from me in the country I should probably
know all about him, his affairs, his family, his calling, and his
habits inside a week, and be intimate enough with him in a fortnight
to borrow his garden-shears or his bill-hook.  This is not always so
idyllic as it seems.  Village life can be poisoned by neighbours
until the victim pines for the solitude of a London street, where
neighbours are so plentiful that you are no more conscious of their
individual existence than if they were blackberries on a hedgerow.

On the occasions on which we become acutely conscious of our
neighbours, the temptation is to think ill of them.  For example, we
were all late the other morning, and Matilda, whose function it is to
keep us up to time, explained that she had overslept herself because
of those people next door.  Four o'clock it was, m'm, before the din
ended.  Some of us had lost count of the hours at two and others at
three but Matilda was emphatic.  She had heard the last of the
revellers go away in a car, and had looked at her watch and it was
exactly four.  No one disputed her word.  It was gratifying to know
that the hour was four rather than three.  If it had been five we
should doubtless have been still more gratified.  It would have made
the case against those people next door still blacker.  And it can
never be too black for their deserts.  Our neighbours are at once too
near to us and too far away from us.  If they were under our own roof
we might be able to make something of them; if they were only in the
next street we could forget all about them.  But they are just far
enough away to escape our celestial influence and quite close enough
to be a nuisance.

They are always in the wrong.  Consider the hours they keep--entirely
different from our hours and therefore entirely reprehensible.  If
they do not offend by their extravagant piety they shock you by their
levity.  Perhaps they play tennis on Sunday, or perhaps they don't,
and in either case they are vulnerable to criticism.  They always
manage to be gay when you are sleepy.  They take a delight in going
away for more holidays than you can possibly have, or perhaps they
don't go away for holidays at all, in which case their inferiority is
clearly established.  If they are not guilty of criminal waste, they
can be convicted of shabby parsimony.  They either dress too
luxuriously or do not dress luxuriously enough for the decencies of
the neighbourhood.  We suspect that they are no better than they
should be.  Observe the frequency with which their servants come and
go.  Depend upon it, they find those people next door impossible.
Their habits and their friends, the music they play, the pets that
they keep, the politics they affect, the newspapers they read--all
these things confirm our darkest fears.

It is possible to believe anything about them--especially the worst.
What are those strange sounds that penetrate the wall in the small
hours?  Surely that is the chink of coin!  And those sudden shrieks
and gusts of laughter?  Is there not an alcoholic suggestion about
such undisciplined hilarity?  We know too much about them, and do not
know enough.  They are revealed to us in fragments, and in putting
the fragments together we do not spare them.  There is nothing so
misleading as half heard and half-understood scraps.  And the curious
thing about those people next door is that, if you ever come to know
them, you find they are not a bit like what you thought they were.
You find to your astonishment that they have redeeming features.
Perhaps they find that we have redeeming features too.  For the
chastening truth is that we all play the rôle of those people next
door to somebody.  We are all being judged, and generally very
unfavourably judged, on evidence which, if we knew it, would greatly
astonish us.  It might help us to be a little more charitable about
those people next door if we occasionally remembered that we are
those people next door ourselves.

But the St. John's Wood case illustrates the frail terms on which
immunity from annoyance by neighbours is enjoyed.  Two musicians
dwelling in one house gave lessons to pupils on the piano, and the
man next door, who objected to his peace being disturbed in this way,
took his revenge by banging on tin cans, and otherwise making things
unpleasant for the musicians.  I do not know what the law said on the
subject.  It may be admitted that the annoyances were equal in
effect, but they were not the same in motive.  In the one case the
motive was the reasonable one of earning an honest living: there was
no deliberate intention of being offensive to the neighbours.  In the
other case, the motive was admittedly to make a demonstration against
the neighbours.  What is to be done in such circumstances?  It is not
an offence to play the piano in one's own house even for a living.
On the other hand, it is hard, especially if you don't like music, or
perhaps even more if you do, to hear the scales going on the piano
next door all day.

The question of motive does not seem to be relevant.  If my neighbour
makes noises which render my life intolerable, it is no answer to say
that he makes them for a living and without intending to destroy my
peace.  He does destroy my peace, and it is no comfort to be assured
that he does not mean to.  Hazlitt insisted that a man might play the
trombone in his own house all day if he took reasonable measures to
limit the annoyance to his neighbours; but Hazlitt had probably never
lived beside a trombone.  I find the argument is leading me on to the
side of the tin-can gentleman, and I don't want it to do that, for my
sympathies are with the musicians.  And yet----

Well, let us avoid a definite conclusion altogether and leave the
incident to make us generally a little more sensitive about the
feelings of our neighbours.  They cannot expect us never to play the
piano, never to sit up late, never to be a little hilarious, any more
than we can expect never to be disturbed by them.  But the amenities
of neighbourliness require that we should mutually avoid being a
nuisance to each other as much as we can.  And if our calling compels
us to be a little noisy, we should bear that in mind when we choose a
house and when we choose the room in which we make our noises.  The
perfect neighbour is one whom we never see and whom we never hear
except when he pokes the fire.




HOW WE SPEND OUR TIME

I read an entertaining article in the _Observer_ the other Sunday,
which set me to the unusual task of making a calculation.  Figures
are not my strong point, and sums I abhor.  But this article launched
me on the unfamiliar task of making a sum.  I hope I have done it
correctly, but any schoolboy who cares to audit the account will be
able to convict me if I am wrong.  The article was the record of a
gentleman who had, in the course of the past twelve years, played
twenty thousand rubbers of auction bridge, and had kept a careful
account of his experiences, the proportions of games he had won and
lost, the average of "hundred aces" and "yarboroughs" he had had, how
he had fared with "honours," with many curious points which had
arisen, and which were no doubt illuminating to the student of the
game.

But it was not these things which set me adding, subtracting,
multiplying and dividing.  My knowledge of bridge is as contemptible
as my handicap at golf.  The author of the article would not sit down
at the same table, probably not in the same room, with such a
'prentice hand as I am at the game.  Nor was it the financial aspect
of the matter that interested me.  That side of the story was not
without its attractions.  The player, on the analysis of his own and
his opponents' "hands" over the twelve years showed, had had
distinctly the worse of the luck, but he was obviously a good player,
for he had won at fifty-five per cent. of his sittings and, playing
generally for half-crown rubbers, had won in the twelve years £2750
of the £5000 that had changed hands in the games, each year having
shown a profit on his labours.

There was, however, one item which was missing from this elaborate
stocktaking, and it was this item that started my sum.  I began to be
interested in this gentleman from the point of view of the time he
had devoted to the game over a period of years, which had not been
without their anxieties.  This consideration touched a wider question
about which I have often thought vaguely and idly--the question, that
is, of how the average man passes his time.  Here was an average man
of a certain class who had incidentally given me a hint to build up
his time-sheet form.  Taking an hour as the average time occupied by
a rubber--which, with intervals and interruptions, seems a moderate
estimate--I found that during the twelve years he had spent twenty
thousand hours at the card-table--that is, two years and rather more
than three months, day and night.

That was a substantial chunk of the twelve years to start with.  I
came next to the item of sleep, and assuming that, having made up his
nightly account of the day's play, our author indulged in the normal
eight hours of repose, I found that in the twelve years he had
accounted for 34,840 hours in this way, and my schoolboy will, I
hope, agree with me that this amounts in sum to approximately four
years of sleep, day and night.  I came next to meals.  A man who can
spend five hours a day at cards as an amusement will, I am sure, not
hurry over his meals.  He will take his lunch at his club, and his
coffee and gossip after lunch, and he will dine well and leisurely
before turning to the solid work of the card-table, for no doubt most
of his card-playing will be done after dinner.  Three hours a day is
a reasonable allowance for the meal intervals, which, on this basis,
account for 12,140 hours, or one year and three-eighths, during the
twelve years.  Holidays and Sundays (with due deduction on items
already accounted for, cards, sleep, meals) account for a further
half-year over the twelve years.  For all the odds and ends of
things, the outdoor recreations, golf, motoring, the daily journeys
to and from town, theatres, visits to church, the occasional day at
Lord's, the reading of newspapers, parties, public meetings,
novel-reading, and so on, an average of two hours a day must be
allowed, giving 8760 hours in the twelve years, or, roughly, a year
of time.  These items make up 75,680 hours out of the 105,120 hours
into which the twelve years are divided.  There remain 25,060 hours,
or two years and seven-eighths, which I will charitably assume are
devoted to work.  On this basis my sum is as follows:

  Sleep             4     years
  Work              2 7/8 years
  Cards             2 1/3 years
  Meals             1 3/8 years
  Odds and ends     1     year
  Holidays            1/2 year
                   ______
  Approximately    12     years

I present the result to the _Observer_ gentleman as a footnote to his
entertaining article.  Far be it from me to moralise about it.  If
the misuse of time were a hanging matter, few of us would escape the
scaffold.  I daresay I have wasted as much time in the twelve years
as our bridge-player has done, though in different ways.  But I think
he will agree that the sum is worth doing and worth thinking about,
and that when next he says that he has not time for this, that, or
the other, he will know he is not telling the truth.

And while he is thinking about it, I will venture to recall for him
an old story which he may have heard, but which is worth telling on
the chance that he has not.  Herbert Spencer was once staying at an
hotel and, being fond of billiards, strolled into the billiard-room
where he saw a young man who invited him to play a game.  Spencer
agreed and "broke," unfortunately leaving his ball on the baulk line,
but playable.  It was in the days when the "feather" stroke was
allowed (I fancy it is now barred) and the young man took his cue and
ran out by means of that delicate device.  When he had reached his
"100," the philosopher, putting up his cue with which he had not
scored a point, addressed him thus: "A certain degree of facility in
games of skill is a pleasant and desirable accomplishment; but, young
man, such facility as you have displayed this evening is evidence of
a misspent youth."




A SENTENCE OF DEATH

"The most dramatic thing I remember?  I need not pause to answer that
question," said my companion.  "Do you recall the Lipski case?  Ah,
well, you will know what a sensation it created.  It occurred in the
hey-day of the great Stead at the _Pall Mall_.  What a flair the
fellow had for a sensation, and what a frenzy he could communicate to
the public mind.  Lipski had been sentenced to death for the murder
of his paramour, and doubtless would have been hanged quite quietly
but for the fact that Stead became interested in the case and
convinced that the man was innocent.  There was enough ground for the
belief to warrant what would now be called a 'stunt,' and Stead
seized his opportunity in his own incomparable fashion, and a raging,
tearing propaganda followed in the Press.  The public mind was lashed
into a fury of indignation.  Petitions poured in for the reprieve of
the condemned man; demonstrations took place in the streets; crowds
assembled in front of Buckingham Palace to wring the Royal
prerogative out of the Queen.

"Day succeeded day, and still the storm rose, and still the Home
Secretary held his hand.  The right of criminal appeal did not exist
in those days, and Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, had no
guidance to rely on except that of the judge who had tried the case,
Fitzjames Stephen, and Stephen would commit himself to neither 'yea'
nor 'nay,' but took refuge behind the jury's verdict, and left the
matter there.  The Home Secretary was in despair.  Daily he saw
himself held up to execration as a murderer, daily the petitions
poured in, and the crowds gathered in the streets.

"Saturday came, and on Monday the execution was to take place.
Appeals to Stephen were in vain, and every detail of the evidence had
been examined again and again without a ray of new light.  It was not
only the condemned man whose fate was involved.  If he was guilty and
Matthews reprieved him, the latter would have yielded to an ignorant
clamour and disgraced his office; if he was not guilty, and Matthews
did not reprieve him, he would have executed an innocent man in the
face of an unprecedented public warning.  The day passed in anxious
and ceaseless inquiry.  In the afternoon he sent word to Stephen.  He
must see him once more.  They could meet at the Home Office the
following (Sunday) evening at five o'clock.

"I was then on the Home Office staff, and it was my duty to be in
attendance while this critical conference was in progress.  Time
passed without a sound or sign coming from the room where the
argument of life or death was proceeding.  In the quiet of the late
Sunday afternoon the chimes of Big Ben sounded the quarters from the
Clock Tower.  Six o'clock struck.  I was tired of sitting alone, and
opening the door of the Secretary's room quietly I entered and took a
seat in the shadow.

"It was a strange scene that I had broken in on.  Absolute silence
prevailed; but both men were so engrossed in thought that my entrance
passed quite unnoticed.  Matthews was seated in his chair, his elbows
on his knees, his head buried in his hands.  Stephen, his eyes fixed
on the carpet before him, strode to and fro across the room.

"I sat and waited.  Outside, the church bells had begun ringing for
the evening service, and their music alone broke the heavy silence of
the room.  Then Matthews spoke briefly, raising a point that had been
hammered to weariness before.  There was a brief answer from Stephen,
and the silence was resumed, Matthews with his head still resting in
his hands, Stephen still pacing the floor.  Time passed.  The bells
ceased ringing, seven o'clock struck, and we passed into a soundless
quiet.  Now and then a question was put and an answer given, but
there was no discussion.  It seemed that the strange scene might
continue until the hangman slipped his bolt next morning.  I counted
the quarters--one--two--three--eight o'clock.  Three hours had gone
by and no light had broken on the silent struggle.

"I had ceased to expect any change in this drama of indecision, and
resigned myself to an all-night vigil.  I sat and speculated as to
the course of events.  What seemed most probable to me was that the
silent drama would go on far into the night and that then in sheer
exhaustion there would be surrender.  They would not be able to hold
out to daylight, and in despair of coming to a decision would choose
the way of safety.  Presently my ears caught the sound of a step in
the corridor without.  It paused at the door.  A sudden thought
flashed in my mind as I waited for what should follow.  There came a
low tap at the door, and I hastily opened it.  As I did so a
messenger handed me a letter.  I took it eagerly, raised the flap
sufficiently to catch the words, 'I, Lipski, hereby confess...' and
passed it to Matthews.  As he read it he leapt to his feet with a cry
as of one who had himself escaped a sentence of death, and for a
moment the load lifted from the two men made them almost beside
themselves with joy.  Then Matthews remembered the circumstances and
turned grave....

"The next morning Lipski was hanged, and all the world read the
confession.  It was Matthews' moment of supreme triumph.  He was the
minister who had defied the ragings of the Press and the mob and been
justified in his firm resistance to ignorant clamour.  But none knew
the torture behind that firmness, or the misery of those silent hours
the night before.  How would it have ended without that knock at the
door?  Ah, who can say?  But I think Lipski hanged himself."




ON AN ELDERLY PERSON

After a long walk through Richmond Park and by the Thames one
afternoon recently, I went with a companion into a refreshment-place
for tea.  As we waited for service there entered a tall, stout,
elderly gentleman in a tall hat.  He took a seat at a table not far
off.  The face seemed familiar to me, notably the heavy under-jaw
that projected with a formidable air of determination.  I ransacked
my memory a moment, and the identity of the stout, elderly gentleman
came back to me vividly.  I drew my companion's attention to him, and
then raised the second finger of my right hand on which the bone
between the first and second joints was palpably enlarged.  "That," I
said, "is a little memorial which that gentleman in the tall hat gave
me forty years ago.  He was a good bowler in those days, straight and
fast, and a good length, but he had a trick of getting up badly, and
when he hit you he hit you hard.  One day he hit me in practice when
I was playing without a glove, and this is his signature."

But it was not this memory that made the elderly gentleman chiefly
interesting to me.  It was the fact that he was elderly--so
flagrantly elderly.  The last time I had seen him he was a stalwart
young fellow, quick in his movements, with his head and body thrust a
little forward as though his legs could not quite keep pace with his
purpose, and with that formidable chin sticking out as it were in
challenge to the future.  Now he would have passed for an alderman,
"in fair round belly."  He moved heavily and slowly like one who had
reached whatever goal he had set out after and had no more use for
that determined under-jaw.  In looking at him I seemed to see myself
in a mirror.  I must be elderly like that, too.  If he were to
recognise me as I had recognised him he, no doubt, would be as
surprised as I had been to find what an elderly person I had grown
into since the days when I was a fresh-coloured youth and we played
cricket together.

It is by these reflected lights that the havoc which the years play
with us is visible to us.  The approach of age is so stealthy that we
do not perceive it in ourselves.  Others grow old, but we live on
under the illusion of unchanging youth.  There may be a bald patch on
the head; but that is nothing.  Quite young fellows have bald patches
on the head.  That eminent lawyer, Mr. Billson Stork, was bald at
twenty-five, and at thirty-five had not a hair above his ears.  No,
baldness is no evidence.  Nor are grey hairs evidence.  We all know
people who were grey-headed in their early manhood.  It is true that
we do not run now as we used; but that is simply because we do not
want to run.  What is there to run for?  All these things are
discounted by the dissimulating spirit that dwells in us and refuses
to let us know that we are visibly taking our place among the old
fellows.

Then some incident like that I have described dissipates momentarily
the pleasant illusion that defies the calendar.  Perhaps someone in
the bus, full of good intentions, offers you his seat.  You are glad
of the seat and you appreciate the kindness, but your feelings are
complicated by the suggestion that you bear about you the stigmata of
decrepitude.  You have become a person whose venerable years entitle
you to consideration.  You realise, almost with a shock, that to the
eyes of that admirable young man in the bus you are an old gentleman
whom it would be indecent to leave hanging on to a strap.  It is a
disillusioning experience, and if the young man could read your mind
he would probably conclude that the higher courtesy would have been
to keep his seat and leave you your comfortable fancy.  There are
cases when politeness cuts deeper than impertinence.  I myself saw an
illustration of this in a bus only yesterday, when a young fellow
rose to make room for a very stout lady, although there was a vacant
seat beside him.  It is true that the stout lady really needed two
seats, but she did not want the fact proclaimed in that public way,
and her anxiety to point out to the young man that there was still a
vacant seat showed that the stout as well as the elderly can nurse
illusions about themselves.

But it is in his own family that the sharpest reminders of the cold
truth are borne in upon the elderly.  There was a time, it does not
seem long ago, when you were an Olympian to your children, when the
cloud on your brow had the authority of Jove, and the lightest word
on your lips was a Delphic oracle.  That phase passed insensibly.
You began to measure yourself in your slippers with the new
generation.  You began to discover that they could wear your boots,
and then that they could not wear your boots.  A little later and you
knew that you had come down from Olympus altogether, and that these
young people had ideas which were not your ideas, that they belonged
to a new world which was not your old, unchallenged world.  They had
ceased to be your children and had become something like brothers and
sisters.  All this accomplished itself so quietly, so naturally, that
you did not notice it.

Then, one day, something happens, a trifling action, it may be, a
trifling word, an accent, a gesture, but it is enough.  It lifts the
curtain of your fiction.  You know that you have changed places with
the children of yester-year.  They are no longer your children.  They
have ceased even to be your brothers and sisters.  They are becoming
a sort of maiden aunt or benevolent uncle.  You realise that to them
you have become something of an antiquity, a person who must be
humoured because of his enormous past and his exiguous future.  You
feel that if you are not careful you will be invited to take
somebody's arm to steady you.  You suspect that your ways are the
source of amusement, respectful but undisguised, like the ways of a
rather wayward child.  In short, you learn that you are no longer the
young fellow you have imagined yourself to be, but an elderly person,
like any other elderly person of your years.  It is not an unpleasant
discovery.  It may even be a pleasant discovery.  And in any case it
is only a passing spasm.  The indomitable youth within soon puts the
revelation aside.  I suspect that he never really does grow elderly,
no matter what tales the vesture of decay in which he is clothed may
tell about him to the outside world.




TAMING THE BEAR

A woman, sitting behind me on the top of a bus, was explaining to her
companion how to manage husbands.  She was a strong-minded person and
very confident on the subject.  She had been married fifteen years,
she said, and was satisfied that what she had to learn about taming
the bear was not worth learning.  As far as I could gather her main
thesis was that you must not make too much of the bear.  We (I speak
as one of the husbands under the scalpel of this formidable woman)
must not be encouraged to think that we were little tin gods.  We
must not be allowed to get the idea that our wives were not
independent of us.  That was fatal.  The more a woman showed that she
could paddle her own canoe the more humble and manageable we became.

I gathered, too, that we had to be humoured and even humbugged.  We
were rather like unruly children who needed to have a lollipop
stuffed in our mouth occasionally to keep us quiet and in good
humour.  It was quite easy to fool us.  Only that morning her husband
wanted to get up to breakfast.  "No," said she, "you stay and have
your breakfast comfortably in bed."  And he did.  "I didn't want him
downstairs getting in the way and keeping me talking about this, that
and the other.  I like to have my breakfast in peace."

As she rattled on I seemed to see the whole tribe of husbands
drooping abjectly before her withering exposure.  Things which had
been mercifully hidden from me became suddenly clear.  That habit of
breakfasting in bed, for example.  It was an old habit with me, a
relic of other days, when I went to bed as the dawn was breaking and
the birds were tuning up for a new day.  I had continued it with
grave twinges of conscience long after the excuse for it had ceased
to exist.  I had felt it was an inexcusable laziness.  I had
determined for years to break it.  Some day, I had said to myself, I
will stop this hedonish self-indulgence.  I will set the household an
example.  I will be up with the lark.  I will give the family an
agreeable shock.  I pictured the delight with which they would hail
my astonishing appearance on that never-to-be-forgotten day when I
came down to breakfast.

Now the whole deceit was as plain as a pikestaff.  Now I understood,
thanks to that masterful voice behind me, why my feeble protests,
periodically uttered, against having my breakfast in bed had been so
kindly repulsed.  "Oh no, stay where you are.  It's no trouble."  And
I had stayed, listening to the chirping of the sparrows, reading my
book, and taking my tea and toast in comfortable ease.  And now I
knew the humiliating truth.  It was all a blind.  I was not
wanted--that was the plain English of it.  I was given my breakfast
in bed in order that I might be kept out of the way.  It was not a
beautiful act of affectionate thoughtfulness, but an artful policy, a
method of getting rid of a domestic nuisance under the disguise of
generous indulgence.  I own my blood boiled.  Never again, I said.

Meanwhile, the astounding revelation of the way in which the innocent
tribe of husbands was chastened and disciplined proceeded.  I learned
how we were most effectually fleeced and cozened.  You feed the brute
first.  If you want something particular, a new hat or a sealskin
jacket, something that you would not get out of us while we were
fierce and hungry, you raise the subject when we are well fed, when
the hard lineaments of our august countenance relax and the
comforting juices of the body begin to spread a benign influence over
our emotions.  Then we fall.  I learned, too, that in the philosophy
of this terrific woman a little judicious jealousy was mixed with the
diabolical potion with which we were beguiled.  "Nothing wrong, of
course, my dear, but it does them no harm to know that we are not
enslaved, and that there are other fish in the sea beside themselves."

As I heard the disclosure of the net of intrigue with which we were
enveloped I felt that something must be done about it.  There must be
an exposure.  The plot must be shown up.  The scales must be lifted
from the eyes of the blind and credulous victims who sit passively
while their doom is woven about them.  But this was only the prelude.
There must be a crusade.  We must have a Husbands' Defence League,
with a slogan, "Down with Delilah," and a banner, illuminated by
exclusively masculine hands, bearing the portrait of our patron
saint, the estimable John Knox, author of that famous and splendid
treatise (which I have not yet read) entitled _First Blast of the
Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women_.  That, said I, was
the stuff to give them.  Brave old John, the foe of Bloody Mary,
hated of Elizabeth, the scourge of the Queen of Scots.  Three queens,
all of them women and all of them his enemies.  Glorious old John!

Meanwhile there must be action at once.  My eyes had been opened to
the sinister meaning of breakfast in bed.  I would deal with that
forthwith.  I would open my campaign without a moment's delay.
To-morrow morning I would certainly get up to breakfast.  I would
not, of course, give the least hint of the enormous meaning of the
act.  I would simply get up, just as naturally and unostentatiously
as if I were a regular getter-up.  I would stroll down negligently,
perhaps whistling a bar or two of some familiar air in an
absent-minded way that would suggest that I had been doing this sort
of thing all my life.  If there were comments--as there would be--I
would turn them aside with an artful jest.  I would not disclose my
hand.  That would be fatal until I had got my Husbands' Defence
League in motion.  Then I would open my batteries like thunder.  Then
the Monstrous Regiment of Women would know the tremendous storm that
is foreshadowed when I go down to breakfast to-morrow morning....
Grand old John!  I shall read your treatise to-night (perhaps).  I
shall think of you to-morrow when I throw off the coverlet of the
sluggard and begin the first skirmish of the campaign.  I will not be
unworthy of you, old John.  There shall be heard in the land again
the blast of your trumpet and fear shall invade the heart of Delilah.




OURSELVES AND OTHERS

I was playing a game of golf the other day with a man whom I had
known in other affairs, but whom I had not met before on the golf
links.  He is one of those men, of whom I wrote some time ago, who
are ridden by one idea to the exclusion of all other ideas.  At the
moment the thing that filled his mind was the Capital Levy, and it
filled it so completely that I fancy he went round the links without
ever quite realising what he was about.  He would pause in the midst
of addressing the ball and resume the argument from some new angle.
He would make his tee and forget to put the ball on it while he threw
another illuminating ray on the absorbing topic.  I tried to divert
his attention from the Capital Levy by remarks on the game or the
beauty of the day, or anything else that was handy, as a red herring,
to draw him off the scent; but it was all in vain.  He stuck to his
theme as precedents stick to law or barnacles to a ship's bottom.

But it was not the subject that was the chief offence to the day and
the occasion.  What distressed me most was his unconsciousness of the
way he was blocking the course.  There were a lot of people on the
links, and it was clear to me that we were checking those behind us
unduly.  I gave him hints--slight at first and broad as day as my
temper rose--that we must move more quickly.  They fell on ears that
did not hear.  He patted his tee, and looked up to continue his
argument; then his ball would roll off the tee, and he would make
another little sand-castle; then a new thought would strike him, and
he would stop altogether until he had disclosed it.  And all the time
I was sensible that curses not loud but deep were being uttered, and
quite reasonably uttered, by the people behind us.

Now my friend was not an ill-mannered boor, nor even a selfish
person.  He was simply unconscious of other people; and although he
angered me a great deal at the time, I am not holding him up to
reprobation entirely.  He seemed to me to have an invaluable quality
in an extravagant measure.  I was conscious that I envied his
stolidity and power of divorcing himself from external influences
even while I groaned under his intolerable calm.  It was a
preposterous situation.  He was doing all the mischief and I was
suffering all the penalty.  It reminded me of the younger Pitt who
drank the wine while the Clerk of the House got the headache.  I was
miserable at holding up the people behind, but my opponent who was
holding them up was not even aware that they were there, so absorbed
was he in the activities of his own mind.

Within reason, this insensibility to the outside world is a precious
gift.  Many of the Scotch people have it in an aggravating degree.
_J'y suis, j'y reste_ is their motto.  They have what the Americans
love to call "poise," an imperturbable indifference to the emotions
of others that is half the secret of their success.  They are masters
of themselves and are clothed in a good tough skin that makes them
proof against all the winds that blow.  They are inferior, of course,
to the Jews, whose insensibility to the feelings of others sometimes
passes belief.  It is the heritage no doubt of two thousand years of
buffetings by a hostile world, and it enables them to exploit their
superior qualities of brain to the maximum.  But they are trying and
often offensive, even to those of us who loathe the gospel according
to Mr. Belloc.

I should be sorry to see this callosity offered as a model; but there
is a virtue in it.  A too sensitive skin is a heavy handicap in a
rough world.  There is no more sterilising thing than to be
excessively conscious of other people.  It is the source of most of
our weaknesses and affectations, and of nearly all our insincerities
of speech and action.  There are some of us who are hardly ever our
real selves in our contacts with others.  Goldsmith "wrote like an
angel but talked like poor Poll," because in the presence of company
he lost the rudder of himself and was drowned by the waves of
inferior but more aggressive minds.  We do and say many foolish and
many insincere things because the attractions and repulsions of other
personalities play the dickens with our emotions.  It was this
consideration, I think, that led Hazlitt to rank humility as the
lowest of the virtues.  He meant that the sense of inferiority
subordinated us to the dominion of other minds and defeated the
authentic expression of ourselves.

My friend on the golf links, of course, carried insensibility to
others too far.  Personality should not be like a reed shaken in the
wind.  It should be stable and erect, standing four-square to all the
winds that blow.  But while it should not be worried or deflected by
what it thinks others may be doing or saying or feeling, it ought not
to be forgetful of the rights and conveniences of others.  Nor should
it forget those small graces that sweeten our intercourse with
others.  Take the familiar case of birthdays.  It is easy to forget
other people's birthdays as we grow older and have many birthdays to
remember.  It is easy to forget them, because we become indifferent
to our own.  When the light has gone off the morning hills we have no
particular pleasure in reminding ourselves how the shadows are
lengthening on our path.  Years ago we reached a new milestone with
the comfortable feeling that there were any number of milestones
ahead, and that to pass another one was rather a gay experience.  If
anything, we did not pass them speedily enough.  We could not make
the laggard time keep pace with the hurry of the spirit.  But when
the milestones stretch far behind us and we can count those in front
on the fingers of one or two hands the zest for birthdays is
diminished.  We may even come to regard them in the light of those
"third and final" notices which announce the impatience of the
tax-collector at our dilatory ways.

But though we may prefer to forget our own birthdays, we like other
people to remember them.  We like them to remember the day as an
assurance that they remember us.  We live by the affections, and our
happiness depends much more than we are aware of upon the conviction
that we have a place in the hearts and memories of others.  If we are
unfortunate enough to have outlived that place and to have become
negligible laggards on the stage, the fact is mercifully concealed
from us on 364 days in the year.  But on the 365th day it may be
blindingly revealed by a silence that stabs to the heart.

I suppose few of us have escaped the experience in some measure.
Perhaps Aunt Anne comes down to breakfast on her birthday morning a
little conscious of the day and hoping to receive a more cordial
greeting than usual on the occasion from her nephews and nieces,
whose birthdays are marked with red letters in her own calendar and
celebrated by gifts on which she has spent anxious thought.  And the
breakfast passes without a word on the subject.  If Aunt Anne is a
sensible woman she makes allowance for the thoughtlessness of youth
and remembers that she was once young and careless herself; but she
will be an exceptional woman if she does not feel that something of
the brightness has gone out of the day.

These little domestic tragedies mean more to us than we care to
admit.  The small attentions and civilities we bestow or forget to
bestow on each other make the atmosphere in which we move.  It is
many years since I read _Wuthering Heights_, but I remember how the
gloom and oppression which hang about that powerful book are created
by such trifling incidents as the meeting of father and son in the
morning without a word of greeting.  They simply glower at each other
and pass to their tasks.  It is the graces of conduct that give life
its flavour and make it sunny for ourselves, as well as for others.
Wordsworth uses the perfect image for them when he says:

  The charities that soothe and heal and bless,
    Are scattered all about our feet--like flowers.

Even remembering the birthday of a friend may help to keep the garden
of the mind in beauty and a reasonable regard for the amenities of
the links is no bad discipline of conduct.  I would not have my
friend hurry his shot from a too acute sense of the people behind.
Let him take his time and keep his head.  But let him give others
their place in the sun.




AN OFFER OF £10,000

I had a great and pleasurable shock this morning.  I was deep in drab
and perplexed thought about the muddle the world had got into and,
incidentally, the muddle I was getting into myself, when the postman
came and, among other things, brought me a letter from a gentleman
named Rosen.  I had never heard of him before--shouldn't know him if
I met him.  Yet he began in this cordial fashion: "Can I be of any
service to you?"  My heart leapt up at so friendly and handsome an
inquiry.  This was the sort of man I had dreamt of meeting all my
life, a hearty, kindly fellow, full of melting charity who only asked
to be allowed to help a lame dog over the stile.  I wondered who had
told Mr. Rosen about me and induced him to sit down and write in this
warm, generous spirit.  Or perhaps he was a reader who had been
touched by the articles of "Alpha of the Plough."  I imagined him
reading one of my most agreeable little things--one with just a hint
of pathos in it perhaps--and turning to Mrs. Rosen and saying: "We
ought to do something for this charming writer, my dear.  What would
you suggest?"  And the sensible woman--just touching her eyes, I
think, with the corner of her handkerchief--replied: "Why not write
to him and ask what he would like?"  And Mr. Rosen exclaimed:
"Admirable woman!  The very thing," and hastened to his desk and
wrote forthwith.

But he did not stop at asking whether he could be of any service to
me.  With a fine sense of delicacy he raised a subject which he knew
I might have some hesitation in mentioning myself.  "He is sure,
being a literary man, to be hard-up," he said to Mrs. R., "and you
can tell he is a sensitive fellow who would starve rather than say
anything about it.  We must make it easy for him to tell us all about
it."  And Mrs. R., her eyes shining through her tears--for she is a
soft-hearted woman--said: "Yes, poor fellow, make it easy for him."
So Mr. Rosen, his heart warming towards me, went on: "If an immediate
sum of money, £50 to £10,000, would be useful, you can have same at
_first interview or per registered post_ upon your note of
hand--i.e., without security."

When I read this I was amazed.  How had he hit the sum so perfectly?
Why, it was precisely something between £50 and £10,000--rather
nearer £10,000 than £50--that I _did_ want.  It seemed like manna
dropping from heaven.  I called to Jane up the stairs and asked her
to come and hear of the splendid luck that had befallen us.  I
declaimed the letter to her in loud and joyous tones.  "However can
he have heard of us?" she said.  "But I wish he wouldn't say 'same.'"
"We must not look a gift-horse in the mouth," I said severely.
"These noble-hearted people always say 'same.'  'We send same by even
post,' they say, 'but if same is not satisfactory, we will take same
back and return money for same.'  It is very clear and saves time.
We must not be fastidious.  We must not let our little literary
niceties stand in the way of £10,000.  I think I shall take the
£10,000.  He doesn't seem to mind whether it's £50 or £10,000, and I
mind a great deal."

Jane thought we ought to see the Rosens first, to make sure there was
not a mistake.  It would be odious if we wrote accepting, took the
money, spent it, and then found it was meant for someone else of the
same name, who probably needed it more.  I said I thought Mr. Rosen
would not like this cold and calculating way of meeting his friendly
advances.  I had now a clear perception of him.  He was an elderly,
big-hearted man with a flowing white beard.  He wanted to do a little
good in the world before he left it, and he had chosen me as the
humble vessel of his benefaction because he liked my articles in the
_Star_.  What need was there to go prying into his motives farther?
He would certainly not like it.  He did not want the thing to be
talked about.  "Please retain the card (enclosed) as a guarantee of
absolute secrecy," he said in his letter.  That showed the sort of
man he was.  He did good by stealth.  It was our plain duty to
respect his wishes.  If he did not want the matter talked about, why
should we worry him with inquiries?

I think this consideration had great weight with Jane and removed any
lingering scruples she had about taking the money.  She accepted my
view of Mr. Rosen as a venerable old gentleman of the Cheeryble type
who wanted to make people happy, and she agreed that we ought not to
put obstacles in his way.  In the evening we went for a walk down New
Bond Street, where the dear old man lives, and took a survey of the
premises of our fairy godfather from the other side of the road.  I
fancy we caught a glimpse of him at the window, with flowing white
beard and skull-cap and velvet jacket and gold-rimmed spectacles,
through which his eyes beamed with benevolence upon the passers-by.
To-morrow I think I will write and tell him I will accept his kind
offer of service.  Or perhaps I will call, for the post is very
uncertain.  But I don't think I will take the £10,000.  It would look
grasping.  I think I will ask him for £5000.  And I will promise him,
of course, "absolute secrecy."




IN A LUMBER-ROOM

I went into the lumber-room glowing with an emotion of apostolic
fervour.  I would clear out this rubbish of the past.  It was a shame
that it should cumber the ground when space was so exiguous and rents
so expensive.  Why, this room, said I to myself (looking sternly
meanwhile at the chaos within), would take a bed.  At a squeeze it
would take two beds.  Let in the light and the air, and it would be a
bedroom fit for the most delicate sleeper, remote alike from the
noise without and the disturbing sounds within.  I was not sure I
would not claim it for myself.  Carlyle would have revelled in a room
so impenetrable to the cock's shrill clarion and the clatter of the
early morning milk-cans.

By this time my eye had grown accustomed to the dim light within and
the rubbish began to take definition.  I stooped down and picked
up--a boot.  Not an ordinary boot, but a boot of monumental pattern,
weighing between two and three pounds, with leather like the hide of
a rhinoceros and with huge nails cunningly shaped to grip the rocks.
Here and there a nail was missing.  I knew where each had gone.  The
one missing from the right sole was knocked out on the Pillar Rock
one winter's day.  That one from the heel was left on the
Finsteraarjock, and with that reminder all the splendours of the
Oberland, the gloom of the Rhone Valley below, the Dom and the
Matterhorn catching the last rays of the sun beyond, came back with a
sudden and vivid glory, like the landscape of a dream.  Rubbish!
This rubbish? ... I found the fellow of the boot and put them aside.
They must be oiled again and stuffed afresh with oats to keep them in
shape.  I might yet kick a nail or two out of them before the curtain
of the rocks and the glaciers was rung down upon my journeyings.

Undismayed by this check I turned to the lumber again.  From the
confusion a handle protruded.  I seized it and drew out an old and
battered cricket-bat.  I had not seen it for years, and had long
forgotten its existence, but at the touch and sight of it old scenes
submerged me like a tide.  It was pregnant with secret records that I
alone could read.  That fracture at the bottom was done--let me
see--yes, at far-away Lancaster more than thirty years ago, when I
was a casual member of a wandering team playing the asylum staff.
And at the hint my mind went a-travelling to the pleasant pastures of
the Fylde, with the Lune dreamily flowing by the castled town, and
the fine sweep of Morecambe Bay visible to the mind's eye beyond,
with the evening light spreading over the tranquil landscape and
flushing the distant peaks of Lakeland....  And that crack down the
middle commemorated Whackerley's terrific feat when, last man in
against a village team, he went and smote the bowling like a fury and
converted an ignominious defeat...  But let me tell the story of that
heroic day....

Fifteen for nine wickets!  The scorer, a heavy youth with a straw in
his mouth and his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, announced
the fact to me with undisguised enjoyment.  He was sitting on a
tussock of grass that served for pavilion, commanding a good view of
the wicket that was set in the midst of the undulations of the
common.  Around him were strewn the hats and coats of the players, a
few derelict pads, and two jars of ale.

"Looks like a wash-out," said the scorer as the last man in a purple
cap departed from the vicinity of the tussock, smacking his leg with
the bat, whether with nervousness or assurance no one could say, for
no one had ever seen him bat.

"Well, you never can tell," said the publican.  "Cricket's a rum
game, and what I says is this: 'You never know when a dark horse'll
turn up.'"  He had brought up the refreshments at my request, and he
was not the man to desert me in a tight place.

It was a tight place.  I had challenged the village team, and had got
together a scratch lot from anywhere; a boy home from school, elderly
persons who "used to play, but haven't touched a bat for years,
y'know," a man who had once played for his "house" at Harrow, another
whose brother had been twelfth-man for his college, and so on--a team
of great expectations, a team that might astonish the countryside or
vanish in laughter.

It looked like vanishing in laughter.  We had begun very hopefully.
The village team had straggled up from the valley straight from the
harvest fields that stretched below over the countryside.  A few,
including Alec, an enterprising young farmer, with a round cherubic
face, who captained the team, were in flannels; the rest in their
harvesting clothes.  Alec won the toss and declared that he would
take first smack.  It was a wicket of fire, outwardly smooth and
amiable, but charged with volcanic possibilities that made the ball
work miracles, plunging, shooting, bumping, breaking like an untamed
colt or an infuriated bull.  We missed a catch or two in the first
over, but two wickets fell in the second, and when Tom Wilkins, the
local Jessop, was run out and six wickets were down for twenty we
seemed to have the villagers at our mercy.

We found unsuspected support from an aged umpire--a
responsible-looking person with a bowed back and a massive grey
beard, sexton, bell-ringer and parson's factotum--who followed one
simple rule.  Whenever he was appealed to he held up his hand,
gravely and benignantly, like a bishop administering a blessing.
With his help we got rid of two or three truculent fellows who looked
like scoring, and all the team were out for forty-nine.  They would
have been out for less if I had not, in a weak moment, put Jim Whelks
on to bowl.  Jim is the local higgler and had assured me that he had
captained a team "down in the sheers," and that his
bowling--underhand--was such a whirlwind affair that the local men
stood in terror of him.  "Don't suppose they'll let me bowl, sir," he
said, confidentially, the night before.  But they did.  I wished they
hadn't, for his whirlwind piled up twelve byes for them.

It seemed a small thing to score fifty runs.  The publican was sure
we should do it.  "It's a team of dark horses," he said to me
cheerfully, "and it stands to reason there's one flier amongst 'em."
To Alec I fancy he had another tale, for the publican is above party,
with a foot planted securely in each camp.  But the dark horse did
not appear.  Our misfortunes began in the first over, and continued
with remarkable regularity during the succeeding overs.  If anyone
looked like making a stand the venerable umpire, pursuing his
sovereign rule with inflexible impartiality, held up his hand.
Fifteen for nine, and as the last man went in smacking his leg with
his bat, we wondered how we were to steal from the stricken field
unobserved by the village folk, who were sitting in the shade under
the hedge.

But what was this?  Purple Cap, who had gone in last because he was
so confident that he "wasn't worth a run," had cracked the first ball
to the ditch for four and snicked the next for one.  Twenty!  Well,
well, this was not disgraceful.  He had the bowling again.  The first
ball went over the hedge--six; the second bounded down the hill
towards the valley--four-thirty.  "Well, he is a one-er," said the
scorer, changing his straw to the other side of his mouth.  Panic
seized the bowlers; the fielders went farther and farther out into
the landscape.  But Purple Cap was insatiable.  He seemed not a man
but a hurricane.  He leapt at everything with a devouring fury and
the ball flew here, there, and everywhere.  Once the stumper
appealed, but he had the wrong umpire for judge.  My bat was smashed,
but I didn't care.  "Send him more bats," I shouted.  The score rose
like magic.  "A regular pelthoria of runs," said the publican.
Forty--fifty (the match was
won)--sixty--seventy----eighty--eighty-five--then a well-directed
throw-in from the long-field knocked the wicket down.  "How's that?"
Up went the venerable umpire's arm like a semaphore at the familiar
sound.  And Purple Cap came back to the tussock in triumph.

"It was just as I said," remarked the publican when I saw him
standing before the inn later in the evening.  "'Mark my words,' I
said, 'there's a dark horse in that lot somewhere,' and a dark horse
there was.  I ain't seen anything like it since my soldiering days in
India.  Killed a python we did--dead as a door-nail down to the last
two-foot of his tail.  I put my arm on his tail and he closed round
it that tight you couldn't pull him away until his tail was dead too.
I ain't seen such a lively tail since until I set eyes on that chap
in the purple cap this evening.  He's stirred this place up and no
mistake.  They won't forget him in a hurry."

Of course, the bat must remain.  It was not a bat, but a living
memorial, a thing that talked to me a joyous private language and
seemed to secrete by some magic the very essence of myself.  To
destroy it would be a sort of suicide.  As well might Nelson have
broken up the timbers of the old _Victory_ to heat the kitchen fire.
I rubbed the dust from its battered face and put it honourably in the
corner.

I began to feel as though I had been caught desecrating a cemetery.
The vision of that additional bedroom, with windows, fresh air and
electric light, was fading.  I bent a little doubtfully and seized a
large tome.  It was an old album, one of those huge and ugly volumes
that no household was without a generation ago, but no household
visibly possesses to-day.  And I began to turn over its leaves....
What is there more poignant than an old, forgotten album?  Here are
"the children" again, miraculously resurrected from the past, playing
on the sands at Dawlish, swimming in the sea, standing against the
sky-line of the cliffs at Sheringham with the sunshine upon their
laughing faces and their hair streaming in the wind.  How long I
spent over that old album I do not know, for it stirred many thoughts
that made me forgetful--thoughts that do not easily find words to
clothe them.  But I put the album aside for dusting.  Really this
lumber-room might be kept more tidily and reverently.

And what is this vast cover, sticking out, dog-eared, from the
lumber?  My old portfolio, given me forty-six years ago as a tribute
from admiring parents to my artistic achievements.  How I gloried in
its ample blue covers.  Why, Landseer himself, the incomparable
Landseer, must have such a portfolio as that.  And I laboured with my
pencil to fill it with things worthy of its dignity, and here they
were to-day, old portraits of grandmothers and aunts and copies of
Landseer's dogs and horses and Peter Paul in his big hat, and the
serene Dürer, with his long flaxen curls, and, on each one, in large,
bold, boyish writing, "Drawn by ----" and the date carefully put in
lest posterity should not know that these miracles were done by one
so young.  Ay de mi, as old Carlyle used to say.  Ay de mi....

I have changed my mind about the lumber-room.  We have plenty of
bedrooms, and if we haven't we must go short.  That lumber-room is
the abode of finer things than bedsteads.  It is a chamber of the
spirits.  But it must certainly be kept more tidy.




OUR NEIGHBOUR THE MOON

Jane observed just now that she was sure the days were drawing out.
We laughed, as we were expected to, at the immemorial remark, but we
cheerfully agreed that there was truth in it.  We looked at our
watches.  It was past four and the landscape of half a dozen counties
still lay, darkening but visible from the hillside, while in the
garden the thrushes were singing as though it were a summer evening.
The moon, which had been faintly visible long before the sun had set,
was beginning to take up "the wondrous tale."  It was that bewitching
moment of the day when the two luminaries are about equally matched
and the light of the moon filters through the light of the day and a
new scheme of shadows begins to take shape about you as you walk.

If I were asked to name the chief difference between living in town
(as I used to do) and living in the country (as I now chiefly do), I
think I should say that it consisted in the place which the moon
fills in our everyday life, especially of course in the dark season
of the year.  It might almost be said that we do not discover the
moon until we live in the country.  In town it is only another and a
rather larger lamp hung aloft the street.  We do not need it to light
us on our way and are indifferent to its coming and going.  If it
shines, well; if it does not shine, no matter.  We go about our
business in either case, and do not consult the calendar to know
whether such-and-such a night will be light enough to go to the
theatre or to dinner with Aunt Anne at Kensington, as the case may
be.  Nothing but fog can interfere with these amenities and the
calendar is uninformed as to the vagaries of the fog.

But in the country the moon is not an unconsidered and casual visitor
whose movements are of such little account that we do not trouble to
study them.  It is, on the contrary, the most important and most
discussed neighbour we have.  In town we do not think of the moon in
neighbourly terms.  It is something remote and foreign, that does not
come within the scope of our system.  We should miss the lamp across
the road that sends a friendly ray through our window-curtains all
night, and if we went down to Piccadilly Circus one evening and did
not see the coloured signs twinkling on the shop-fronts we should
feel lonely and bereaved.  But if the moon did not turn up one
evening according to plan, hardly one Londoner in a thousand would
notice the fact.  He would read about it in the newspapers next day
and talk about it coming up to the City in the tube, but he would not
have discovered the fact himself or have been sensible of any loss.

It is otherwise with us country bumpkins.  The neighbourliness of the
moon and of the stars is one of the alleviations of our solitude.  We
have no street lamps or pretty coloured sky-signs to look at, and so
we look at the Great Bear and Orion, the Sickle and the Pleiades,
trace out Cassiopeia's chair and watch to see Sirius come up over the
hilltop like a messenger bearing thrilling tidings.  We know they are
far off, but there is nothing between us, and intimacy seems to make
them curiously near and friendly.  A cloudy night that blots out the
stars is as gloomy an experience for us as an accident at the
electric power-house that puts out the street lights and plunges the
house in darkness is to the dweller in Hampstead or Clapham.

But it is the moon that is our most precious neighbour.  Its phases
are as much a part of the practical mechanism of life as the
winding-up of the clock, and the hour of its rising and setting
regulates our comings and goings.  If it failed to turn up one night
all the countryside would know about it.  There would be a universal
hue-and-cry and no one would sleep in his bed for watching.  When the
sickle of the new moon appears in the sunset sky the cheerful nights
set in.  There is no need to light the lantern if we want to go to
the wood-shed or to the chicken-run at the end of the garden to
investigate some unfamiliar sound that proceeds from thence.  If
there is anything contemplated at the village schoolroom down in the
valley it is fixed for an evening when the moon is high to light us
by road or field-path; and when the moon is near the full we reach
the high festival of our country nights.  Then, no matter how busy
the day has been or how comfortable the fireside is, the call of our
neighbour the moon to come out and see the magic he can throw over
the landscape is irresistible.

It is irresistible now.  While I have been writing, the moon has been
gathering power.  The night is clear and full of stars.  There is the
glisten of frost on the grass.  The wind has fallen and the plain
that glimmers below in the moonlight is soundless.  It would be a sin
not to be abroad on such a night.  Moreover Ben and Jeff need a run
before settling down for sleep.  They love the moonlight too, not for
its poetry but for its aid in the ceaseless, but ever unrewarded,
task of exploring rabbit-holes and other futile hints of sport.
"Come, Ben!  Come, Jeff! ... Walk."




ON SMILES

If I were to be born into this world again and had the choice of my
endowments I should arrange very carefully about my smile.  There is
nothing so irresistible as the right sort of smile.  It is better
than the silver spoon in the mouth.  It will carry you anywhere and
win you anything, including the silver spoon.  It disarms your
enemies and makes them forget that they have a grudge against you.
"I have a great many reasons for disliking you," said a well-known
public man to a friend of mine the other day, "but when I am with you
I can never remember what they are."  It was the flash of sunshine
that did for him.  He could not preserve his hostility in the
presence of the other's disarming smile and gay good-humour.  He just
yielded up his sword and sunned himself in the pleasant weather that
the other carried with him like an atmosphere.

At the Bar, of course, a pleasant address is worth a fortune.  I
suppose there has been no more successful figure in the law courts in
our time than Rufus Isaacs, but I fancy he won as many of his
victories by the debonair smile with which he irradiated the courts
as by his law.  You could see the judge on the bench and the jury in
the box basking in the warmth that he shed around them.  The weather
might be as harsh as it liked outside; but here the sky was clear and
the sun was shining genially.  It was a fine day and the only blot on
the landscape was the unhappy counsel for the other side, who thumped
the table and got red in the face as he saw his client's case melting
away like snow before a south wind.

And among politicians it is notorious that a popular smile is the
shortest cut to the great heart of democracy.  In an estimate of the
qualities that have contributed to Mr. Lloyd George's amazing success
a high place would have to be given to the twinkling smile, so merry
and mischievous, so engagingly frank and so essentially secret and
calculating, with which, by the help of the photographer, he has
irradiated his generation.  If Mr. Asquith had learned how to smile
for public consumption, the history of English politics, and even of
the world, would have been vastly different; but Mr. Asquith's smile
is private and intellectual and has no pictorial value, and I doubt
whether anyone ever heard him laugh outright.  He was born without
the chief equipment of the politician in a democratic age.  No one
knew the value of that equipment more than Theodore Roosevelt.  He
was the most idolised public man America has produced for half a
century, and he owed his popularity more to his enormous smile than
to any other quality.  It was like a baron of beef.  You could cut
and come again.  There was no end to it.  It seemed to stretch across
the Continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and when it burst
into laughter it shook the land like a merry earthquake.  There was
not much behind the smile, but it was the genuine article, the
expression of a companionable spirit and a healthy enjoyment of life,
and it knocked the Americans "all of a heap."  Woodrow Wilson's smile
was almost as spacious as Roosevelt's, but it was less infectious,
for it was thoughtful and reflective; came from the mind rather than
the feelings, and never burst into laughter.  It was the smile of the
schoolmaster, while Roosevelt's was the smile of the uproarious
schoolboy who was having no end of "a bully time."

Really first-rate smiles are rare.  For the most part our smiles add
little to our self-expression.  If we are dull, they are dull.  If we
are sinister, they are only a little more sinister.  If we are smug,
they only emphasise our smugness.  If, like the Lord High Everything
Else, we were born sneering, our smile is apt to be a sneer, too.  If
we are terrible, like Swift, we shall have his "terrible smile."
Only rarely do we light upon the smile that is a revelation.  Harry
Lauder's smile is like a national institution or a natural element.
It is plentiful enough to fill the world.  It is a continual and
abundant feast that requires neither words nor chorus, and when he
laughs you can no more help feeling happy than he can.  Lord
Balfour's smile is famous in another way.  It has the untroubled
sweetness of a child's, and there are few who can resist its charm;
but it is elusive and seems too much like a mask that has little to
do with the real man.  You feel that he would send you to the
scaffold with the same seraphic sweetness with which he would pass
you the sugar.  It is not an emanation of the man like that abundant
smile, at once good-humoured and sardonic, with which Mr. Birrell
sets the company aglow.

The most memorable smiles are those which have the quality of the
unexpected.  A smile that is habitual rarely pleases, for it suggests
policy, and the essence of a smile is its spontaneity and lack of
deliberation.  Archbishop Temple said he hated people who were always
smiling, and then, looking across the luncheon table at the vicar who
had been doing his best to ingratiate himself with the terrible
prelate, added: "Look at the vicar there--_he's_ always smiling."  It
was a cruel affront, but the smile that has the quality of an
artifice is hard to bear.  It was so in the case of Mrs. Barbauld, of
whom it was said that she wore such an habitual smile that it made
your face ache to look at her.  One would almost prefer the other
melancholy extreme, illustrated by that gloomy fanatic, Philip II.,
who is said to have laughed only once in his life, and that on
receiving the merry news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.  The
smiles that dwell in the mind most are those that break suddenly like
sunshine from unexpected places.  That was the quality of the
curiously wistful smile that played over the ascetic features of Lord
Morley in conversation.  You could forgive all his asperities when he
smiled.  But the most delightful example of the unexpected smile that
I know is that of the pianist, Frederic Lamond.  The intensity of his
countenance forbids the suggestion of a smile, and at the piano he
seems to descend into unfathomable depths of gravity and spiritual
remoteness.  But when the piece is over and the house breaks out into
thunders of applause, he emerges from the depths with a smile that
suggests that the Land of Beulah has broken on his sight.  It is so
sudden a transition that you almost seem to catch a glimpse of the
Land of Beulah yourself.

But it is no use for those of us who have only humdrum smiles to
attempt to set up a smile that is an incantation.  Smiles, like
poets, are born, not made.  If they are made, they are not smiles,
but grimaces, and convict us on the spot.  They are simply an attempt
to circulate false news.  There is no remedy for us of the negligible
smile, but to be born again and to be born different, not outside but
within, for the smile is only the publication of the inward spirit.




WHEN IN ROME...

I have not seen any reply from a certain distinguished Englishman who
has recently been in America to the resolution passed by an American
women's society, and published in the Press, denouncing certain
alleged proceedings of his as a moral affront to public opinion in
America.  The allegations were to the effect that he had invited
people to drink from his private store of alcoholic liquor in the
ante-rooms of some chapel where he had been speaking, and that his
daughter had smoked cigarettes in public.  Whether the statements
were well-founded or an invention of the Press I do not know, nor for
the purpose I have in view does it matter.  The incident interests
me, not as a question of morals but of manners.  Morals are largely a
local thing, a question of latitude and climate, of custom and time.
They vary with the conditions of life and the habit of thought.

When we eat our morning rasher we are conscious of no moral offence,
but to the Jew it would be not merely a moral offence, but an
irreligious act.  The difference is probably traceable to nothing
more than climatic conditions.  With us a pig is a perfectly safe
article of diet, but in the East it is a perilous food; and being
also a tempting food it needed the inhibitions both of morality and
religion to prevent its consumption.  I have no doubt that if the
Jewish religion had originated in the Western world, there would have
been no ordinance against pork in it.  But while we may regard that
ordinance as irrelevant in this country, we should be wanting in good
manners if, on inviting a Jew to dinner, we offered him nothing but a
varied choice of pig's meat.  We may consider his morality absurd,
but we have no right to flout it because we do not approve of it.

And the same thing, I think, applies to those who visit foreign
countries.  It is their business to respect the morals and
conventions of those countries even if they do not share them or like
them.  It is, for example, one thing for an American citizen who
loves wine and liberty to denounce Prohibition in his own country,
and quite another thing for a stranger on a visit to show disrespect
to the law of the land, however mistaken he may regard it.  It seems
silly to us to try to get morally indignant at women smoking
cigarettes.  It has become a commonplace which we accept without
comment.  But it is not long since such a thing would have been
undreamed of in our world, and when a visitor from abroad who did it
deliberately would have given great and very proper offence.  The
axiom "When in Rome do as Rome does" is a counsel of civility.  It
does not mean that it is our duty to kiss the Pope's toe or adopt the
moral code of Rome ourselves; but it does mean that we should not
scoff at Roman ways or publicly, or semi-publicly, indicate that we
dislike them.

When I go to a foreign country I do my best to be inconspicuous, and
to pass myself off as one of the people.  I do not succeed, for I
happen to be an insular person, who carries the marks of his origin
on him in every gesture, accent and movement.  If I dislike a law in
my own country and think it should be altered, I have no hesitation
in holding it up to opprobrium, and even breaking it, if only in that
way can it be successfully fought.  But it would be an impertinence
on my part to go to France and defy the liquor laws of that country
because I did not think they were stringent enough, or denounce the
inspection of women because I think it is a loathsome practice,
liable to the vilest insults and misuse.  French morality accepts
these things, and I have no right of interference if I go there.

I am not sure that I even like moral missionaries from one country to
another.  The offence, if it is an offence, is in a different
category from that of the man who publicly flouts the laws and
customs of another land in which he happens to be a visitor; but it
certainly borders on bad manners.  I express no opinion about
"Pussyfoot" Johnson's gospel, but I confess I always feel an
irritation at his intrusions here.  However much I wanted the country
to be converted to his point of view, I should still wish that he
would stay at home and cultivate his own garden, and leave us to look
after our own morals and practices.  And by the same token I should
resent the idea of a person going from this country to America and
openly flouting its public morality, or taking sides in a domestic
controversy that happened to be raging there.  In short, it is a
question not of morals, but of manners.

I do not think the idea I have in my mind could be better illustrated
than by a famous story of Spurgeon.  I daresay it is familiar to some
of my readers, but it is so apposite and so good that they will not
object to renew its acquaintance.  In the days of his unparalleled
popularity, when the great preacher filled the Tabernacle from floor
to ceiling, it was the custom of the young bucks sometimes to show by
their ill-manners their contempt for something they did not
understand.  One night three of them went into the gallery with their
hats on, and refused to remove them when the attendant requested them
to do so.  Spurgeon watched the incident, and when the preliminaries
of the service had been concluded and the time came for the sermon,
he prefaced his remarks with something like these words: "In all the
occasions of life it is our duty and should be our pleasure to
respect the feelings of others and the customs of others, even if we
do not share them.  The other day I went into a Jewish synagogue and,
according to my practice when entering a place of worship, I removed
my hat.  But, having done so, an attendant came to me and reminded me
that in the Jewish synagogue it was necessary that the head should be
covered.  I thanked him and, of course, obeyed the reminder.  Now"
(looking up to the gallery and raising his voice) "will those three
young Jews in the gallery show that respect to the customs of this
place of worship which I showed to theirs?"




THE JESTS OF CHANCE

There is one story in Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson's
autobiography that is sure of a place among the legends of celebrated
men.  It is that in which he tells by what a lucky accident he was
saved, when "a raw recruit," from deserting from the Army, of which
he was destined to become one of the most illustrious ornaments.
Another young private who occupied a bed in the room in which he
slept stole the civilian clothes in which Robertson contemplated
making his escape, and vanished.  I daresay Robertson said some harsh
things at the time about the thief, who had put temptation out of his
way; but he must have thanked him almost every day of his life since.
For in taking away Robertson's clothes the thief had put a
field-marshal's baton in his knapsack.

Not many of us have the luck to become field-marshals through the
purloining of our trousers, but few of us are without experience of
the part which trifles that seem of small moment at the time play in
our careers.  "Character," says Victor Hugo, "is destiny," and a
greater than Hugo has observed that it is not in our stars but in
ourselves that we are thus and thus.  This is no doubt true, though
the doctrine may be carried too far.  For example, I think that
Hazlitt is a little unjust to Charles James Fox when he says that the
history of his failure is written in his fluctuating chin.  I doubt
whether, if the parts had been reversed, Pitt would have done any
better.  But no one can compare the easy, good-natured profile of Fox
with the haughty masterfulness of Pitt's without knowing which of the
two would win in an encounter of will-power where the circumstances
were even.

I remember Lord Fisher once describing to me with great admiration a
wonderful feat of navigation by which that famous sailor, Admiral
Wilson, had brought the fleet through great perils in a fog, fighting
all the way with his obstinate chief officer over charts and
calculations.  "But Wilson had his way," said Fisher.  "You see, his
jaw stuck out half an inch farther than the other fellow's."  There
is much virtue in a jaw that will stand no nonsense.  You can read
the whole history of the most wonderful one-man achievement in the
annals of trade in the stubborn chin of Lord Leverhulme, just as you
can read the tale of Mr. Balfour's political purposelessness in his
amiable but indecisive countenance.  "I can see him now," wrote a
friend quoted in Mrs. Drew's _Some Hawarden Letters_.  "I can see him
now, standing at the top of the great double staircase, torn with
doubts which way to go down.  'The worst of this staircase,' he would
say, 'is that there is absolutely no reason why one should go down
one side rather than the other.  What am I to do?'"

But though destiny is much a matter of chins, the Imp of Chance who
comes in and steals our trousers has no small part in determining our
lives and shaping events.  I have read that Wallenstein in his youth
had a crack on the head which he, no doubt, felt was a misfortune,
but it gave him just the surgical treatment that converted him from a
dullard into a great general.  Loyola got wounded in battle, and,
thanks to that circumstance, found his true vocation and became the
creator of the greatest religious order in history, and, with Luther,
perhaps the greatest maker of history for six centuries.  Newton,
according to the legend, sees an apple fall and starts a train of
thought that reveals one of the profoundest secrets of the universe.
I suppose no one who has advanced far in life can fail to recall
trifles that shaped the whole course of his career--a broken
engagement, a misdirected letter, a chance meeting.  At the time it
seemed nothing, and now, in the retrospect, it is seen to have meant
everything.  The chin may dictate events within limits, but the Imp
of Chance has as often as not the final word.

There is an interesting speculation on the theme of what might have
happened in Mr. Asquith's book on the origin of the war.  Referring
to the appointment of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein as German
Ambassador to London in 1912 and his death a few months later, he
says that he is confident, so far as one can be confident in a matter
of conjecture, that if Marschall had lived there would have been no
European War in 1914.  I fancy that is a common view in informed
quarters.  Marschall stood intellectually, as well as physically,
head and shoulders above the petty men with whom the Kaiser had
surrounded himself, and it is inconceivable that he would have
allowed his country to drift into war under an entire misapprehension
as to the mind and power of this country.

It is in this way that the chapter of accidents plays havoc with the
affairs of men.  All the woes of Ilium sprang from an elopement, and
it is a commonplace that if Cleopatra's nose had been a shade
longer--or shorter, for that matter--the whole story of the ancient
world would have been altered.  I suppose the most momentous
political event in the history of the last thousand years was the
rupture between England and America, which is said to have happened
as the result of a shower of rain.  But for that rupture, the British
Commonwealth to-day would include the whole North American Continent,
and its word would be sovereign over the earth.  Perhaps the seat of
authority would have been in Washington, instead of London, but
wherever it was it would have stabilised this reeling world and given
its people a security that now seems unattainable.  The speculation
which attributes the enormous calamity of the loss of America to a
shower of rain is more fanciful, but hardly less reasonable, than
that which Mr. Asquith advances in regard to the European War.  The
Earl of Bute was the evil genius of George III., and the inspiration
of his disastrous policy.  And the origin of his sinister power was a
storm at Epsom which kept the royal party from going home.  The
Prince of Wales needed someone to make up a hand at cards to pass the
time while the shower lasted, and Bute, then a young man, being
handy, was selected, and from that incident ingratiated himself with
the Prince and still more with the Prince's wife.  She established
his influence over her son whom later, as George III., he led into
the ruinous part of personal government which culminated in the
Boston Tea Party, the War of Independence, and the Republic of the
Stars and Stripes.

Chance does not, of course, always play a malevolent part like this.
It sometimes works as if with a superb and beneficent design.
Lincoln, on the threshold of fifty, regarded himself as having failed
in life and he died at fifty-six, one of the world's immortals.  It
was the quite unimportant incident of his debate with Douglas that
threw him into prominence on the eve of the crisis which, but for his
wisdom and magnanimity, would have left America like Europe, a group
of warring States.  But in the end chance betrayed him.  On the night
he was murdered the faithful guardian who had shadowed and protected
him throughout the war was sick, and his place was taken by a
substitute who became absorbed in the play, and allowed Booth to slip
unseen into the President's box and fire the fatal shot.  But it
might be argued that even in this felon betrayal, chance only
completed the splendour of its design, for Lincoln's work was done,
and it was the circumstances of his death that threw the nobility of
the man into relief for all time.

And while the accidents of life so often seem to take control of
events, it is no less true that our most deeply calculated schemes
sometimes turn round and smite us.  When Queen Victoria's eldest
daughter married the King of Prussia's eldest son, it was universally
agreed that a grand thing had been done for the peace of the world,
and when later a child was born, the rejoicings in London, as you may
read in the contemporary records, were like those that welcome a
great victory.  That child was the ex-Kaiser William, now an exile in
Holland.  In the light of to-day those rejoicings of sixty odd years
ago read like a grim comment on this queer and inexplicable world.

It is one of the agreeable features of the diverting adventure of
life that our triumphs so often come clothed in misfortune and that
the really big things that happen to us take the shape of trifles.
Whenever we are tempted to inveigh against things that go wrong, we
might do worse than remember the Field-Marshal's trousers.




IN DEFENCE OF "SKIPPING"

A few days ago Mr. Chesterton expressed a doubt whether he had ever
read Boswell "through."  Knowing Mr. Chesterton, and having a
life-long acquaintance with Boswell, I share his doubt.  G.K.C. has
an amazing gift for seizing the spirit and purport of a book by
turning over the pages in handfuls and sampling a sentence here and
there.  He treats books as the expert wine-taster treats wines, not
drinking them in great coarse gulps, but moistening his lips and
catching the bouquet on his palate.  The parallel is no doubt as
misleading as most parallels are apt to be.  Good wines have to be
"tasted" in this way, but the better the book the deeper should be
the draught or the more deliberate and patient the mastication.
"Chewed and digested" is Bacon's phrase.

But I am far too much addicted to "skipping" myself to treat the
practice as a crime in others.  When I was young and industrious and
enthusiastic I read as solemnly and slavishly as anyone.  I was like
a dog with a bone.  The tougher the theme the more I exercised my
intellectual molars on it.  Stout fellows like Zimmermann _On
Solitude_, and Burke on _The Sublime and Beautiful_, and Mill _On
Liberty_ were the sort of men for my youthful ardour.  I cannot
honestly say I enjoyed them, but I can honestly say that I read them,
and I can also honestly say that I shall never read them or their
like again.  I finished my drudgery long ago, and have become a mere
idler among books, a person who has served his apprenticeship and can
go about enjoying himself, taking a sip here and a longish "pull"
there, passing over this vintage, and returning to that and generally
behaving like a freeman wandering over the estates of the mind,
without a duty to anything but his own fancy.

I, too, doubt whether I have read Boswell through.  Why should I read
it through?  I have read the conversations a hundred times and I hope
to read them a hundred times more; but I will make no affidavit about
the letters.  I suspect that I have been "skipping" the letters
unconsciously all my life.  And _Paradise Regained_?  My conscience
is clear about _Paradise Lost_, and I can still mouth the speeches of
the first author of our misfortunes whom the judgment of time had
converted into the hero of that immortal poem.  But can I put my hand
on my heart and say I have read the _Regained_ right through?  I
cannot.  I am not even sure that I have read Shakespeare through.  I
have a vague notion that in the lusty youth of which I have spoken I
did read _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_ with the rest, but I am
quite prepared to believe that I only like to believe I did.

There is high precedent for those of us who "skip."  Johnson himself
was a famous "skipper," and confessed that he seldom finished a book.
It is true that he performed the amazing feat of rising two hours
before his usual time to read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.  He
was a truthful man, or I should find difficulty in believing him.  Of
course the achievement was not so great as it seems, for though
Johnson believed in early rising on principle and recommended all
young men to practise it, he did not himself rise until noon.  But
the idea of getting up, if only at ten in the morning, with a
feverish desire to read Burton tries my faith even in Johnson's
veracity.  It is pleasant to dip occasionally into that astonishing
rag-box of learning, but most of us are as likely to read Bradshaw's
Time Table through as Burton's _Anatomy_ through.  It is not a book;
it is a curiosity.

It is a common experience to find that the habit of "skipping" grows
on us as we grow older.  It is not merely that we are more tired or
more lazy: it is that we are more discreet and more delicate in our
intellectual feeding.  It is with reading as with eating.  When we
are young we can eat anything.  If we are offered a bun before dinner
we express no astonishment, but consume it recklessly.  But, grown
older and wiser, as Holmes remarks, we receive the offer of a bun
before dinner with polite surprise.  And so with books.  When the
magic of Shelley seizes us at seventeen we can devour _The Revolt of
Islam_ as we devoured that large boggy bun, but later we learn to
discriminate even with Shelley, and to take great spaces of him as
read.  And even the most fervent Wordsworthian would admit that his
reading of Wordsworth is patchy, and that if the poet had not written
a line after he left Grasmere for Rydal Water, his indebtedness to
him would not have been sensibly diminished.  Who, for example, can
honestly say that he has traversed the Sahara of the _Ecclesiastical
Sonnets_?

This is not a plea for skimpy reading.  It is good for the young to
worry their bone even if there is little meat on it.  I would have
them serve an arduous apprenticeship in the great world of books,
cleaving their own way laboriously through the wilderness.  The
anthology business for the young is a little over-done.  The youthful
digestion ought not to be weakened by an exclusive diet of "elegant
extracts," and spoon-feeding robs us of the joys of discovery and
adventure.  What delight is there like encountering in the wilderness
some great unknown of whom we have never heard?  It is like coming
into a fortune, or rather it is better than coming into a fortune,
for these are "riches fineless" that grow with compound interest and
are not subject to the vicissitudes of things.  I found a young
maiden of my acquaintance the other day in a mood of unusual
exaltation.  She had fallen in love and was hot with the first
rapture of passion.  She had encountered _Emma_ and was aflame with
ardour for more adventures in the serene world that Jane Austen had
opened out before her.  That is the way, casual and unsought, that
the realms of gold should be invaded.  Youth should be encouraged to
fashion its own taste and discriminate for itself between the good,
the better and the best.  When that is done we can "skip" as we like,
with an easy mind and a good conscience.  We have learned our path
through the wilderness.  We know where the hyacinths grow and where
we can catch the smell of the wild thyme, and the copse where the
nightingale sings to the moon.  And if with this liberty of knowledge
we "skip" some of the high-brows, and are found more often in the
company of Borrow than of Bacon--well, we have done our task-work and
are out to enjoy the sun and the wind on the heath.




AN OLD ENGLISH TOWN

It was a wish of Seneca's that the wise and virtuous when they slept
could lend their thoughts and their feelings out to less wise and
less virtuous people.  It would be equally admirable if we could
occasionally let our spiritual selves take wing and go on holiday,
leaving the body at home to carry on the routine business, receive
callers, answer the telephone, pay the bills, and so on.  If it were
possible for me to take such a holiday I should go to Tewkesbury,
where the eighth centenary of the famous Norman church of that town
is being celebrated.  There was a time when I had no desire to go to
Tewkesbury.  It was one of the places I did not want to go to because
I feared that seeing it would destroy the Tewkesbury of my fancy.  No
one would hesitate to go to a place like Birmingham or Glasgow, for
their names awaken no emotions in the mind, and experience of them
can shatter no pleasant images.

But Tewkesbury is a name to conjure with.  It belongs to the poetry
of things.  It is entangled in history and comes with the pomp of
trumpets and the echoes of far-off deeds.  It has the tang of
Shakespeare about it.  Was it not with its name that that great star
swam into our ken with the earliest of our remembered lines?--

  ... false, fleeting, perjured Clarence
  That stabbed me on the field by Tewkesbury.

Observe, not "the field at Tewkesbury" or "of Tewkesbury," but "the
field by Tewkesbury."  A subtle difference, but enough to convince
anyone who has been to that field that Shakespeare wandered there in
his young days, perhaps boating thither from Stratford some summer
day with Ann Hathaway.  Was it not Tewkesbury's mustard that Falstaff
hurled at Poins--or was it Pistol?  "His wits are as thick as
Tewkesbury mustard," he said.  I like to think that Falstaff stayed
at the "Hop Pole" at Tewkesbury on that famous recruiting journey
into Gloucestershire, when he ate a pippin in Squire Shallow's
orchard, and that it was the mustard he got there that made his eyes
water and stuck in his memory.  It was certainly at the "Hop Pole"
that Mr. Pickwick stopped for dinner on his journey from Bath.  That
is the last time, I think, that anything important happened at
Tewkesbury.  Since then it has slept, and one liked to think it was
sleeping in a beautiful mediæval dream, undisturbed by anything more
modern than an occasional stage-coach or the horn of the red-coated
huntsman clattering through the street.

That was how I liked to think of Tewkesbury, and I stayed away from
it, lest I should find it was all cinemas, fried-fish shops and tin
tabernacles.  But one day last summer I was journeying by road from
Wales and found Tewkesbury in my path, and that it was convenient to
stay like Mr. Pickwick at the "Hop Pole."  And now I know that
Tewkesbury is as good as its name, and that I can go there and see as
perfect a bit of old England as can be seen from the Tamar to the
Tweed.  Of course, a city like York will give you infinitely more,
layer on layer of history written on its stones, telling of the
England of the Britons, of the Romans, the Saxons, the Normans, and
so onward.

But these are remains--the splendid litter of the centuries.  The
wonderful thing about Tewkesbury is that it is a living whole, a
single town of Tudor England left apparently almost
untouched--certainly unspoiled.  Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
timbered houses, with their upper floors overhanging the pavements,
line the three broad compact streets, and between these reverend
buildings little doorways admit to multitudinous courts where the
poor live.  I daresay it oughtn't to be so.  I daresay the courts
ought to be swept away and the people housed with gardens far afield.
But at this moment I am not a social enthusiast, but a lover of the
picturesque, and no doubt it is this compact structure of the place
that has kept it so perfect a survival of the past.  By the gardens
and the courts flows Shakespeare's Avon, and just beyond the town it
joins the broad flood of the Severn near the Bloody Field where the
Wars of the Roses ended--a place of rank grass, left, I was told,
untouched since that day of slaughter, nearly half a thousand years
ago.  "They're afeard o' what they might find," said the old man who
directed me.  And over all is the great Abbey Church, next to Durham
Cathedral perhaps the finest piece of Norman ecclesiastical
architecture in England.  Thither from the Bloody Field on that day
of battle long ago were borne the corpses of the two rivals, and
there their bones lie side by side, preaching, for those who care to
hear, more potent sermons on the fitful fever of life than ever came
from the pulpit.

And this beautiful town is set in a landscape as gracious as "a
melody that's sweetly played in tune"--a wide, rich vale, the most
fertile part of England.  The sun comes up over the Cotswolds in the
morning, and sets over the great range of the Malverns in the
evening.  Between these two sheltering ramparts Tewkesbury lies,
dreaming of the Middle Ages.  I daresay it has its worries like any
other place.  But I refuse to be a realist about Tewkesbury.  I will
indulge my love of romance.  I will remember only that as I came away
from the "Hop Pole" a vehicle with four jolly-looking fellows inside
came up tooting a horn that played old-fashioned airs, and bringing
in its train a swarm of boys.  And as the boys gathered round the car
one of the jolly-looking fellows put his hand in his pocket and drew
out a heap of coins that he scattered among them.  It was in the true
spirit of the place.  I fancy Mr. Pickwick did the same thing when he
left the "Hop Pole," and I am sure that Falstaff did--in spite of the
mustard.  I would have done the same thing myself, if I had had the
courage and the coppers.  The next time I go to Tewkesbury I will
fill my pockets with coppers.




ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA

I was travelling down to Devonshire the other day when I met a man in
the train with whom I fell into conversation.  It was a wonderful
day.  We had left the fog behind us in London and the countryside
glowed, rich and warm, under the sunshine of a cloudless November
day.  It seemed an occasion on which one could have found a thousand
agreeable things to talk about, but I noticed that wherever the
conversation with the stranger started it always got round to the
taxation of land values.  Now I happen to be in favour of the
taxation of land values.  It is a question about which my mind is as
clear as it is about anything in this perplexing world.  I am
prepared to vote in favour of it in due season and to speak in favour
of it when I think any useful purpose can be served.  But I confess I
got painfully bored by this well-meaning man and that I hailed the
opportunity of going to the restaurant car to lunch with secret
thanksgiving.  I don't think I shall ever be caught _tête-à-tête_
with that missionary of the One Idea again.  I have got him on the
list of People I Can Do Without.

It is a list made up largely of those who wear a bee in their bonnet.
There is no surer prescription for the Complete Bore than the tyranny
of an idea.  We flee instinctively from the man who is always telling
us the same thing, who comes into the circle with one ceaseless
theme, to which he hitches the heavens above and the earth beneath,
and the waters under the earth.  There is that excellent publicist,
Vernon Pizzey, for example.  You have but to say "Good day" to him in
the street, and he will buttonhole you, and, with the abstracted air
of one who has seen a vision, will open the flood-gates of Birth
Control upon you.

When I first knew him he was the passionate pilgrim of Prohibition.
Banish alcohol from the face of the earth, and all the problems of
life would be solved, and sorrow and sighing would flee away.  He has
passed out of that phase.  It is no longer the abolition of Drink
that lights the fires of fanatical faith in his eyes: it is the
Abolition of Children.  The New Jerusalem which he will build in
England's green and pleasant land will have no children playing in
its streets.  When he hears of a childless home, a ghost of a smile
flits over his features, and when he hears of a family of six he
looks as though he has heard of some unmentionable sin.  He dreams of
a golden age when the propagation of children among the poor will be
a punishable offence, and when the people of whom he does not approve
will be sterilised by order of the court.  His prophet is Dean Inge.

I am not concerned here with the merits of his obsession.  I refer to
him only as an example of those who are ridden by an idea.  An idea
may be good or bad, but no idea is good enough to claim one's whole
waking thoughts.  We like people who have many facets to their minds,
who hold strong opinions on a variety of subjects and know how to
keep them under control, airing them when they are in season and
putting them in cold storage when they are not of season.  We like
them to think in many quantities, to let their thought range over the
whole landscape of things, to have plenty of windows to their mind
and to open them in turn to all the winds that blow.  We ought not to
be the slave of one idea, but the master of legions which we should
exercise and discipline and from which we should extract a working
philosophy of life.  However good the text we ought not always to be
preaching a sermon from it.  I remember when I was a boy a most
excellent man, a lawyer, who, every evening in the week, would take
his stand on the plinth of a Sebastopol cannon in front of the Shire
Hall that faced down the High Street of the country town in which I
lived, and from thence would exhort the passers-by to repentance.  No
one ever heeded him, no one ever even paused to listen to him, and he
lives in my memory a solitary figure weighed down with the wickedness
of men, giving his life unselfishly to the delivery of his unregarded
message, a man whose very agony had become a town jest.

Life is a multitudinous affair, and we suspect the sanity of a mind
which is chained to one idea about it.  I remember leaving the House
of Commons on that tremendous day, the 3rd of August, 1914, when Sir
Edward Grey had just made a speech that announced the most
world-shaking event in history.  In a few hours we should be involved
in the greatest war the world had ever seen.  An acquaintance of mine
left the House with me, and as we seated ourselves in a cab he turned
to me and said, "Did you see that outrageous vivisection case down at
Wigan?"--or some such place.  I forget what I answered, but I
remember the strange feeling that came over me that I was cooped up
with Mr. Dick.  Here was the old, kindly world we had known for a
lifetime plunging down into the gulf of unimaginable things.  And
beside me, indifferent to all the enormous happening, was Mr. Dick,
his mind tortured with the wicked doings down at Wigan, or wherever
it was.

There is of course another side to the shield of the man with One
Idea.  He could make out a good case for himself and I think I could
make out a good case for him.  The mere fact that his passion is
disinterested is alone enough to command respect in a world where
disinterested enthusiasm is a rare commodity.  He is of the stuff of
martyrs.  He is prepared to die for his idea, or what is harder, to
take the whips and scorns of men who are often, spiritually, not fit
to black his boots.  It is his uncalculating passion that keeps the
flame of ideas burning in a dark world.  Without him our moral
currency would be sadly depreciated and the quality of the general
life would lose its salt and savour.  I often admire his singleness
of purpose.  I sometimes even envy a disinterestedness which leaves
me ashamed by comparison.  But I do not want to spend a week-end with
him and I will not travel down to Devonshire with him if I can find a
seat in the luggage-van or standing room in the corridor.




TO AN UNKNOWN ARTIST

It is certainly an unequal world.  As I was crossing Piccadilly
Circus yesterday my eye fell on a man at work on the building that is
being pulled down at the corner of Regent Street, next to the
"Criterion."[1]  He was standing on a fragment of wall of the
disembowelled building that still jutted out a few yards from the
side of the "Criterion," which rose like a vertical precipice beside
him, without foothold or handhold that a squirrel could cling to.  He
was perhaps fifty feet from the ground.  The width of the wall was, I
suppose, a foot--just space enough for heel and toe to find
standing-room.  He was armed with a pick-axe, and with it he was
cutting away the fragile buttress from underneath his feet.  His body
rose and fell with the strokes of the pick-axe.  When he had loosened
some portion of the wall, he would stand on one foot and scrape away
the debris with the other.  As it fell rattling to the ground a cloud
of dust boiled up, smothering him and partially hiding him from view.
Then he would turn to with the pick again, loosen another portion,
and repeat the operation.


[1] The vacant site is now covered by a new block of buildings.


I stood and watched him with respect bordering on admiration.  I
could not help reflecting what a helpless figure I should have cut in
his place and what a short time I should be there.  I have been proud
of my modest achievements on the rocks, but here was a man who made
those achievements seem silly, and he did it as unconcernedly as if
he were hoeing potatoes in his garden.  Presently he straightened his
back, loosened his shoulders, paused, threw a glance up at the
vertical cliff above him, and another down the vertical cliff below
him, and then resumed.

So I saw him cut away row after row of the brickwork on which he
stood.  There was a drop of fifty feet, "straight as a beggar can
spit," back and front of him--not an inch of room for the play of his
feet.  Every movement had to be true to the fraction of an inch.
Every piece of brickwork he removed involved a new problem within the
same inexorable limits.  The slightest mistake, and he would plunge
down to the rubbish below, and a coroner's jury would say "Accidental
death," and that would be the end of his story.  Perhaps there would
be two lines about him at the bottom of a newspaper column, but
nobody would read it, for everybody would be so busy reading how Mr.
Kid Lewis put Mr. Frankie Burns to sleep, and how Abe Mitchell did
the fourth hole in two, and why Hobbs or somebody else was not caught
in the second over.

And this man, rising and falling with the blows of his pick-axe up
there on the fragment of wall, is not doing this perilous job
occasionally.  He is doing it every day.  All his working life is
spent on some such giddy task as this, swaying to and fro with his
axe between a drop of fifty feet on one side and fifty feet on the
other.  He must never forget--for a moment.  He must never be
dizzy--for a moment.  He must be prepared for any sudden gust of wind
that blows.  As I watched him he seemed to assume the proportions of
a great artist.  He seemed to become heroic--a figure carrying his
life lightly on that frail ledge of the vertical cliff.  I daresay it
had never occurred to him to think of himself in either rôle.  Yet
the mere skill of the man was more delicate than the skill of the
rather dull cricketers I saw at Lord's on Saturday.  There were
12,000 people standing round hour by hour to watch Lee and Haig pile
up the stupendous total of fifty runs inside two hours.  I do not
blame the spectators.  I was one of them myself, and very dull I
found it.  But nobody bothered to give a glance at the figure swaying
to and fro on the crumbling wall.  Yet as a mere exhibition of skill
it was not inferior to the pedestrian play at Lord's or to a skipping
match between Carpentier and Dempsey at £1000 a minute.  And
remember, he was not engaged in a sham fight.  He had a drop of fifty
feet back and front.  Instant death on either side all the time.

But then he was only doing useful work.  I wondered what he got for
risking his life every hour of every day.  Perhaps as much in a week
or a month as the _Star_ will pay me for writing this article about
him.  Perhaps as much in a year as an eminent counsel will pocket for
a day's "refresher."  Perhaps as much in a lifetime as Monsieur
Carpentier will take for ten minutes' running exercise with Dempsey
in the ring, winding up with a tap in the stomach, a count-out, a
handshake (and a wink).  No; on second thoughts, not half that, not
quarter that.

When I passed through Piccadilly Circus in the evening the man had
gone.  So had the fragment of wall on which he stood.  You may see
the mark of the place where the wall rose on the side of the
"Criterion."  It is the mark of an unknown artist to whom I offer
this tribute of my admiration.




ON LIVING FOR EVER

For some time past I have noticed on the hoardings of London a
placard illustrated with the picture of an American gentleman named
Rutherford, who is represented lifting a prophetic fist in the manner
of the advertisements of Horatio Bottomley before that prophet of the
war had the misfortune to be found out, and declaring that there are
"thousands in this city who will never die."  I have not had the
curiosity to attend his meetings or to inquire into the character of
his revelation.  I do not know, therefore, whether I am likely to be
one of the people whom Mr. Rutherford has his eye upon.  But the
threat which he holds over my head has led me to look the possibility
in the face.  I suppose Mr. Rutherford is satisfied that it is an
agreeable possibility.  He would not have come all the way from
America to tell us about it if he had not thought it was good news
that he was bringing.

I think he is mistaken.  Judging from my own reactions, as the
Americans would say, to his prophecy, I fancy the general feeling
would not be one of joy but of terror.  If anything could reconcile
us to the thought of death it would be the assurance that we should
never die.  For the pleasure as well as the pathos of life springs
from the knowledge of its transitoriness.

  All beauteous things for which we live
  By laws of time and space decay.
  But oh, the very reason why
  I clasp them is because they die.

All our goings and comings are enriched with the sense of mortality.
All our experiences are coloured by the thought that they may return
no more.  Rob us of the significance of the last words of Hamlet and
the realm of poetry would become a desert, treeless and songless.  It
is because "the rest is silence" that the smallest details of our
passage through life have in them the power of kindling thoughts such
as these:

  Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad.
    Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow--
  A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord,
    How rich and great the times are now!
      Know, all ye sheep
      And cows, that keep
  On staring that I stand so long
    In grass that's wet from heavy rain--
  A rainbow and a cuckoo's song
    May never come together again;
      May never come
      This side the tomb.


It is not alone the beauty of the sunset that touches us with such
poignant emotion: it is because in the passing of the day we see the
image of another passing to which we move as unfalteringly as the sun
moves into the shadow of the night.  When in these autumn days we
walk in the woodlands amid the patter of the falling leaves, it is
the same subtle suggestion that attunes the note of beauty to a minor
key.  Through the stillness of the forest there echo the strokes of a
distant axe felling some kingly beech.  For seventy, perhaps a
hundred years it has weathered the storms of life, and now its hour
has come and in its falling there is the allegory of ourselves.  I
think it is that allegory that makes my neighbour so passionately
conservative about his trees.  They stand too thick about his
grounds, but he will not have the axe laid to one of them.

We cannot go an unusual journey without a dim sense of another
journey from which we shall not return, nor say a prolonged
"good-bye" without the faint echo in our minds of ultimate farewells.
And who ever left the old house that has sheltered him so long and
grown so familiar to sight and touch without feeling some shadow pass
across the spirit that is more than the shadow cast by bricks and
mortar?  Life is crowded with these premonitions and forebodings that
make our pleasures richer by reminding us that they are terminable.

And such is the perversity of human nature that if Mr. Rutherford
should turn out to be well-informed, those of us who are marked down
for deathlessness would find that the pleasure of life had vanished
with its pathos.  We should be panic-stricken at the idea of never
coming to an end, of never being able to escape from what
Chesterfield called "this silly world," and Salisbury "this miserable
life."  We should yearn for death as the condemned prisoner yearns
for life or the icebound whaler for the spring.  We do not want to
die now, but to be comfortable we want to know that we shall die some
day.  Being under sentence of death we cling to life like limpets to
a rock, but if we were sentenced to life we should shriek for the
promise of death.  We should hate the sunset that we were doomed to
see for ever and ever, and loathe the autumn that mocked us with its
falling leaves.

I remember that in one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
remarks that she is so happy that she regrets that she cannot live
three hundred years.  We all have moments like that, moments when
life seems so good that we envy the patriarchs and would be glad if
we could abide here longer than Nature permits.  But in our gayest
moments we could not contemplate the prospect of seeing in the New
Year of, let us say, 10024 A.D., with the certainty that we were
destined to wait on for the New Year of 100024 A.D., and so on to the
crack of doom.  The mind would reel before such an enormous vista.
We should stagger and faint at the prospect of a journey that had no
end and of a future as limitless and unthinkable as space.  We should
look into the darkness and be afraid.  There may be an infinite
destiny for us to which this life is only a preparatory school.  It
is not unreasonable to think it is so--that when this fitful fever is
over we may pass out into realms and into a state of being in which
the muddle of this strange episode will be resolved.  But here we are
finite.  Here we have no abiding city and all our feelings are
conditioned by finite terms.  We are rather like the batsman at the
wicket.  He does not want to get out.  When he has made his 50 he
strives to make his 100, and when he has made his 100, he is just as
anxious to make 200.  But it is the knowledge that the innings will
end, that every ball may be his last, that gives zest to the game.
If he knew that he never could get out, that by an inexorable decree
he was to be at the wicket for the rest of his days, he would turn
round and knock the stumps down in desperation.

No, Mr. Rutherford, you have mistaken us.  We do not want your
revelation.  The play is worth seeing, though I wish it were more
good-humoured and the players a little more friendly; but we do not
wish to watch it for ever.  We like to know that the curtain will
fall and that, a little weary and sleepy, we shall be permitted to go
home.  We are in no hurry, sir, but we like to know that the curtain
is there.




ON INITIALS

A letter came to me the other day from a gentleman of the name of
Blodgett, residing in Chicago.  I do not, I regret to say, know Mr.
Blodgett, but he has heard about me and even read my books, and he
has a desire--which I find it difficult to resent--to possess my
autograph.  He wants to place it "in the literary shrine in his
library" beside the autographs of "G. K. Chesterton, J. M. Barrie, A.
A. Milne, E. V. Lucas, Lord Northcliffe," and other deities that he
apparently worships in far-away Chicago.  I yielded to Mr. Blodgett's
request, for I am not made of the stern stuff that can turn a deaf
ear to flattery.  I endeavour to mortify the pride that Mr.
Blodgett's compliment arouses by reflecting that for one person who
wants my autograph there are one million who would wade through blood
and tears for Charlie Chaplin's, or Georges Carpentier's, or Mary
Pickford's, or the late Monsieur Landru's, or the eminent Mr. Horatio
Bottomley's.  I recalled the scene I saw at Lord's a few days ago
when at the end of an innings as the teams left the field an enormous
crowd rushed forward and enveloped them like a plague of locusts,
each with an open book in one hand and a pen in the other, and a
prayer on the lips for the autograph of some illustrious player.  I
reflected that no mob ever pursued me with these flattering
attentions.

But in vain.  The agreeable incense goes to my head.  A request for
my autograph makes me swell with pomp.  However hard I try to be
humble, I can't do it.  The vision of Mr. Blodgett (of Chicago) rises
before me.  I see him carrying my illustrious autograph about in his
breast-pocket and stopping his friends on Michigan Avenue to flaunt
my flourishes before their eyes.  I see him arriving home in the
evening and shouting the glad tidings that my autograph has come to
Mrs. Blodgett and the young Blodgetts up the staircase.  And I sink
to sleep at night with the agreeable vision of my humble signature
resting in the "literary shrine" of Mr. Blodgett beside the august
name of "Northcliffe."

But I refer to Mr. Blodgett's letter not because of his request, but
because of his manner of addressing me.  He writes to me as "Reginald
S. Thomson, Esq." I cannot deny that my name (for the purpose of this
article) is Reginald.  I wish I could.  What possessed my revered
parents--peace to their ashes--to call me Reginald I do not know.
Perhaps it was out of respect for the memory of the saintly Heber,
whose precocious piety was set before me, with not much success, for
my youthful imitation.  But whatever its origin, I cannot recall the
time when I did not loathe the name of Reginald.  I took the earliest
opportunity of disowning it, and for fifty years I have passed
through the world under the sign of R. S. Thomson.  Our English habit
of using initials only for our Christian names was a source of solace
to me.  It enabled me to forget all about Reginald, and to leave the
world in darkness about my disgraceful secret.  I left it to suppose,
if it supposed at all, that behind the R. there lurked nothing more
offensive than Robert, or Richard, or, at the worst, Rufus.

A visit to America, however, betrayed the wretched truth to the
world.  The Americans are as particular about flourishing their front
names as we often are about concealing ours.  Mr. Herodotus P. Champ
would be cut to the quick if you addressed him as Mr. H. P. Champ.
He would regard it as a studied affront.  And, being a polite people,
the Americans take as much pains to unearth the Christian names of
their visitors as their visitors take to hide them.  Nothing will
convince them that we wear initials because we like them.  I had no
sooner stepped ashore at New York than I was confronted with Mr.
Reginald S. Thomson.  Wherever I went I was haunted by that
objectionable person.  He went with me into parlours and on to
platforms.  He gibed at me in headlines.  He mocked at me with his
Portland slip and his white spats and his eye-glass.  It was not
until I had placed the Atlantic between myself and America that I
ceased to be shadowed by Reginald.  He is still over there, holding
me up to ridicule with his insufferable elegances.

No doubt others have suffered in the same way.  It would not surprise
me to learn that Mr. H. G. Wells is known from Boston to Los Angeles
as Mr. Hannibal G. Wells.  Nobody in England knows what lurks behind
"H. G."  Mr. Wells keeps the secret from his closest friends, but I
daresay it is babbled all over America, and that there is not an
intelligent schoolboy who does not discuss the latest book of Hector
G. Wells or H. Gascoigne Wells, or Horatio Gordon Wells, as the case
may be.  No doubt Mr. Wells has excellent reasons for not publishing
his front names to the world.  He may dislike them as much as I
dislike Reginald.  Parents who give us our names immediately we
appear in the world are naturally liable to do us an injury.  They
have, let us say, been stirred by some royal wedding, and call their
poor infant "Lascelles" in a fervour of loyalty.  And perhaps
Lascelles grows up into a fierce Communist who would prefer the L. to
stand for Lenin.  What is he to do but to take refuge in initials?
And since he alone is concerned, why should we pry into the secrets
which those initials conceal?

It would be a simple way of relief if our baptismal names were
temporary, and each of us chose the names by which he desired to be
known on coming of age.  Then they would fit us more happily than
Reginald fits me or Hannibal--if it is Hannibal--fits Mr. Wells.




PLANTING A SPINNEY

The idea of planting a spinney arose out of the necessity of finding
a name for the cottage.  It is difficult to find a name for anything,
from a baby to a book, but it is most difficult of all to find a name
for a house.  At least so we found it.  Jane wanted "The Knoll," and
somebody else, with a taste for Hardy, wanted "The Knap," and someone
else, as a tribute to Meredith (and in view of the fact that the
upland we had built on was a famous place for skylarks), wanted "Lark
Uprising" (what would the postman have thought?), and another wanted
"Windy Gap," and so on, and amid the multitude of suggestions the
cottage seemed as though it would lose its youth and grow old without
any name at all.

Then one day someone said "The Spinney," and in sheer desperation
everyone else said, "Why, of course, 'The Spinney.'  Perfect.  The
very thing."  The only objection that was made was that there was no
spinney.  But a good name could not be sacrificed to so negligible a
consideration.  Moreover, what had we been about to forget to plant
so desirable a thing as a spinney?  There, below the house, just out
of the line of view so as not to blot out the landscape of four
counties, was the very spot, and in the garden there were plenty of
trees, pine, spruce, chestnut, beech, and lime of twelve or fifteen
years' growth ready to hand.  It would have been safer and simpler to
have set young saplings, but that would not have satisfied the
elders.  It would have been starting a spinney for another generation
to enjoy, and we wanted a spinney that we could sit under ourselves.

If you plant saplings, I think you ought to do it in your youth so
that you and the trees can grow to maturity and age together.  I
often regret that I did not plant an acorn from that glorious tree,
the Queen Elizabeth's oak at Chenies, when I was young.  It would
have been a stalwart fellow by this time with a comfortable shade on
summer days.  But now, no, I should be too heavily handicapped in the
race, and the young oak just starting on its prodigious career would
mock my little span.  One ought not, of course, to be sentimental
over such things, but if you love trees you cannot help it.  Witness
that story in Tacitus of the noble Roman who owned the garden of
Lucullus and who, being sentenced to be burned in his garden, asked
permission the night before his execution to go and choose the place
for the funeral pyre in order that the flames which consumed him
should spare the trees he loved.  That is a fine legend by which to
be remembered for two thousand years.

I was told the other day a pleasant fact about Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman which will endear him still more to some and make
him appear, perhaps, absurd to others.  When he went from London to
his estate of Belmont in Scotland, it was his practice to walk round
his park and take off his hat to the trees he loved most.  If Sir
Henry had been given to irony, it might be supposed that the gesture
was intended as a compliment on the company he had left behind at
Westminster.  "The more I see of men," he might have meant, adapting
Pascal's famous phrase, "the better I like trees."  But I do not
fancy there was any anger with men in his greeting.  There was
nothing of the misanthrope in that shrewd and companionable man.  He
was a good hater, and had as acute a sense of character as any man of
his time.  He knew a crook or a humbug by instinct, and anything
fraudulent or shoddy withered in his presence; but an honest, plain
man was always at home with him.

He saluted his favourite trees in the spirit in which Xerxes, when
passing with his army through Lydia, decorated with golden ornaments
a plane-tree of extraordinary beauty, and left a warrior from the
Immortal Band to be its special guard, as you may read in Herodotus.
He saluted them because he loved them, and no one who has the spirit
of the woodlands in him will think the action odd or even fanciful.
It has never occurred to me to go about the woods taking off my hat
to the kings of the forest, but that only shows that I have less
imagination and less chivalry than he had.  I am not sure I shall not
do so in future.  It is the least courtesy I can offer them for all
the pleasure they have given me in life, and the action will seem
reasonable enough to anyone who has witnessed those wonderful
experiments of Professor Bhose which reveal the inner life of the
tree with such thrilling suggestions of consciousness and emotion.

It is not possible to live much among trees without experiencing a
subtle sense of comradeship with them.  Our intimacy may not go so
far as that of Giles Winterbourn, in _The Woodlanders_, who could
tell what sort of trees he was passing in the dark by the sound of
the wind in the branches--but without that erudition it can create an
affection almost personal, not unlike that we feel for those quiet
companions of whom we have not thought much, perhaps, until we find
that their simple constancy and friendliness had made the atmosphere
and sunshine in which we moved.

I confess that when I walk through the woods that crown the hills
behind the cottage, and see the great boles of the noblest of the
beeches marked for felling, I feel very much as when I hear bad news
of an old friend.  That those glorious fellows, whom I have seen
clothing themselves with green in the spring and with gold in the
autumn, should be brought low and split into fragments to make chairs
and tables seems a sacrilege.  It is an unpractical sentiment, of
course, and I daresay if I owned the trees I should cut them down
too.  So I am glad I don't own them, and can just love them and
lament them.

I should, however, find it hard to cut down beech-trees of all trees,
for after many affairs of the heart with trees, my affections have
settled finally on them as the pride of our English woodlands.  With
what stateliness they spring from the ground, how noble their shade,
how exquisite the green of their leaves in spring, how rich the gold
of autumn, what a glowing carpet they spread for us in winter!  If I
go to Epping Forest it is to see the grand patriarchs of the tribe
who are gathered together in solemn conclave in Monk's Wood, and if I
place Buckinghamshire high among the counties, it is because there
you will find a more abundant wealth of beeches than anywhere else in
the land.

But I am no narrow sectarian about trees.  If I put the beech first,
I worship at many shrines.  When I go to Chenies it is to pay my
devotions to the Duke of Bedford's oaks, and especially the aforesaid
Queen Elizabeth's oak, which still strews the greensward with acorns,
though in its ancient trunk, hollowed by the centuries, you could
seat a tolerably large tea-party.  And who would go to Shere without
a visit to those stalwart Spanish chestnuts that are the glory of the
Duke of Northumberland's park?  It is worth a journey to Salisbury,
not merely to see the spire and Stonehenge, but to make the
acquaintance of those magnificent cedars in Wilton Park.  There is an
elm at Nuneham that I go to see much as I go to see a venerable
relative, and there is a wonderful yew-tree in the churchyard of
Tidworth in Surrey that is better worth a pilgrimage than many a
cathedral.

But to return to the spinney.  We began our adventure a year ago,
between the months of November and February, which are the limits
within which transplanting can be done.  A dozen spruce, two pines, a
sycamore and two limes, all standing ten to a dozen feet in their
boots, so to speak, were, with enormous gruntings, heavings and
perspirations, borne to the chosen spot, and there placed in new-dug
holes, earthed up, wired in position, and left to weather the storms.
The handy-man shook his head over the operation--"didn't know but
what they warn't too big to shift, but happen some on 'em would
live."  All through the spring and summer I watched those trees
struggling for life, like a doctor walking the wards of a hospital
and feeling the pulses of his patients.  Month by month the spruces
flickered on.  The fairest of them all was the first to give up the
ghost definitely, and then three others followed.  It was August
before any shoots of new foliage began to appear, and then one by one
the remainder put forth tiny buds of life, the last sending out his
faint signal of spring as late as October.  "Ain't done so bad," said
the handy-man, scratching his head to help him to a right judgment.

To-day with more heavings and gruntings the handy-man and I have
transplanted another bunch of pines a good fifteen feet in height to
the spinney, and for months to come I shall walk the wood again to
catch signs of life in my new patients.  Meanwhile, in order to
provide for the future, we have planted young saplings among the big
trees, and altogether my spinney, I think, makes a handsome show.  I
have just had a walk along the lane below to view it as a stranger
might, and, speaking as a stranger, I remarked to myself that that
was a nice little spinney beside the cottage on the hill, and when I
came to the gate I, still as a stranger, was struck by the
appropriateness of the name.  I think that that spinney will be my
memorial to the countryside, and I want no better.  There is no
pleasanter thing to be remembered by than trees.  They are better
than battles or books, for they do not record our passions, our
ambitions, or our contentions.  They record only that we once passed
this way and loved the friendliness of the woods.




ON WEARING AN EYEGLASS

"Roughly speaking," says a writer in a recent issue of the _New
Statesman_, "no man using or wearing a monocle should be appointed to
any public post in the United States.  Believe me, nothing short of
his fine simplicity and intellectual integrity would have enabled Mr.
William Archer to 'get away with it.'"  The warning occurs in an
admirable article dealing with the disastrous way in which official
England is usually represented in America.  It is a subject of first
importance, on which I am in entire agreement with the writer, and
about which I could say much from personal knowledge.  But the
eyeglass will serve.  You can see the whole landscape surveyed by the
writer through the Englishman's eyeglass.

And, first, let me clear away the suggestion about my good friend
William Archer.  It is true he carries an eyeglass, and I have seen
him on occasion use it to examine documents.  But he does not wear an
eyeglass, and he does wear spectacles.  Neither in fact nor in spirit
can he be included in the ranks of the Eyeglass Englishman.  Nor,
indeed, can all those who do wear an eyeglass be included in that
category.  I have known men who succeeded in wearing an eyeglass
without offence.  I have even known a lady who wore one so naturally
and with such a suggestion of unconsciousness that you yourself were
almost unconscious that she wore it.

But, generally speaking, an eyeglass is an ostentation.  It is an
ostentation because it is so much more natural, easy and unaffected
to wear spectacles, which serve precisely the same uses.  You put a
pair of spectacles on your nose and forget all about them.  And the
world forgets all about them.  You cannot do that with an eyeglass.
The world cannot do that with an eyeglass.  Spectacles convey no
implications, carry no comment; but an eyeglass is as declaratory as
a Union Jack.  It is a public announcement of ourselves.  It is an
intimation to the world that we have arrived.  And the world takes
note of the fact.  When it thinks of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, it
thinks of an eyeglass as inevitably as when it thinks of Nelson it
thinks of an armless sleeve, or when it thinks of Richard III. it
thinks of a hump-back.  An eyeglass is as troublesome as a feverish
baby.  It is an occupation.  It is almost a career.  It is always
dropping out and being reaffixed with an ugly contortion of the
muscles of the eye-socket.  And if, by long practice, it is kept in
position without contortion, you are insensibly kept wondering how
the feat is performed and waiting for the laws of Nature to operate.

In a word, a monocle calls attention to itself.  It is a calculated
affectation.  It is an advertisement that we are someone in
particular, and that we expect to be observed.  It is as much a
symbol of class consciousness as the red tie of the Socialist, and it
is much less pleasing, for the red tie is an assertion of human
equality, while the monocle sets up a claim to social exclusiveness.
The wearer of the red tie wants everybody to wear red ties.  The more
red ties he sees, the happier he feels.  If everybody wore red ties
it would be very heaven.  Surely the millennium is at hand, he would
say.  He would feel the spasm that Hyndman felt when he noticed that
all the porters of a certain station were wearing red ties.  "See,"
he said to John Burns, "see the red ties! the social revolution is on
the march."  "Nothing of the sort," said Burns.  "It's a part of the
station uniform."  Hyndman's face fell, for he did really want to see
everybody wearing the same coloured tie as himself.  But if one
morning Lord Dundreary (late of the Guards) saw the whole of
Piccadilly bursting out into monocles, every policeman wearing a
monocle, and every cabman wearing a monocle, and everybody in the
buses wearing a monocle, he would feel that the pillars of the
firmament were tumbling down.  He would take off his monocle and
grind it under his heel.  He must belong to an exclusive set or cease
to find life livable.

The philosophy of the eyeglass is explained in the familiar story of
Disraeli and Chamberlain.  When the famous Israelite, who was an
artifice from the curl plastered on his forehead to the sole of his
foot, saw through his eyeglass the terrible Radical Mayor of
Birmingham enter the House for the first time, he turned to his
neighbour and said: "He wears his eyeglass _like a gentleman_."  He
was satisfied.  There was no reason to fear the Mayor of Birmingham.
He was "one of us."  No one would say that So-and-So "wears his
spectacles like a gentleman" any more than he would say that he
"wears his hat" (or his boots) "like a gentleman."  What Disraeli
meant was that Chamberlain could do an exceptional thing with the air
of one who was doing an ordinary thing.  He knew how to be
conspicuous without being unhappy.  He wore the badge of the superior
person as if he had forgotten it was there.  He wore it as though
Nature had decorated him at birth with the Order of the Eyeglass.  He
was a Perfect Gentleman.

There is nothing wrong in being a Perfect Gentleman.  It is a very
proper ambition; but we ought not to label ourselves Perfect
Gentlemen.  We ought to be content to leave the world to discover
that we are Perfect Gentlemen, and not proclaim the fact by means of
a pane of glass hung perilously in the right eye.  For, according to
the practice of the best circles, it should always be in the right
eye.  The left eye may be as blind as a bat, but it would never do to
wear a pane of glass there.  If you do that you do not know the first
law of the Cult of the Eyeglass.  None of the best people wear the
monocle in the left eye.  It is like eating peas with your knife, or
tucking your serviette in at your collar, as the Germans (who are
most Imperfect Gentlemen) do, instead of wearing it on your knees,
where it will not get in the way of anything that happens to fall.

It is impossible to think of greatness in the terms of the eyeglass.
Shakespeare himself could hardly survive so limiting and belittling a
circumstance.  Try to think of Milton, in the days before blindness
had come upon him, sitting at Cromwell's elbow with an eyeglass in
his right eye.  Imagine Gladstone or Newman wearing eyeglasses.  The
mind rejects the image as a sort of sacrilege.  Indeed one may almost
say that the measure of greatness is the extent of the humiliation
which an eyeglass would inflict upon the subject.  And, yet again--so
dangerous is it to generalise--there are rare cases in which an
eyeglass seems the fitting property of the man.  Joseph Conrad was
such a case.  There was in him a haughty aloofness from the drama
that he observed with such cold and dispassionate understanding that
his eyeglass had a certain significance that gave it warrant.  He did
not wear it "like a gentleman."  He wore it like a being of another
creation.

I do not know whether we invented the monocle, nor do I know whether
it is a peculiarly English institution; I fancy it is.  In any case,
it is the universal attribute of the stage Englishman abroad, and in
America, where an eyeglass would be an offence against the unwritten
law of the republic, it symbolises all those manners of the superior
person whose export abroad, and especially to the United States, does
our interests much harm.  The warning of the writer in the _New
Statesman_ is badly needed.  Let us keep the Eyeglass Englishman
(whether he wears an eyeglass or not) at home, where we are used to
him, and where he can do no mischief.  After all, he does not
represent us.  He is only one in ten thousand of us.  Why should he
be chosen to make us misunderstood by people who dislike the idea of
social caste and all its appurtenances?




A MAN AND HIS WATCH

I suppose most people recognised something of themselves in the
story, reported in the papers the other day, about the man and his
watch.  He was hurrying to the station when it occurred to him that
he had not got his watch on.  So he took his watch out of his pocket
to see if he had time to run home and get it.  I do not know how the
affair continued; but I like to think of him hurrying back, bursting
into his house, bouncing upstairs, feeling under his pillow for the
watch, finding it was not there, and creating a fine hubbub in his
family, before his little daughter remarks that it is in his pocket.
And of course he misses the train.  We have all done this sort of
thing.  A very grave and responsible man who sat in Parliament for
many years told me that he went up to his bedroom one evening to
change into evening-dress.  And at the stage of undressing at which
the ceremony of winding up his watch usually occurred, he wound it
up, put it under his pillow--and got into bed.  Happily, before he
had fallen asleep he remembered that he had come up, not to undress
for bed, but to dress for dinner.

I had an absurd experience of the kind myself not long ago.  As
everyone knows, there are two tube-stations at Oxford Circus,
connected underground.  I went down the lift at one station intending
to catch a train somewhere, and walked along the subway until I came
to a lift, into which a crowd of people were hurrying.  I suppose my
mind was occupied with some affair, and the mere habit of joining any
crowd that is going into any lift swept me in on the tide.  The
ticket-collector was too busy to check my ticket, and I duly found
myself out in the street again at the place from which I had started
before I realised what I had done.  I have the less hesitation in
making this confession because few of us can have failed to have some
experience of the sort.  Most of our actions are as automatic as the
functions of walking, or breathing, or masticating our food.  They
have become so habitual that we do not have to think about doing
them.  They perform themselves, as it were, without our help.

If it is your custom to lock up at night and put out the lights, you
do so quite mechanically, and if, having locked the sitting-room door
and reached the foot of the stairs, your mind chances to wake up and
inquire: "Now did you put the lights out?" and sends you back to make
sure, you never fail to find that the action has performed itself
without any conscious effort on your part.  It used to be no uncommon
thing for my family to find the front-door securely bolted in broad
daylight.  I was in those days always the last home at night, and,
having opened and closed the door, it was my custom to stoop down and
bolt it.  If by chance I came in during the morning or afternoon the
process was faithfully performed.  The habit of bolting the door had
become a part of the habit of unlocking it, and it needed a conscious
effort of the mind to break the sequence.  Or to take another
example, anybody can walk asleep down his own stairs quite safely,
but if he woke up at the head of the stairs in the dark and began to
think how the stairs went on and how many there were, he would not be
able to get down them without feeling his way like a blind man.

And most of us, I suppose, know how easy it is to forget the most
familiar name when the mind wakes up and urgently asks for it.  You
are talking, let us say, to Blessington when up comes Whorlow.  You
know Whorlow as well as you know your own shadow, and if you met him
in the street in the ordinary way his name would be on your tongue as
naturally as your own.  But now your mind interferes.  It demands
Whorlow's name for the purposes of introduction on the
spot--instantly.  The passive habit of thinking Whorlow when you see
Whorlow vanishes.  Your active thought becomes engaged.  It rushes
round in search of his name, and cannot find it, and you end by
mumbling something unintelligible.  And probably Whorlow, who is a
little sensitive about his name, feels that you have deliberately
slighted him.

It is not difficult to credit the stories of the people who forget
their own names or their own telephone number.  These things have
been committed to the automatic workings of the mind.  Our active
thought is not concerned with them, and when we consciously think
about them they escape.  As Samuel Butler says, we don't know a thing
until we have ceased to know that we know it.  If we ask ourselves
whether we know it we are on the way to being lost.  He takes the
case of the accomplished pianist who rattles off a nocturne of Chopin
or an impromptu of Schubert without a check or a mistake.  The habit
of the thing acquired by infinite practice carries him on like the
wind.  But let him be stopped in mid-flight, as it were, and then
begin to think about the notes, and he will flounder and hesitate
until the current of habit seizes him again and sweeps him to the
close.  Anyone can provide illustrations out of his own experience.
I can spell Philippi as well as most if I take it at a rush, but if I
begin by asking myself how to spell it, I fancy I should get
entangled in the "l's" and "p's."

In the case of the man and his watch, we see this conflict of the
active and passive mind in its most elementary form.  His conscious
thought is that he has forgotten his watch and that there is little
time to spare to get it.  Is there enough time?  In comes habit and
takes his watch out of his pocket to tell him how long it is before
the train starts.  The action is so automatic that he does not
associate it with the subject of his disquietude.  And there he
stands, looking at his watch to see if he has time to go home and get
it--a perpetual joke which we can all enjoy, none the less, perhaps
all the more, because we suspect that we all stand there with him.




YOUTH AND OLD AGE

"The Abbé, in spite of his fifty-eight years..."  I was reading a
story of De Maupassant in a railway-train, when this bitter
reflection on my age pulled me up with a slight shock.  I was on my
way to a cricket-match--my annual cricket-match; my team against the
village team--and this suggestion that I was an obsolescent old
fellow cast a momentary shadow over my spirit.  But I remembered that
De Maupassant died in the thirties or early forties and that he could
not be expected to know that fifty-eight is about the time when a man
ought to be getting his second wind.

It is the habit of youth to antedate old age in this offensive way.
Jane Austen, who died, I think, when she was under forty, was
accustomed in her twenties to write of people who had passed forty as
if they had come out of the Ark, and Addison speaks in his essay on
the "Widows' Club" of a man of sixty as if the fact was sufficient to
show that he was in the last stages of senile decay.  I had the
curiosity to look up Addison's age at his death and found it was
forty-six.  It gave me a curious sensation to discover that that
grave and elderly spirit had died when he was twelve years my junior.
He had always seemed to me so much older than I could ever hope to be
that it had never occurred to me to measure my years with his.

It is one of the humbling experiences we have as we grow older to
find that, in years, we have left behind so many of those who filled
the world with the sound of their name without having ourselves yet
done anything to boast about.  Alexander only lived half my lifetime;
Shelley and Keats when they died were young enough to be the sons of
a man of fifty-eight; Napoleon was the first man in Europe at
twenty-seven and had reached Waterloo at forty-six; all the vast
world of Shakespeare had been created when he was in the early
forties; the younger Pitt was Prime Minister twenty years and died at
an age when Mr. Lloyd George was still a private member.  And so on.

The explanation, I suppose, is that modern conditions have put old
age off ten or twenty years.  When Jane Austen wrote of elderly men
of forty she did so because they were elderly men at forty.  What
with their weakness for port wine--both Addison and Pitt were
notorious for the amount of liquor they carried--and the rudimentary
knowledge of disease and its causes, life was a much briefer affair
than it is now.  Whatever grievance we may have against the age of
science, it has made our days long in the land, and what is more
important, it has made them healthier.  The average man of sixty
to-day is, counting age in real values, younger than the average man
of fifty in the eighteenth century.  That is no doubt one of the
reasons why youth does not cut quite such a dash in the world as it
did when Napoleon was the first soldier in Europe at twenty-seven,
and Pitt the first statesman in Europe at twenty-six.  The old
fellows go on living and insisting on being young and keeping their
jobs.

They even go on playing cricket and watching cricket.  When I got on
the village playground, I found among the spectators a gay old
gentleman of ninety-three, of whom I have written before in these
articles, who never misses a match, and who looks on a man of
fifty-eight as a person who has hardly yet come to years of
discretion.  His genial greeting blew away the slight shadow cast
over me by Maupassant's unkind cut, and "in spite of my fifty-eight
years" I succeeded in giving the scorer a bit of trouble, so much so
that I thought it worth while when I was out to go and look over his
shoulder at the nice little procession of "ones" and "twos" that
followed my name.  I should have liked Jane Austen and Maupassant and
Addison to have looked over the scorer's shoulder with me.  They
would have changed their tune about old fellows of fifty-eight.




THE GOLDEN AGE

I see that Dean Inge has been lamenting that he did not live a couple
of generations ago.  He seems to think that the world was a much more
desirable place then, that it has been going to the dogs ever since,
and that the only comfortable thought that we can cultivate in this
degenerate time is that we shall soon be out of it.  Assuming for the
moment that the world was a happier place fifty or sixty years ago, I
doubt whether it follows that the Dean would have been happier in it
than he is in our world to-day.  The measure of personal happiness is
fortunately not dependent on external circumstances.  It is affected
by them, of course.  Most of us are more agreeable people when we
have dined than when we are hungry, when we have slept well than when
we have not slept at all, when our horse or our party has won than
when it has lost, when things go right than when things go wrong.  No
philosophy is an anodyne for the toothache, and the east wind plays
havoc with the feelings of the best of us.  In these and a thousand
other ways we are the sport of circumstance, but in this respect we
are no better and no worse off than our forbears fifty years ago or
five hundred years ago, or than our descendants will be fifty or five
hundred years hence.

But our essential happiness or unhappiness is independent of these
things.  It is a quality of character.  It may have a physical basis.
Our happiness, said the French lady to Boswell, depends upon the
circulation of the blood.  It may equally depend on our nervous
constitution or the functioning of our organs.  I cannot doubt that
the Carlyles would have been happier people if they had had better
digestions.  They lived in that period which is held up to us as the
time when it was good to be alive, but it is doubtful whether two
more miserable people than they were are to be found on earth to-day,
and Carlyle himself damned his own time even more bitterly than the
Dean damns this.  He would have damned any time in which he had the
misfortune to live, for life would always have been a sorrowful
affair to him.  It was his habit of mind.  And the world for each of
us is what the mind makes it.

  The mind is its own place, and in itself
  Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.


In short, whether life is a comedy or a tragedy or just a humdrum
affair that cannot be called either, does not depend upon the time in
which we happen to live, for it is all these things at all times.  It
depends upon our point of view.  I fancy Little Tich would have found
the world as amusing as a country fair if he had lived in the Rome of
Caligula, and I am sure that Carlyle would have found it as sad as a
funeral if he had lived in the Garden of Eden.  There is no question
of merit or virtue in the matter.  If there is, it is not the
meritorious or the virtuous who are usually the most happy.  It is
they who take life lightly and indifferently who get the most fun out
of it.  I doubt whether there was ever a more odious monster on earth
than Sulla, whose savageries and debaucheries made him not so much a
man as a satyr.  Yet, except for the hideous disease from which he
died, there can hardly ever have been a more fortunate man or one who
found the world, in a gross sense, a more amusing place.  Even when
his corpse was burned with the accustomed solemnities, the wind blew
and the rain fell in perfect time and sequence, "so that," as
Plutarch says, "his good fortune was firm even to the last, and did
as it were officiate at his funeral."  Dean Swift cursed the day he
was born, though he lived in the relatively comfortable time of Queen
Anne, and being the man he was, he would have cursed the day he was
born no matter what period of history he had lived in.  He carried an
unhappy world in the terrific gloom of his own mind.

Indeed, if we want to play with the idea of how we might have been
happy, it is not the thought of living in other times that will
satisfy us, but the thought of living other men's lives.  If I had
the privilege of antedating my birth, I would not bother about the
period, but would choose very carefully my personality.  Among the
ancients I should select to be Herodotus, whose immortal work is
saturated with the sunshine of as delighted a spirit as ever walked
the earth.  And among the moderns I would choose with equal
confidence to live the life of Macaulay.  It is true that he wept
very copiously.  I have amused myself sometimes in reading his
"Life," by collating the occasions on which he was in tears.  He
could have said with Michelet, "Le don que Saint Louis demande et
n'obtient pas, je l'eus 'Le don des larmes.'"  Novels and poetry were
bedewed with his tears.  He wept whenever he was reminded of the
sister he had lost, when he visited his old home in Bloomsbury, when
he said "Hail!" and when he said "Farewell!" when friends fell away,
and when foes, like Peel, passed into silence.  But, in spite of his
overcharged affection, what a rich, full, joyous life it was!  What
zest, what kindliness, what noble feeling, what fine living!  I put
Macaulay lower in the scale of literature than I once did, but in the
scale of humanity there is none higher.

There never was a golden age in which happiness was the universal
portion, nor one in which it was denied to those who had the gift
within.  It is a personal affair, not an affair of time, place or
condition, and if we are sad, it is idle to lament that we were not
born in days when we could have been merry.  Sancho Panza is happy in
any age, and Don Quixote is always sorrowful.




THE TOP OF THE LADDER

I suppose that if we had been asked, any time during the first twenty
years of this century, who was the most enviable of living men,
Caruso would, in the popular opinion, have had the first place.  He
had out-soared challenge.  He was the idol of both hemispheres.  He
earned the income of a prince, and he earned it in the most
pleasurable of all ways by giving pleasure to others and winning fame
for himself.  Yet he declared himself to be "often the unhappiest of
men."  And his unhappiness was that worst form of unhappiness, the
canker of success.  "When I was unknown," he said, "I sang like a
bird, careless, without thought of nerves.  But I am bending to-day
beneath the weight of renown which cannot increase, but which the
least vocal mishap may compromise.  That is why I am often the
unhappiest of men."

It is the penalty exacted by success.  The top of the ladder is a
desirable place, and we all like to get there, but having got there
we find that the foothold is precarious and that the drop is deep.  A
fall from the lower rungs of the ladder does us no harm.  We can pick
ourselves up and start again with a good heart, and without much hurt
to our self-esteem.  We may get higher, and in any case we shall not
fall lower.  And in the meantime there is the joy of "getting there"
to spur us on.  We are happy in the pursuit of happiness.  There it
dwells at the top rung of the ladder and if only we can reach it all
our yearnings will be satisfied and we shall enter into a seraphic
peace of possession that will be undisturbed.  And having got there
we find that all the fun was in the climbing, and that the prize is a
fleeting rainbow.  There is no way farther up and the way down is
easy.  The crowd shouts its applause from below, but Martinelli is
coming up behind and will shove Caruso over the top.

But Caruso, like Nelson, had the good fortune not to outlive his
triumph.  "Go at your zenith" was Nelson's maxim, and it is difficult
to read the story of his deliberate exposure of himself at Trafalgar
without concluding that he sought death.  It was a stroke of his
emotional and decisive genius, and it left him immortally at the top
of the ladder.  Had Wellington died at Waterloo he would have been
there with him, instead of being remembered as a grumpy old gentleman
who blocked the path and said "damn," and had his windows broken by
the mob.

It is asking for trouble to expect a permanent dwelling-place at the
top of the ladder, and to pin one's happiness to such an uncertain
tenure.  Life is a great comedian, and plays merciless practical
jokes with its most august victims.  It thrust the young Corsican up
to a height of power unparalleled in the history of the world and
then left him to eat his heart out on a bit of rock in a remote
ocean, growing prematurely old and fat and diseased.  But Napoleon's
penalty was light compared with that of the Kaiser, who must surely
hold the record for all time as the sport of the gods.  Napoleon at
least knew what a fickle thing success was.  Starting with nothing,
he had won the world, and to his cynical and _realpolitik_ mind there
was nothing surprising in his loss of what he had won.

But the Kaiser had never had the salutary teaching of experience.  He
was born at the top of the ladder, and could conceive of no existence
away from that dizzy eminence; he really believed that he belonged to
a semi-divine order, and if we had had the misfortune to be born in
his circumstances most of us would have had the same illusion.  Now,
after such splendour of power as Louis XIV. himself never enjoyed, he
is cast aside like an old shoe, disowned by his people, repudiated by
his relatives, his empire shrunk to the dimensions of a Dutch garden,
and he himself become, to all appearances, of no more significance
than if he were an Italian organ-grinder or blew the trombone in a
German band.  He must surely have had a larger measure than any man
in history of what Chaucer calls the heaviest of all afflictions:

  For of fortune's sharp adversitee,
    The worst kind of infortune is this,
  A man to have ben in prosperitee
    And it remembren when it passèd is.

"And it remembren when it passèd is."  It was that bitterness which
Caruso feared even when he was at the top of the ladder.  It is that
bitterness which is about all that life has left to the negligible
exile in Holland.




ON FACES--PAST AND PRESENT

In a matter of taste we cannot expect a decisive verdict, and it is
probable therefore that the discussion which is proceeding in the
Press as to whether we are more handsome than our forefathers will
leave this interesting problem unsettled.  "Of course men are growing
more handsome," says Sir William Orpen, the painter.  "Of course men
are not growing more handsome," says Professor Geddes, the
sociologist.  Between the two views comes that of Professor Keith,
the anthropologist, who says simply that faces are changing, whether
for better or worse he does not venture an opinion.

I have no doubt that Professor Geddes has got his eye on the Greeks.
He usually has.  And if we bring the ancient Greeks into the
competition I do not see how the verdict can go against him.  The
memorials they have left of the human face and form are still the
accepted standard of beauty.  The highest praise that the idolaters
of that young Apollo, Carpentier, can give him is that he is like a
Greek god.  And the Romans were handsome fellows, too.  Judging from
the most famous and most authentic bust of Cæsar, that great man had
a face of extraordinary intellectual beauty.  If you were to put, let
us say, a bust of Mr. Winston Churchill beside that of Cæsar, you
would not be disposed to say that we had achieved much in the way of
growing handsome in the course of two thousand years.  There were
ugly fellows then, of course, as there are ugly fellows now.  Sulla,
with his blotched and satyr face, was as unpleasant in appearance as
he was in character, and the great Socrates was no thing of beauty.
But in comparing ourselves with the past we must compare best with
best.

And if we leave the ancient world and come down to a time of which we
have authentic records in portraiture, the evidence is still with
Geddes.  You would have to stand a long time in the Strand before you
saw coming along its populous pavements a face of such sublimity as
that of Dante, and I fancy that if Beatrice appeared in a ball-room
in Belgravia she would not lack suitors for a dance.  Take the men
that Dürer and Holbein painted four hundred years ago.  It will be
hard to match the exquisite sensitiveness and enlightenment that live
in the face of Erasmus, or the dignity and noble austerity of
Bellini's portrait of the great Doge Loredano, which you may see in
the National Gallery.  Is there a face comparable with it in the
House of Commons to-day?  And what of that wonderful face of the
Bishop in the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael which you may also see in
the National Gallery?

And coming down a century or so later, and to another land, have we
much ground for thinking we of to-day are more handsome than
Velasquez' Spaniards?  Put Sir William Orpen's portraits of the
modern English into competition with Velasquez' portraits of the
Spaniards of three hundred years ago, and you will feel you have
passed to a lower plane of beauty.  You may say that it is unfair to
compare a supreme artist with a merely clever technician; but the
material they have worked on is the faces they have seen about them,
and the faces of Velasquez live in the memory like a sonnet of Keats
and the faces of Orpen leave no impression behind.  Where will the
much-praised "Chef" be beside the solemn beauty of Velasquez'
"Menippus" three hundred years hence?  Where will it be even beside
the "Tailor" of Moroni, to which it offers so common-place a
challenge?

Or take our own country.  While Velasquez was painting the princes
and beggars of Spain, Vandyck was painting the princes and nobles of
our own Court.  By comparison with the faces of Velasquez, the faces
of Vandyck are shallow and sentimental; but no one will deny that
they are handsome faces.  No one will deny, for example, that Charles
I. was as handsome as any king we have had in the last century.  And
I suppose, judging by the records of the young Milton, it would be
difficult to find in all our millions to-day a face of equal beauty
to his.

I am not suggesting by all this that, so far from growing more
handsome, we are growing less handsome.  The probability is that the
proportion of handsome faces remains about the same in all
generations.  But no doubt time changes the lines both of face and
form.  I am told that the armour in the Tower worn by the warriors of
the past would be too tight a fit for the average well-developed man
of to-day, and I suppose our jaws have narrowed, for the skulls of
ancient peoples are remarkable for the evenness of the teeth, while
to-day the bulk of us have more teeth than we have room for, and have
to have some out or carry them sideways.  Changes like these are due
to changed conditions--softer foods, more knowledge of the body and
its needs, and so on.  Women, for example, are taller than they were
a few generations ago when convention denied them the muscular
exercises of to-day.  The coming of the bicycle was their real
emancipation.  It abolished the long skirt, gave them the freedom of
their limbs, and in the end the freedom of their minds.  They are not
more beautiful than their grandmothers were, but they are different.
Perhaps they are better.




IN PRAISE OF MAIDEN AUNTS

I have received a rebuke from a lady at Cardiff, that, though
unmerited, calls for respectful attention.  In an article written
during the crisis in Anglo-French relations, I said that the visits
of English Ministers to M. Poincaré made as little impression on him
as a visit from his maiden aunt would do.  My correspondent takes the
illustration as an affront to maiden aunts.  "Is a maiden aunt in
your opinion the most contemptible thing on earth?" she demands.  "If
you would say 'Yes,' please open your eyes and think again.  If you
would say 'No,' will you kindly help us to scotch this vulgar lie by
refraining from using this irrelevant metaphor?"

I offer my correspondent and the whole company of maiden aunts a
sincere assurance that in taking their names in vain I had no
intention to imply a contempt which I certainly did not feel, and
which, if I had felt, would have been dishonouring not to them but to
me.  I wanted to emphasise the disregard of M. Poincaré for the views
of the British Government, and chose an illustration which I thought
effective.  I assumed that however much M. Poincaré loved his maiden
aunt (if he has a maiden aunt) he did not act on her advice in state
affairs.  I still hold that view.  I shall give his maiden aunt the
credit of thinking that if he followed her opinion he would act with
much more wisdom than he has shown.  That, I admit, was not in my
mind when I wrote, and I will not advance it now as a means of
dodging my correspondent's arrow.  But while I confess that I thought
that maiden aunts were not the persons that prime ministers usually
consulted on high politics, I did not mean that they were
contemptible or negligible on that account.  Maiden aunts, I rejoice
to say, have happier and cleaner affairs to occupy them than politics.

Take the most illustrious of all maiden aunts, the dear, lovable,
unforgettable Betsy Trotwood.  I have had many affairs of the heart
in fiction, from Rosalind to Tess, but I do not think that there is
any woman who lives in books who ever won my affection more securely
and uninterruptedly than Miss Trotwood.  It is a pleasure merely to
write her name.  It must be nearly fifty years since I made that
amazing journey with David Copperfield on the Dover road, but I still
remember the first meeting with Aunt Betsy as I remember no other
adventure in life.  David was at his last gasp and I was at my last
gasp with him.  We could bear no more.  And then, looking over the
gate--the best-known gate in literature except that "wicket-gate" of
another immortal journey--we saw that radiant woman appear with her
handkerchief tied over her cap, her gardening gloves on, and her
pruning knife in her hand, and there followed that thrilling welcome,
the memory of which sweeps over the mind like a wave of glory.

I am told that the boys of to-day do not make that journey on the
Dover road, and do not know what it is to feel Aunt Betsy collar them
and take them into the parlour and dose them, and bath them and put
their tired limbs to bed.  Unhappy boys!  What a bare, disinherited
life is theirs!  I would not sacrifice Betsy Trotwood for any memory
I have, or the Dover road that brought me to her for any golden road
to Samarkand.  But I do not recall that Betsy Trotwood cared twopence
about politics, or ever mentioned them.  She had more serious
interests.  There were the donkeys to keep at bay, there was Mr.
Dick's great mind, "as sharp as a surgeon's lancet," to inquire into,
there was her garden, and there was her nephew.

What would David have done without that sublime woman?  What would
any nephews and nieces do if there were no maiden aunts?  Betsy
Trotwood was the perfect type and pattern of all the tribe.  "There
was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and
carriage."  Listen to the fly-driver of whom David and I inquired the
way:


"Trotwood?" said he.  "Let me see.  I know the name too.  Old lady?"

"Yes," I said, "rather."

"Pretty stiff in the back?" said he, making himself upright.

"Yes," I said.  "I should think it very likely."

"Carries a bag?" said he, "bag with a good deal of room in it: is
gruffish and comes down on you sharp? ... My opinion is, she won't
stand anything, so here's a penny for you."


Admirable fly-driver!  But you were mistaken.  The outside of our
maiden aunts is apt to be roughish, but, like Gunga Din, they are
"white, clear white inside."  They come down on you sharp, but they
have hearts of gold.  They are not maiden aunts because they could
not be anything else, or are inferior to their sisters, or have less
of the milk of human kindness.  They have had their romances and put
them by, suffered their bereavements, and learned to turn a brave,
even harsh, face to the world; but where shall we find such a welcome
from the Dover roads of life as they give us, where such a wealth of
disinterested affection, where such treasured memories of our
thoughtless selves?  How many of us have had such a maiden aunt as
Betsy Trotwood, a little stiff in the back, as the fly-driver said, a
little severe in face and manner perhaps, a bit of a martinet about
taking our physic, keeping out of mischief, and things like that, but
withal a boundless ocean of affection, a person who had no use for
her own birthdays but never forgot ours, who took us to our first
play and showed us over the Tower, and was ready to fetch and carry
for us till she dropped.  Compare them with bachelor uncles.  Here
and there you may find a brilliant exception, like the uncle in _The
Golden Age_, who went away in an auriferous shower, or Macaulay, who
must have been the most gorgeous uncle in history; but they are few,
and only reveal the general poverty of the tribe, whereas maiden
aunts...

No, madam, heaven forbid that I should speak disrespectfully of
maiden aunts.  By the great name of Betsy Trotwood, I swear I am
guiltless of such base ingratitude.

. . . . . .

Do not remind me, dear reader, that Betsy Trotwood was not a maiden
aunt.  Let us respect her secret which her creator ought never to
have disclosed, and remember her as the chief ornament of the goodly
company to which she spiritually belonged.




OCTOBER DAYS

Just below me on the hillside is a forty-acre field that slopes
gently down to the valley.  Last year it was ploughed by a
motor-tractor: this year I rejoice to say it is being ploughed in the
old way, as it has been ploughed for a thousand years.  I suppose we
ought to be grateful for the motor-tractor and the steam-digger that
in cheapening production cheapen our food, but I am glad that the
farmer below me has returned to the ancient way.  When the machine
comes in, the poetry goes out, and though poetry has no place in the
farmer's ledger it is pleasant to find that he has sound reasons for
reverting to the primitive plough.  All the operations of the fields
are beautiful to see.  They are beautiful in themselves and beautiful
in their suggestions of the permanence of things in the midst of
which we come and go like the guests of a day.  Who can see the
gleaners in the field, or the haymakers piling the hay on the
hay-wain, or the mower bending over the scythe without the stirring
of the feelings which the mere beauty of the scene or of the motion
does not explain?  Indeed the sense of beauty itself is probably only
the emanation of the thoughts subtly awakened by the action.  It is
so with pictures.  I do not know any painting that lives in my mind
with a more abiding beauty than one of Millet's.  It is just a
solitary upland field, with a flight of birds and an untended plough
lying in the foreground.  The barrenness and austerity of the scene
are almost forbidding at the first glance, but as the mind dwells on
it, it becomes instinct with meaning and emotion.  Evening has come
and darkness is falling over the land.  The labourer has left the
field and the rooks are going home.  In the midst of the ancient
solitude and silence that have taken possession of the earth, the old
plough has the passion of personality.  It embodies the epic of man's
labour with the intensity that direct statement could not convey but
only the power of suggestion can give.

And so it is with the scene before me.  As I watch the ploughman
drawing that straight, undulating line in the yellow stubble of the
field, he seems to be not so much a mortal as a part of the
landscape, that comes and goes as the seasons come and go, or as the
sun comes and goes.  His father, it may be, ploughed this field
before him, and his father before him, and so on back through the
centuries to the days when the monks still drank their sack and ate
their venison in the monastery below, which is now only a mound of
stones.  And over the new-ploughed soil the rooks, who have as
ancient an ancestry as himself, descend in clouds to forage as they
have descended in these late October days for a thousand years.  And
after the rooks, the starlings.  They have gathered in hosts after
the pleasant domestic intimacies of summer for their winter
campaigning, and stream across the sky in those miraculous mass
manœuvres that affect one like winged and noiseless music.  When
they swoop down on the upturned soil the farmer blesses them.

He forgets the devastations of the summer in the presence of the
ruthless war which the mail-clad host is making on the
leather-jackets and other pestilent broods that lurk in the soil.
They, too, have their part in the eternal economy of the fields.
They are notes in that rhythm of things which touches our
transitoriness with the hint of immemorial ancestry.  The ploughman
has reached the far end of his furrow and rests his horses while he
takes his lunch by the hedgerow.  That is aflame once more with the
returning splendours of these October days.  The green of summer has
turned to a passion of gold and scarlet and yellow and purple, and
all over the landscape the foliage is drunk with colour.  The elms
that have stood so long garbed in sober green are showing wonderful
tufts and curls of bright yellow at the top, like old gentlemen who
are growing old gaily.  It is as though they have suddenly become
vocal and hilarious and are breaking into song.  A few days hence
they will be a glory of bright yellow.  But that last note of triumph
does not belong to October.  It is in the first days of November that
the elm is at its crowning hour.  But the beech is at its best now,
and the woodlands that spread up the hillside glow, underfoot and
overhead, with the fires of fairyland.

In the bright warm sunshine there is a faint echo of the songs of
spring.  There are chirrups and chatterings from voices that have
been silent for long.  There is the "spink, spink" of the chaffinch,
and from the meadowland at the back there comes at intervals the song
of a lark, not the full song of summer, but no mean imitation of it.
It is the robin, however, who is now chorister-in-chief.  His voice
was lost or unnoticed when the great soloists were abroad, but now he
is left to sing the requiem of the year alone--unless we include the
owl who comes punctually every evening as the dusk falls to my
garden, and utters a few owlish incantations.

I can see the ploughman nearing the top end of the field, and can
hear the jangle of the harness and his comments to the horses and
almost the soft fall of the soil as the furrow is turned over.  I
think I will bid him adieu, for these October days provide tasks for
me as well as for the ploughman.  There are still some apples to
pick, there is an amazing bed of carrots to be got up, there are
laurels to be cut down, there are--oh, joy!--bonfires to be lighted,
and there are young fir-trees to be transplanted.  I think I will
start with the bonfires.



THE END



  Made At The
  Temple Press
  Letchworth
  Great Britain










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