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Title: This and That and the Other
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release Date: March 9, 2020 [eBook #61590]
Language: English
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THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
by
H. BELLOC
Author of "On Anything," "On Everything," "On
Something," etc.
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
Dodd, Mead and Company
Published, November, 1912
To
_EVAN CHARTERIS_
PREFACE TO THE READER
Since I am assured that this book requires a Preface I must attempt to
write one, but I cannot conceive upon what lines it should run unless
they be an apology for writing of so many things, and in very many
different moods, and in so many different ways.
A Preface is intended to introduce to the Reader the air in which the
book that follows must be taken, but what air attaches in common to
historical reconstructions, to abstract vagaries, to stories, to jests,
to the impression of a storm, and to annoyance with a dead scientist?
The sort of introduction which a book like this needs is like that
which a man might find to say who should have to deliver at a house
a ton of coals, some second-hand books, a warrant, several weather
forecasts and a great quantity of dust. I do not know how such a man
would make himself pleasant to the homestead, or prepare for the
reception of so mixed a load.
But now I come to think of it the parallel is not quite just. For the
man with that heap of rubbish in his cart would be bound to deliver
the same, and proportionately to annoy the recipient. But you are not
bound to buy, to borrow, or even to pick up this book. And even if you
do you are not bound to read it. If you do read it I advise you to read
the Essay beginning on page forty-five; the history beginning on page
one hundred and forty-three; the denunciation of the very wickedest
sort of men, which I have begun on page one hundred and three; the
sort of thing which Shakespeare suffered, which you will find on page
one hundred and eighty-six. When you have waded through all that you
can console yourself by reading the last essay, which is intended to
console you. I hope it will. Farewell.
H. BELLOC.
P.S. I have never read a Preface in my life, and I suppose you will not
read this.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I AN OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG DIPLOMATIST 1
II ON PEDANTS 12
III ON ATHEISM 22
IV ON FAME 28
V ON REST 33
VI ON DISCOVERY 38
VII ON INNS 45
VIII ON ROWS 56
IX THE PLEASANT PLACE 62
X ON OMENS 82
XI THE BOOK 89
XII THE SERVANTS OF THE RICH 103
XIII THE JOKE 111
XIV THE SPY 122
XV THE YOUNG PEOPLE 128
XVI ETHANDUNE 135
XVII THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG 143
XVIII THE CROOKED STREETS 153
XIX THE PLACE APART 162
XX THE EBRO PLAIN 170
XXI THE LITTLE RIVER 178
XXII SOME LETTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TIME 186
XXIII ON ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE GREAT 198
XXIV ON LYING 207
XXV THE DUPE 213
XXVI THE LOVE OF ENGLAND 219
XXVII THE STORM 224
XXVIII THE VALLEY 233
XXIX A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA 242
XXX PARIS AND THE EAST 253
XXXI THE HUMAN CHARLATAN 262
XXXII THE BARBARIANS 273
XXXIII ON KNOWING THE PAST 284
XXXIV THE HIGHER CRITICISM 296
XXXV THE FANATIC 307
XXXVI A LEADING ARTICLE 314
XXXVII THE OBITUARY NOTICE 320
XXXVIII THE "MERRY ROME" COLUMN 327
XXXIX OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG PARASITE 335
XL ON DROPPING ANCHOR 344
THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
I
AN OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG DIPLOMATIST
MY VERY DEAR YOUNG DIPLOMATIST,
My life-long friendship with your father the Old Diplomatist, must
excuse me for the liberty I am now taking.
I am infinitely concerned that your career should be a successful one
and that before you perish of senile decay you should have held the
position of Ambassador in at least three great capitals of Europe.
You certainly will not attain to such eminence unless you are early
instructed by some competent authority in the mysteries of your trade,
and as I am singularly well placed for giving you private information
upon these, I shall immediately proceed to do so.
I beg you to remember at the very outset of your responsible profession
what destinies will lie in your hands. The lives of countless innocent
men will depend upon your judgment and upon your provocation or
restraint of some great war. The principal fortunes of our time will
be largely dependent upon your decisions and will always fluctuate
according to the advice you may give your Government. More important
still, the honour of your country and its splendour before the world
will hang upon your good sense and foresight. Weigh, therefore, I
beg of you, before you undertake so high a function, its duties and
its perils, and all that you may have to answer for at the Last Day,
if indeed (as so many still pretend) human beings are answerable
in the long run for the good or evil they have done upon earth. Do
not, however, be deterred by any shirking of consequences, or by
what Tennyson has well called "Craven fears of being great" from the
tremendous task which your noble calling involves. Some one must
undertake it, and why not you? Having well balanced in your mind these
major things, next note carefully, I beg of you, the rules I am about
to lay down.
The first of these is that you shall possess yourself of an income
of not less than $2,000 a year. You will immediately protest, and
with justice, that it is impossible upon such a revenue to impress
the nobility of Austria, of Russia, or even of Montenegro, with those
qualities which invariably accompany great wealth; but your objection
is a youthful and improvident one. You will not be required at this
outset of your activities to dazzle by any lavish expenditure the
luxurious Courts of the countries I have just named. You are too young
to be entrusted with any such duty and at the most it will be incumbent
upon you to expend no more upon appearances than what is necessary
for making a decent show at the dinner table of others. It is true
that from time to time you will have to entertain at a meal, and at
your own charges, a journalist perhaps or even a traveller, but from
a narrow and cautious observation of some several hundred instances I
have discovered that of an average of two hundred meals consumed by
Young Diplomatists in the space of a year at places of public resort,
no more than 83 at the most, nor less than 51 at the least, were a
burden upon their purses. And by management of the simplest sort you
can enjoy the hospitality of others at least three times as often as
you are compelled to extend it yourself. Moreover, you will have this
great advantage, that you will know the habits of the capital in which
you reside and can give your guest the impression of having dined well
amid luxurious surroundings, although as a matter of fact he shall have
dined exceedingly ill amid surroundings which I tremble to remember:
for I also have been in Arcadia.
If I have set down such a figure as $2,000 it is merely because that
sum has been decided upon by those experts in the profound art of
International Politics who determine the minimum for the Court of St.
James.
Let us leave this sordid matter and consider next the higher part of
your mission, in which connection I will first speak of what your
clothing and demeanour should be.
It is not true that the presence of a crease clearly emphasised down
the front of each trouser leg is a necessity or even an advantage to
the conduct of World-wide affairs. Upon the contrary, I have come to
the settled conclusion after no little review of the matter that a
mere hint at such a line is not only sufficient, but preferable to any
emphasis of it.
You may object to me that the eminent man who advised and all but
carried out the occupation of the South Pole by the troops of
Monomotapa six years ago, stretched his trousers in a machine every
night, or, to speak more accurately, ordered his valet under pain of
death to provide that detail. It is true. But it was not because of, it
was in spite of, this habit that the Baron brought his pigs to market,
and annexed to the dominion of his Sovereign those regions which were
abandoned the next year with the utmost precipitation.
I yield to no one in my admiration of his amazing subtlety and
comprehensive coup d'oeil; but I have it upon unimpeachable testimony
that the too great rigidity of his garments formed, until the very
last moment, an obstacle to the success of his plans. I give it to
you, therefore, as a general rule, that you should do no more than
put the trousers upon a table, and pass your hand lightly over them
before putting them on; in this way you will produce such a crease as
will suggest, and no more than suggest, the feature upon which I have
detained you in this paragraph.
More important even than your garments will be your method of address
and in particular your conversation with women. Here I can only give
you the advice which I fear may seem somewhat general and vague, that
you should never neglect upon the one hand to engage in a dialogue of
some sort, nor venture, upon the other, to be drawn into a violent
altercation.
Thus, if it be your good fortune (as it was once mine) to sit upon a
marble terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and there drink a
Chianti of that sort which the French call "Iron Filings" accompanied
by the flesh of goats, it would be noted disastrously against you if
you refused during the whole course of the meal to utter a word to the
lady upon your left or to the lady upon your right. But it will advance
you in no way if at the second course you allow your ungovernable
temper to become your master, and to tell either of these flanking
parties what you thought of them in the heat of the moment. Any attempt
to retrieve your position after such an excess by loud appeals to the
justice of your cause would but degrade you further in the eyes of
your chief, and you might look in vain during all succeeding years for
an appointment to the conduct of important and delicate negotiations
between any two great powers. No: under such circumstances (to take a
concrete instance) don't mention trivial things of literature or of
the weather, but discover something novel in the aspect of the sea, or
recite for the advantage of the company (but at intervals of not less
than five minutes) some terse falsehood that may have occurred to you,
and preferably one damaging to the moral character of an innocent man.
Never contradict any statement whatsoever that may be made in your
presence, at least in public. Nor, upon your part, make any affirmation
which might lead to a contradiction but, after waiting until you have
heard an expression of opinion from that person whom you would address,
agree with it, differing only in just so much as will lend salt to
the remainder of the delightful interchange. Let it appear in all you
say that you are at once more learned than those about you, and yet
believe them to be more learned than yourself. When you allude to the
Great never do so in terms of familiarity, even if the Great be your
own Uncle, but rather in terms of distant admiration or of still more
distant contempt. Above all--this I most urgently charge you--confess
in the most open manner a complete ignorance of how money is made,
whether honourably or dishonourably. This last precept is the more
difficult to fulfil when you consider that in the high-bred world of
European gentlemen in which you will find yourself, money is very
nearly the sole subject of discourse.
There remains to be dealt with the last exercise whereby some important
mission confided to you may be brought to an issue.
I will suppose that a cautious Government is making an experiment
of your abilities and has despatched you for the negotiation of a
Commercial Treaty with the Viceroy of Seringapatam: a very usual test
for the judging of a man's capacities.
You will, during the weeks in which sundry varlets draft letters,
exchange views, consider schedules, and argue tariffs, make it your
particular care to visit His Excellency and His Excellency's Wife, to
play tennis with His Excellency's daughters once or twice, but more
certainly to pursue in company with His Excellency's sons some animal
which may be killed without any serious risk.
When the preliminaries of the Treaty have been agreed to and the
moment has come for fixing your signature thereto, it is in the essence
of good breeding that you should perform the act quite simply with some
ordinary pen, such for instance as the fountain pen which you carry in
your pocket, and I need hardly say that jokes framed for the occasion,
or any flippancy of demeanour during the solemnity would be in equally
bad taste. You shall (if my memory of many such occasions serves me
right) spread your left hand (which you will previously have washed
very carefully) outwards over the paper, arch your eyebrows somewhat,
say to your salaried friend, "Where do I sign?" and then quickly put
down your name in the place indicated, and that in a very ordinary
manner. These are the little things that betray not only the Gentleman
but the Arbiter of the World's Destinies.
Space forbids me to deal with the minor matters of religion, affection
and morals. I only beg you to keep all three under a severe restraint,
and in particular the first, too great a zeal in which has early
ruined many a rising young fellow.
Good-bye, my dear Young Diplomatist. If they send you to Paris ask for
Berlin; and if they send you to Berlin kill yourself.
I am, in fond remembrance of your father,
Your devoted friend,
H. BELLOC.
II
ON PEDANTS
The just and genial man will attempt to take pleasure in what surrounds
him when it is capable of giving him amusement, always supposing that
it does not move him to wrath. I mean, that a man who is both just and
companionable will rather laugh than turn sour at the discomforts of
this world. For example, consider the Pedant.
Never was such an exasperating fellow; never was there a time when he
ran riot as he does now! On which account many are bewildered and many
sad, they know not why, and many who know their time are soured, but a
few (and I hope they may be an increasing few) are neither bewildered
nor saddened nor soured by this spectacle, but claim to be made
merry--and are.
What is a Pedant?
There are many fixed human types, and every one of them has a name.
There is the Priest, there is the Merchant, there is the Noble--and
there is the Pedant. Each of these types are known by a distinctive
name, and to most men they call up a clear image, but because they are
types of mankind they are a little too complicated for definition.
Nevertheless I will have a try at the Pedant.
The essence of the Pedant is twofold, first that he takes his
particular science for something universal, second, that he holds with
the Grip of Faith certain set phrases in that science which he has
been taught. I say "with the Grip of Faith"; it is the only metaphor
applicable; he has for these phrases a violent affection. Not only does
he not question them, but he does not know that they can be questioned.
When he repeats them it is in a fixed and hierarchic voice. When they
are denied he does not answer, but flies into a passion which, were he
destined to an accession of power, might in the near future turn to
persecution.
Alas! that the noblest thing in man should be perverted to such a use;
for Faith when it is exercised upon those unprovable things which are
in tune with things provable, illuminates and throws into a right
perspective everything we know. But the Faith of the Pedant!...
The Pedant crept in upon the eclipse of our religion; his reign is
therefore brief. Perhaps he is also but a reflection of that vast
addition to material knowledge which glorified the last century.
Perhaps it is the hurry, and the rapidity of our declining time, which
makes it necessary for us to accept ready-made phrases and to act on
rules of thumb good or bad. Perhaps it is the whirlpool and turmoil of
classes which has pitchforked into the power of the Pedant whole groups
of men who used to escape him. Perhaps it is the Devil. Whatever it is
it is there.
You see it more in England than in any other European country. It runs
all through the fibre of our modern literature and our modern comment,
like the strings of a cancer. Come, let us have a few examples.
There is "the Anglo-Saxon race." It does not exist. It is not there.
It is no more there than Baal or Moloch or the Philosopher's Stone, or
the Universal Mercury. There never was any such race. There were once
hundreds and hundreds of years ago a certain number of people (how many
we do not know) talking a local German dialect in what is now Hampshire
and Berkshire. To this dialect historians have been pleased to give the
name of Anglo-Saxon, and that is all it means. If you pin your Pedant
down to clear expression, saying to him, "Come, now, fellow, out with
it! What is this Anglo-Saxon race of yours?" you find that he means a
part (and a part only) of such people in the world as habitually speak
the English language, or one of its dialects: that part only which in
a muddy way he sympathises with; that part which is more or less of
his religion, and more or less conformable to his own despicable self.
It does not include the Irish, it does not include the negroes of the
United States, but it does include a horde of German Jews, and a mixed
rabble of every origin under the sun sweating in the slums of the New
World.
Why then you may ask, and you may well ask, does the man use the phrase
"Anglo-Saxon" at all?
The answer is simple. It smacks--or did originally smack--of learning.
Among the innumerable factors of modern Europe one, and only one, was
the invasion of the Eastern part of this island (and only the Eastern
part) by pirates from beyond the North Sea. The most of these pirates
(but by no means all) belonged either to a loose conglomeration of
tribes whom the Romans called Saxones, or to a little maritime tribe
called Angles. True, the full knowledge of that event is a worthy
subject of study; there is a good week's reading upon it in original
authorities, and I can imagine a conscientious man who would read
slowly and make notes, spending a fortnight upon the half dozen
contemporary sources of knowledge we possess upon these little
barbarian peoples. But, Lord! what a superstructure the Pedant has
raised upon that narrow base!
Then there is "alcohol"; what "alcohol" does to the human body, and
the rest of it; to read the absurd fellows one would imagine that this
stuff "alcohol" was something you could see and handle; something with
which humanity was familiar, like Beef, Oak, Sand, Chalk, and the rest.
Not a bit of it. It does not exist any more than the "Anglo-Saxon race"
exists. It is a chemical extraction. And in connection with it you have
something very common to all such folly, to wit, gross insufficiency
even in the line to which its pedantry is devoted. For this chemical
abstraction of theirs may be expressed in many forms and it is only
in one of these forms that they mouth out their interminable and
pretentious dogmas. Humanity, healthy European humanity that is, the
jolly place called Christendom, has drunk from immemorial time wine
and beer and cider. It has been noticed (also from immemorial time)
that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and
that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined. There is
the important fact which humanity has never missed, and without which
the rhodomontades of the Pedant would have no foothold. It is because
his pretended knowledge relates to a real evil with which humanity is
acquainted that people listen to him at all on the subject. He ill
requites their confidence! He exploits and bamboozles them to the top
of their bent. He terrifies the weak victims (and the weaker witnesses)
of drunkenness and often, I am sorry to say, picks their pockets as
well. I can call to mind as I write more than one Pedant who by harping
on this word "alcohol" has got very considerable sums out of the
public. Well, it is the public's fault! _Vult decipi et decipiatur._
And a murrain on it--also a quinsy!
Then there is "the Fourth Gospel": your Pedant never calls it the
Gospel of S. John, as his fathers have done before him for two thousand
years. He must give it a pretentious name and then, because it happens
to be cram-full of Christian doctrine, he must deny its authenticity.
There is not a vestige of proof against that authenticity, nor for
that matter a vestige of sound historical proof in favour of it.
Like everything else in the fundamental structure of the Faith from
the Mass to the Apocalypse, it has for witness the tradition of the
Church, and is no more acceptable as an historic document of the type
of the "Agricola" or the "Catiline Orations" than any one of the other
Gospels. There is not an event mentioned in the whole of the New
Testament which has true historic value. The whole thing depends upon
Belief, and Belief in a corporate teaching body. Yet how your Pedant
has flourished upon this same Fourth Gospel! Now he is "reverently
accepting it," now "reluctantly rejecting it"; he fondles it as a cat
does a mouse, and when you try to come to handgrips with him he will
first (taking you for a simple and unlearned man) put you off with
silly technicalities. You have but to read up the meaning of these
technicalities in the dictionary to find that he is talking through
his hat. He has no evidence, and there can be no evidence, as to
whether the Gospel was or was not written by the traditional figure
which the Catholic Church calls S. John, and all he has to say on the
matter would not tempt the most gullible gambler to invest a penny on a
ten-to-one chance.
Then there is "the conflict between religion and science." What the
Pedant really means when he uses that phrase (and he has not only used
it threadbare but has fed it by the ton to the recently enfranchised
and to the vulgar in general) is the conflict between a mystical
doctrine and every-day common sense. That conflict has always existed
and always will exist. If you say to any man who has not heard of such
a thing before "I will kill you and yet you will survive" or "This
water is not ordinary water, it does more than wash you or assuage your
thirst, it will also cure blindness, and make whole a diseased limb,"
the man who has not heard such things before, will call you a liar;
of course he will, and small blame to him. We can only generalise from
repeated experience, and oddities and transcendental things are not
within the field of repeated experience. But "science" has nothing to
do with that. The very fact that they use the word religion is enough
to show the deplorable insufficiency of their minds. What religion?
Your Pedant is far too warped and hypocritical to say exactly what he
means even in so simple a case; so he uses the word "religion," a term
which may apply to Thugs with their doctrine of the sanctity of murder,
or to the Mahommedans who are not bound to any transcendental doctrine
but only to a Rule of Life, or to Buddhists who have but a philosophy,
or to Plymouth Brethren, or to Head Hunters.
I said at the beginning of this that the Pedant was food for laughter,
rather than for anger.
Humph!
III
ON ATHEISM
The Atheist is he that has forgotten God. He that denies God may
do so in many innocent ways, and is an Atheist in form, but is not
condemnable as such. Thus one man will reason by contradiction that
there can be no God. If there were a God (says he), how could such
things be? This man has not read or does not know sufficient to his
purpose, or is not wide enough. His purpose is Truth, so he is not to
be condemned. Another will say, "There is no God," meaning, "There
is none that I have heard called God": as, the figure of an old man;
some vengeful spirit; an absurdity taught him by fools; and so forth.
Another also will say, "There is no God," as he would say, "Thus do I
solve this riddle!" He has played a game, coming to a conclusion of
logic, and supposes himself right by the rules of the game. Nor is he
more to be condemned than one who shall prove, not that God is not, but
that God is, by similar ways. For though this last man proves truth,
and that first man falsehood, yet each is only concerned with proving,
and not with making good or standing up for the Truth, so that it shall
be established. Neither would found in the mind something unshakeable,
but each would rather bring a process to its conclusion for neatness.
We call that man Atheist who, thinking or unthinking, waking or
sleeping, knows not God; and when it is brought to him that either God
is not or is, would act as though the question mattered nothing. Such
an Atheist makes nothing of God's judgments nor of his commands. He
does not despise them but will have them absent, as he will have God
absent also. Nor is he a rebel but rather an absconder.
Of Atheism you may see that it is proper to a society and not to a
man, so that Atheists are proper to an Atheist Commonwealth, and this
because we find God in mankind or lose him there.
Rousseau would have no Atheist in the Republic. All other opinion he
thought tolerable, but this intolerable because through it was loosened
every civil bond. But if a Commonwealth be not Atheist no Atheist will
be within it, since it is through men and their society that one man
admits God. No one quite lonely could understand or judge whether of
God's existence or of much lesser things. A man quite lonely could
not but die long before he was a man grown. He would have no speech
or reason. Also a man Atheist in a Commonwealth truly worshipping
would be abhorrent as a traitor with us and would stand silent. How,
then, would Rousseau not tolerate the Atheist in his Republic, seeing
that if his Republic were not Atheist no Atheist could be therein? Of
this contradiction the solution is that false doctrine of any kind is
partially hidden and striving in the minds of men before one man shall
become its spokesman. Now of false doctrine when it is thus blind and
under water nothing can be either tolerated or proscribed. The ill-ease
of it is felt but no magistrate can seize it anywhere. But when one man
brings it up to reason and arms it with words, then has it been born
(as it were) into the world, and can be tried and judged, accepted or
expelled.
No Commonwealth has long stood that was Atheist, yet many have been
Atheist a little before they died: as some men lose the savour of
meats, and the colours and sounds of things also a little before they
die.
A Commonwealth fallen into this palsy sees no merit in God's effect of
Justice, but makes a game of law. In peril, as in battle or shipwreck,
each man will save himself. In commerce man will cozen man. The
Commonwealth grown Atheist lets the larger prey upon the less, until
all are eaten up.
They say that a man not having seen salt or knowing that such a thing
as salt might be and even denying that salt could be (since he had not
seen it), might yet very livelily taste the saltness of the sea. So it
is with men who still love Justice, though they have lost Religion. For
these men are angered by evil-doing, and will risk their bodies in pity
and in indignation. They therefore truly serve God in whose essence
Justice resides, and of whom the Effect in Society is Justice. But what
shall we say of a man who speaks of salt as a thing well known, and yet
finds no division between his well and the water of the sea? And that
is the Atheist case. When men of a mean sinfulness purchase a seat of
judgment, and therein, while using the word "God," care nothing for
right but consider the advantage of their aged limbs and bellies, or of
the fellow rich they drink with, then they are Atheist indeed.
That Commonwealth also is Atheist in which the rulers will use the fear
of God for a cheat, hoping thereby to make foolish men work for them,
or give up their goods, or accept insult and tyranny. It is so ordered
that this trick most powerfully slings back upon its authors, and that
the populace are now moved at last not by empty sentences which have
God's name in them, but by lively devils. In the end of such cheats the
rich men who so lied are murdered and by a side wind God comes to his
own.
One came to a Courtier who had risen high in the State by flattery
and cowardice, but who had a keen wit. To this Courtier he propounded
a certain scheme which would betray the Commonwealth, and this the
Courtier agreed to. But when he had done so he said: "Either God is or
is not. If he is not, why then we have chosen well."
This instance is a mark and Atheism is judged by it. For if God is not,
then all falsehoods, though each prove the rest false, are each true,
and every evil is its own good, and there is confusion everywhere. But
if God is, then the world can stand. Now that the world does stand all
men know and live by, even those who, not in a form of words but in the
heart, deny its Grand Principle.
IV
ON FAME
Fame is that repute among men which gives us pleasure. It needs much
repetition, but also that repetition honourable. Of all things desired
Fame least fulfils the desire for it; for if Fame is to be very great
a man must be dead before it is more than a shoot; he therefore has
not the enjoyment of it (as it would seem). Again, Fame while a man
lives is always tarnished by falsehood; for since few can observe him,
and less know him, he must have Fame for work which he does not do and
forego Fame for work which he knows deserves it.
Fame has no proper ending to it, when it is first begun, as have things
belonging to other appetites, nor is any man satiated with it at any
time. Upon the contrary, the hunger after it will lead a man forward
madly always to some sort of disaster, whether of disappointment in
the soul, or of open dishonour.
Fame is not to be despised or trodden under as a thing not to be
sought, for no man is free of the desire of it, nor can any man believe
that desire to be an imperfection in him unless he desire at the same
time something greater than Fame, and even then there is a flavour of
Fame certain to attach to his achievement in the greater thing. No one
can say of Fame, "I contemn it"; as a man can say of titles, "I contemn
them." Nor can any man say of the love of Fame, "This is a thing I
should cast from me as evil," as a man may say of lust when it is
inordinate, that is, out of place. Nor can any man say of Fame, "It is
a little thing," for if he says that he is less or more than a man.
The love of Fame is the mobile of all great work in which also man is
in the image of God, who not only created but took pleasure in what he
did and, as we know, is satisfied by praise thereof.
In what way, then, shall men treat Fame? How shall they seek it, or
hope to use it if obtained? To these questions it is best answered that
a man should have for Fame a natural appetite, not forced nor curiously
entertained; it must be present in him if he would do noble things. Yet
if he makes the Fame of those things, and not those things themselves
his chief business, then not only will he pursue Fame to his hurt, but
also Fame will miss him. Though he should not disregard it yet he must
not pursue it to himself too much, but he will rightly make of it in
difficult times a great consolation.
When Fame comes upon a man well before death then must he most
particularly beware of it, for is it then most dangerous. Neither must
he, having achieved it, relax effort nor (a much greater peril) think
he has done his work because some Fame now attaches thereto.
Some say that after a man has died the spreading of his earthly Fame
is still a pleasure to him among greater scenes: but this is doubtful.
One thing is certain, Fame is enjoyable in good things accomplished;
bitter, noisome and poisonous in all other things--whether it be the
Fame of things thought to be accomplished but not accomplished, or Fame
got by accident, or Fame for evil things concealed because they are
evil.
The judgment of Fame is this: That many men having done great things of
a good sort have not Fame. And that many men have Fame who have done
but little things and most of them evil. The virtue of Fame is that it
nourishes endeavour. The peril of Fame is that it leads men towards
itself, and therefore into inanities and sheer loss. But Fame has a
fruit, which is a sort of satisfaction coming from our communion with
mankind.
They that believe they deserve Fame though they lack it may be consoled
in this: that soon they shall be concerned with much more lasting
things, and things more immediate and more true: just as a man who
misses some entertainment at a show will console himself if he knows
that shortly he shall meet his love. They that have Fame may correct
its extravagances by the same token: remembering that shortly they will
be so occupied that this earthly Fame of theirs will seem a toy. Old
men know this well.
V
ON REST
Rest is not the conclusion of labour but the recreation of power. It
seems a reward because it fulfils a need: but that need being filled,
Rest is but an extinction and a nothingness. So we do not pray for
Rest; but (in a just religion) we pray after this life for refreshment,
light and peace--not for Rest.
Rest is only for a little while, as also is labour only for a little
while: each demanding the other as a supplement; yet is Rest in some
intervals a necessary ground for seed, and without Rest to protect the
sprouting of the seed no good thing ever grew.
Of many follies in a Commonwealth concerning Rest the chief is that
Rest is not needed for all effort therein. Thus one man at leisure will
obtain work of another for many days without a sufficiency of Rest for
that other and think to profit by this. So he may: but he profits
singly, and when many rich do so by the poor it is like one eating his
own flesh, since the withdrawal of Rest from those that labour will
soon eat up the Commonwealth itself.
Much that men do with most anxiety is for the establishment of Rest.
Wise men have often ordered gardens carefully for years, in order
to enjoy Rest at last. Beds also are devised best when they give
the deepest interval of repose and are surrounded by artifice with
prolonged silence, made of quiet strong wood and well curtained from
the morning light. It is so with rooms removed from the other rooms of
a house, and with days set apart from labour, and with certain kinds of
companionship.
Undoubtedly the regimen of Rest for men is that of sleep, and sleep
is a sort of medicine to Rest, and again a true expression of it. For
though these two, Rest and Sleep, are not the same yet without sleep
no man can think of Rest nor has Rest any one better body or way of
being than this thing Sleep. For in sleep a man utterly sinks down in
proportion as it is deep and good into the centre of things and becomes
one with that from which he came, drawing strength not only by negation
from repose, but in some way positive from the being of his mother
which is the earth. Some say that sleep is better near against the
ground on this account and all men know that sleep in wild places and
without cover is the surest and the best. Sleep promises waking as Rest
does a renewal of power; and the good dreams that come to us in sleep
are a proof that in sleep we are still living.
A man may deny himself any other voluptuousness but not Rest. He may
forego wine or flesh or anything of the body, and music or disputation,
or anything of the mind, or love itself, or even companionship; but not
Rest, for if he denies himself this he wastes himself and is himself
no longer. Rest, therefore, is a necessary intermittent which we must
have both for soul and body and is the only necessity inherent to both
those two so long as those two are bound together in the matter and net
of this world. For food is a necessity to the body and virtue to the
soul, but Rest to one and to the other.
There is no picture of delight in which we envy other men so much as
when, lacking Rest, we see them possessing it; on which occasions we
call out unwisely for a Perpetual Rest and for the cessation of all
endeavour. In the same way men devise a lack of Rest for a special
torment, and none can long survive it.
Rest and innocence are good fellows, and Rest is easier to the innocent
man. The wicked suffer unrest always in some sort on account of God's
presence warning them, though this unrest is stronger and much more to
their good if men also warn them and if they live among such fellows in
their commonwealth as will not permit their wickedness to be hidden or
to go unpunished.
Rest has no time, and in its perfection must lose all mark of time. So
a man sleeping deeply knows not how many hours have passed since he
fell asleep until he awake again.
There are many good accompaniments for Rest, slow and distant music
which at last is stiller and then silent; the scent of certain herbs
and flowers and particularly of roses; clean linen; a pure clear air
and the coming of night. To all these things prayer, an honourable
profession and a preparation of the mind are in general a great aid,
and, in the heat of the season, cool water refreshed with essences. A
man also should make his toilet for Rest if he would have it full and
thorough and prepare his body as his soul for a relaxation. He does
well also in the last passage of his mind into sleep to commend himself
to the care of God; remembering both how petty are all human vexations
and also how weathercock they are, turning now a face of terror and
then in a moment another face of laughter or of insignificance. Many
troubles that seem giants at evening are but dwarfs at sunrise, and
some most terrific prove ghosts which speed off with the broadening of
the day.
VI
ON DISCOVERY
There is a great consolation lying all bottled and matured for those
who choose to take it, in the modern world--and yet how few turn to it
and drink the bracing draft! It is a consolation for dust and frequency
and fatigue and despair--this consolation is the Discovery of the World.
The world has no end to it. You can discover one town which you had
thought well known, or one quarter of the town, or one house in the
quarter of the town, or one room in that house, or one picture in that
room. The avenues of discovery open out infinite in number and quite a
little distance from their centre (which is yourself and your local,
tired, repeated experience) these avenues diverge outwards and lead to
the most amazingly different things.
You can take some place of which you have heard so often and in so
vulgar a connotation that you could wish never to hear of it again,
and coming there you will find it holding you, and you will enjoy many
happy surprises, unveiling things you could not dream were there.
How much more true is it not, then, that discovery awaits you if you
will take the least little step off the high road, or the least little
exploration into the past of a place you visit.
Most men inhabiting a countryside know nothing of its aspect even quite
close to their homes, save as it is seen from the main roads. If they
will but cross a couple of fields or so, they may come, for the first
time in many years of habitation, upon a landscape that seems quite new
and a sight of their own hills which makes them look like the hills of
a strange country.
In youth we all know this. In youth and early manhood we wonder what
is behind some rise of land, or on the other side of some wood which
bounded our horizon in childhood. Then comes a day when we manfully
explore the unknown places and go to find what we shall find.
As life advances we imagine that all this chance of discovery has been
taken from us by our increased experience. It is an illusion. If we are
so dull it is we that have changed and not the world; and what is more
we can recover from that dulness, and there is a simple medicine for
it, which is to repeat the old experiment: to go out and see what we
may see.
Some will grant this true of the sudden little new discoveries quite
close to home, but not of travel. Travel, they think, must always be
to-day by some known road to some known place, with dust upon the mind
at the setting out and at the coming in. It is a great error. You can
choose some place too famous in Europe and even too peopled and too
large, and yet make the most ample discoveries there.
"Oh, but," a man will say, "most places have been so written of that
one knows them already long before seeing them."
No: one does nothing of the kind. Even the pictured and the storied
places are full enough of newness if one will but shake off routine and
if one will but peer.
Speak to five men of some place which they have all visited, perhaps
together, and find out what each noticed most: you will be amazed at
the five different impressions.
Enter by some new entry a town which hitherto you had always entered by
one fixed way, and again vary your entry, and again, and you will see a
new town every time.
There are many, many thousand Englishmen who know the wonderful sight
of Rouen from the railway bridge below the town, for that lies on the
high road to Paris, and there are many thousand, though not so many,
who know Rouen from Bon-Secours. There are a few hundred who know it
from the approach by the great woods to the North. There are a dozen or
so perhaps who have come in from the East, walking from Picardy. The
great town lying in its cup of hills is quite different every way.
There is a view of Naples which has been photographed and printed and
painted until we are all tired of it. It is a view taken from the
hill which makes the northern horn of the Bay; there is a big pine
tree in the foreground and Vesuvius smoking in the background, and I
will bargain that most people who read this have seen that view upon
a postcard, or in a shop window, and that a good many of them would
rightly say that it was the most hackneyed thing in Europe.
Now some years ago I had occasion to go to Naples, a town I had always
avoided for that very reason--that one heard of it until one was tired
and that this view had become like last year's music-hall tunes.
I went, not of my own choice but because I had to go, and when I got
there I made as complete a discovery as ever Columbus made or those
sailors who first rounded Africa and found the Indian Seas.
Naples was utterly unlike anything I had imagined. Vesuvius was not a
cone smoking upon the horizon--it was a great angry pyramid toppling
right above me. The town was not a lazy, dirty town with all the marks
of antiquity and none of energy. It was alive with commerce and all the
evils and all the good of commerce. It was angrily alive; it was like a
wasp nest.
I will state the plain truth at the risk of being thought paradoxical.
Naples recalled to me an _American_ seaboard town so vividly that
I could have thought myself upon the Pacific. I could have gone on
for days digging into all this new experience, turning it over and
fructifying it. My business allowed me not twenty-four hours, but the
vision was one I shall never forget, and it was as completely new and
as wholly creative, or re-creative, of the mind, as is that land-fall
which an adventurous sailor makes when he finds a new island at dawn
upon a sea not yet travelled.
Every one, therefore, should go out to discover, five miles from home,
or five hundred. Every one should assure himself against the cheating
tedium which books and maps create in us, that the world is perpetually
new: and oddly enough it is not a matter of money.
VII
ON INNS
Here am I sitting in an Inn, having gloomily believed not half an hour
ago that Inns were doomed with all other good things, but now more
hopeful and catching avenues of escape through the encircling decay.
For though certainly that very subtle and final expression of a good
nation's life, the Inn, is in peril, yet possibly it may survive.
This Inn which surrounds me as I write (the law forbids me to tell its
name) is of the noblest in South England, and it is in South England
that the chief Inns of the world still stand. In the hall of it, as
you come in, are barrels of cider standing upon chairs. The woman that
keeps this Inn is real and kind. She receives you so that you are
glad to enter the house. She takes pleasure in her life. What was her
beauty her daughter now inherits, and she serves at the bar. Her son
is strong and carries up the luggage. The whole place is a paradise,
and as one enters that hall one stands hesitating whether to enjoy its
full, yet remaining delight, or to consider the peril of death that
hangs to-day over all good things.
Consider, you wanderers (that is all men, whatsoever, for not one of
you can rest), what an Inn is, and see if it should not rightly raise
both great fears and great affection.
An Inn is of the nation that made it. If you desire a proof that the
unity of Christendom is not to be achieved save through a dozen varying
nations, each of a hundred varying counties and provinces and these
each of several countrysides--the Inns will furnish you with that proof.
If any foolish man pretend in your presence that the brotherhood of men
should make a decent man cosmopolitan, reprove his error by the example
of an Inn.
If any one is so vile as to maintain in your presence that one's
country should not be loved and loyally defended, confound so horrid a
fool by the very vigorous picture of an Inn. And if he impudently says
that some damned Babylon or other is better than an Inn, look up his
ancestry.
For the truth is that Inns (may God preserve them, and of the few
remaining breed, in spite of peril, a host of new Inns for our sons),
Inns, Inns are the mirror and at the same time the flower of a people.
The savour of men met in kindliness and in a homely way for years and
years comes to inhabit all their panels (Inns are panelled) and lends
incense to their fires. (Inns have not radiators, but fires.) But
this good quintessence and distillation of comradeship varies from
countryside to countryside and more from province to province, and more
still from race to race and from realm to realm; just as speech differs
and music and all the other excellent fruits of Europe.
Thus there is an Inn at Tout-de-suite-Tardets which the Basques made
for themselves and offer to those who visit their delightful streams.
A river flows under its balcony, tinkling along a sheer stone wall,
and before it, high against the sunset, is a wood called Tiger Wood,
clothing a rocky peak called the Peak of Eagles.
Now no one could have built that Inn nor endowed it with its admirable
spirit, save the cleanly but incomprehensible _Basques_. There is no
such Inn in the Béarnese country, nor any among the Gascons.
In Falaise the Normans very slowly and by a mellow process of some
thousand years have engendered an Inn. This Inn, I think, is so good
that you will with difficulty compare it with any better thing. It
is as quiet as a tree on a summer night, and cooks crayfish in an
admirable way. Yet could not these _Normans_ have built that _Basque_
Inn; and a man that would merge one in the other and so drown both is
an outlaw and to be treated as such.
But these Inns of South England (such as still stand!)--what can be
said in proper praise of them which shall give their smell and colour
and their souls? There is nothing like them in Europe, nor anything to
set above them in all the world. It is within their walls and at their
boards that one knows what South England once did in the world and
why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die at last. But if it _is_
gone--why, no lover of it need remain to drag his time out in mourning
it. If South England is dead it is better to die upon its grave.
Whether it dies in our time or no you may test by the test of its
_Inns_. If they may not weather the chaos, if they fail to round the
point that menaces our religion and our very food, our humour and our
prime affections--why, then, South England has gone too. If, if (I
hardly dare to write such a challenge), if the Inns hold out a little
time longer--why, then, South England will have turned the corner and
Europe can breathe again. Never mind her extravagances, her follies or
her sins. Next time you see her from a hill, pray for South England.
For if she dies, you die. And as a symptom of her malady (some would
say of her death-throes) carefully watch her Inns.
Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull men, blind men,
weak-stomached men and men false to themselves, I do not speak: but of
their effect. Why such blighting men are nowadays so powerful and why
God has given them a brief moment of pride it is not for us to know.
It is hidden among the secret things of this life. But that they _are_
powerful all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right living, know
well enough and bitterly deplore. The effect of their power concerns
us. It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whitening of our own blood.
Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by gluttony of an evil
sort--though to say so sounds absurd, for one would imagine that
gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so it is, when it is your true
gluttony of old, the gluttony of our fathers made famous in English
letters by the song which begins:
I am not a glutton
But I do like pie.
But evil gluttony, which may also be called the gluttony of devils,
is another matter. It flies to liquor as to a drug; it is ashamed of
itself; it swallows a glass behind a screen and hides. There is no
companionship with it. It is an abomination, and this abomination has
the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to substitute for it, first a
gin-palace, and then, in reaction against that, the very horrible house
where they sell only tea and coffee and bubbly waters that bite and
sting both in the mouth and in the stomach. These places are hotbeds of
despair, and suicides have passed their last hours on earth consuming
slops therein alone.
Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury. The rich will have their
special habitations in a town so cut off from ordinary human beings
that no Inn may be built in their neighbourhood. In which connection I
greatly praise that little colony of the rich which is settled on the
western side of Berkeley Square, in Lansdowne House, and all around
the eastern parts of Charles Street, for they have permitted to be
established in their midst the "Running Footman," and this will count
in the scale when their detestable vices are weighed upon the Day of
Judgment, upon which day, you must know, vices are not put into the
scale gently and carefully so as to give you fair measure, but are
banged down with enormous force by strong and maleficent demons.
Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns is poverty, when it is pushed
to inhuman limits, and you will note especially in the dreadful
great towns of the North, more than one ancient house which was
once honourable and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have stayed,
now turned ramshackle and dilapidated and abandoned, slattern,
draggle-tail, a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers come and pull
it down to make an open space wherein the stunted children may play.
Thus, again, you will have the pulling down of an Inn and the setting
up of an Hotel built of iron and mud, or ferro-concrete. This is
murder.
Let me not be misunderstood. Many an honest Inn calls itself an hotel.
I have no quarrel with that, nor has any traveller I think. It is a
title. Some few blighted and accursed hotels call themselves "Inns"--a
foul snobbism, a nasty trick of words pretending to create realities.
No, it is when the thing is really done, not when the name is changed
that murder calls out to God for vengeance.
I knew an Inn in South England, when I was a boy, that stood on
the fringe of a larch wood, upon a great high road. Here when the
springtime came and I went off to see the world I used to meet with
carters and with travelling men, also keepers and men who bred horses
and sold them, and sometimes with sailors padding the hoof between port
and port. These men would tell me a thousand things. The larch trees
were pleasant in their new colour; the woods alive with birds and the
great high road was, in those days, deserted: for high bicycles were
very rare, low bicycles were not invented, the rich went by train
in those days; only carts and caravans and men with horses used the
leisurely surface of the way.
Now that good Inn has gone. I was in it some five years ago, marvelling
that it had changed so little, though motor things and money-changers
went howling by in a stream and though there were now no poachers
or gipsies or forestmen to speak to, when a too smart young man
came in with two assistants and they began measuring, calculating,
two-foot-ruling and jotting. This was the plot. Next came the deed. For
in another year, when the Spring burst and I passed by, what should I
see in the place of my Inn, my Inn of youth, my Inn of memories, my Inn
of trees, but a damnable stack of iron with men fitting a thin shell
of bricks to it like a skin. Next year the monster was alive and made.
The old name (call it the Jolly) was flaunting on a vulgar signboard
swing in cast-iron tracing to imitate forged work. The shell of bricks
was cast with sham white as for half-timber work. The sham-white was
patterned with sham timbers of baltic deal, stained dark, with pins of
wood stuck in: like Cheshire, not like home. Wrong lattice insulted
the windows--and inside there were three bars. At the door stood an
Evil Spirit, and within every room upstairs and down other devils, his
servants, resided.
It is no light thing that such things should be done and that we cannot
prevent them.
From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most. No
conscious efforts, no Bond Street nastiness of false conservation,
will save the beloved roofs. Change your hearts or you will lose your
Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost
your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of
England.
VIII
ON ROWS
THE HON. MEMBER: _Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker! Is the Hon. Member
in order in calling me an insolent swine?_
(_See Hansard passim_)
A distinguished literary man has composed and perhaps will shortly
publish a valuable poem the refrain of which is "I like the sound of
broken glass."
This concrete instance admirably illustrates one of the most profound
of human appetites: indeed, an appetite which, to the male half of
humanity, is more than an appetite and is, rather, a necessity: the
appetite for rows.
It has been remarked by authorities so distant and distinct, yet each
so commanding, as Aristotle and Confucius, that words lose their
meanings in the decline of a State.
Absolutely purposeless phrases go the rounds, are mechanically
repeated; sometimes there is an attempt by the less lively citizens
to _act_ upon such phrases when Society is diseased! And so to-day
you have the suburban fool who denounces the row. Sometimes he calls
it ungentlemanly--that is, unsuitable to the wealthy male. If he says
_that_ he simply cannot know what he is talking about.
If there is one class in the community which has made more rows than
another it is the young male of the wealthier classes, from Alcibiades
to my Lord Tit-up. When men are well fed, good-natured, fairly innocent
(as are our youth) then rows are their meat and drink. Nay, the younger
males of the gentry have such a craving and necessity for a row that
they may be observed at the universities of this country making rows
continually without any sort of object or goal attached to such rows.
Sometimes he does not call it ungentlemanly, but points out that a row
is of no effect, by which he means that there is no money in it. That
is true, neither is there money in drinking, or breathing, or sleeping,
but they are all very necessary things. Sometimes the row is denounced
by the suburban gentleman as unchristian; but that is because he knows
nothing about human history or the Faith, and plasters the phrase down
as a label without consideration. The whole history of Christendom is
one great row. From time to time the Christians would leap up and swarm
like bees, making the most hideous noise and pouring out by millions to
whang in their Christianity for as long as it could be borne upon the
vile persons of the infidel. More commonly the Christians would vent
their happy rage one against the other.
The row is better fun when it is played according to rule: it sounds
paradoxical, and your superficial man might conceive that the essence
of a row was anarchy. If he did he would be quite wrong; a row being
a male thing at once demands all sorts of rules and complications.
Otherwise it would be no fun. Take, for instance, the oldest and most
solid of our national rows--the House of Commons row. Everybody knows
how it is done and everybody surely knows that very special rules are
observed. For instance, there is the word "traitor." That is in order.
It was decided long ago, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, of Birmingham,
called Mr. Dillon a traitor. But I have heard with my own ears the word
"party-hack" ruled out. It is not allowed.
By a very interesting decision of the Chair, pointing is ruled out
also. If a member of the House suddenly thrusts out his arm with a long
forefinger at the end of it and directs this instrument towards some
other member, the Chair has decided the gesture to be out of order. It
is, as another member of the Chamberlain family has said, "No class."
Throwing things is absolutely barred. Nor may you now imitate the noise
of animals in the chamber itself. This last is a recent decision, or
rather it is an example of an old practice falling into desuetude.
The last time a characteristic animal cry was heard in the House of
Commons was when a very distinguished lawyer, later Lord Chief Justice
of England, gave an excellent rendering of a cock-crow behind the
Speaker's chair during a difference of opinion upon the matter of Home
Rule--but this was more than twenty years ago.
It is a curious thing that Englishmen no longer sing during their rows.
The fine song about the House of Lords which had a curse in it and was
sung some months ago by two drunken men in Pall Mall to the lasting
pleasure of the clubs, would come in very well at this juncture; or
that other old political song now forgotten, the chorus of which is (if
my memory serves me), "Bow wow wow!"
No one has seized the appetite for a row more fully than the ladies
who demand the suffrage. The "disgraceful scenes" and "unwomanly
conduct" which we have all heard officially denounced, were certainly
odd, proceeding as they did from great groups of middle-class women
as unsuited to exercises of this sort as a cow would be to following
hounds, but there is no doubt that the men enjoyed it hugely. It had
all the fun of a good football scrimmage about it, except when they
scratched. And to their honour be it said they did not stab with those
murderous long pins about which the Americans make so many jokes.
Before leaving this fascinating subject of rows, we will draw up
for the warning of the reader a list of those to whom rows are
abhorrent. Luckily they are few. Money-lenders dislike rows; political
wire-pullers dislike rows; very tired men recovering from fevers must
be put in the same category, and, finally, oddly enough, newspaper
proprietors.
Why on earth this last little band--there are not a couple of dozen
of them that count in the country--should have such a feature in
common, Heaven only knows, but they most undoubtedly have; and they
compel their unfortunate employees to write on the subject of rows
most amazing and incomprehensible nonsense. There is no accounting for
tastes!
IX
THE PLEASANT PLACE
A gentleman of my acquaintance came to me the other day for
sympathy.... But first I must describe him:--
He is a man of careful, not neat, dress: I would call it sober rather
than neat. He is always clean-shaven and his scanty hair is kept
short-cut. He is occupied in letters; he is, to put it bluntly, a
litteratoor; none the less he is possessed of scholarship and is a
minor authority upon English pottery.
He is a very good writer of verse; he is not exactly a poet, but still,
his verse is remarkable. Two of his pieces have been publicly praised
by political peers and at least half a dozen of them have been praised
in private by the ladies of that world. He is a man fifty-four years of
age, and, if I may say so without betraying him, a little disappointed.
He came to me, I say, for sympathy. I was sitting in my study watching
the pouring rain falling upon the already soaked and drenched and
drowned clay lands of my county. The leafless trees (which are in
our part of a low but thick sort) were standing against a dead grey
sky with a sort of ghost of movement in it, when he came in, opened
his umbrella carefully so that it might not drip, and left it in the
stone-floored passage--which is, to be accurate, six hundred years
old--kicked off his galoshes and begged my hospitality; also (let me
say it for the third time) my sympathy.
He said he had suffered greatly and that he desired to tell me the
whole tale. I was very willing, and his tale was this:
It seems that my friend (according to his account) found himself
recently in a country of a very delightful character.
This country lay up and heavenly upon a sort of table-land. One went up
a road which led continually higher and higher through the ravines of
the mountains, until, passing through a natural gate of rock, one saw
before one a wide plain bounded upon the further side by the highest
crests of the range. Through this upland plain ran a broad and noble
river whose reaches he could see in glimpses for miles, and upon the
further bank of it in a direction opposite that which the gate of rock
regarded, was a very delightful city.
The walls of this city were old in their texture, venerable and
majestic in their lines. Within their circumference could be discerned
sacred buildings of a similar antiquity, but also modern and convenient
houses of a kind which my friend had not come across before, but which
were evidently suited to the genial, sunlit climate, as also to the
habits of leisured men. Their roofs were flat, covered in places by
awnings, in other places by tiled verandas, and these roofs were often
disposed in the form of little gardens.
Trees were numerous in the city and showed their tops above the lower
buildings, while the lines of their foliage indicated the direction of
the streets.
My friend was passing down the road which led to this plain--and as it
descended it took on an ampler and more majestic character--when he
came upon a traveller who appeared to be walking in the direction of
the town.
This traveller asked him courteously in the English tongue whether he
were bound for the city. My friend was constrained to reply that he
could not pretend to any definite plan, but certainly the prospect all
round him was so pleasant and the aspect of the town so inviting, that
he would rather visit the capital of this delightful land at once than
linger in its outskirts.
"Come with me, then," said the Traveller, "and if I may make so bold
upon so short an acquaintance, accept my hospitality. I have a good
house upon the wall of the town and my rank among the citizens of it is
that of a merchant;--I am glad to say a prosperous one."
He spoke without affectation and with so much kindness, that my friend
was ravished to discover such a companion, and they proceeded in
leisurely company over the few miles that separated them from their
goal.
The road was now paved in every part with small square slabs, quite
smooth and apparently constructed of some sort of marble. Upon either
side there ran canalised in the shining stone a little stream of
perfectly clear water. From time to time they would pass a lovely
shrine or statue which the country people had adorned with garlands. As
they approached the city they discovered a noble bridge in the manner,
my friend believed, of the Italian Renaissance, with strong elliptical
arches and built, like all the rest of the way, of marble, while the
balustrade upon either side of it was so disposed in short symmetrical
columns as to be particularly grateful to the eye. Over this bridge
there went to and fro a great concourse of people, all smiling, eager,
happy and busy, largely acquainted, apparently, each with the others,
nodding, exchanging news, and in a word forming a most blessed company.
As they entered the city my friend's companion, who had talked of many
things upon their way and had seemed to unite the most perfect courtesy
and modesty with the widest knowledge, asked him whether there was any
food or drink to which he was particularly attached.
"For," said he, "I make a point whenever I entertain a guest--and
that," he put in with a laugh, "is, I am glad to say, a thing that
happens frequently--I make a point, I say, of asking him what he really
prefers. It makes such a difference!"
My friend began his reply with those conventional phrases to which we
are all accustomed, "That he would be only too happy to take whatever
was set before him," "That the prospect of his hospitality was a
sufficient guarantee of his satisfaction," and so forth: but his host
would take no denial.
"No, no!" said he. "Do please say just what you prefer! It is so
easy to arrange--if you only knew!... Come, I know the place better
than you," he added, smiling again; "you have no conception of
its resources. Pray tell me quite simply before we leave this
street"--for they were now in a street of sumptuous and well-appointed
shops--"exactly what shall be commissioned."
Moved by I know not what freedom of expression, and expansive in a
degree which he had never yet known, my friend smiled back and said:
"Well, to tell you the truth, some such meal as this would appeal
to me: First two dozen green-bearded oysters of the Arcachon kind,
opened upon the _deep_ shell with all their juices preserved, and each
exquisitely cleaned. These set upon pounded ice and served in that
sort of dish which is contrived for _each_ oyster to repose in its own
little recess with a sort of side arrangement for the reception of the
empty shells."
His host nodded gravely, as one who takes in all that is said to him.
"Next," said my friend, in an enthusiastic manner, "real and good
Russian caviar, cold but not frozen, and so touched with lemon--only
just so touched--as to be perfect. With this I think a little of
the wine called Barsac should be drunk, and that cooled to about
thirty-eight degrees--(Fahrenheit). After this a True Bouillon, and by
a True Bouillon," said my friend with earnestness, "I mean a Bouillon
that has long simmered in the pot and has been properly skimmed, and
has been seasoned not only with the customary herbs but also with a
suspicion of carrot and of onion, and a mere breath of tarragon."
"Right!" said his host. "Right!" nodding with real appreciation.
"And next," said my friend, halting in the street to continue his list,
"I think there should be eggs."
"Right," said his host once more approvingly; "and shall we say----"
"No," interrupted my friend eagerly, "let me speak. Eggs _sur-le-plat_,
frizzled to the exact degree."
"Just what I was about to suggest," answered his delighted entertainer,
"and black pepper, I hope, ground large upon them in fresh granules
from a proper wooden mill."
"Yes! Yes!" said my friend, now lyric, "and with _sea_ salt in large
crystals."
On saying which both of them fell into a sort of ecstasy which my
friend broke by adding:
"Something quite light to follow ... preferably a sugar-cured Ham
braised in white wine. Then, I think, spinach, not with the ham but
after it; and that spinach cooked perfectly dry. We will conclude with
some of the cheese called Brie. And for wine during all these latter
courses we will drink the wine of Chinon: Chinon Grillé. What they
call," he added slyly, "the _Fausse maigre_; for it is a wine thin at
sight but full in the drinking of it."
"Good! Excellent!" said his host, clapping his hands together once with
a gesture of finality. "And then after the lot you shall have coffee."
"Yes, coffee roasted during the meal and ground immediately before its
concoction. And for liqueur...."
My friend was suddenly taken with a little doubt. "I dare not ask,"
said he, "for the liqueur called Aquebus? Once only did I taste it. A
monk gave it me on Christmas Eve four years ago and I think it is not
known!"
"Oh, ask for it by all means!" said his host. "Why, we know it and love
it in this place as though it were a member of the family!"
My friend could hardly believe his ears on hearing such things, and
said nothing of cigars. But to his astonishment his host, putting his
left hand on my friend's shoulder, looked him full in the face and said:
"And now shall _I_ tell you about cigars?"
"I confess they were in my mind," said my friend.
"Why then," said his host with an expression of profound happiness,
"there is a cigar in this town which is full of flavour, black in
colour, which does not bite the tongue, and which none the less
satisfies whatever tobacco does satisfy in man. When you smoke it you
really dream."
"Why," said my friend humbly, "very well then, let us mention these
cigars as the completion of our little feast."
"Little _feast_, indeed!" said his host, "why it is but a most humble
meal. Anyhow, I am glad to have had from you a proper schedule of your
pleasures of the table. In time to come when we know each other better,
we will arrange other large and really satisfactory meals; but this
will do very well for our initiatory lunch as it were." And he laughed
merrily.
"But have I not given you great trouble?" said my friend.
"How little you will easily perceive," said his companion, "for in this
town we have but to order and all is at once promptly and intelligently
done." With that he turned into a small office where a commissary at
once took down his order. "And now," said he emerging, "let us be home."
They went together down the turnings of a couple of broad streets
lined with great private palaces and public temples until they came
to a garden which had no boundaries to it but which was open, and
apparently the property of the city. But the people who wandered here
were at once so few, so discreet and so courteous, my friend could not
discover whether they were (as their salutes seemed to indicate) the
dependents of his host, or merely acquaintances who recognized him upon
their way.
This garden, as they proceeded, became more private and more domestic;
it led by narrowing paths through high, diversified trees, until,
beyond the screen of a great beech hedge, he saw the house ... and it
was all that a house should be!
Its clear, well set stone walls were in such perfect harmony with
the climate and with the sky, its roof garden from which a child was
greeting them upon their approach, so unexpected and so suitable, its
arched open gallery was of so august a sort, and yet the domestic
ornaments of its colonnade so familiar, that nothing could be
conceived more appropriate for the residence of man.
The mere passage into this Home out of the warm morning daylight into
the inner domestic cool, was a benediction, and in the courtyard which
they thus entered a lazy fountain leaped and babbled to itself in a
manner that filled the heart with ease.
"I do not know," said his host in a gentle whisper as they crossed the
courtyard, "whether it is your custom to bathe before the morning meal
or in the middle of the afternoon?"
"Why, sir," said my friend, "if I may tell the whole truth, I have no
custom in the matter; but perhaps the middle of the afternoon would
suit me best."
"By all means," said his host in a satisfied tone. "And I think you
have chosen wisely, for the meal you have ordered will very shortly be
prepared. But, for your refreshment at least, one of my friends shall
put you in order, cool your hands and forehead, see to your face and
hair, put comfortable sandals upon your feet and give you a change of
raiment."
All of this was done. My friend's host did well to call the servant who
attended upon his guest a "friend," for there was in this man's manner
no trace of servility or of dependence, and yet an eager willingness
for service coupled with a perfect reticence which was admirable to
behold and feel.
When my friend had been thus refreshed he was conducted to a most
exceptional little room. Four pictures were set in the walls of it,
mosaics, they seemed--but he did not examine their medium closely. The
room itself in its perfect lightness and harmony, with its view out
through a large round arch upon the countryside beyond the walls (the
old turrets of which made a framework for the view), exactly prepared
him for the meal that was prepared.
While the oysters (delightful things!) were entering upon their tray
and were being put upon the table, the host, taking my friend aside
with an exquisite gesture of courteous privacy, led him through the
window-arch on to a balcony without, and said, as they gazed upon the
wall and the plain and the mountains beyond (and what a sight they
were!):
"There is one thing, my dear sir, that I should like to say to you
before you eat ... it is rather a delicate matter.... You will not mind
my being perfectly frank?"
"Speak on, speak on," said my friend, who by this time would have
confided any interests whatsoever into the hands of such a host.
"Well," said that host, continuing a little carefully, "it is this: as
you can see we are very careful in this city to make men as happy as
may be. We are happy ourselves, and we love to confer happiness upon
others, strangers and travellers who honour us with their presence. But
we find--I am very sorry to say we find ... that is, we find from time
to time that their _complete_ happiness, no matter with what we may
provide them, is dashed by certain forms of anxiety, the chief of which
is anxiety with regard to their future receipts of money."
My friend started.
"Nay," said his host hastily, "do not misunderstand me. I do not mean
that preoccupations of business are alone so alarming. What I mean is
that sometimes, yes, and I may say often (horrible as it seems to us!),
our guests are in an active preoccupation about the petty business of
finance. Some few have debts, it seems, in the wretched society from
which they come, and of which, frankly, I know nothing. Others, though
not indebted, feel insecure about the future. Others though wealthy
are oppressed by their responsibilities. Now," he continued firmly, "I
must tell you once and for all that we have a custom here upon which we
take no denial: _no denial whatsoever_. Every man who enters this city,
who _honours_ us by entering this city, is made free of _that_ sort of
nonsense, thank God!" And as he said this, my friend's host breathed
a great sigh of relief. "It would be intolerable to us to think," he
continued, "that our welcome and dear companions were suffering from
such a tawdry thing as money-worry in our presence. So the matter is
plainly this: whether you like it or whether you do not, the sum of
£10,000 is already set down to your credit in the public bank of the
city; whether you use it or not is your business; if you do not it is
our custom to melt down an equivalent sum of gold and to cast it into
the depths of the river, for we have of this metal an unfailing supply,
and I confess we do not find it easy to understand the exaggerated
value which other men place upon it."
"I do not know that I shall have occasion to use so magnificent a
custom," said my friend with an extraordinary relief in his heart, "but
I certainly thank you very kindly for its intention, and I shall not
hesitate to use any sum that may be necessary for my continuing the
great happiness which this city appears to afford."
"You have spoken well," said his host, seizing both his hands, "and
your frankness compels me to another confession: We have at our
disposal a means of discovering exactly how any one of our guests may
stand: the responsibilities of the rich, the indebtedness of the
embarrassed, the anxiety of those whose future may be precarious. May I
tell you without discourtesy, that your own case is known to me and to
two trustees, who are public officials--absolutely reliable--and whom,
for that matter, you will not meet."
My friend must have looked incredulous, but his host continued firmly:
"It is so, we have settled your whole matter, I am glad to say, on
terms that settle all your liabilities and leave a further £50,000 to
your credit in the public bank. But the size of the sum is in this city
really of no importance. You may demand whatever you will, and enjoy,
I hope, a complete security during your habitation here. And that
habitation, both the Town Council and the National Government, beg you,
through me, to extend to the whole of your life."
* * * * *
"Imagine," said my friend, "how I felt.... The oysters were now upon
the table, and before them, ready for consumption, the caviar.
The Barsac in its original bottle, cooled (need I say!) to exactly
thirty-eight degrees, stood ready...."
At this point he stopped and gazed into the fire.
"But, my dear fellow," said I, "if you are coming to me for sympathy
and simply succeed in making me hungry and cross...."
"No," said my friend with a sob, "you don't understand!" And he
continued to gaze at the fire.
"Well, go _on_," said I angrily.
"There isn't any _on_," he said; "I woke!"
We both looked into the fire together for perhaps three minutes before
I spoke and said:
"Will you have some wine?"
"No thank you," he answered sadly, "not _that_ wine." Then he got up
uneasily and moved for his umbrella and his galoshes, and the passage
and the door. I thought he muttered, "You might have helped me."
"How could I help you?" I said savagely.
"Well," he sighed, "I thought you could ... it was a bitter
disappointment. Good night!" And he went out again into the rain and
over the clay.
X
ON OMENS
Only the other day there was printed in a newspaper (what a lot of
things they print in newspapers!) five lines which read thus:
"Calcutta, Thursday.
"An hour before the Viceroy left Calcutta on Wednesday for the
last time lightning struck the flag over Government House, tearing
it to shreds. This is considered to be an omen by the natives."
The Devil they did! A superstitious chap, your native, and we have
outgrown such things. But it is really astonishing when you come
to think of it how absurdly credulous the human race has been for
thousands of years about omens, and still is--everywhere except here.
And by the way, what a curious thing it is that only in one country,
and only in one little tiny circle of it should this terrible vice have
been eradicated from the human mind! If one were capable of paradox one
would say that the blessing conferred upon us few enlightened people
in England was providential; but that would be worse superstition than
the other. There seems to be a tangle somewhere. Anyhow, there it is:
people have gone on by the million and for centuries and centuries
believing in omens. It is an illusion. It is due to a frame of mind.
That which the enlightened person easily discovers to be a coincidence,
the Native, that is, the person living in a place, thinks to be in some
way due to a Superior Power. It is a way Natives have. Nothing warps
the mind like being a Native.
The Reform Bill passed in 1832 and destroyed not only the
Pot-Wallopers, but also the ancient Constitution of the country. From
that time onwards we have been free. When the thing was thoroughly
settled (and the old Poor Law was being got rid of into the bargain),
the old House of Lords, and the old House of Commons, they caught
fire, "and they did get burnt down to the ground." Those are the very
words of an old man who saw it happen and who told me about it. The
misfortune was due to the old tallies of the Exchequer catching fire,
and this silly old man, who saw it happen (he was a child of six at
the time), has always thought it was an Omen. It has been explained to
him, not only by good, kind ladies who go and visit him and see that
he gets no money or beer, but also from the Pulpit of St. Margaret's
Church, Westminster (where he regularly attends Divine Service by kind
permission of the Middle Class, and in the vain hope of cadging alms),
that there is no such thing as Providence, and that if he lets his mind
dwell on Omens he will end by believing in God. But the old man is much
too old to receive a new idea, so he goes on believing that the burning
of old St. Stephen's was an Omen.
Not so the commercial traveller, who told me in an hotel the other
day the story of the market-woman of Devizes, to exemplify the gross
superstitions of our fathers.
It seems that the market-woman, sometime when George III was King, had
taken change of a sovereign on market-day, from a purchaser, when there
were no witnesses, and then, in the presence of witnesses, demanded
the change again. The man most solemnly affirmed that he had paid her,
to which she replied: "If I have taken your money may God strike me
dead." The moment these words were out of the market-woman's lips, an
enormous great jagged, forked, fiery dart of lightning, three miles
long, leapt out of a distant cloud, and shrivelled her up. "Whereupon,"
ended the commercial traveller, "the people of Devizes _in those days_
were so superstitious that they thought it was a judgment, they did!
And they put up a plate in commemoration. Such foolishness!" It is sad
to think of the people of Devizes and their darkness of understanding
when George III was King. But, upon the other hand, it is a joy to
think of the fresh, clear minds of the people of Devizes to-day. For
though, every Sunday morning, about half an hour after Church time,
every single man and woman who had shirked Church, Chapel, Mosque or
Synagogue, each according to his or her creed should fall down dead of
no apparent illness, and though upon the forehead of each one so taken,
the survivors returning from their services, meetings or what-not,
should find clearly written in a vivid blue the Letters of Doom.
None the less the people of Devizes would, it is to be hoped, retain
their mental balance, and distinguish between a coincidence (which
is the only true explanation of such things) and fond imaginings of
supernatural possibilities.
There is an old story and a good one to teach us how to fight against
any weakness of the sort, which is this. Two old gentlemen who had
never met before were in a first-class railway carriage of a train that
does not stop until it gets to Bristol. They were talking about ghosts.
One of them was a parson, the other was a layman. The layman said he
did not believe in ghosts. The parson was very much annoyed, tried to
convince him, and at last said, "After all, you'd have to believe in
one if you saw one."
"No, I shouldn't," said the layman sturdily. "I should know it was an
illusion."
Then the old parson got very angry indeed, and said in a voice shaking
with self-restraint:
"Well, you've got to believe in ghosts now, for I am one!" Whereat he
immediately vanished into the air.
The old layman, finding himself well rid of a bad business, shook
himself together, wrapped his rug round his knees, and began to read
his paper, for he knew very well that it was an illusion.
Of the same sturdy sense was Isaac Newton, when a lady came to him who
had heard he was an astrologer, and asked him where she had dropped
her purse, somewhere between Shooter's Hill and London Bridge. She
would not believe that the Baronet (or knight, I forget which) could
be ignorant of such things, and she came about fourteen times. So to
be rid of her Newton, on the occasion of her last visit, put on an
old flowered dressing-gown, and made himself a conical paper hat, and
put on great blue goggles, and drew a circle on the floor, and said
"Abracadabra!" "The front of Greenwich Hospital, the third great window
from the southern end. On the grass just beneath it I see a short devil
crouched upon a purse of gold." Off went the female, and sure enough
under that window she found her purse. Whereat, instead of hearing the
explanation (there was none) she thought it was an Omen.
Remember this parable. It is enormously illuminating.
XI
THE BOOK
This is written to dissuade all rich men from queering the pitch of
us poor litteratoors, who have to write or starve. It is about a Mr.
Foley: a Mr. Charles Foley, a banker and the son of a banker, who in
middle life, that is at forty, saw no more use in coming to his office
every day, but began to lead the life of a man of leisure. Next, being
exceedingly rich he was prompted, of course, to write a book. The thing
that prompted him to write a book was a thought, an idea. It took him
suddenly as ideas will, one Saturday evening as he was walking home
from his Club. It was a fine night and the idea seemed to come upon him
out of the sky. This was the idea: that men produce such and such art
in architecture and society and so forth, on account of the kind of
climate they live in. Such a thought had never come to him before and
very probably to no other man. It was simple like a seed--and yet, as
he turned it over, what enormous possibilities.
He lay awake half the night examining it. It spread out like a great
tree and explained every human thing on earth; at least if to climate
one added one or two other things, such as height above the sea and
consequent rarity of the air and so forth--but perhaps all these could
be included in climate.
Hitherto every one had imagined that nations and civilisations had each
their temperament and tendency or genius, but those words were only
ways of saying that one did not know what it was. _He_ knew: Charles
Foley did. He had caught the inspiration suddenly as it passed. He
slept the few last hours of the night in a profound repose, and next
day he was at it. He was writing that book.
He was a business-man--luckily for him. He did not speak of the great
task until it was done. He was in no need of money--luckily for him.
He could afford to wait until the last pages had satisfied him. Life
had taught him that one could do nothing in business unless one had
something in one's hands. He would come to the publisher with something
in his hands, to wit, with this MSS. He had no doubt about the title.
He would call it "MAN AND NATURE." The title had come to him
in a sort of flash after the idea. Anyhow, that was the title, and he
felt it to be a very part of his being.
He had fixed upon his publisher. He rang him up to make an appointment.
The publisher received him with charming courtesy. It was the publisher
himself who received him; not the manager, not the secretary, nor any
one like that, but the real person, the one who had the overdraft at
the Bank.
He treated Mr. Charles Foley so well that Mr. Foley tasted a new joy
which was the joy of sincere praise received. He was in the liberal
arts now. He had come into a second world. His mere wealth had never
given him this. When the publisher had heard what Mr. Charles Foley
had to say, he scratched the tip of his nose with his forefinger, and
suggested that Mr. Foley should pay for the printing and the binding of
the book, and that then the publisher should advertise it and sell it,
and give Mr. Foley so much.
But Mr. Foley would have none of this. He was a business man and he
could see through a brick wall as well as any one. So the publisher
made this suggestion and that suggestion and talked all round about
it. He was evidently keen to have the book. Mr. Foley could see that.
At last the publisher made what Mr. Foley thought for the first time a
sound business proposition, which was that he should publish the book
in the ordinary way and then that he and Mr. Foley should share and
share alike. If there was a loss they would divide it, but if there was
a profit they would divide that. Mr. Foley was glad that he came to a
sensible business decision at last, and closed with him. The date of
publication also was agreed upon: it was to be the 15th of April. "In
order," said the publisher, "that we may catch the London season."
Mr. Charles Foley suggested August, but the publisher assured him that
August was a rotten time for books.
Only the very next day Mr. Foley entered upon the responsibilities
which are inseparable from the joys of an author. He received a letter
from the publisher, saying that it seemed that another book had been
written under the title "Man and Nature," that he dared not publish
under that title lest the publishers of the other volume should apply
for an injunction.
Mr. Foley suffered acutely. He left his breakfast half finished; ran
into town in his motor, as agonized in every block of the traffic as
though he had to catch a train; was kept waiting half an hour in the
publisher's office because the principal had not yet arrived, and,
when he did arrive, was persuaded that there was nothing to be done.
The Courts wouldn't allow "Man and Nature," the publisher was sure of
that. He kept on shaking his great big silly head until it got on Mr.
Foley's nerves. But there was no way out of it, so Mr. Foley changed
the title to "ART AND ENVIRONMENT"--it was the publisher's
secretary who suggested this new title.
He got home to luncheon, to which he now remembered he had asked a
friend--a man who played golf. Mr. Foley did not want to make a fool
of himself, so he led up very cautiously at luncheon to his great
question, which was this: "How does the title 'Art and Environment'
sound?" He had a friend, he said, who wanted to know. On hearing this
Mr. Foley's golfing friend gave a loud guffaw, and said it _sounded_
all right; so did the _Origin of Species_. It would come out about the
same time, and then he spent three or four minutes trying to remember
who the old johnny was who wrote it, but Mr. Foley was already at the
telephone in the hall. He was not happy; he had rung up the publisher.
The publisher was at luncheon. Mr. Foley damned the publisher. Could he
speak to the manager? To the secretary? To one of the clerks? To the
little dog? In his anger he was pleased to be facetious. He heard the
manager's voice:
"Yes, is that Mr. Foley?"
"Yes, about that title."
"Oh, yes, I thought you'ld ring up. It's impossible, you know, it's
been used before; and there's no doubt at all that the University
printers would apply for an injunction."
"Well, I can't wait," shouted Mr. Foley into the receiver.
"You can't what?" said the manager. "I can't hear you, you are talking
too loud."
"I can't wait," said Mr. Foley in a lower tone and strenuously.
"Suggest something quick."
The manager could be heard thinking at the end of the live wire. At
last he said, "Oh, anything." Mr. Foley used a horrible word and put
back the receiver.
He went back to his golfing friend who was drinking some port steadily
with cheese, and said: "Look here, that friend of mine I have just
been telephoning to says he wants another title."
"What for?" said the golfing friend, his mouth full of cheese.
"Oh, for his book of course," said Mr. Foley sharply.
"Sorry, I thought it was politics," answered his friend, his mouth
rather less full. Then a bright thought struck him.
"What's the book about?"
"Well, it's about art and ... climate, you know."
"Why, then," said the friend stolidly, "why not call it 'Art and
Climate'?"
"That's a good idea," said Mr. Foley, stroking his chin.
He hurried indecently, turned the poor golfing friend out, hurried
up to town in his motor in order to make them call the book "Art and
Climate." When he got there he found the real publisher, who hummed and
hawed and said: "All this changing of titles will be very expensive,
you know." Mr. Foley could not help that, it had to be done, so the
book was called "Art and Climate," and then it was printed, and seventy
copies were sent out to the Press and it was reviewed by three papers.
One of the papers said:
"Mr. Charles Foley has written an interesting essay upon the
effect of climate upon art, upon such conditions as will affect
it whether adversely or the contrary. The point of view is an
original one and gives food for thought."
Mr. Foley thought this notice quite too short and imperfect.
The second paper had a column about it, nearly all of which was made
out of bits cut right out of the book, but without acknowledgment or in
inverted commas. In between the bits cut out there were phrases like,
"Are we however to believe that ..." and "Some in this connection would
decide that...." But all the rest were bits cut out of his book.
The third review was in _The Times_, and in very small type between
brackets. All it did was to give a list of the chapters and a sentence
out of the preface.
Mr. Foley sold thirty copies of his book, gave away seventy-four and
lent two. The publisher assured him that books like that did not have a
large immediate sale as a novel did; they had a slow, steady sale.
It was about the middle of May that the publisher assured him of this.
In June the solicitors of a Professor at Yale acting for the learned
man in this country, threatened an action concerning a passage in the
book which was based entirely upon the Professor's copyright work.
Mr. Foley admitted his high indebtedness to the Professor, and wore a
troubled look for days. He had always thought it quite legitimate in
the world of art to use another person's work if one acknowledged it.
At last the thing was settled out of court for quite a small sum, £150
or £200, or something like that.
Then everything was quiet and the sales went very slowly. He only sold
a half-dozen all the rest of the summer.
In the autumn the publisher wrote him a note asking whether he might
act upon Clause 15 of the contract. Mr. Foley was a business man. He
looked up the contract and there he saw these words:
"If after due time has elapsed in the opinion of the publisher,
a book shall not be warrantable at its existing price, change of
price shall be made in it at the discretion of the publisher or of
the author, or both, or each, subject to the conditions of Clause
9."
Turning to Clause 9, Mr. Foley discovered the words:
"All questions of price, advertisements, binding, paper, printing,
etc., shall be vested in Messrs. Towkem Bingo and Platt,
hereinafter called the Publishers."
He puzzled a great deal about these two clauses, and at last he
thought, "Oh, well, they know more than I do about it," so he just
telegraphed back, "Yes."
On the first of the New Year Mr. Foley got a most astonishing document.
It was a printed sheet with a lot of lines written in red ink and an
account. On the one side there was "By sales £18," then there was
a long red line drawn down like a Z, and at the bottom, "£241 17s.
4½d.," and in front of this the word "Balance," then the two were added
together and made £259 17s. 4½d. Under this sum there were two lines
drawn.
On the other side of the document there was a whole regiment of items,
one treading upon another's heels. There was paper, and printing, and
corrections, binding, warehousing, storage, cataloguing, advertising,
travelling, circularizing, packing, and what I may call with due
respect to the reader, "the devil and all." The whole of which added
up to no less than the monstrous sum of £519 14s. 9d. Under this was
written in small letters in red ink, "Less 50% as per agreement," and
then at the bottom that nasty figure, "£259 17s. 4½d.," and there was
a little request in a round hand that the balance of £241 17s. 4½d.
should be paid at Mr. Foley's convenience.
Mr. Foley, white with rage, acted as a business man always should. He
wrote a short note refusing to pay a penny, and demanding the rest of
the unsold copies. He got a lengthier and stronger note from Messrs.
Towkem and Thingummebob, referring to his letter, to Clause 9 and to
Clause 15, informing him that the remainder of the stock had been sold
at a penny each to a firm of papermakers in the North of England, and
respectfully pressing for immediate payment.
Mr. Foley put the matter in the hands of his solicitors and they ran
him up a bill for £37 odd, but it was well worth it because they
persuaded him not to go into court, so in the long run he had to pay
no more than £278 17s. 4½d., unless you count the postage and the
travelling.
Now you know what happened to Mr. Foley and his book, and what will
happen to _you_ if you are a rich man and poach on my preserves.
XII
THE SERVANTS OF THE RICH
Do you mark there, down in the lowest point and innermost funnel of
Hell Fire Pit, souls writhing in smoke, themselves like glowing smoke
and tortured in the flame? You ask me what they are. These are the
Servants of the Rich: the men who in their mortal life opened the doors
of the Great Houses and drove the carriages and sneered at the unhappy
guests.
Those larger souls that bear the greatest doom and manifest the more
dreadful suffering, they are the Butlers boiling in molten gold.
"What!" you cry, "is there then, indeed, as I once heard in childhood,
justice for men and an equal balance, and a final doom for evil
deeds?" There is! Look down into the murky hollow and revere the awful
accomplishment of human things.
These are the men who would stand with powder on their heads like
clowns, dressed in fantastic suits of gold and plush, with an ugly
scorn upon their faces, and whose pleasure it was (while yet their time
of probation lasted) to forget every human bond and to cast down the
nobler things in man: treating the artist as dirt and the poet as a
clown; and beautiful women, if they were governesses or poor relations
or in any way dependents, as a meet object for silent mockery. But now
their time is over and they have reaped the harvest which they sowed.
Look and take comfort, all you who may have suffered at their hands.
Come closer. See how each separate sort suffers its peculiar penalty.
There go a hopeless shoal through the reek: their doom is an eternal
sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom. There is nothing to comfort
them, not even memory: and they know that for ever and for ever they
must plunge and swirl, driven before the blasts, now hot, now icy, of
their everlasting pain. These are those men who were wont to come
into the room of the Poor Guest at early morning with a steadfast and
assured step and a look of insult. These are those who would take the
tattered garments and hold them at arm's length as much as to say:
"What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm
with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven
knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next
discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and
notably loose tobacco.
These are they that would then take out with the utmost patience,
private letters, money, pocket-books, knives, dirty crumpled stamps,
scraps of newspapers, broken cigarettes, pawn tickets, keys, and much
else, muttering within themselves so that one could almost hear it with
their lips: "What a jumble these paupers stuff their shoddy with! They
do not even know that in the Houses of the Great it is not customary to
fill the pockets! They do not know that the Great remove at night from
their pockets such few trinkets of diamonded gold as they may contain.
Where were they born or bred? To think that _I_ should have to serve
such cattle! No matter! He has brought money with him I am glad to
see--borrowed, no doubt--and I will bleed him well."
Such thoughts one almost heard as one lay in the Beds of the Great
despairing. Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which
is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled
in and he would set beside it a great can and silently pronounce the
judgment that whatever else was forgiven the middle-class one thing
would not be forgiven them--the neglect of the bath, of the splashing
about of the water and of the adequate wetting of the towel.
All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands. But be
comforted. They writhe in Hell with their fellows.
That man who looked us up and down so insolently when the great doors
were opened in St. James' Square and who thought one's boots so comic.
He too, and all his like, burn separately. So does that fellow with the
wine that poured it out ungenerously, and clearly thought that we were
in luck's way to get the bubbly stuff at all in any measure. He that
conveyed his master's messages with a pomp that was instinct with scorn
and he that drove you to the station, hardly deigning to reply to your
timid sentences and knowing well your tremors and your abject ill-ease.
Be comforted. He too burns.
It is the custom in Hell when this last batch of scoundrels, the horsey
ones, come up in batches to be dealt with by the authorities thereof,
for them first to be asked in awful tones how many pieces of silver
they have taken from men below the rank of a squire, or whose income
was less than a thousand pounds a year, and the truth on this they are
compelled by Fate to declare, whereupon, before their tortures begin,
they receive as many stripes as they took florins: nor is there any
defect in the arrangement of divine justice in their regard, save that
the money is not refunded to us.
Cooks, housemaids, poor little scullery-maids, under-gardeners,
estate carpenters of all kinds, small stable lads, and in general
all those humble Servants of the Rich who are debarred by their
insolent superiors from approaching the guests and neither wound them
with contemptuous looks, nor follow these up by brigandish demands
for money, _these_ you will not see in this Pit of Fire. For them
is reserved a high place in Paradise, only a little lower than that
supreme and cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the happy souls of
all who on this earth have been Journalists.
But Game-Keepers, more particularly those who make a distinction and
will take nothing less than gold (nay _Paper_!), and Grooms of the
Chamber, and all such, these suffer torments for ever and for ever. So
has Immutable Justice decreed and thus is the offended majesty of man
avenged.
And what, you will ask me perhaps at last, what of the dear old family
servants, who are _so_ good, _so_ kind, _so_ attached to Master Arthur
and to Lady Jane?
Ah!... Of these the infernal plight is such that I dare not set it down!
There is a special secret room in Hell where their villainous hypocrisy
and that accursed mixture of yielding and of false independence
wherewith they flattered and be-fooled their masters; their thefts,
their bullying of beggarmen, have at last a full reward. Their eyes
are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pretence of affection,
nor are they here rewarded with good fires and an excess of food, and
perquisites and pensions. But they sit hearthless, jibbering with cold,
and they stare broken at the prospect of a dark Eternity. And now and
then one or another, an aged serving-man or a white-haired housekeeper,
will wring their hands and say: "Oh, that I had once, only once, shown
in my mortal life some momentary gleam of honour, independence, or
dignity! Oh, that I had but once stood up in my freedom and spoken to
the Rich as I should! Then it would have been remembered for me and I
should now have been spared this place--but it is too late!"
For there is no repentance known among the Servants of the Rich, nor
any exception to their vileness; they are hated by men when they live,
and when they die they must for all eternity consort with demons.
XIII
THE JOKE
There are two kinds of jokes, those jokes that are funny because they
are true, and those jokes that would be funny anyhow. Think it out and
you will find that that is a great truth. Now the joke I have here for
the delectation of the broken-hearted is of the first sort. It is funny
because it is true. It is about a man whom I really saw and really knew
and touched, and on occasions treated ill. He was. The sunlight played
upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder under the light of the
sun, and not yet have gone down into that kingdom whose kings are less
happy than the poorest hind upon the upper fields.
It was at College that I knew him and I retained my acquaintance with
him--Oh, I retained it in a loving and cherishing manner--until he was
grown to young manhood. I would keep it still did Fate permit me so to
do, for he was a treasure. I have never met anything so complete for
the purposes of laughter, though I am told there are many such in the
society which bred his oafish form.
He was a noble in his own country, which was somewhere in the
pine-forests of the Germanies, and his views of social rank were far,
far too simple for the silent subtlety of the English Rich. In his poor
turnip of a mind he ordered all men thus:
First, reigning sovereigns and their families.
Secondly, mediatized people.
Third, Princes.
Fourth, Dukes.
Fifth, Nobles.
Then came a little gap, and after that little gap The Others.
Most of us in our College were The Others. But he, as I have said, was
a noble in his distant land.
He had not long been among the young Englishmen when he discovered
that a difficult tangle of titles ran hither and thither among them
like random briars through an undergrowth. There were Honourables, and
there were Lords, and Heaven knows what, and there were two Sirs, and
altogether it puzzled him.
He couldn't understand why a man should be called Mr. Jinks, and
his brother Lord Blefauscu, and then if a man could be called Lord
Blefauscu while his father Lord Brobdignag was alive, how was it that
quite a Fresher should be called Sir Howkey--no--he was Sir John
Howkey: and when the Devil did one put in the Christian name and when
didn't one, and why should one, and what was the order of precedence
among all these?
I think that last point puzzled him more than the rest, for in his own
far distant land in the pine-woods, where peasants uglier than sin
grovelled over the potato crop and called him "Baron," there were no
such devilish contraptions, but black was black and white was white.
Here in this hypocritical England, to which his father had sent him as
an exile, everything was so wrapped up in deceiving masks! There was
the Captain of the Eleven, or the President of the Boat Club. By the
time he had mastered that there might be great men not only without
the actual title (he had long ago despaired of that), but without so
much as cousinship to one, he would stumble upon a fellow with nothing
whatsoever to distinguish him, not even the High Jump, and yet "in"
with the highest. It tortured him I can tell you! After he had sat
upon several Fourth Year men (he himself a Fresher), from an error as
to their rank, after he had been duly thrown into the water, blackened
as to his face with blacking, sentenced to death in a court-martial
and duly shot with a blank cartridge (an unpleasant thing by the way
looking down a barrel); after he had had his boots, of which there
were seven pair, packed with earth, and in each one a large geranium
planted; after all these things had happened to him in his pursuit of
an Anglo-German understanding, he approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth
whom he had discovered with certitude to be the cousin of a Duke, and
begged him secretly to befriend him in a certain matter, which was this:
The Baron out of the Germanies proposed to give a dinner to no less
than thirty people and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all secrecy
to collect for him an assembly worthy of his rank and to give him
privately not only their names but their actual precedence according to
which he would arrange them at the table upon his right and upon his
left.
But what did the pot-bellied youth do? Why he went out and finding all
his friends one after the other he said:
"You know Sausage?"
"Yes," said they, for all the University knew Sausage.
"Well, he is going to give a dinner," said the pot-bellied one, who was
also slow of speech, "and you have to come, but I'm going to say you
are the Duke of Rochester" (or whatever title he might have chosen).
And so speaking, and so giving the date and place he would go on to
the next. Then, when he had collected not thirty but sixty of all
his friends and acquaintances, he sought out the noble Teuton again
and told him that he could not possibly ask only thirty men without
lifelong jealousies and hatreds, so sixty were coming, and the Teuton
with some hesitation (for he was fond of money) agreed.
Never shall I forget the day when those sixty were ushered solemnly
into a large Reception Room in the Hotel, blameless youths of varying
aspect, most of them quite sober--since it was but 7 o'clock--presented
one by one to the host of the evening, each with his title and style.
To those whom he recognized as equals the Aristocrat spoke with
charming simplicity. Those who were somewhat his inferiors (the lords
by courtesy and the simple baronets) he put immediately at their
ease; and even the Honourables saw at a glance that he was a man of
the world, for he said a few kind words to each. As for a man with no
handle to his name, there was not one of the sixty so low, except a
Mr. Poopsibah of whom the gatherer of that feast whispered to the host
that he could not but ask him because, though only a second cousin, he
was the heir to the Marquis of Quirk--hence his Norman name.
It was a bewilderment to the Baron, for he might have to meet the
man later in life as the Marquis of Quirk, whereas for the moment he
was only Mr. Poopsibah, but anyhow he was put at the bottom of the
table--and that was how the trouble began.
In my time--I am talking of the nineties--young men drank wine: it
was before the Bishop of London had noted the Great Change. And Mr.
Poopsibah and his neighbour--Lord Henry Job--were quite early in the
Feast occupied in a playful contest which ended in Mr. Poopsibah's
losing his end seat and going to grass. He rose, not unruffled, with a
burst collar, and glared a little uncertainly over the assembled wealth
and lineage of the evening. Lord Benin (the son of our great General
Lord Ashantee of Benin--his real name was Mitcham, God Rest His Soul)
addressed to the unreal Poopsibah an epithet then fashionable, now
almost forgotten, but always unprintable. Mr. Poopsibah, forgetting
what nobility imposes, immediately hurled at him an as yet half-emptied
bottle of Champagne.
Then it was that the bewildered Baron learnt for the last time--and for
that matter for the first time--to what the Island Race can rise when
it really lets itself go.
I remember (I was a nephew if I remember right) above the din and
confusion of light (for candles also were thrown) loud appeals as in
a tone of command, and then as in a tone of supplication, both in the
unmistakable accents of the Cousins overseas, and I even remember what
I may call the Great Sacrilege of that evening when Lord Gogmagog
seizing our host affectionately round the neck, and pressing the back
of his head with his large and red left hand, attempted to grind his
face into the tablecloth, after a fashion wholly unknown to the
haughty lords of the Teufelwald.
During the march homewards--an adventure enlightened with a sharp
skirmish and two losses at the hands of the police--I know not what
passed through the mind of the youth who had hitherto kept so careful
a distinction between blood and blood: whether like Hannibal he swore
eternal hatred to the English, or whether in his patient German mind
he noted it all down as a piece of historical evidence to be used in
his diplomatic career, we shall not be told. I think in the main he was
simply bewildered: bewildered to madness.
Of the many other things we made him do before Eights Week I have no
space to tell: How he asked us what was the fashionable sport and how
we told him Polo and made him buy a Polo pony sixteen hands high,
with huge great bones and a broken nose, explaining to him that it
was stamina and not appearance that the bluff Englishman loved in a
horse. How we made him wear his arms embroidered upon his handkerchief
(producing several for a pattern and taking the thing as a commonplace
by sly allusion for many preparatory days). How we told him that it was
the custom to call every Sunday afternoon for half an hour upon the
wife of every married Don of one's College: How we challenged him to
the Great College feat of throwing himself into the river at midnight:
How finally we persuaded him that the ancient custom of the University
demanded the presentation to one's Tutor at the end of term of an
elaborate thesis one hundred pages long upon some subject of Theology:
How he was carefully warned that surprise was the essence of this
charming tradition and not a word of it must be breathed to the august
recipient of the favour: How he sucked in the knowledge that the more
curious and strange the matter the higher would be his place in the
schools, and how the poor fool elaborately wasted what God gives such
men for brains in the construction of a damning refutation against the
Monophysites: How his tutor, a humble little nervous fool, thought he
was having his leg pulled--all these things I have no space to tell you
now.
But he was rich! Doubtless by the custom of his country he is now in
some great position plotting the ruin of Britannia and certainly she
deserves it in his case. He was most unmercifully ragged.
XIV
THE SPY
One day as I was walking along the beach at Southsea, I saw a little
man sitting upon a camp-stool and very carefully drawing the Old Round
Stone Fort which stands in the middle of the shallow water, one of the
four that so stand, and which looks from Southsea as though it were
about half-way across to the Island.
I said to him: "Sir, why are you drawing that old Fort?"
He answered: "I am a German Spy, and the reason I draw that Fort is to
provide information for my Government which may be useful to it in case
of war with this country."
When the gentleman sitting upon the camp-stool, who was drawing the
Old Round Stone Fort in the middle of the water, talked like this he
annoyed me very much.
"You merely waste your time," said I. "These Forts were put up nearly
sixty years ago, and they are quite useless."
"I know nothing about that," said the little man--he had hair like hemp
and prominent weak blue eyes of a glazed sort, and altogether he struck
me as a fool of no insignificant calibre--"I know nothing about that. I
obey orders. I was told to draw this Fort, and that I am now doing."
"You do not draw well," said I, "but that is neither here nor there. I
mean that what you draw is not beautiful. What I really want to know is
why in thunder you were told to draw that round stone barrel, for which
no one in Europe would give a five-pound note."
"I have nothing to do with all that," said the little man again, still
industriously drawing. "I was told to draw that Fort, and that Fort I
draw." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"Can you not tell me for whom you are drawing it?" said I at last.
"Yes," said he, "with great pleasure. I am drawing it for his
King-like and Kaiser-like Majesty By the Grace of God and the Authority
of the Holy See, William, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg,
Duke of Romshall, Count Hohenzollern and of the Great German Empire,
Emperor."
With that he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"I do assure you most solemnly," said I again, "that you can be of no
use whatever to your master in this matter. There are no guns upon that
ridiculous thing; it has even been turned into a hotel."
But the little man paid no attention to what I said. He went on obeying
orders. He had often heard that this was the strength of his race.
"How could there conceivably be any guns on it?" said I imploringly.
"Do think what you are at! Do look at the range between you and Ryde!
Do consider what modern gunnery is! Do wake up, do!"
But the little man with hair like hemp said again: "I know nothing
about all that. I am a lieutenant in the High Spy Corps, and I have
been told to draw this Fort and I must draw it." And he went on drawing
the Old Round Stone Fort.
Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I thought that civilization was
in peril if men such as he really existed and really went on in this
fashion.
However, I went back into Southsea, into the town, and there I bought
a chart. Then I struck off ranges upon the chart and marked them in
pencil, and I also marked the Fairway through Spithead into Portsmouth
Harbour. Then I came back to the little man, and I said: "Do look at
this!"
He looked at it very patiently and carefully, but at the end of so
looking at it he said: "I do not understand these things. I do not
belong to the High Map-making Corps; I belong to the Spy Corps, and I
have orders to draw this Fort." And he went on drawing the Old Round
Stone Fort.
Then, seeing I could not persuade him, I went into a neighbouring
church which is dedicated to the Patron of Spies, to wit, St. Judas,
and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus:
"Oh, St. Judas! Soften the flinty heart of this Spy, and turn him,
by your powerful intercession, from his present perfectly useless
occupation of drawing the Old Round Stone Fort to something a little
more worthy of his distinguished mission and the gallant profession he
adorns."
When I had prayed thus diligently for half an hour something within
me told me that it was useless, and when I got back to the seashore I
found out what the trouble was. Prayers went off my little man like
water off a cabbage-leaf. My little man with hair like hemp was a
No-Goddite, for he so explained to me in a conversation we had upon the
Four Last Things.
"I have done my drawing," he said at the end of this conversation (and
he said it in a tone of great satisfaction). "Now I shall go back to
Germany."
"No," said I, "you shall do nothing of the kind. I will have you tried
first in a court, and you shall be sent to prison for being a Spy."
"Very well," said he, and he came with me to the court.
The Magistrate tried him, and did what they call in the newspapers
"looking very grave," that is, he looked silly and worried. At last
he determined not to put the Spy in prison because there was not
sufficient proof that he was a Spy.
"Although," he added, "I have little doubt but that you have been
prying into the most important military secrets of the country."
After that I took the Spy out of court again and gave him some dinner,
and that night he went back home to Germany with his drawing of the Old
Round Stone Fort.
It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing business, but that is
their look-out. _They_ think they are efficient, and _we_ think they
are efficient, and when two people of opposite interests are agreed on
such a matter it is not for third parties to complain.
XV
THE YOUNG PEOPLE
One of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon these fine spring
days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to
wonder if they are what I was at their age.
There is an element in human life which the philosophers have
neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name
has been coined for it. But I am not at a loss to describe it. It is
that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere
change in perspective, or in point of view. It is that change which
makes Death so recognisable and too near; achievement necessarily
imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more
than that. It is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them,
which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years,
but which is now palpable and part of the senses: known. All who have
passed a certain age know what I mean.
This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of
judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth; and it is best to
trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the
young.
There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking
a little too stiffly down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself
immortal, I wonder, as I did? Does the thought of oblivion appal him
as it did me? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he
thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any
singularity in dress or gesture, I can well believe, for that is common
to all youth. But does he also, as did I and those of my time, purpose
great things which are quite unattainable, and think the summit of
success in any art to be the natural wage of living?
Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy
all our old illusions? Do they think the country invincible? Do they
vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the
former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some
natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night? Are
they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do?
I wonder!--Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a
billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the
street. And is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three
periods: their childhood; their much more important years at a public
school (which last fill up most of their consciousness); their new
untried occupation?
And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I
think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe
that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in
any trade is best recognised and best paid; that labour is a happy
business; and that women are of two kinds: the young who go about to
please them, the old to whom they are indifferent.
Do they drink? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble? I
conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound? Of that there can be no
doubt! See them hop on and off the motor 'buses and cross the streets!
And what of their attitude towards the labels? Do they take, as I
did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they diffident
when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the
presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of
one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all
social lies is Gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime
Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes
up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless
also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or
much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all
the rest of England in a ruck below.
Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used
all to be so bewildered! Things did not fit in with the very simple
and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The
motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few
base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would
always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the
make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery
that of _these_ men and of _such_ material the Great are made; and will
the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came
to their elders?
I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks
that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all
great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of
unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the
young man walking down Cockspur Street (he has got to Northumberland
Avenue by now), lives in a static world. For him things are immovable.
There are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are
there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does
one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing,
anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be
always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and
generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul,
and as yet unbetrayed.
Well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young
people, quite half the world is happy. Not one of that happy half
remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the little streets there
were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or
what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded
by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can
pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works.
And for them, all the new things--houses which are veils of mud on
stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of
taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels--are the things that always were and
always will be.
A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games
and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and
stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal,
but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable
from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.
Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the Young also
are caught with the obsession of change? Why, then, not even half the
world is happy.
XVI
ETHANDUNE
In the parish of East Knoyle, in the county of Wiltshire, and towards
the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse
covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet above the sea in height.
From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward
over a great rising roll of countryside.
To the west, upon the sky-line of a level range of hills, not high,
runs that long wood called Selwood and there makes an horizon. To the
north the cultivated uplands merge into high open down: bare turf of
the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the
watershed between the Northern and the Southern Avon. Eastward that
chalk land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.
From this high knoll a man perceives the two days' march which Alfred
made with his levies when he summoned the men of three Shires to fight
with him against the Danes; he overthrew them at Ethandune.
The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment
to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has
imperilled the survival of either between the Roman time and our own.
That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare,
and in which its continued life (individually the living memory of
the Empire and informed by the Faith) was most in peril, was not the
generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that
which witnessed the breaking of the Mahommedan tide in the eighth, when
the Christians carried it through near Poitiers, between the River
Vienne and the Chain, the upland south of Chatellerault. The gravest
moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could
remember the order of Charlemagne, and which fought its way desperately
through the perils of the later ninth century.
Then it was, during the great Scandinavian harry of the North and
West, that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was
shaken; its relics of central government were perishing of themselves;
letters had sunk to nothing and building had already about it something
nearly savage, when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers.
And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though
the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were
conscious of our past and of our inheritance, and seemed to feel that
now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed:
a bridge already nearly ruined.
If that bridge were not crossed there would be no future for
Christendom.
Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it,
were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we
know. At Ethandune and before Paris the double business was decided.
Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in this island.
Alfred is its hero, and its site is that chalk upland, above the Vale
of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved:
the hills above Eddington and Bratton upon the Westbury road.
The Easter of 878 had seen no King in England. Alfred was hiding with
some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the
Severn sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the
history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which
Christendom has re-arisen. In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.
There is a place at the southern terminal of the great wood, Selwood,
which bears a Celtic affix, and is called "Penselwood," "the head of
the forest," and near it there stood (not to within living memory,
but nearly so) a shire-stone called Egbert's Stone; there Wiltshire,
Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just eastward of the gap by which
men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the
levies, that is the lords of Somerset and of Wiltshire and their
followers, come also riding from Hampshire, met the King. But many had
fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.
"And seeing the King, as was meet, come to life again as it were after
such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense
joy, and there the camp was pitched."
Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the
barbarians who had ruined half the West.
Day was just breaking when the levies set forth and made for the
uplands and for the water partings. Not by mere and the marshes of the
valley, but by the great camp of White Sheet and the higher land beyond
it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the King across the
open turf of the chalk to where three Hundreds meet, and where the
gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the Counts had
been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land.
It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree which marked the
junction of the Hundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this
tree still stood and bore the name of the Iley Oak. The place of that
day's camp stands up above the water of Deveril, and is upon the
continuation of that Roman road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the
sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from
the great Ridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the
second camp was pitched.
With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made.
The whole of that way (which should be famous in every household in
this country) is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the
high rolling land of the Downs from summit to summit until--from that
central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury--they saw
before them, directly northward and a mile away, the ring of earthwork
which is called to-day "Bratton Castle." Upon the slope between the
great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there from those
naked heights that overlook the great plain of the Northern Avon, that
the fate of England was decided.
The end of that day's march and action was the pressing of the Pagans
back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great
society sat down before the ringed embankment watching all the gates of
it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection
and rounding up the stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.
That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the Northmen
treatied, conquered "by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred took
hostages "as many as he willed." Guthrum, their King, accepted our
baptism, and Britain took that upward road which Gaul seven years later
was to follow when the same anarchy was broken by Eudes under the walls
of Paris.
All this great affair we have doubtfully followed to-day in no more
than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfully over a
thousand years. But the thing happened where and as I have said. It
should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of
the Republic established our exalted but perilous modern day.
XVII
THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG
Up in the higher valley of the River Sarthe, which runs between low
knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of
pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer
morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher
land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older
servants in the chief men's retinue could remember Charlemagne.
Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land,
and each possessed of commissions from the Imperial authority. The one
had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, the other had marched
westward to join him, coming from the Beauce, with his command. Each
was a _Comes_, a Lord Administrator of a countryside and its capital,
and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About
them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the
footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.
The force had already marched far that morning. It was winding in line
down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside,
and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but
they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates.
The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken
camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their
marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the
rare peasantry were confused.
They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the
place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they
recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound
roughly with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with
his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away
beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still
summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had
seen the straggling line of the Northern men an hour before, hurrying
over the Down and coming towards that farm.
Of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse
the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong,
rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. Could he guess the
numbers? It might be two hundred; it was not three. How long had they
been in the countryside? Four days, at least. It was four days ago that
they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had
been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had
they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard.
His cousin from up the valley complained that three oxen had been
driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from
St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more--how
much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three, whom he had
helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of
his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to
dig the graves.
The lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly
eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from
Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the
peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck,
tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather
coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him
some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. He had taken
off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point.
He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its
action than to be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this though at
any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of
the barbarians.
Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the
expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through
all the North of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and
in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage,
but vague stories went about--that his father was from the Germanies;
that his father was from the Paris land; that it was his mother who had
brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade
him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the Emperor had
enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's
son; a yeoman.
On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men or women of his
blood. But ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of
the empire, adding, also, one village to another in his possession,
from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land
with the profits of office after office. He had been _Comes_ of Tours,
_Comes_ of Auxerre, _Comes_ of Nevers. He had the commission for all
the military work between Loire and Seine. There were songs about him,
and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the
populace most wondered.
So this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little
force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging
from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the
saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two
hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone
bridge unbroken. Immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood
and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the
goal of the pirates--and there they were! They had seen the imperial
levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running--tall,
lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with
battle-axe or short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of
the village.
Immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies,
gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the
bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed,
formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into
the streets of the place.
Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church
there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some
burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. He
fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the
northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there
was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the
doors. Then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just
missing one of the marshals. The Comes of Poitiers shouted for wood to
burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were
pressed. Faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as
this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at
short range from within the church-tower.
The first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for
marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the
slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such
opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased,
then came another arrow from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and he
went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next,
with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a
panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.
Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a
fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door
blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone so huge that even at such a
moment they marvelled at him.
Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great
buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong
thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a salute
of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted, straining,
a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram
against the second hinge. But, just as the shock came, an arrow from
the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder,
and he went down. Even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of
the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates
that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.
Four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the
three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be
tended. But his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms
had ceased; and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the
thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead.
The name of this village and this church was Brissarthe; and the man
who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose,
was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings.
From this man sprang Eudes, who defended Paris from the Sea-Rovers:
Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair;
and so through century after century to the kings that rode through
Italy, to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour of his wars, and to
that last unfortunate who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793. His
line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques
would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the
crown of Spain.
XVIII
THE CROOKED STREETS
Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder,
which are my delight, and hurt no man living?
Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in
their capitals and their great towns: they do not know why they do it;
neither do I.
It ought to be enough, surely, to drive the great broad ways which
commerce needs and which are the life-channels of a modern city,
without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between:
the islands of the past. For, note you, the Crooked Streets are packed
with human experience and reflect in a lively manner all the chances
and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men.
One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, a third
the track some animal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of
years ago; another is the line of an old defence, another shows where a
rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor one's family
can trace was born; a garden now all houses, and its owner who took
delight in it turned to be a printed name.
Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with the futilities of
great governments, nor with the fads of too powerful men, and they will
build you Crooked Streets of their very nature as moles throw up the
little mounds or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city
but glories, or has gloried, in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked
Streets. There is none, however wasted and swept by power which, if you
leave it alone to natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in
less than a hundred years and keep them for a thousand more.
I know a dead city called Timgad, which the sand or the barbarians of
the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies between the
desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountain-side. Its
columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways
are choked. It has a great forum or market-place, all flagged and even,
and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side.
All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you
may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into
darkness.
Well, take any other town which has not thus been mummified and
preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will
find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries
of Christian time has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind
of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles,
so it is with Nîmes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with
the City of London, on which by a special Providence the curse of the
Straight Street has never fallen, so that it is to this day a labyrinth
of little lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire to set it all
out in order with "piazzas" and boulevards and the rest--but the
English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets
and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best.
The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and of
avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as
regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town--or
rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called
the "Place des Vosges" what was intended. But when they had driven
their Straight Street two hundred yards or so the exchequer ran dry,
and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they
have hurt it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and
magnificent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great
avenues and lines of palaces; but why should they pull down my nest
beyond the river--Straw Street and Rat Street and all those winding
belts round the little Church of St. Julien the Poor, where they say
that Dante studied and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up
his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars.
Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and each will have its
character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one
to another is like travelling in a multitude or mixing with a number
of friends. In a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that one should
be the Moneylenders' Street and another that of the Burglars, and a
third that of the Politicians, and so forth through all the trades and
professions.
Then also, how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from
Crooked Streets! Consider those old Dutch towns where you suddenly
come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns
of Central France which from one street and then another show you the
Gothic in a hundred ways.
It is as it should be when you have the back of Chartres Cathedral
towering up above you from between and above two houses gabled and
almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from
such fissures into the great Place, the parvis of the cathedral, like
a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were
not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that
these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was
wise enough when he designed that there should lead all up beyond the
Tiber to St. Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern nondescript
horde, which has made Rome its prey, is very ill advised to drive those
new Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster
and great gaps that will not fill.
You will have noted in your travels how the Crooked Streets gather
names to themselves which are as individual as they, and which are
bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and
humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served
as a soldier. There was the Street of the Three Little Heaps of Wheat,
the Street of the Trumpeting Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and
an exceedingly pleasant street called "Who Grumbles at It?" and another
short one called "The Street of the Devil in His Haste," and many
others.
From time to time those modern town councillors from whom Heaven has
wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have
not the power to take away my Crooked Streets and put Straight ones in
their places, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates
some snobbery of the time: some little battle exaggerated to be a great
thing; some public fellow or other, in Parliament or what not; some fad
of the learned or of the important in their day.
Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses
built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was
painted "Kipling Street: late Nelson Street."
Upon another occasion I went to a little Norman market town up among
the hills, where one of the smaller squares was called "The Place of
the Three Mad Nuns," and when I got there after so many years and was
beginning to renew my youth I was struck all of a heap to see a great
enamelled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the
triangle. They had called it "The Place Victor Hugo"!
However, all you who love Crooked Streets, I bid you lift up your
hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build Straight
Streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy
good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant
future; but in this case I am right enough. The Crooked Streets will
certainly return.
Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day,
and that in another man's work, but which, having once seen it, I shall
retain all the days of my life.
"Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem," or words to that
effect. I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion, and
anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man, if I have
changed it so much the better.
XIX
THE PLACE APART
Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do)
so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the
happiness I had of it.
* * * * *
One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among
the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and
good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite
the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not
tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where
there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is
still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.
The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it
a solemn slope of woodland leading up gently to where, two miles
or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of
the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy,
hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought,
as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good
things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.
A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first
regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved
a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all
about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly
and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged
in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing
and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of
trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of
the countryside.
Just where the slope began to go downwards again upon the further
side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The
path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my
way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while
that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw
before me the Valley.
Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed
and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or
so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one;
moreover, that descent had been gentle.
The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left
hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had
passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.
Let me describe it.
Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall),
the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low
chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch standing up among
them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark
belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was
behind that long afternoon of hills.
Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the
glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which
followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there
a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass.
These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary
was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any
sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human
kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor
of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little
cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley
converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four
miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less. The sun as I
have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike
place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light
might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green
cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.
Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the
wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this
single and most unexpected vale.
So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to
myself: "I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us."
For we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our
masters give us holidays, but God only: until at last we lay down the
business and leave our work for good and all. And so much for holidays.
Anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.
It was not as are common and earthly things. There was a peace about
it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which
invited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them; and all
was completely still. I heard no birds from the moment when I left
the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a
companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but it slid full and at once
mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either
side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going.
The pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there
was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in
height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind
moved it.
There were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or
fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western
slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right
on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Never have I found a
place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.
If any man owned that Valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned
it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which
it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than
an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was
not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which
memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but
rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had
been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is
also its youth, was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to
attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for
possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps
possess, but not while the business is on.
I went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no
blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves
or of those that have movement.
So I went until I came to the low pass at the head of the place,
and when I had surmounted it I looked down a steep great fall into
quite another land. I had come to a line where met two provinces, two
different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.
The moor (for so I would call it) upon the further side fell away and
away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could see,
further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields
and the anxious life of men.
XX
THE EBRO PLAIN
I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt
shock which the Northern eye receives when it first looks from some
rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain.
"Deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of
that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar
vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas;
nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give
forth when, looking southward toward Mexico and the sun, a man shades
his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare
river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.
Corn grows in that new Spain beneath one: many towns stand founded
there; Christian Churches are established; a human society stands
firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. But to the
Northern eye first seeing it--nay, to a Northerner well acquainted with
it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision--it is always
a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as
he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he
knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe been
fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along
this naked and burnt valley of the Ebro.
I will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the
boundaries of the Basque country, from the Peak of Anie, down through
the high Pyrenean silences to those banks of Aragon where the river
runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the
main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of
thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to
have climbed the further range (which is called "The Mountains of
Stone," or "The Mountains of the Rock"), and, coming upon its further
southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast
extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically
clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs
of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland,
from within sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the Southern Sea,
that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than
any views in Europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land,
partly from the Iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp
in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as
might be the landscapes of a dead world.
The traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of
the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the Anie through
forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still
dignified by many and noble trees, and alive with cascading water.
While he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel
before the next) which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall,
he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable
soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own
Northern conception of pasture-land. The herbage upon which he would
pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though
sparse and Southern, would have reminded him of home.
But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and
sees at last the whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out before him,
it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green
which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. Though
human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were,
with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing
at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller
asks himself doubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt,
insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men--things with
histories.
For the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth
fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final
limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and
dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere
height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off
Aragon from the south and the old from the new Castile, save where the
higher knot of the Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.
This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected
and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians,
is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of the
distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of
desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in
commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility
or of romance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.
The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this peculiar
impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus--and they
are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places
of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north
by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with
no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of
urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in
England. Yet even those few, I say, who enter Spain from the north, as
Spain should be entered--over the mountain roads--have not all of them
received the impression of which I speak.
I have so received it, I know; I could wish that to the Northerner it
were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should
live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a
distant bell, that ritual and a creed should have survived there--so
absolute is its message of desolation.
With a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish,
but increases. Especially to one who shall make his way painfully on
foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again,
who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some
bridge over Ebro and look down, it may be, at a trickle of water
hardly moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed, or it may be at
a turbid spate roaring a furlong broad after the rains--in either
case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man; who shall hobble from
little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men
in that silent land and at their lack of smiles and at the something
fixed which watches one from every wall; who shall push on over the
slight wheel-tracks which pass for roads--they are not roads--across
the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field; to one who has done all
these things, I say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there
comes an appreciation of its wilful silence and of its unaccomplished
soul. That knowledge fascinates, and bids him return. It is like
watching with the sick who were thought dead, who are, in your night
of watching, upon the turn of their evil. It is like those hours of
the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper wakened can
find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon
itself--but waits for dawn. Behind all this lies, as behind a veil
of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will
discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of Spain.
XXI
THE LITTLE RIVER
Men forget too easily how much the things they see around them in the
landscapes of Britain are the work of men. Most of our trees were
planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. Our ploughs for countless
centuries have made even the soil of the plains the lines of a great
view; its groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and of road are
very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was
set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it--which, alone of
creatures, speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning
its origin and its end. It is man that has transformed the surface
and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his
handiwork.
There is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the
historical truth of what I am here saying. As God made it, it was
but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of tangled underwood,
sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers,
scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains, dried up and
stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. Then, no one will ever
know how many centuries ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing with
his hands. He took my little river; he began to use it, to make it, and
to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave to it its
ancient name, which is the ancient name for water, and which you will
find scattered upon streams large and small from the Pyrenees up to the
Northern Sea and from the West of Germany to the Atlantic. He called it
the Adur; therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old,
for pedants hate the fruitful humour of antiquity.
Well, not only did man give my little river (an inconceivable number of
generations ago) the name which it still bears, but he bridged it and
he banked it, he scoured it and he dammed it, until he made of it a
thing to his own purpose and a companion of the countryside.
With the fortunes of man in our Western and Northern land the fortunes
of my little river rose and fell. What the Romans may have done with it
we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little--coins sink in it
and the foundations of buildings are lost.
In the breakdown which we call the Dark Ages, and especially perhaps
after the worst business of the Danish Invasion, it must have broken
back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been
before man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks and the maples, the
coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars encroached upon
tilled land; the banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting
dams, the waterwheels were forgotten and perished. There seem to have
been no mills. There is no good drinking water in that land, save here
and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well, and the people of
the Dark Ages in Britain, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the
desolation of my valley.
Then came the Norman: the short man with the broad shoulders and the
driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp
wherever he marched, from the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed that
land again, he ploughed the clay, he cut the undergrowth, and he built
a great house of monks and a fine church of stone where for so long
there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of
the weald.
To my little river the Norman was particularly kind. He dug it out and
deepened it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it; it brimmed to its
banks, it was once more the companion of men, and, what is more, he dug
it out so thoroughly all the twenty miles to the sea that he could even
use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream
came to be called Shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when
all this was done, right up to the wharf which the Knight Templars had
built above the church to meet the waters of the stream.
All the Middle Ages that fruitfulness and that use continued. But
with the troubles in which the Middle Ages closed and in which so
much of our civilisation was lost, the little river was once more
half abandoned. The church still stood, but stone by stone the great
building of the Templars disappeared. The river was no longer scoured;
its course was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild beasts came
back, the lands of the King were lost. One use remained to the
water--the Norman's old canalisation was forgotten and the wharf had
slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field
with no deep water standing by. This use was the use of the Hammer
Ponds. Here and there the stream was banked up, and the little fall
thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies in
which the iron of the countryside was worked. For in this clay of
ours there was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks of the weald
furnished the charcoal for its smelting. The metal work of the great
ships that fought the French, many of their guns also, and bells and
railings for London, were smithied or cast at the issue of these Hammer
Ponds. But coal came and the new smelting; our iron was no longer
worked, and the last usefulness of the little river seemed lost.
Then for two generations all that land lay apart, the stream quite
choked or furiously flooding, the paths unworkable in winter: no roads,
but only green lanes, and London, forty miles away, unknown.
The last resurrection of the little river has begun to-day. The railway
was the first bringer of good news (if you will allow me to be such an
apologist for civilisation); then came good hard roads in numbers, and
quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the car. The energy of men
reached Adur once again, and once again began the scouring and making
of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man; so that, though
we have not tackled the canal as we should (that will come), yet with
every year the Adur grows more and more of a companion again. It has
furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbours, and in one
place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though
clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well.
The other day as I began a new and great and good dam with sluices
and with puddled clay behind oak boards and with huge oak uprights
and oaken spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, I thought to
myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what I was doing
was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time
incalculable to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great
pleasure, for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men,
whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead.
This little river--the river Adur before I have done with it--will be
as charming and well-bred a thing as the Norman or the Roman knew.
It shall bring up properly to well-cut banks. These shall be boarded.
It shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay, and reeds
and water lilies shall grow only where I choose. In every way it shall
be what the things of this world were made to be--the servant and the
instrument of Man.
XXII
SOME LETTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TIME
_From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake_
MY DEAR VICTORIA,--Yes, by all means tell your young friend Mr.
Shakespeare that he can come to Paxton on Saturday. As you say that he
can't get away until the later train I will have Perkins meet him from
the village. I don't suppose he rides, but I can't mount him anyhow. I
hope there is no trouble about Church on Sunday.
_From Mrs. Myers to Lady Clogg_
One thing I _am_ looking forward to, dear, is this little coon
Shakespeare. Victoria told me about him. She says sometimes he will
play and sometimes he won't play. But _she_ says he's quiet in harness
just now. It seems that sometimes he talks all of a sudden. And one
can get him to _sing_! Anyhow I _do_ want to see what he's like.
(_The rest of this letter is about other matters._)
_From Messrs. Hornbull and Sons to William Shakespeare Esq._
SIR,--We have now sent in our account three times, and the last time
with a pressing recommendation that you should settle it, but you have
not honoured us by any reply. We regret to inform you that if we do not
receive a cheque by Wednesday the 22nd inst. we shall be compelled to
put the matter into other hands.
_From John Shakespeare to his mother, Mrs. Shakespeare_
DEAREST MAMMA,--I am afraid Billie really can't pay that money this
week. He was awfully apologetic about it and I gave him a good talking
to, but if he hasn't got it he hasn't. After all it isn't absolutely
necessary until the 30th.
_From Jonathan Truelove Esq. to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR OLD CHAP,--I am going to do something very unconventional, but
we know each other well enough I think. Can you let me have the £5 I
lent you two years ago? I have to get in every penny I can this week,
suddenly. If you can't don't bother to answer, I am not going to press
you.
_From Sir Henry Portman, Attorney General, to the Secretary of the
Crown Prosecutor_
DEAR JIM,--No, I can't manage to get round to the Ritz this evening.
Mary says that she wants Johnnie to leave Dresden. What inconceivable
rubbish! Why can't she let him stay where he is? You might as well
drown yourself as leave Dresden. What on earth could it lead to?
By the way, do choke off that silly ass Bates, if he is still worrying
about Shakespeare. No one wants anything done, and No. 1 would be
awfully angry if there was a prosecution. Rather than allow it I would
find the money myself.
Yours, H. P.
_From James Jevons and Co. Publishers, to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR SIR,--Our attention has been called to your work by our
correspondent in Edinburgh, and he asks us whether we think you could
see your way to something dealing with Scottish history. He does not
want it cast in the form of a play, for which he says there will be
no sale with the Scottish public, seeing the exceedingly English cast
of your work, but if you could throw it into Ballad form he thinks
something could be done with it.
Of course such things can never be remunerative at _first_. The
Edinburgh firm for whom he writes propose to buy sheets at 4½d. or 5d.
and to give a royalty of 10 per cent. to be equally divided between
our firm and yourself. They could not go beyond 500 copies for the
first edition. It may be worth your while, in spite of the trifling
remuneration, to consider this offer in order to secure copyright and
to prevent any pirating of future editions in Scotland. Pray advise.
We are,
Your obedient servants,
JAMES JEVONS AND CO.
_From Messrs. Firelight, Agents, to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--We have had a proposal from Messrs. Capon in
the matter of your collected Poems. As you know, verse is not just now
much in demand with the public, and they could not manage an advance on
royalties. They propose 10 per cent. on a 5s. book after the first 250
copies sold. The honorarium is, of course, purely nominal, but it might
lead to more business later on. Could you let us know your views upon
the matter?
Very faithfully yours,
_pro_ FIRELIGHT AND CO.
C. G.
_From Clarence de Vere Chalmondeley to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR SIR,--Having certain sums free for investment, I am prepared to
lend, not as a money-lender but as a private banker, sums from £10 to
£50,000, on note of hand alone, without security. No business done with
minors.
Very faithfully yours,
CLARENCE DE VERE CHALMONDELEY.
_From William Shakespeare to Sir John Fowless_ (_scribbled hastily in
pencil_)
I will try and come if I can, but it's something awful. I only got my
proofs read by 2 o'clock in the night; I had to do my article for _The
Owl_ before 10 this morning, then I have got to go and meet the Church
Defence League people on my way to the station, and catch a train to a
place where Mrs. Blake wants me to go somewhere in the Midlands, about
5. I think I can look in on my way to the station.
That man you asked me to see about the brandy is a fraud. Would you,
like a good fellow, tell Charlie _not to forget to mention in his
article that "Hamlet" will only be played on Tuesdays and Fridays in
the afternoon, matinées_. Don't forget this because people want to know
when it is going to be. There was a very good notice in _The Jumper_. I
do feel so ill.
W. S.
_From S. Jennings, Secretary, to George Mountebank Esq._
DEAR SIR,--Mr. Shakespeare is at present away from home and will return
upon Thursday, when I will immediately lay your MSS. before him.
I am,
Very faithfully yours,
S. JENNINGS, Secretary.
_From Mr. Mustwrite of Warwick to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--I have never met you, and perhaps you will think
it a great impertinence on my part to be writing as I do. But I must
write to tell you the deep and sincere pleasure I have received from
your little brochure "Venus and Adonis," which the Rev. William Clarke,
our Clergyman, lent me only yesterday. I read it through at a sitting
and I could not rest until I had written to tell you the profound
spiritual consolation I derived from its perusal.
I am, dear Mr. Shakespeare,
Very much your admirer,
GEORGE MUSTWRITE.
_To William Shakespeare Esq._ (_unsigned, and written in capital
letters rather irregularly_)
No doubt you think yourself a fine fellow and the friend of the working
man--I don't think! Some of us know more about you than you think we
do. I erd you at the Queen's Hall and you made me sick. You aren't fit
to black the boots of the man you talked against.
_To William Shakespeare Esq._, O.H.M.S. (_printed_)
SIR,--In pursuance with the provisions of Her Majesty's Benevolent Act,
you are hereby required to prepare a true and correct statement of your
emoluments from all forms of (in writing) literary income, duly signed
by you within 21 days from this date. If, however, you elect to be
assessed by the District Commissioners under a number or a letter, &c.
&c. &c.
_From the Earl of Essex to W. Shakespeare Esq._ (_lithographed_)
DEAR SIR,--I have undertaken to act as Chairman this year of the
Annual Dinner of the League for the Support of Insufficiently Talented
Dramatic Authors. You are doubtless acquainted with the admirable
objects of &c. &c. I hope I may see your name among the stewards
whose position is purely honorary, and is granted upon payment of five
guineas, &c. &c. This laudable &c. &c.
Very faithfully yours,
ESSEX.
_From Mrs. Parxinson to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--Can you come and talk for our Destitute Pick
Pockets Association on Thursday the 18th? I know you are a very busy
man, but I always find it is the most busy men, who somehow manage to
find time for charitable objects. If you can manage to do so I would
send my motor round for you to Pilbury Row, and it would take you out
to Rickmansworth where the meeting is to be. I am afraid it cannot take
you back, but there is a convenient train at 20 minutes to 8, which
gets you into London a little after 9 for dinner, or, if that is too
late you might catch the 6.30, which gets you in at 8.15, only that
will be rather a rush. My daughter tells me how much she admired your
play, _Macduff_, and very much wants to see you.
_From the Duchess of Dump to William Shakespeare Esq._
DEAR MR. SHAKESPEARE,--I want to ask you a really _great_ favour. Could
you come to my Animals Ball on the 4th of June dressed up as a gorilla?
I _do_ hope you can. We have to tell people what costumes they are to
wear for fear that they should duplicate. Now _don't_ say no. It's
years since we met. Last February wasn't it?
Yours ever,
CAROLINE DUMP.
_Printed on Blue Paper with the Royal Arms_
In the name of the Queen's grace, OYEZ!
WHEREAS there has appeared before Us Henry Holt a Commissioner of the
Queen's, &c. &c.
AND WHEREAS the said Henry Holt maketh deposition that he has against
you (_in writing_) _William Shakespeare_, a claim for the sum of (_in
writing_) _£27 2s. 1d._, now we hereby notify you that you are summoned
to appear before us, &c. &c., upon (_in writing_) _Wednesday the 25th
of May_ in the Year of Our Lord (_in writing_) _1601_, given under the
Common Seal this (_in writing_) _second day of May 1601_.
HENRY HOLT, a Commissioner of the Queen's &c. &c.
XXIII
ON ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE GREAT
It is generally recognised in this country that an acquaintance more
or less familiar with the Great, that is, with the very wealthy,
and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one
generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service.
I am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own
social rank, certain views which I think will not be unprofitable to
them in this matter.
I will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty; to
be the son of some professional man; to have been kept, at the expense
of some anxiety to his parents, for five years or so at a public
school, and to have proceeded to the University upon a loan.
With such a start he cannot fail, if he is in any way lively or
amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a
whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called "The Great,"
and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction, unless they die
prematurely of hard living or hereditary disease.
After such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship
and patronage of these people would seem to be secure; and yet we know
from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and
that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their
betters at Winchester or Magdalen (to take two names at random) not two
are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those
London houses, which are rated at over £1000 a year.
The root cause of such failures is obvious enough.
The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would,
so far as general opportunities go, be lost if one did not advertise
it; and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives.
For by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well
acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the
recitation of acquaintance with themselves.
Formerly--about seventy years ago--your man who would succeed recited
upon the slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis, his friendship
with the Great. It was one of Disraeli's methods of advancement. The
Great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and
towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. William tells
me he remembers his dear father warning me of this.
Those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to
abandon methods so simple and to take refuge in allusion. Thus a young
fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties
was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and
such a notability and swearing that he would not meet him. For to
profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that
notability moved.
Or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and, on the whole,
unfavourably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a
method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. While a
third way was to use Christian names, and yet to use them with a tone
of indifference, as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than
friends.
But the Great are ever on the alert, and this habit of allusion was
in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses; so that in our own
time it has been necessary to invent another. I do not promise it any
long survival, I write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my
time, but I think a young man is well advised in this second decade of
the twentieth century to assume towards the Great an attitude of silent
and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them
less well than he does.
Thus three men will be in a smoking room together. The one, let us
say, will be the Master of the King's Billiard Room, an aged Jew who
has lent money to some Cabinet Minister; the second a local squire,
well-to-do and about fifty years of age; the third is my young reader,
whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. The Master of the
King's Billiard Room will say that he likes "Puffy." The squire will
say he doesn't like him much because of such and such a thing; he will
ask the young man for his opinion. Now, in my opinion, the young man
will do well at this juncture to affect ignorance. Let him deliberately
ask to have it explained to him who Puffy is (although the nickname may
be familiar to every reader of a newspaper), and on hearing that it is
a certain Lord Patterson he should put on an expression of no interest,
and say that he has never met Lord Patterson.
Something of the same effect is produced when a man remains silent
during a long conversation about a celebrity, and then towards the end
of it says some really true and intimate thing about him, such as, that
he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot bear his double eyelids
or that his gout is very amusing.
Another very good trick, which still possesses great force, is to
repudiate any personal acquaintance with the celebrity in question, and
treat him merely as some one whom one has read of in the newspapers;
but next, as though following a train of thought, to begin talking of
some much less distinguished relative of his with the grossest possible
familiarity.
A common and not ineffective way (which I mention to conclude the
list) is to pretend that you have only met the Great Man in the way of
business, at large meetings or in public places, where he could not
possibly remember you, and to pretend this upon all occasions and very
often. But this method is only to be used when, as a matter of fact,
you have not met the celebrity at all.
As for letting yourself be caught unawares and showing a real and naïf
ignorance of the Great, that is not only a fault against which I will
not warn you, for I believe you to be incapable of it, but it is also
one against which it is of no good to warn any one, for whoever commits
it has no chance whatsoever of that advancement which it is the object
of these notes to promote.
When you are found walking with the Great in the street (a thing which,
as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company
with people of your position), it is as well, if your companion meets
another of his own Order, to stand a little to one side, to profess
interest in the objects of a neighbouring shop window, or the pattern
of the railings. Such at least is the general rule to be laid down for
those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better
method, which is as follows:
Catch if you can the distant approach of the Other Great before your
Great has spotted him, then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied
by the pulling out of your watch, depart: for there is nothing that
so annoys the Great during the conference of any two of them, as the
presence of a third party of your station.
Since my remarks must be put into a brief compass (though I have much
more to say upon this all-important subject) I will conclude with what
is perhaps the soundest piece of advice of all.
Never under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift even of the
smallest value, upon the Great. Never let yourself be betrayed into
a generous action, nor, if you can possibly prevent it, so much as a
generous thought in their regard. They are not grateful. They think
it impertinent. And it looks odd. There is a note of equality about
such things (and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in
correspondence) which is very odious and offensive. Moreover, as has
been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of
the middle class falls into the habit of asking the Great to meals,
of giving them books or pictures or betraying towards them in any
fashion a spirit of true companionship, he bursts; and that, as a rule,
after a delay quite incredibly short. Some men of fair substance have
to my knowledge been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of
one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at
Cowes, in the Isle of Wight; from which spot I send these presents,
and where, by the way, at the time of writing, the stock of forage in
the forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the
mainland.
God bless you!
XXIV
ON LYING
He that will set out to lie without having cast up his action and
judged it this way and that, will fail, not in his lie, indeed, but in
the object of it; which is, _imprimis_, to deceive, but _in ultimis_
or fundamentally, to obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and
another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not vainly and wantonly
as for sport (saving a very few that are habitual), but rather for
some good to be got or evil to be evaded: as when men lie of their
prowess with the fist, though they have fought none--no, not even
little children--or in the field, though they have done no more than
shoot a naked blackamoor at a furlong. These lie for honour. Not so our
stockers and jobbers, who lie for money direct, or our parliament men,
who lie bestraught lest worse befall them.
Lies are distinguished by the wise into the Pleasant and the Useful,
and again into the Beautiful and the Necessary. Thus a lie giving
comfort to him that utters it is of the Lie Pleasant, a grateful thing,
a cozening. This kind of lies is very much used among women. This
sort will also make out good to the teller, evil to the told, for the
pleasure the cheat gives; as, when one says to another that his worst
actions are now known and are to be seen printed privately in a Midland
sheet, and bids him fly.
The lie useful has been set out _ut supra_, which consult; and may be
best judged by one needing money. Let him ask for the same and see how
he shall be met; all answers to him shall be of this form of lie. It is
also of this kind when a man having no purse or no desire to pay puts
sickness on in a carriage, whether by rail or in the street, crying
out: "Help! help!" and wagging his head and sinking his chin upon his
breast, while his feet patter and his lips dribble. Also let him roll
his eyes. Then some will say: "It is the heat! The poor fellow is
overcome!" Others, "Make way! make way!" Others, men of means, will
ask for the police, whereat the poorer men present will make off. But
chiefly they that should have taken the fare will feel kindly and will
lift the liar up gently and convey him and put him to good comfort
in some waiting place or other till he be himself--and all the while
clean forget his passage. For such is the nature of their rules. Lord
Hincksey, now dead, was very much given to this kind of lie, and
thought it profitable.
You shall lie at large and not be discovered; or a little, and for
once, and yet come to public shame, as it was with Ananias and his
good wife Sapphira in Holy Scripture, who lied but once and that was
too often. While many have lied all their lives long and come to no
harm, like John Ade, of North-Chapel, for many years a witness in the
Courts that lied professionally, then a money-lender, and lastly a
parliament-man for the county: yet he had no hurt of all this that any
man could see, but died easily in another man's bed, being eighty-three
years of age or thereabouts, and was very honourably buried in Petworth
at a great charge. But some say he is now in Hell, which God grant!
There is no lie like the winsome, pretty, flattering, dilating
eyelid-and-lip-and-brow-lifting lie such as is used by beauty
impoverished, when land is at stake. By this sort of lie many men's
estates have been saved, none lost, and good done at no expense save to
holiness. Of the same suit also is the lie that keeps a parasite in a
rich man's house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter, a model upon a
sculptor, and beggars upon all men.
Fools will believe their lies, but wise men also will take delight in
them, as did the Honourable Mr. Gherkin, for some time His Majesty's
Minister of State for the Lord Knows What, who, when policemen would
beslaver him, and put their hands to their heads and pay court in a
low way, told all that saw it what mummery it was; yet inwardly was
pleased. The more at a loss was he when, being by an accident in the
Minories too late and his hat lost, his coat torn and muddy, he made to
accost an officer, and civilly saying, "Hi----" had got no further but
he took such a crack on the crown with a truncheon as laid him out for
dead, and he is not now the same as he was, nor ever will be.
Ministers of religion will both show forth to the people the evil
of lying and will also lie themselves in a particular manner, very
distinct and formidable: as was clear when one denounced from the
pulpit the dreadful vice of hypocrisy and false seeming, whereat a
drunkard not yet sober, hearing him say, "Show me the hypocrite!" rose
where he was, full in church, and pointed to the pulpit, so that he
was thrust out for truth-telling by gesture in that sacred place; as
was that other who, when the preacher came to "Show me the drunkard,"
jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the parson's wife: a very
mutinous act. But to Lying.
He that takes lying easily will take life hardly; as the saw has it,
"Easy lying makes hard hearing," but your constructed and considered,
your well-drafted lie--that is the lie for men grown, men discreet
and fortunate. To which effect also the poet Shakespeare says in his
_Sonnets_--but no matter! The passage is not for our ears or time,
dealing with a dark woman that would have her Will: as women also must
if the world is to wag, which leads me to that sort of lie common
to all the sex of which we men say that it is the marvellous, the
potent, the dextrous, the thorough, or better still, the mysterious,
the uncircumvented and not explainable, the stopping-short and
confounding-against-right-reason lie, the triumphant lie of Eve our
mother: Iseult our sister: Judith, an aunt of ours, who saved a city,
and Jael, of holy memory.
But if any man think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for
his pains; and if any man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or
compound, for he attempts the mastery of women.
Which no man yet has had of God, or will.
Amen.
XXV
THE DUPE
The Dupe is an honest creature, and such honesty is the noblest work
of God. The Dupe is not the servant of the Knave, but his ally. The
Dupe does not, as too simple a political philosophy would have it,
serve only for a material on which the Knave shall work; he is also the
moral support of the Knave, strengthening and comforting the Knave's
most inward soul and lending lubrication to the friction of public
falsehood. For the Knave is of many sorts, and the Dupe helps them all.
The plumb Knave, or Knave Absolute, finds in the Dupe such an honest
creature as does not revile him, and it is good to know that one is
loved by some few honest souls. Thus the Knave Absolute is foolish
indeed when he lets the Dupe see by gesture or tone that he thinks him
a fool, for the Dupe is very sensitive and touchy in all weathers.
The Knave Qualified (in his many incarnations) must have the Dupe about
him or perish. Thus the Knave who would save his soul by self-deception
feeds, cannibal-like, upon the straightforwardness of the Dupe, and
says to himself: "How can I be such a Knave after all, since these good
Dupes here heartily agree with me?"
The Knave Cowardly props himself upon that sort of courage in the Dupe
which always accompanies virtue. "I run a risk," says he, "in proposing
the State purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend
the Old Knave went under thus in 1895; but the Good Dupe is a buckler
in the fight; he will dare all because his heart is pure."
The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe to see to details and to meet
men in ante-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining.
This sort of Knave will have two or even three Dupes for private
secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law.
The Dupe is in God's providence very numerous, for his normal rate
of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death-rate low. On
this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch
the Dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by
the Knave; nor is the one to be distinguished from the other by the
coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one be old
enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand,
will not be of great service in any physical struggle and must not be
depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse and when disturbed
he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a Rogue Dupe will turn
upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured.
The Dupe has his habitat, but that not easily defined, as in the
suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where
the leisured and the inane make their lives seem so much longer than
those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the Dupe
will sometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in
such few years as wholly to discomfit the calculations of the Knaves.
Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before
numbers whom they had thought to be Dupes (seeing that the locality was
Little Partington) but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-Dupes,
men working with their hands or what-not, quite undeceivable, as often
as not Atheist, and ready to storm the platform and tear the Knave
alive.
The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been said above, will tolerate no
hint of impatience. On the other hand, he needs no breaking in and
will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible
to travellers when they first come across the Dupe what burdens he
will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole Plain appears
to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large
houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses, howdahs sheltering masters
and mistresses, cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable institutions,
all as it were endowed with a motion of their own until you stoop down
and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the
backs of an enormous migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for a Better
Land.
The Dupe also differs from other creatures in that he will sleep
comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon
them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death
itself without dispute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about him a
forlorn and naked feeling to which it were a pity to condemn him. His
food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and
he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he
will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes
very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him,
that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite
is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick,
buck, and rear, and behave in a manner altogether out of his nature.
The Dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves
to treat it shyly, and to flirt with it as it were. There is no
prettier sight than to see a number of Dupes met together arching and
curvetting, side-glancing and denying, before they plunge their heads
and manes into the life-giving liquid.
It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his life very consistently
happy, and on this account many not born Dupes, imitate the Dupes and
would be of them, in which they fail, for the Dupe is God's creature
and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation as has already been
affirmed.
XXVI
THE LOVE OF ENGLAND
Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a
general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the
object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.
The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love
of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country,
the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it
in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in
words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it
draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that
ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more
produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to
what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who
love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they
hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are
dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from
their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.
The love of England has in it no true plains but fens, low hills, and
distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable, small and
ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of
England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers
of England no long pageantry of battle. Nature has given Englishmen
an appetite for battle, and between the two men who love England make
a legend for themselves of wars unfought, and of arms permanently
successful; though arms were they thus always successful would not be
arms at all.
The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong
rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which a
minority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed
as yet to save the future of England. In no other land will you so
readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right
to doubt the common policy; but though you will nowhere discover such
men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few.
The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to
institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In
its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of
action and of vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal
to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the
institution to sterilise with age and to grow fantastic.
The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at
closer and at closer times (while we have lived) it has failed to save.
Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by
this music in their souls than by any other, wherever England is or
is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you may discover what religion has
been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epics
arise. In men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a
set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength yet almost barren.
Nourished and exampled by England, flourishing upon the field of
England, the love of England is a love of the very earth: of the smell
of growing things and of certain skies, and of tides in river-mouths,
and of belts of sea.
If a man would understand this great thing England which is now in
peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not
consider the accident of England's success and failure, nor certain
empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor
certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other
arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the
passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes
the place, nor with some active work in contrast with which it seems
so empty and unproducing a thing. He must not set it against a creed
(it is not so high as that), nor against a conquest or a true empire
such as Spain and Rome possessed.
If a man would understand the love of England he must do what hardly
any one would dare to do: that is, he must clearly envisage England
defeated in a final war and ask himself, "What should I do then?"
XXVII
THE STORM
There is a contemptible habit of mind (contemptible in intellect, not
in morals) which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of
perception.
The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the
mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The
mystics have never proved their theory true. But it is undoubtedly
true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold; it is
true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly
manifold, and that one perception breeds one hundred others, so that
we advance through life as through a pageant enjoying in greater and
greater degree day by day (if we open ourselves to them) the glorious
works of God.
There is a detestable habit of mind, which either does not understand,
or sneers at, or despises, or even wholly misses--when it is persisted
in--this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us
with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first colour
for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those
intimations of high and half-remembered things which a new aspect of
a tree or house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us
to forget, or to let grow stale, the pleasure with which the scent
of woods blest us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the
mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of
experience, kill humour and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to
us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less
alive, it adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of
sad knowledge as life, however well lived, must properly do, but a
useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters
it would persuade us that all things may be read and known and that
nothing is worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest
rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be
despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing
bears a fruit and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best
an unexplained fragment. Even in that highest of fields, the field of
service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if
we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and
becomes useless: may be called abortive and fails its end.
These thoughts arose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my
Mill the advance of a great storm cloud; for in the majestic progress
which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from
the Channel I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of
thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that
which I very well knew was in its awfulness allied to the life of the
soul.
For very many days the intense heat had parched the Weald. The leaves
dropped upon the ash and the oak, the grass was brown, our wells had
failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant
pools. We thought the fruits would wither; and our houses, not built
for such droughts and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long after
the cool of the evening had come.
At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed
far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over
Egdean Side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us
how it had rained in London--as though rain falling in London ever fell
upon earth or nourished fruits and men!
We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of
Heaven. But to-day the great storm came up, marching in a dark
breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders about it; and it was
personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate
which the River Adur has pierced, leaving upon either side the high
chalk hills; the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and
menacing cloud.
No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoplied could have
mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the
sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy,
that great idol (for it has been all of these things), which, since
we have tilled the earth, we have watched, we have welcomed, we have
combated, we have unfortunately worshipped. This was that God of the
Storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets.
The Parish Church, which had seemed under the hard blue sky of the
early morning a low brown thing, with its square tower of the Templars
and of the Second Crusade, stood up now white, menacing, and visionary
against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park
beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and
stubbornly still, no leaves upon them moving at all. The Downs an hour
away first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were but half seen, and at
last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were
struck with silence. The fowls nestled together, and the only sign that
animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the whinny of a horse
in a stable where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and
the mad circling and swooping of a bird distracted by the change in the
light.
For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us
like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my Mill a sort of
driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow-shoot of
rain; but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many
parched fields and lanes, driving before the edge of the thunder. There
was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive
air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into
a cellar; it was like the opening of a mine door to a draft. The
vigour of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without
refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came
under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One
might for some five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds advanced
and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began
to be heard as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had
come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbour
next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill groaned, turning a
little; it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon
us. It lightened, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire
sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than
anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lands.
The thunder ran through all this, not very loud but continuous, and
a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the
cloud. White wreaths blown out in jets as though by some caprice in
wilful shapes showed here and there, and here and there, against such
a blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly, hurrying distracted
left and right without a purpose. All the while the rain fell.
The village and the landscape and the Weald, the Rape, the valley,
all my county you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied, and
overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army; it was a victory more
absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured
and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it
were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene
upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant.
When the storm had passed over northward to other places beyond, and
when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky
which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was
visible again very low upon the distant horizon, over the English sea,
the memory of all this was like the memory of a complete achievement.
No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the
vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God.
XXVIII
THE VALLEY
Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem
to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other,
until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates
and frames the whole.
The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all
men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this
sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching
great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all
his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the
sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to
the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a
man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south
toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the
Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest
of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in
the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of
their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of
the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when, upon the
escarpments of the Tuolumne, he turns back and looks westward over the
Stockton plain towards the coast range which guards the Pacific.
The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for
that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home,
insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such
a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon
the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over
the Vale of Severn toward the rank above rank of the Welsh solemnities
beyond, until the straight line and height of the Black Mountain
against the sky bounds his view and frames it.
It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness,
a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly
he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who
dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the
necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's
dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men
within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the
world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent
glory of the thing he sees.
The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of wall,
cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond.
The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the
reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of
fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.
Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye;
sometimes in the summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles only;
always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion
and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.
Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above
forest, and beyond it a great, noble range, unwooded and high against
Heaven, guarding all the place, which I for my part knew from the day
when first I came to know anything of this world. There is a high place
under fir trees; a place of sand and bracken in South England, whence
such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and "There,"
said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation.
In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man."
And so there was. There was a steading for me in the midst of those
hills.
It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house
throwing out arms and layers, and making itself over ten generations of
men. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but
that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the
panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled.
Another room was large and light, built in the manner of one hundred
and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.
It had been thrown out South--and this is quite against our custom;
for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to
present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.
It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would
have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this
house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another;
and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and
some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it the
little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good
place was enclosed, silent, and secure.
"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a
Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and
those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little
mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range
beyond--all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.
For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the
place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have
been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man
who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home.
To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such
things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years,
set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat,
the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midst of that landscape,
set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.
Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve
whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be,
and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and
perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or,
much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you
refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into
the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It
may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I
went through the woods saying to myself:
"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!"
another part of me at once replied:
"Ah, and so did you!"
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:
"Not at all, for the chance I never had; all I have lost is my
desire--no more."
"No, not only your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the
fulfilment of it." And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all
men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration
of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come
whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion to
produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal
sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure
passions of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory of Heaven.
But the wood was empty. The offer did not come. The moment was lost.
The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer
poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before I end,
to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn, The
Griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the
town of March, in the sad Fen-Land near the Eastern Sea:
"England my desire, what have you not refused?"
XXIX
A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA
The other day--indeed some months ago--I was in the company of two men
who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an
Englishman acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and rather proud of
knowing it; the other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra.
The first had the advantage of his fellow in world-wide travel, the
reading of many newspapers and (beside his thorough knowledge of
Catalonian) a smattering of French, German, and American.
I was touched to see the care and deference and good-fellowship which
the superior extended to the inferior in this colloquy.
I did not hear the beginning of it: it was the early middle part which
I came in for; it was conducted loudly and with gestures upon the part
of the Andorran, good-humouredly but equally openly on the part of the
Englishman, who said:
"I grant you that life is very hard for some of our town dwellers in
spite of the high wages they obtain."
To which the Andorran answered: "There is nothing to grant, your Grace,
for I would not believe their life was hard; but I was puzzled by what
you told me, for I could not make out how they earned so much money,
and yet looked so extraordinary." The Andorran showed by this that he
had visited England.
At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said: "Do you think
me extraordinary?"
The Andorran was a little embarrassed. "No no," he said, "you do not
understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see, I mean
unhappy and lacking humanity."
The Englishman smiled more genially still in his good wholesome beard,
and said: "Do I look to you like that?"
"No," said the Andorran gravely, "nor does that gentleman whom you
pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron, Mr.
Bernstein I think ... you were both well-fed and well-clothed ... and
what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask
about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the
poorest, and when I asked you about the poorest in your towns you told
me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully
working, twenty-five pesetas a week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a
week! Oh ...! Why, I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved
is a hundred pesetas; and with a hundred pesetas ...! Oh, one can buy a
great brood sow; or if one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in the
world; or again, a little mule just foaled, which in two years, mind
you, _in two years_" (and here he wagged his finger) "will be a great
fine beast" (and here he extended his arms), "and the _next_ year will
carry a man over the hills and will sell for five hundred pesetas. Yes
it will!"
The Englishman looked puzzled. "Well," said he, leaning forward,
ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, "there's your pound
a week."
The Andorran nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also.
"Now of course the man is not always in work."
"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with angry eyes, "the neighbours
shall see to that!"
"No," said the Englishman, irritated, "you don't understand; he can't
always find some one to _give_ him work."
"But who _gives_ work?" said the Andorran. "Work is not _given_." And
then he laughed. "Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it!" And
he laughed more loudly.
"You don't understand," repeated the Englishman, pestered, "he can't
work unless some one allows him to work for him."
"Pooh!" said the Andorran, "he could cut down trees or dig, or get up
into the hills."
"Why," said the Englishman with wondering eyes, "the perlice would have
him then."
The Andorran looked mournful: he had heard the name of something
dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted
lonely places and strangled men.
"Well then," went on the Englishman in a practical fashion, again
ticking on his fingers, "let us say he can work three weeks out of the
five."
"Yes?" said the Andorran, bewildered.
"He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in the five weeks.... I
don't mind, call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like, or even
eighteen."
"What is an 'average'?" said the Andorran, frowning.
"An average," said the Englishman impatiently, "oh, an average is what
he gets all lumped up."
"Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely, "that he gets eighteen
pesetas every Saturday?"
"No, _no_, NO!" struck in the Englishman. "Twenty-five
pesetas, as you call them, when he can get work, and nothing when he
can't."
"Good Lord!" said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself.
"How does the poor fellow know whether perlice will not be at him
again? It is enough to break a man's heart!"
"Well, don't _argue_!" said the Englishman, keen upon his tale. "He
gets an average, anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them, a week.
Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go in rent, and
if he is a decent man, seven."
The Andorran was utterly at sea. "But if he is wretched, why should he
pay, and if he is decent why should he pay still more?" he asked.
"Why, damn it all!" said the Englishman, exploding, "a man must live!"
"Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly, "that is why I am asking the
question. He pays this tax, you say, five pesetas, if he is wretched
and seven if he is decent. But a man may be decent although he is
wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the poor?"
"It isn't a tax," said the Englishman. "He pays it for his house."
"But a man could buy a house," said the Andorran, "with a few payments
like that."
The Englishman sighed. "Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it
anyhow."
"Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his turn, "you must have a wicked
King. But, please God, he cannot spend it all on his pleasures."
"It isn't paid to the King, God bless him," said the Englishman. "The
man pays it to his landlord."
"And suppose he doesn't?" said the Andorran defiantly.
"Well, the perlice," began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face
showed that he was afraid of occult powers.
"So there, you see," went on the Englishman, calculating along with
rapid content, "he's only got thirteen."
The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. "Well," said he
doubtfully, "I will grant him thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man
can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a
little cotton on the child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to
buy a bed, why there is his straw."
"Straw's not decent, and we don't allow it," said the Englishman
firmly; "he doesn't buy a bed always; sometimes he rents it."
"I don't understand," said the Andorran, "I don't understand."
There was a little pause during which neither of the two men looked
at the other. The Englishman went on good-naturedly and laboriously
explaining:
"Now let's come to bread."
"Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, "man lives by bread and wine."
"Well," said the Englishman, ignoring this interruption, "you see,
bread for the lot of them would come to half that money."
"Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, "you are quite right. Bread is a
very serious thing." And he sighed.
"Half of it," continued the Englishman, "goes in bread. And then, of
course, he has to get a little meat."
"Certainly," said the Andorran.
"Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on, "and there's boots."
"Oh, he could do without boots," said the Andorran.
"No he can't," said the Englishman, "they all have to have boots; and
then you see, there's tea."
The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. "You Englishmen are
so fond of tea," he said, smiling. "I have noticed that you ask for
tea. Juan has tea to sell."
The Englishman nodded genially. "I will buy some of him," he said.
"Well, go on," said the Andorran.
"And there's a little baccy, of course"--and he gave the prices of both
those articles. "They're a leetle more than you might think," continued
the Englishman, a little confused. "They're taxed, you see."
"Taxed again?" said the Andorran.
"Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, "not much; besides which, I haven't
said anything was taxed yet: they pay about double on their tea and
about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it.
Oh, if they get regular work they're all right!"
"Then," said the Andorran, summing it all up, "they ought to do very
well."
"Yes, they ought," said the Englishman, "but somehow they're not steady
of themselves: they get _pauperised_."
"What is that?" said the Andorran.
"Why, they get to expect things for nothing."
"They think," said the Andorran cheerfully, "that good things fall from
the sky. I know that sort: we have them." He thought he had begun to
understand, and just after he had said this we came to a village.
I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these
few lines, that I heard this conversation in Andorra valley itself,
while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman, myself and an
Ironist were proceeding through the mountains, riding upon mules.
We had come to the village of Encamps, and there we all got down to
enter the inn. We had a meal together and paid, the four of us, exactly
five shillings and threepence all together for wine and bread, cooked
meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a cigar.
This was the end of the conversation in Andorra: it was my business
to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point
in political economy, to which I did justice; but the conventions
of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this
remarkable experience.
XXX
PARIS AND THE EAST
One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the
survivor of our time.
It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if
you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last
the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires,
as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised
civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain
civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little
broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember
that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is
ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian
Faith and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from
change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand
years has not seemed capable of decline. You have in the history of
it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and
fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more
fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner
fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes
him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of
age; only, Europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like
some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.
This thought to which I perpetually return, occurred to me as I handled
a book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered
by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of
many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A
reader might say as he glanced at this book: "Here is one of the most
ancient things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is looking at one of
the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris."
I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say:
"Here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable,
the Oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on
earth, the heart of Gaul--yet the mobile thing has a history almost as
long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."
Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of
drawing. It is an impression of the Statue of the Republic under a
cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of
the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies,
what furious combats have raged round that idea: I mean combats, not
debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to
kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other
day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly
remembers that the whole thing is after all only of the last hundred
years--what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities
possesses in one's eyes!
The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European
manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling
which we know in Eastern things. The mind is like deep and level water,
never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the
thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.
I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European
feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by
the Pool of London, or at the top of the rue St. Jacques, or in the
place of the Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient
yellow dusts of Toledo from over the tumbling strength of the Tagus?
He may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little
introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability
and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks of the Japanese
to-day. But if he felt it he must have felt it by education. For us
it is in our blood. We stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in
and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending.
And that brings me back to where I began, How much longer will our
civilisation endure?
Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern
Europe.
It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large
abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric
in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their
one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that
civilisation by their very enthusiasm.
It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more
dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the
soul of Europe can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for
anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the
responsibility and the freedom of citizens, and it is their pleasure
to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side,
our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families,
properties, armies.
The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation
has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question
that was only whispered some little time ago--whether the cement
still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality
disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an
end.
But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask
myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going
by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs,
Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have
been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which
have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the
Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society--when I ask myself
those questions, I answer less and less with every year.
Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said:
"It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time
was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which
raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the
fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has
accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is
difficult to reply.
* * * * *
A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and
is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century,
and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have
said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he
knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall
then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.
A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might
have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the
change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour,
the cruelty and the making of lies.
Certainly those who were present in Paris _before_ the 10th of
August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be
a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no
hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.
All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that
typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as
the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to
say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not
deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.
Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely
admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never
was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power; never had it
less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that
whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these
blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled
huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the
answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things
not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow
up into living forms. We shall see.
XXXI
THE HUMAN CHARLATAN
It is curious that the Scientific Spirit has never tabulated any
research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan.
It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain
excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those
excellences. The material upon which he works is twofold: the ignorance
and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men.
Where animals are concerned the Scientific Spirit has tabulated a good
deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the
habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous
to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalogue. The successful
deception practised for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a
creature, we can discover in our books. But no one has tabulated the
human charlatan.
An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of
charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso.
To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than
Disraeli, or than the present Mayor of Rome: but his Italian name
deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was
assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest
men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian
civilisation when the newspapers (themselves half duped) had persuaded
them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso.
One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the
object with which he desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides his
methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewellery
in Whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article
full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it,
and what it is, you learn last in the business or not at all. The
whole process is one of suggestion, or, as our forefathers called it,
"hoodwinking." Lombroso was true to type in this regard.
The European Press was deluged one day with notices, praise, reviews of
a book which was called _Degeneration_. It was a tenth-rate book, but
we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe
its author. We learnt that his name was Nordau. There was no process
of logic in the book, there was no labour. Where it asserted (it was a
mass of assertions) it usually trespassed on ground which the author
could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive
to the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from
the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number
who do not understand the nature of international forces were taken in.
For one man who read the farrago a hundred were taught to magnify the
name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in
did the public casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of
Lombroso's.
A book of greater value (which is not saying much) proceeded from the
pen of one Ferrero. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and
the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both.
For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with
the vague impression that a certain great Ferrero dominated European
thought. He gave opinions (among other things) upon the polity of
England so absurd and ignorant that, had the process of suggestion
not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small
measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international
trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought.
We were not allowed to judge the man by his work; no, we must accept
the work on the authority of the man; only after the trick had been
successfully worked did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of
Lombroso's.
Lombroso's own department of charlatanry was to attack Christian morals
in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil.
In another epoch and with other human material to work upon his
stock-in-trade would have taken some other form, but Lombroso had been
born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief
intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon
the lines of materialism, and Lombroso took to it as naturally as his
spiritual forerunners took to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual
descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have in the near
future our Lombrosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping Devil, and the
Manifesting Dead Great Aunt--indeed this development coincided with his
own old age--but as things were, the easiest charlantry in his years
of vigour was to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on Materialist
lines did the worthy Lombroso proceed. His method was childishly
simple, and we ought to blush for our time or rather for that of our
immediate seniors that it should have duped anybody--but it was far
from childishly guileless.
When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of
those already wealthy, and when society, in the decline or depression
of religion, takes to the worshipping of wealth, those whom the
laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into
which Lombroso was born. No man was executed for treason, few men
were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to
social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The
purveying of false news was a way to fortune: the forestaller and the
briber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular
instinct which would repress and punish cowardice, oppression, the
sexual abominations of the rich, and their cruelties, had no outlet
for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with
the least responsible, the weakest willed, and the most unfortunate
of the very poor. We owe to Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that
the weakest willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate
of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an
intellectual equipment Lombroso erected the majestic structure of human
irresponsibility.
Two hundred men and women are arrested for picking pockets in such
and such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human
dignity which is characteristic of modern injustice permits these
poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed,
tortured, caged, and stripped: measured, recorded, dealt with as
vile bodies for experiment. Lombroso (or for that matter any one
possessed of a glimmering of human reason) can see that of these two
hundred unfortunate wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased or
malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random
among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured
citizens. The Charlatan is in clover! He gathers his statistics:
twenty-three per cent. squint, eighteen per cent. have lice--what is
really _conclusive_ no less than ninety-three per cent. suffer from
metagrobolisation of the hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek for
the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much
knowledge of men and things to see what the Charlatan can make of such
statistics. Lombroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory
uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-do--that their fellow-men if
unfortunate can be treated as irresponsible chattels.
There is the beginning and end of the whole humbug.
With the characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness
and the strength of this vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected--and
equally obvious--series of facts is dragged in. If men drink too much,
or if they have inherited insanity, or are in any other way afflicted,
by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will, they
will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies; and where such
irresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well-to-do,
the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their
acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity being unaccompanied by
calculation will lead to the lock-up. And so you have another stream of
statistics showing that "alcoholism" (which is Scientist for drinking
too much) and epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material success.
On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has
probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against
which the common sense of society is already reacting.
Fortunately for men Charlatanry of that calibre has no very permanent
effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso had for
one moment intended a complete theory of Materialist morals or had for
one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement,
he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan
and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company-worker, the traitor,
the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are
the curse of modern Europe--not the most wretched of the very poor. Of
course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the sort; for there is nothing
to tell.
Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this man was one of those
charlatans who are found out in time. Common sense revolted and in
revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively while that enemy
was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow: it is
sufficient to quote two.
After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent
the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the
great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and
asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the
pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and
barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers
and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these
hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind Nature the
hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and
the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he
was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who
washed down his carriage.
The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous
nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the
skull of Charlotte Corday"--which skull he duly analysed, measured, and
labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words.
Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull
was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's--a medical student had
sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have
had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled
it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso
swallowed it.
The Ass!
XXXII
THE BARBARIANS
The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in
historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.
When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by
the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the
settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land,
and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent,
irruptions of barbaric hordes.
The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss
of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as
though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than
the old age and fatigue of an antique society.
Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of
our own civilisation to-day, or at least its corruption, have asked
themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its
final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea
was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception
which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely
adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of
reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy
the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible
conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a
half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great
industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of
our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial
society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing
rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most
degraded types.
But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to
set forth the causes of a civilisation's decay. Before the barbarian
in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it
cannot absorb or reject an alien element it is because its organism has
grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost
or deteriorated; and whoever would restore any society which menaces
to fall, must busy himself about the inward nature of that society
much more than about its external dangers or the merely mechanical and
numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it.
Whenever we look for "the barbarian," whether in the decline of our
own society or that of some past one whose historical fate we may be
studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than
for its source.
None the less to mark those visible effects is instructive, and
without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the
disease. A modern man may, therefore, well ask where the barbarians
are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall, if
it be permitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot effect, the
destruction of Christendom.
With that word "Christendom" a chief part of the curious speculation
is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects
or adopts, ridicules or admires, the religious creed of Europe, he
must, in any case, recognise two prime historical truths. The first
is that that creed which we call the Christian religion was the
soul and meaning of European civilisation during the period of its
active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion
characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay
and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost
soon after its corporate existence.
So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship
that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness,
are accepted or rejected rather by the appetite of the reader than by
his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If
we will forget for a moment what we may _desire_ in the matter and
merely consider what we _know_, we shall without hesitation admit both
the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by
accident or superficially, but in a formative connection, just as an
Englishman is English or as a poem is informed by a definite scheme
of rhythm. It is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of a
society's end is the dissolution of that causative moral thing, its
philosophy or creed.
Now here we discover the first mark of the Barbarian.
Note that in the peril of English society to-day there is no positive
alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe.
It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations,
often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed
certitude in morals.
So far has this process gone that to be writing as I am here in public,
not even defending the creed of Christendom, but postulating its
historic place, and pointing out that the considerable attack now
carried on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution of our society,
has about it something temerarious and odd.
Next look at secondary effects and consider how certain root
institutions native to the long development of Europe and to her
individuality are the subject of attack and note the nature of the
attack.
A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can
be presented merely as a matter of degree, and that, because our
institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very
disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past
been ourselves.
But an argument of this sort has no weight with the serious observer.
It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no
longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to
pass through the total change which in a living organism we call death.
Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage (to take but two
fundamental institutions of the European) is precisely of this nature.
Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny
their moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that, quite as much
as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the
relativeness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the
institution which they are apparently concerned to support.
See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the
plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made
that, good or ill, it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer
made is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary, or merely
traditional.
Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips
of the defence, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents
of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term "a
sacrament," yet how many for whom marriage is still a sacrament will
forego the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents?
The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property
should be restored that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is
normal to the European family in its healthy state--all this we hear
less and less. More and more do we hear it defended, however morbid in
form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater
stability for the State or a mere power which threatens and will break
its opponents tyrannously.
The spirit is abroad in many another minor matter. In its most
grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics: in its most
vicious, the clear processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is
as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical
or the hyperbolic universe and tries to picture parallel straight
lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly
old-fashioned as to remain parallel.
The Barbarian when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like
a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift
of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity and
contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown.
The Barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or
colour of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for
line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple cow for colour, are the mark
of great painting.
The Barbarian hopes--and that is the very mark of him--that he can have
his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly
produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be
at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension
of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems
to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that
civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient
and solemn truth, "_Sine Auctoritate nulla vita_."
In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that
he cannot _make_; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot
sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every
civilisation exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long
stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old
certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh
we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces
there is no smile.
We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the
fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in
them, but only wasting at the last.
Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that
is profitable.
The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement
derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed
or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but
merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he
in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great
and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant
we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as
he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him
a congenial soil--and that is as much as to say that we are dying.
XXXIII
ON KNOWING THE PAST
An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.
First, the mind must grasp the nature of historic change and must
be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each
successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution
and progression.
Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is the dates and hours of
such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired.
Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching
and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each
is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the
other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the
scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the
establishment of truth.
History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called
in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of
political science; or it may be called the great story whose interest
is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its
tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the
manifestation of God.
But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the
value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative
formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the
establishment of truth.
A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours,
the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the
soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a
particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind
all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed
knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he
knows their due sequence and proportion; he knows not what to omit,
nor what to enlarge upon, among so many, or rather a potentially
infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be (as some would
put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use
history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he
establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger,
is untruth. And so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better
that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be
possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive.
A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the
establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his
daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their
acts and of his own are fully within his grasp.
If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining
mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine
and expand and confirm his use of that present experience. If he know
nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his
own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if
he brings in aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the
past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not
its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will
tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for
ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining
forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them
in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own
society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though
insufficiently have grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false
philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his
eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have
history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of
thought in the immediate and the remote past.
This being evidently the case one is tempted to say that a just
estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the
past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the
details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior
importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in
history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of
facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential
to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been
examined.
The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were
wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could
not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for
we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is
foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect.
A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if he
have but a vague and general sentiment of the old Pagan civilisation
of the Mediterranean so long as that sentiment corresponds to the very
large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair.
But he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has
not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly
unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of
Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never
been mentioned to him.
Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable;
contrariwise it will be detrimental and of negative value to his
judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably
inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of
any two events and putting without fail in the summer what happened in
winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would
never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon
externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal
motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.
It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of
a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External
things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine
that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self
on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance,
ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the
"working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether
an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal that
institutions might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is
not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the
necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which (to repeat) do not produce
ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and
suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and
revelation.
Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that
it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however
just, is the firmer, the larger and the more intense as the range
of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more
function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more
precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency
of the mind to develop a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea
into imaginary regions: for the mind is creative; it will still make
and spin, and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams
out of emptiness.
Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in
England; he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its
whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy;
but in either case, though his general impression was just, he will
tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process
continued, would at last destroy the true image were not scholarship
there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions. He
admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to
forget its cruelties because what is good in our own age is not
accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not
possess because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of
greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will
not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to
that spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely know. And he will
at last have with the English thirteenth century something of that
acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are
external things, and these also are the product of a soul.
Indeed--though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter--a metaphor
may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle,
of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history.
A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend
at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a
friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person
seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors
possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close
and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety
which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can
say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The
other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never
complete, it is asymptotic to completion.
To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an
accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is
continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some
document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the
people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the
national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the
French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society.
But research in either of these cases, and a minute and increasing
acquaintance with detail, does show one London largely apathetic in the
first place, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling
in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy
and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and
to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy
proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could
never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone;
it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic
power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action
was a necessary condition of the National defence during the French
Revolution.
One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true:
namely, that minute and accurate information upon details (the
characteristic of our time in the science of history) must of its own
nature so corroborate just and general judgments of the past, that
through it, when the modern phase of wilful distortion is over, mere
blind scholarship will restore tradition.
I say it sounds too good to be true. But three or four examples of such
action are already before us. Consider the Gospel of St. John, for
instance, or what is called "the Higher Criticism" of the old Hebrew
literature, and ask yourselves whether modern scholarship has not
tended to restore the long and sane judgment of men, which, when that
scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to imperil.
XXXIV
THE HIGHER CRITICISM
I have long desired to make some protest against the attitude which
the Very Learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the Very
Learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about
fifty years behind the Continent. I know that their devotion to the
extraordinary unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their
discovery that new methods are abroad--in both senses of the word
"abroad": for new methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for a very
long time.
But I also know that a mere appeal to reason will be of very little
use, so I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to
the judgment of the Very Learned.
The Very Learned when they desire to fix the date or the authenticity
or both of a piece of literature, adopt among other postulates, these:
(1) That tradition doesn't count.
(2) That common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all
that multiplex integration which the same mind effects from a million
tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their
august consideration.
(3) That the title "Very Learned" (which gives them their authority) is
tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by
confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an
absolute master in about two years.
These are their negative postulates in dealing with a document.
As to their positive methods, of one hundred insufficient tricks I
choose in particular these:
(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and
general air, by allusion discovered within it.
(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical,
and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.
(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any
kind, vitiates record.
(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence
to destroy the reader's general judgment.
(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of
their time in forging.
Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document
which I know a good deal about, called _The Path to Rome_. It professes
to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901
from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to
have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few
contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through
a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the
opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that
Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.
This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson
in scepticism.
"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the
conclusion that the so-called _Path to Rome_ is composed of three
distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my
article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 _et seq._ for [Greek: theta].
For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)
Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather
loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent
decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions
which the other has incorporated in his _Neo-Catholicism in the
Twenty-Second Century_.
The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D.
2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German
is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying
between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known
arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2)
Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the
Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes
upon two considerations:
(1) The _Centime_, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book,
went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century,
as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri
Perro to the Prefect of Aude.
This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit
which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase.
(Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs,
"_Deleted by the Censor_."
It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first
established in America (where, as I shall show, _The Path to Rome_ was
written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that
no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second
century in the English-speaking countries, though there is mention
of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth
appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time.
(Baker has confused the Censorship of _Books_ with that of _Plays_, and
an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private
recitation.)
Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the
mass of ancient literature, commonly known as _The Statute Book_, that
the use of italics is common to distinguish _later_ interpolation.
This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it
destroy the case for the phrase, "_Deleted by the Censor_," as a proof
of an Inferior Limit, 2208, but in this particular instance it is
conclusive evidence that we have interpolation here, for it is obvious
that _after_ the establishment of a Censorship the right would exist
to delete a name in the text, and a contemporary Editor would warn the
reader in the fashion which he has, as a fact, employed.
So much for the negative argument. We can be certain after Dr. Blick's
epoch-making discovery that even the year 2208 is not our Inferior
Limit for A, but we have what is much better, conclusive evidence of a
much earlier _Superior_ Limit, to which I must claim the modest title
of discoverer.
There is a passage in A (pp. 170-171) notoriously corrupt, in which a
dramatic dialogue between three characters, the Duchess, Major Charles
and Clara, is no longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute it have
failed, and on that account scholars have too much tended to neglect it.
Now I submit that though the passage is hopelessly corrupt its very
corruption affords us a valuable indication.
The Duchess, in a stage indication, is made to address "Major Charles."
It is notorious that the term "Major" applied to a certain functionary
in a religious body probably affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern
scholars under a title drawn from the only contemporary fragment
concerning it, as "Old Booth's Ramp." This society was suppressed in
America in the year 2012, _and the United States were the last country
in which it survived_.
No matter how correct, therefore, the text is in this passage, we
may be certain that even the careless scribe took the contemporary
existence of a "major" for granted. And we may be equally certain
that even our existing version of A incorporated in the only text we
possess, was not written later than the first years of the twenty-first
century. We have here, therefore, a new superior limit of capital
importance, but, what is even more important, we can fix with fair
accuracy a new inferior limit as well.
In the Preface (whose original attachment to A is undoubted) we have
the title "Captain Monologue," p. XII (note again the word "Captain,"
an allusion to "Booth's Ramp,") and in an anonymous fragment (B.M.
m.s.s., 336 N., (60)), bearing the title, "Club Gossip," I have found
the following conclusive sentence: "He used to bore us stiff, and old
Burton invented a brand new title for him, 'Captain Monologue,' about
a year before he died, which the old chap did an hour or two after
dinner on Derby Day."
Now this phrase is decisive. We have several allusions to "dinner" (in
all, eight, and a doubtful ninth, tabulated by Ziethen in his _Corpus.
Ins. Am._). They all refer to some great public function the exact
nature of which is lost, but which undoubtedly held a great place in
political life. At what intervals this function occurred we cannot
tell, but the coincident allusion to Derby Day settles it.
The only Lord Derby canonized by the Church died in 1960 and the
promulgation of Beatification (the earliest date that would permit the
use of the word "day" for this Saint) was issued by Pope Urban XV in
May, 2003. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that A was written at
some time between the years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not
profess to fix it; but I confess that the allusion (p. 226) to drinking
coffee coupled with the corresponding allusion to drinking coffee in
a license issued for a Lockhart's Restaurant in 2006 inclines me to
that precise year as the year in which A appeared, or at any rate was
written.
I think in the above I have established the date of A beyond dispute.
I have no case to bring forward of general conclusions, and I know that
many scholars will find my argument, however irrefutable, disturbing,
for it is universally admitted that excluding the manifestly miraculous
_Episodes of the Oracle_, _The Ointment of Epinal_, _The View of the
Alps over a Hundred Miles_, etc., which are all of them properly
referred to in W. and [Greek: theta] respectively, A itself contains
numerous passages too closely connected with the text to be regarded as
additions, yet manifestly legendary--such as the perpetual allusions to
spirits, and in particular to a spirit called "Devil," the inordinate
consumption of wine, the gift of tongues, etc. etc. But I submit that
a whole century, especially in a time which pullulated with examples
of credulity, such as the "Flying Men," "The Telephone," "Wireless
Telegraphy," etc., is ample to allow for the growth of these mythical
features.
I take it, therefore, as now established, that A in its entirety is
not later than 2012 and probably as early as 2006. Upon W I cannot yet
profess to have arrived at a decision, but I incline to put it at about
forty years later, while [Greek: theta] (which includes most of the
doggerel and is manifestly in another style, and from another hand) is
admitted to be at least a generation later than "W" itself.
In a further paper I shall discuss the much-disputed point of
authorship, and I shall attempt to show that Belloc, though the subject
of numerous accretions, was a real historical figure, and that the
author of A may even have worked upon fragments preserved by oral
tradition from the actual conversation of that character.
That is how the damned fools write: and with brains of that standard
Germans ask me to deny my God.
XXXV
THE FANATIC
"I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to be called) what
he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old Biggs answered, 'Man like that's
one of two things: a _Fan_atic or a Fa_nat_ic.' I thought this
very funny."--_St. Germans Sporting Memoirs_, Vol. II, p. 186.
This is a kind of man whom we all love and yet all desire to moderate.
He is excessive only in good, but his excess therein is dangerous. He
proceeds from less to more; first irritated, then exasperated, then
mad. He will not tolerate the necessary foibles of mankind. No, nor
even their misunderstandings. He himself commonly takes refuge in some
vice or other, but a small one, and from this bastion defends himself
against all comers.
The Fanatic will exaggerate the operations of war. If it be necessary
in the conquest of a province to murder certain women, he will
cry shame blindly, without consideration of martial conditions
or remembrance that what we do in war is absolved by indemnities
thereafter following. It is the same with the death of children in
warfare, whether these be starved to death in concentration camps
or more humanely spitted, or thrown down wells, or dealt with in
some other fashion, such as the braining of them against walls and
gateposts: nothing will suit the Fanatic in these matters but a
complete and absolute abstention from them, without regard to strategy
or tactics or any other part of military science. Now many a man shall
argue against practices of one sort or another, as against excesses.
But the Fanatic is nothing so reasonable, being bound by a law of his
nature or rather a lack of law, to violent outburst with no restraint
upon it, and to impotent gnashings.
It is so also in affairs of State when peace reigns, for the Fanatic
is for ever denouncing what all men know must be and making of common
happenings an uncommon crime. Thus, when a minister shall borrow of
a money-lender certain sums which this last generously puts before
him without condition or expense, what must your Fanatic do, but poke
and pry into the whole circumstance, and when the usurer has his just
reward, and is made a Peer to settle our laws for us, the Fanatic will
go vainly about from one newspaper to another seeking which shall print
his foolish "protest" (as he calls it). Mark you also that the Fanatic
is quite indifferent to this: that his foolishness is of no effect. He
will roar in an empty field as loud as any bull and challenge all men
to meet him, and seems well pleased whether they come or no.
It is of the fanatical temper to regard some few men as heroes, or
demigods, and then again, these having failed in something, to revile
them damnably. Thus by the old religious sort you will find the Twelve
Apostles in the Gospel very foolishly revered and made much of as
though they were so many Idols, but let one of these (Judas to wit)
show statesmanship and a manly sense, and Lord! how the Fanatic does
rail at him!
So it is also with foreign nations. The Fanatic has no measure there
and speaks of them as though they were his province, seeing that it
is of his essence never to comprehend diversity of circumstance or
measure. Thus our cousins oversea will very properly burn alive the
negroes that infest them in those parts, and their children and young
people will, when the negro has been thus despatched, collect his bones
or charred clothing to keep the same in their collections, which later
they compare one with another. This is their business not ours, and
has proved in the effect of great value to their commonwealth. But
the Fanatic will have none of it. To hear him talk you might imagine
himself a negro or one that had in his own flesh tasted the fire, and
in his rage he will blame one man and another quite indiscriminately:
now the good President of these people (Mr. Roosevelt as he once was),
now the humble instrument of justice who should have put a match to
the African. And all this without the least consideration of those
surrounding things and haps which made such dealing with negroes a very
necessary thing.
There is nothing workable or of purpose in what this man does. He is
for ever quarrelling with other men for their lack of time or memory
or even courtesy to himself, for on this point he is very tender. He
wearies men with repeating to them their own negotiations, as though
these were in some way disgraceful. Thus if a man has taken a sum of
money in order to write of the less pleasing characters of his mother;
or if he has sold his vote in Parliament, or if he has become for his
own good reasons the servant of some one wealthier than he, or if he
has seen fit to deal with the enemies of his country, the Fanatic will
blurt out and blare such a man's considered action, hoping, it would
seem, to have some support in his mere raving at it. But this he never
gets, for mankind in the lump is too weighty and reasonable to accept
any such wildness.
There is no curing the Fanatic, neither with offers of Money nor with
blows, nor is there any method whatsoever of silencing him, save
imprisonment, which, in this country, is the method most commonly
taken. But in the main there is no need to act so violently by him,
seeing that all men laugh at him for a fool and that he will have no
man at his side. Commonly, he is of no effect at all, and we may remain
his friend though much contemptuous of him, since contempt troubles him
not at all. But there are moments, and notably in the doubt of a war,
when the Fanatic may do great ill indeed. Then it is men's business to
have him out at once and if necessary to put him to death, but whether
by beheading, by hanging, or by crucifixion it is for sober judges to
decide.
The Irish are very fanatical, and have driven from their country many
landlords formerly wealthy who were the support and mainstay of all
the island. It may be seen in Ireland how fanaticism can impoverish.
Upon the other hand, the people of the Mile End Road and round by the
north into Hackney Downs and so southward and westward into the City
of London by Houndsditch are not fanatical at all, and enjoy for their
reward an abounding prosperity.
XXXVI
A LEADING ARTICLE
After the failure of the numerous conferences which have been held
between Charles Stuart and the Commissioners of Parliament, and after
a trial in Westminster Hall the incidents of which it would be painful
to recall, the Court appointed for the purpose has reached a conclusion
with which we think the mass of Englishmen will, however reluctantly,
agree. The courtesy and good feeling upon which we pride ourselves in
our political life seem to have been strangely forgotten during the
controversies of the last few months. It would be invidious to name
particular instances, and we readily admit that the circumstances
were abnormal. Feeling ran high, and with Englishmen at least, who
are accustomed to call a spade a spade, strong words will follow upon
strong emotions; but we can hope that the final decision of the Court
will have put behind us for ever one of the most critical periods of
discussion, with all its deplorable excesses and wild and whirling
words, which we can remember in modern times.
Upon the principle of the conclusion to which the Court has come there
is a virtual unanimity. Men as different as Colonel Harrison on the one
hand and Mr. Justice Bradshaw on the other, Mr. Cromwell--whom surely
all agree in regarding as a representative Englishman--and that very
different character, Mr. Ireton, whom we do not always agree with, but
who certainly stands for a great section of opinion, are at one upon a
policy which has received no serious criticism, and recommends itself
even to such various social types as the blunt soldier, Colonel Pride,
and the refined aristocrat, Lord Grey of Groby.
But though a matter of such supreme importance to the mass of the
people, a measure which it is acknowledged will bring joy to the
joyless, light to those who sit in darkness, and a new hope in their
old age to fifteen millions of British working men and women, may
be unanimously agreed to in principle, it is unfortunately possible
to defeat even so beneficent a measure by tactics of delay and by a
prolonged criticism upon detail. The Government have therefore, in our
opinion, acted wisely in determining to proceed with due expedition
to the execution of Charles Stuart, and we do not anticipate any such
resistance, even partial and sporadic, as certain rash freelances of
politics have prophesied. There was indeed some time ago some doubt as
to the success of a policy to which the Government was pledged, and in
spite of the strong and disciplined majority which they commanded in
the House, in spite of the fact that the House was actually unanimous
upon the general lines of that policy, many people up and down the
country, who did not fully comprehend it, had been led to act rashly
and even riotously against its proposals. All that we may fairly say is
now over, and we trust that the Government will have the firmness to
go forward with a piece of work in which it now undoubtedly has the
support of every class of society.
We should be the last to deny the importance of meeting any serious
objection in detail that still remains. Thus the inhabitants of Charing
Cross have a legitimate grievance when they say that the scene of the
execution will be hidden from them by the brick building which stands
at the northern end of Whitehall, but they must remember that all
practical measures involve compromise and that if their point of view
alone had been considered and the scaffold were to be erected upon the
north of that annex, the crowd for which the Home Secretary has made
such wise provision by the erection of strong temporary barriers in the
Court of the Palace would have no chance of attending at the ceremony.
We confess that the more serious point seems to us to arise on the
Bishop of London's suggestion that only the clergy of the Established
Church should be present upon the platform, and we very much fear that
this pretension--in our view a very narrow and contemptible one--will
receive the support of that large number of our fellow citizens which
is still attached to the Episcopal forms of Christianity. But we take
leave to remind them, and the Bishop of London himself, that the
present moment, when the Free Churches have so fully vindicated their
rights to public recognition, is hardly one in which it is decent to
press these old-fashioned claims of privilege.
There is a third matter which we cannot conclude without mentioning:
we refer to the attitude of Charles Stuart himself. While the matter
was still _sub judice_ we purposely refrained from making any comment,
as is the laudable custom, we are glad to say, in the country. But
now the sentence has been pronounced we think it our duty to protest
against the attitude of Charles Stuart during the last scene of this
momentous political controversy. He is too much of an English gentleman
and statesman to exaggerate the significance of our criticism, or to
fail to understand the spirit in which it is offered, for that is
entirely friendly, but he must surely recognise by this time, that
such petty ebullitions of temper as he exhibited in refusing to plead
and in wearing his hat in the presence of men of such eminence as Mr.
Justice Bradshaw were unworthy of him and of the great cause which he
represents. He would have done well to take a lesson from the humble
tipstaff of the Court, who, though not required to do so by the Judges,
instantly removed his cap when they appeared and only put it on again
when he was conducting the prisoner back after the rising of Court.
Finally, we hope that all those who have been permitted by the Home
Secretary to be present at Whitehall upon next Tuesday will remember
our national reputation for sobriety and judgment in great affairs of
the State, and will be guilty of nothing that might make it necessary
for the Government to use severe measures utterly repugnant to the
spirit of English liberty.
XXXVII
THE OBITUARY NOTICE
Mr. Herod, whose death has just been announced by a telegram from
Lyons, was one of the most striking and forceful personalities of our
time.
By birth he was a Syrian Jew, suffering from the prejudice attaching to
such an origin, and apparently with little prospect of achieving the
great place which he did achieve in the eager life of our generation.
But his indomitable energy and his vast comprehension of men permitted
him before the close of his long and useful life to impress himself
upon his contemporaries as very few even of the greatest have done.
Our late beloved sovereign, Tiberius, perhaps the keenest judge of
men in the whole Empire, is said to have remarked one evening in the
smoking-room to his guests, when Herod had but recently left the
apartment: "Gentlemen, that man is the corner-stone of my Eastern
policy," and the tone in which His Majesty expressed this opinion was,
we may be sure, that not only of considered judgment, but of equally
considered reverence and praise.
It is a striking testimony to Mr. Herod's character that while he was
still quite unknown (save, of course, as the heir of his father) he
mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, and we find in his diary the
shrewd remark that as the first was necessary to culture, so was the
second to statesmanship.
It would have been impossible to choose a more difficult moment
than that in which the then unknown Oriental lad was entrusted by
the Imperial Government with the task which he has so triumphantly
accomplished. The Levant, as our readers know, presents problems of
peculiar difficulty, and though we can hardly doubt that the free and
democratic genius of our country would at last have solved them, we owe
it to the memory of this remarkable personality that the solution of
them should have been so triumphantly successful.
We will not here recapitulate the obscure and often petty intrigues
which have combined to give the politics of Judæa and its neighbourhood
a character of anarchy. It is enough to point out that when Mr.
Herod was first entrusted with his mission the gravest doubts were
entertained as to whether the cause of order could prevail. The
finances of the province were in chaos, and that detestable masquerade
of enthusiasm to which the Levantines are so deplorably addicted,
especially on their "religious" side, had baffled every attempt to
re-establish order.
Mr. Herod's father (to whom it will be remembered the Empire had
entrusted the beginnings of this difficult business), though
undoubtedly a great man, had incurred the hatred of all the worst and
too powerful forces of disorder in the district. His stern sense of
justice and his unflinching resolution in one of the last affairs of
his life, when he had promulgated his epoch-making edict to regulate
the infantile death-rate--a scientific measure grossly misunderstood
and unfortunately resented by the populace--had left a peculiarly
difficult inheritance to the son. The women of the lower classes (as
is nearly always the case in these social reforms) proved the chief
obstacle, and legends of the most fantastic character were--and still
are--current in the slums of Tiberias with regard to Mr. Herod Senior.
When, some years later, he was struggling with a painful disease which
it needed all his magnificent strength of character to master, no
sympathy was shown him by the provincials of the Tetrarchy, and, to
their shame be it said, the professional and landed classes treasonably
lent the weight of their influence to the disloyal side.
It was therefore under difficulties of no common order that Mr. A.
Herod, the son, took over the administration of that far border
province which, we fear, will cause more trouble before its unruly
inhabitants are absorbed in the mass of our beneficent and tolerant
imperial system.
As though his public functions were not burden enough for such young
shoulders to bear, the statesman's private life was assailed in the
meanest and most despicable fashion. His marriage with Mrs. Herodias
Philip--to whose lifelong devotion and support Mr. Herod bore such
beautiful witness in his dedication of _Stray Leaves from Galilee_--was
dragged into the glare of publicity by the less reputable demagogues
of the region, causing infinite pain and doing irreparable injury to
a most united and sensitive family circle. The hand of the law fell
heavily upon more than one of the slanderers, but the evil was done,
and Mr. Herod's authority, in the remote country districts, especially,
was grievously affected for some years.
Through all these manifold obstacles Mr. Herod found or drove a way,
and finally achieved the position we all look back to with such
gratitude and pride in the really dangerous crisis which will be
fresh in our readers' memory. It required no ordinary skill to pilot
the policy of the Empire through those stormy three days in Jerusalem,
but Mr. Herod was equal to the task, and emerged from it permanently
established in the respect and affection of the Roman people. It is a
sufficient testimony to his tact and firmness on this occasion that he
earned in that moment of danger the lasting friendship and regard of
Sir Pontius Pilate, whose firmness of vision and judgment of men were
inferior only to that of his lamented sovereign.
Unlike most non-Italians and natives generally, Mr. Herod was an
excellent judge of horseflesh, and his stables upon Mount Carmel often
carried to victory the colours--_rose tendre_--of "Sir Caius Gracchus,"
the _nom-de-guerre_ by which the statesman preferred to be known on the
Turf.
Mr. Herod's æsthetic side was more highly developed than is commonly
discovered in level-headed men of action. He personally supervised the
architectural work in the rebuilding of Tiberias, and, of the lighter
arts, was a judge of dramatic or "expressional" dancing.
During the earlier years of this eventful career Mr. Herod's life
was greatly cheered and brightened by the companionship of his
stepdaughter, Miss Salome Philip (now Lady Caiaphas), whose brilliant
_salon_ so long adorned the Quirinal, and who--we are exceedingly glad
to hear--has been entrusted with that labour of love, the editing of
her stepfather's life, letters, and verses; for Mr. Herod was no mean
poet, and we may look forward with pleasurable expectation to his
hitherto unpublished elegiacs on the beautiful scenery of his native
land.
By the provisions of Mr. Herod's will he is to be cremated, and the
ceremony will take place on a pyre of cedar-wood in the Place Bellecour
at Lyons.
XXXVIII
THE "MERRY ROME" COLUMN
A weekly feature of the _Carthaginian Messenger_, quoted from its
issue of March 15, 220 B. C.
It is quite a pleasure to be in dear old Rome again after a week spent
upon an important mission which your readers are already acquainted
with, in the Tuscan country. All that drive through Etruria was very
delightful and the investigation will undoubtedly prove of the greatest
use. But what a difference it is to be back in the sparkle and gaiety
of the Via Sacra. Every day one feels more and more how _real_ the
entente is. Probably no nations have become faster friends than those
who have learnt to respect each other in war, and though the Romans
were compelled to accept our terms, and to undertake the difficult
administration of Sicily with money furnished by the Carthaginian
Government, all that was more than twenty years ago and the memory
of it does not rankle now. Indeed, I think I may say that the Roman
character is a peculiarly generous one in this regard. They know what a
good fight is, and they enjoy it--none better--but when it is over no
one is readier to shake hands and to make friends again than a Roman.
I was talking it over with dear little Lucia Balba the other day and I
thought she put it very prettily. She said:
Est autem amicitia nihil aliud, nisi omnium divinarum huminarumque
rerum cockalorumque Romanorum et jejorum concinnatio!
Was it not charming?
Of course there is a little jealousy--no more than a pout!--about
Hasdrubal's magnificent work in Spain, but every one recognises what
a great man he is, and it was only yesterday that M. Catulus (the
son of our fine old enemy Lutatius) said to me with a sigh: "The
reason we Romans cannot do that kind of thing is because we cannot
stick together. We are for ever fighting among ourselves. Just look
at our history!" On the other hand, I can't think that our mixture
of democracy and common sense would suit the Latin temperament,
with its _verve_ and _nescio quid_, which make it at the same time
so incalculable and so fascinating. Every nation must have its own
advantages and drawbacks. We are a little too stolid, perhaps, and
a little too businesslike, but our stolidity and our businesslike
capacity have founded Colonies over the whole world and established a
magnificent Empire. The Romans are a little too fond of "glory" and
give way to sudden emotion in a fashion which seems to us perilously
like weakness, but no one can deny that they have established a
wonderfully methodical and orderly system of roads all over Italy, and
that their capital is still the intellectual centre of the world.
Talking of that I ought to pay a tribute to the Roman home and to Roman
thrift. We hear too much in our country of the Roman amphitheatre and
all the rest of it. What many Carthaginians do not yet know is that
the stay-at-home sober Roman is the backbone of the whole place.
He hates war as heartily as we do, and though his forms of justice
are very different from ours he is a sincere lover of right-dealing
according to his lights. It is due to such men that Rome is, after
ourselves, the chief financial power in the world.
But you will ask me for more interesting news than this sermon. Well!
Well! I have plenty to give you. The Debates in the Senate are as
brilliant and, I am afraid, as theatrical as usual. Certainly the
Romans beat us at oratory. To hear Flaccus deliver a really great
speech about the introduction of Greek manners is a thing one can never
forget! Of course, it will seem to you in Carthage very unpractical
and very "Roman," and it is true that that kind of thing doesn't make
a nation great in the way we have become great, but it is wonderful
stuff to hear all the same--and such a young man too! The Senate has,
however, none of our ideas of order, and the marvel is how they get
through their work at all. There are no Suffetes, and sometimes you
will hear five or six men all talking at once and gesticulating in that
laughable Italian fashion which our caricaturists find so valuable!
Those of my readers who run over to Rome two or three times a year for
the Games will be interested to hear that the great Aurelian house near
the New Temple of Saturn (the rogues with their "Temples!" But still
there is a good deal of real religion left in Rome) is being pulled
down and a splendid one is being put in its place upon the designs of
a really remarkable young architect, Pneius Caius Agricola. He is the
nephew, by the way, of Sopher Masher Baal, whom we all know so well at
Carthage, and who is, I think, technically, a Carthaginian citizen.
Possibly I am wrong, for I remember a delightful dinner with him years
ago among our cousins overseas, and he may very possibly be Tyrian. If
so, and if these humble lines meet his eye, I tender him my apologies.
But anyhow, his nephew is a very remarkable and original artist whom
all Rome is eager to applaud. When the new Aurelian House is finished
it will have a façade in five orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, heavy
Egyptian on the fourth story, and Assyrian on the top, the whole
terminating in a vast pyramid, which is to have the appearance of
stone, but which will really be a light erection in thin plaster slabs.
Last Wednesday we had the review of the troops. You may imagine how
the Roman populace delighted in _that_! There is a good deal that is
old-fashioned to our ideas in the accouterments, and it was certainly
comic to see an "admiral" leading his "sailors" past the saluting
post like so many marines! But it is always a pleasant spectacle for
a warmhearted man to see the humbler classes of Rome picnicking in
true Roman fashion upon the Campus Martius and cheering their sons and
brothers. The army is very popular in Rome, although the men are paid
hardly anything--a mere nominal sum. The Romans do not come up to our
standard of physique, and I am afraid the Golden Legion would laugh at
them. But they are sturdy little fellows, and not to be despised when
it comes to marching, or turning their hands to the thousand domestic
details of the camp; moreover, they are invariably good-humoured, and
that is a great charm.
It is unfortunately impossible to officer all the troops with
gentlemen, and that is a drawback of which thoughtful Romans are
acutely conscious. It is on this account that there is none of that
cordial relation between officer and man which we take for granted in
our service. An intelligent and travelled Roman said to me the other
day: "How I envy you your Carthaginian officers! Always in training!
Always ready! Always urbane!" But we must remember that our service is
not so numerous as theirs.
I must not ramble on further, for the post is going, and you know what
the Roman post _is_. It starts when it feels inclined, and the delivery
is _tantum quantum_, as we say in Italy. I have to be a good hour
before the official time or risk being told by some shabbily uniformed
person that my letter missed _through my own fault_! Next week I hope
to give you an interesting account of Sapphira Moshetim's début. She
is a Roman of the Romans, and I was quite carried away! Such subtlety!
Such declamation! I hope to be her herald, for she is to come to
Carthage next season, and I am sure she will bear out all I say.
XXXIX
OPEN LETTER TO A YOUNG PARASITE
_My dear Boy:_
As you know, I was your father's closest friend for many years, and I
have watched with interest, but I confess not without anxiety, your
first attempts in a career of which he was in my young days the most
brilliant exemplar.
You will not take it ill in a man of my years and in one as devoted to
your family as I am and have proved myself to be, if I tender you a
word of advice.
The profession upon which you have engaged is one of the most difficult
in the world. It does not offer the great prizes which attend the best
forms of cheating, bullying, and blackmail, and at the same time it is
highly limited, and offers opportunities to only a handful of the finer
souls.
Nevertheless, I am not writing this to dissuade you for one moment from
its pursuit. There is something in the fine arts difficult to define,
but very deeply felt by every one, which makes them of themselves a
sort of compensation for their economic limitations. The artist, the
poet, and the actor expect to live, and hope to live well, but each one
knows how few are the prizes, and each in his heart expects something
more than a mere money compensation. So should it be in that great
profession which you have undertaken in the light of your father's
example.
In connection with that, I think it my duty to point out to you that
even the greatest success in this special calling is only modest
compared with successes obtained at the Bar, in commerce, or even in
politics. You will never become a wealthy man. I do not desire it
for you. It should be yours, if you succeed, to enjoy wealth without
its responsibility, and to consume the good things our civilisation
presents to the wealthy without avarice, without the memory of
preceding poverty, and, above all, without the torturing necessity of
considering the less fortunate of your kind.
You must not expect, my dear young man, to leave even a modest
competence; therefore you must not expect to marry and provide for
children. The parasite must be celibate. I have never known the rule
to fail, at least in our sex. You will tell me, perhaps, that in the
course of your career, continually inhabiting the houses of the rich,
studying their manners, and supplying their wants, you cannot fail to
meet some heiress; that you do not see why, this being the case, you
should not marry her, to your lasting advantage.
Let me beg you, with all the earnestness in my power, to put such
thoughts from you altogether. They are as fatal to a parasite's
success as early commercial bargaining to that of a painter. You
must in the first ten years of your exercises devote yourself wholly
to your great calling. By the time you have done that you will have
unlearned or forgotten all that goes with a wealthy marriage; its
heavy responsibilities will be odious to you, its sense of dependence
intolerable. Moreover (though you may think it a little cynical of me
to say so), I must assure you that no one, even a man with your exalted
ideal, can make a success of married life unless he enters it with
some considerable respect for his partner. Now, it is easy for the man
who lays himself out for a rich marriage (and that is a business quite
different from your own, and one, therefore, on which I will not enter)
to respect his wife. Such men are commonly possessed, or soon become
possessed, of a simple and profound religion, which is the worship of
money, and when they have found their inevitable choice, her substance,
or that of her father, surrounds her with a halo that does not fade.
You could hope for no such illusions. The very first year of your
vocation (if you pursue it industriously and honestly) will destroy in
you the possibility of any form of worship whatsoever. No, it will be
yours to take up with dignity, and I trust in some permanent fashion,
that position of parasite which is a proper and necessary adjunct in
every wealthy family, and which, when it is once well and industriously
occupied, I have never known to fail in promoting the happiness of its
incumbent.
Let me turn from all this and give you a few rough rules which should
guide you in the earlier part of your way. You will not, I am sure,
reject them lightly, coming as they do from a friend of my standing
and experience. Young men commonly regard the advice of their elders
as something too crude to be observed. It is a fatal error. What they
take for crudity is only the terseness and pressure of accumulated
experience.
The first main rule is to take note of that limit of insult and
contempt beyond which your master will revolt. Note carefully what I
say. No one, and least of all the prosperous, especially when their
prosperity is combined with culture, will long tolerate flattery.
A certain indifference, spiced with occasional contempt and not
infrequent insolence, is what those of jaded appetite look for in any
permanent companion. Without a full knowledge of this great truth,
hundreds of your compeers have fallen early upon the field, never to
rise again. For if it is true that the wealthy and the refined demand
much seasoning in their companionship, it is equally true that there
is a fairly sharp boundary beyond which they suddenly revolt. Henry
Bellarmine was thrust out of the Congletons' house for no other reason.
The same cause led to poor Ralph Pagberry's imprisonment, and I could
quote you hosts of others.
My next rule is that you should never, under any temptation of weather,
or ill health, or fatigue, permit yourself really and thoroughly to
bore either your patron or any one of his guests, near relatives, or
advisers. As it is not easy for a young man to know when he is boring
the well-to-do, let me give you a few hints.
When the rich begin to talk one to the other in your presence without
noticing you, it is a sign. When they answer what you are saying to
them in a manner totally irrelevant, it is another. When they smile
very sympathetically, but at something else in the room, not your face,
it is a third. And when they give an interested exclamation, such as,
"No doubt. No doubt," or, "I can well believe it," such expressions
having no relation to what passed immediately before, it is a fourth.
Add to these criteria certain plain rules, such as never upon any
account to read aloud to the rich unless they constrain you to do so,
never to sing, never to be the last to leave the room or to go to bed,
and you will not sin upon this score.
Let me give you a further rule, which is, to agree with the women. It
is very difficult for one of our sex to remember this, because our sex
loves argument and is with difficulty persuaded that contradiction and
even controversy are intolerable to ladies. Mould your conversation
with them in such a fashion that they may hear from you either a
brilliant account at second hand of themselves or a very odious one
of their friends; but do not be so foolish as to touch upon abstract
matters, and if these by any chance fall into the conversation, simply
discover your companion's real or supposed position, and agree with it.
I have little more to add. Be courteous to all chance guests in the
house. You will tell me, justly enough, that the great majority of them
will be unimportant or poor or both. But the point is that you can
never tell when one of them may turn out to be, either then or in the
future, important or rich or both. The rule is simple and absolute.
Cultivate courtesy, avoid affection; use the first upon all occasions,
and forget so much as the meaning of the second.
Lastly, drink wine, but drink it in moderation. I have known admirably
successful parasites who were total abstainers, but only in the houses
of fanatics with whom this peculiar habit was a creed. The moment these
successful men passed to other employers, I was interested to note
that they at once abandoned the foolish trick. But if it is important
not to fall into the Mohammedan foible of total abstinence from wine,
it is, if anything, even more important never upon any occasion
whatsoever to exceed in it. Excess in wine is dangerous in a degree
to the burglar, the thief, the money-lender, the poisoner, and many
professions other than your own, but in that which you have chosen it
is not _dangerous_, but _fatal_. Let such excess be apparent once in
the career of a young parasite, and that career is as good as done for.
I urge this truth upon you most solemnly, my dear lad, by way of ending.
I wish you the best of luck, and I am your poor father's devoted friend
and your own.
XL
ON DROPPING ANCHOR
The best noise in all the world is the rattle of the anchor chain when
one comes into harbour at last, and lets it go over the bows.
You may say that one does nothing of the sort, that one picks up
moorings, and that letting go so heavy a thing as an anchor is no
business for you and me. If you say that you are wrong. Men go from
inhabited place to inhabited place, and for pleasure from station to
station, then pick up moorings as best they can, usually craning over
the side and grabbing as they pass, and cursing the man astern for
leaving such way on her and for passing so wide. Yes, I know that.
You are not the only man who has picked up moorings. Not by many many
thousands. Many moorings have I picked up in many places, none without
some sort of misfortune; therefore do I still prefer the rattle of the
anchor chain.
Once--to be accurate, seventeen years ago--I had been out all night by
myself in a boat called the _Silver Star_. She was a very small boat.
She had only one sail; she was black inside and out, and I think about
one hundred years old. I had hired her of a poor man, and she was his
only possession.
It was a rough night in the late summer when the rich are compelled in
their detestable grind to go to the Solent. When I say it was night
I mean it was the early morning, just late enough for the rich to be
asleep aboard their boats, and the dawn was silent upon the sea. There
was a strong tide running up the Medina. I was tired to death. I had
passed the Royal Yacht Squadron grounds, and the first thing I saw was
a very fine and noble buoy--new-painted, gay, lordly--moorings worthy
of a man!
I let go the halyard very briskly, and I nipped forward and got my hand
upon that great buoy--there was no hauling of it in-board; I took the
little painter of my boat and made it fast to this noble buoy, and
then immediately I fell asleep. In this sleep of mine I heard, as in a
pleasant dream, the exact motion of many oars rowed by strong men, and
very soon afterwards I heard a voice with a Colonial accent swearing in
an abominable manner, and I woke up and looked--and there was a man of
prodigious wealth, all dressed in white, and with an extremely new cap
on his head. His whiskers also were white and his face bright red, and
he was in a great passion. He was evidently the owner or master of the
buoy, and on either side of the fine boat in which he rowed were the
rowers, his slaves. He could not conceive why I had tied the _Silver
Star_ to his magnificent great imperial moorings, to which he had
decided to tie his own expensive ship, on which, no doubt, a dozen as
rich as himself were sailing the seas.
I told him that I was sorry I had picked up his moorings, but that,
in this country, it was the common courtesy of the sea to pick up
any spare moorings one could find. I also asked him the name of his
expensive ship, but he only answered with curses. I told him the name
of my ship was the _Silver Star_.
Then, when I had cast off, I put out the sweeps and I rowed gently, for
it was now slack water at the top of the tide, and I stood by while he
tied his magnificent yacht to the moorings. When he had done that I
rowed under the stern of that ship and read her name. But I will not
print it here, only let me tell you it was the name of a ship belonging
to a fabulously rich man. Riches, I thought then and I think still,
corrupt the heart.
Upon another occasion I came with one companion across the bar of
Orford River, out of a very heavy wind outside and a very heavy sea.
I just touched as I crossed that bar, though I was on the top of the
highest tide of the year, for it was just this time in September, the
highest springs of the hunter's moon.
My companion and I sailed up Orford River, and when we came to Orford
Town we saw a buoy, and I said to my companion, "Let us pick up
moorings."
Upon the bank of the river was a long line of men, all shouting and
howling, and warning us not to touch that buoy. But we called out to
them that we meant no harm. We only meant to pick up those moorings
for a moment, so as to make everything snug on board, and that then
we would take a line ashore and lie close to the wharf. Only the more
did those numerous men (whom many others ran up to join as I called)
forbid us with oaths to touch the buoy. Nevertheless, we picked up the
little buoy (which was quite small and light) and we got it in-board,
and held on, waiting for our boat to swing to it. But an astonishing
thing happened! The boat paid no attention to the moorings, but went
careering up river carrying the buoy with it, and apparently dragging
the moorings along the bottom without the least difficulty. And this
was no wonder, for we found out afterwards that the little buoy had
only been set there to mark a racing point, and that the weights
holding the line of it to the bottom were very light and few. So it was
no wonder the men of Orford had been so angry. Soon it was dark, and we
replaced the buoy stealthily, and when we came in to eat at the Inn we
were not recognised.
It was on this occasion that was written the song:
The men that lived in Orford stood
Upon the shore to meet me;
Their faces were like carven wood,
They did not wish to greet me.
etc.
It has eighteen verses.
I say again, unless you have moorings of your own--an extravagant
habit--picking up moorings is always a perilous and doubtful thing,
fraught with accident and hatred and mischance. Give me the rattle of
the anchor chain!
I love to consider a place which I have never yet seen, but which I
shall reach at last, full of repose and marking the end of those
voyages, and security from the tumble of the sea.
This place will be a cove set round with high hills on which there
shall be no house or sign of men, and it shall be enfolded by quite
deserted land; but the westering sun will shine pleasantly upon it
under a warm air. It will be a proper place for sleep.
The fair-way into that haven shall lie behind a pleasant little beach
of shingle, which shall run out aslant into the sea from the steep
hillside, and shall be a breakwater made by God. The tide shall run up
behind it smoothly, and in a silent way, filling the quiet hollow of
the hills, brimming it all up like a cup--a cup of refreshment and of
quiet, a cup of ending.
Then with what pleasure shall I put my small boat round, just round the
point of that shingle beach, noting the shoal water by the eddies and
the deeps by the blue colour of them where the channel runs from the
main into the fair-way. Up that fair-way shall I go, up into the cove,
and the gates of it shall shut behind me, headland against headland,
so that I shall not see the open sea any more, though I shall still
hear its distant noise. But all around me, save for that distant echo
of the surf from the high hills, will be silence; and the evening will
be gathering already.
Under that falling light, all alone in such a place, I shall let go the
anchor chain, and let it rattle for the last time. My anchor will go
down into the clear salt water with a run, and when it touches I shall
pay out four lengths or more so that she may swing easily and not drag,
and then I shall tie up my canvas and fasten all for the night, and get
me ready for sleep. And that will be the end of my sailing.
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber's note: |
| |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------+
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