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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Plain Man and His Wife, by Arnold Bennett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Plain Man and His Wife
+
+Author: Arnold Bennett
+
+Release Date: September 13, 2004 [EBook #13449]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PLAIN MAN AND HIS WIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven desJardins, Project Manager, Keith M. Eckrich,
+Post-Processor and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreaders Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PLAIN MAN AND HIS WIFE
+
+
+By ARNOLD BENNETT
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE OLD ADAM," "THE OLD WIVES' TALE," "BURIED ALIVE," ETC.
+
+
+NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                           PAGE
+
+  I. All Means and No End .........  9
+
+ II. The Taste for Pleasure ....... 33
+
+III. The Risks of Life ............ 60
+
+ IV. In Her Place ................. 87
+
+
+
+
+THE PLAIN MAN AND HIS WIFE
+
+
+
+
+I - ALL MEANS AND NO END
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The plain man on a plain day wakes up, slowly or quickly according to
+his temperament, and greets the day in a mental posture which might be
+thus expressed in words:
+
+"Oh, Lord! Another day! What a grind!"
+
+If you ask me whom I mean by the plain man, my reply is that I mean
+almost every man. I mean you. I certainly mean me. I mean the rich and
+the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful, the idle and the
+diligent, the luxurious and the austere. For, what with the limits of
+digestion, the practical impossibility of wearing two neckties at
+once, the insecurity of investments, the responsibilities of wealth
+and of success, the exhaustingness of the search for pleasure, and the
+cheapness of travel--the real differences between one sort of plain
+man and another are slight in these times. (And indeed they always
+were slight.)
+
+The plain man has a lot to do before he may have his breakfast--and he
+must do it. The tyrannic routine begins instantly he is out of bed. To
+lave limbs, to shave the jaw, to select clothes and assume them--these
+things are naught. He must exercise his muscles--all his muscles
+equally and scientifically--with the aid of a text-book and of
+diagrams on a large card; which card he often hides if he is expecting
+visitors in his chamber, for he will not always confess to these
+exercises; he would have you believe that he alone, in a world of
+simpletons, is above the faddism of the hour; he is as ashamed of
+these exercises as of a good resolution, and when his wife happens to
+burst in on them he will pretend to be doing some common act, such as
+walking across the room or examining a mole in the small of his back.
+And yet he will not abandon them. They have an empire over him. To
+drop them would be to be craven, inefficient. The text-book asserts
+that they will form one of the pleasantest parts of the day, and that
+he will learn to look forward to them. He soon learns to look forward
+to them, but not with glee. He is relieved and proud when they are
+over for the day.
+
+He would enjoy his breakfast, thanks to the strenuous imitation of
+diagrams, were it not that, in addition to being generally in a hurry,
+he is preoccupied. He is preoccupied by the sense of doom, by the
+sense that he has set out on the appointed path and dare not stray
+from it. The train or the tram-car or the automobile (same thing) is
+waiting for him, irrevocable, undeniable, inevitable. He wrenches
+himself away. He goes forth to his fate, as to the dentist. And just
+as he would enjoy his breakfast in the home, so he would enjoy his
+newspaper and cigarette in the vehicle, were it not for that
+ever-present sense of doom. The idea of business grips him. It matters
+not what the business is. Business is everything, and everything is
+business. He reaches his office--whatever his office is. He is in his
+office. He must plunge--he plunges. The day has genuinely begun now.
+The appointed path stretches straight in front of him, for five, six,
+seven, eight hours.
+
+Oh! but he chose his vocation. He likes it. It satisfies his
+instincts. It is his life. (So you say.) Well, does he like it? Does
+it satisfy his instincts? Is it his life? If truly the answer is
+affirmative, he is at any rate not conscious of the fact. He is aware
+of no ecstasy. What is the use of being happy unless he knows he is
+happy? Some men know that they are happy in the hours of business, but
+they are few. The majority are not, and the bulk of the majority do
+not even pretend to be. The whole attitude of the average plain man to
+business implies that business is a nuisance, scarcely mitigated. With
+what secret satisfaction he anticipates that visit to the barber's in
+the middle of the morning! With what gusto he hails the arrival of an
+unexpected interrupting friend! With what easement he decides that he
+may lawfully put off some task till the morrow! Let him hear a band or
+a fire-engine in the street, and he will go to the window with the
+eagerness of a child or of a girl-clerk. If he were working at golf
+the bands of all the regiments of Hohenzollern would not make him turn
+his head, nor the multitudinous blazing of fireproof skyscrapers. No!
+Let us be honest. Business constitutes the steepest, roughest league
+of the appointed path. Were it otherwise, business would not be
+universally regarded as a means to an end.
+
+Moreover, when the plain man gets home again, does his wife's face say
+to him: "I know that your real life is now over for the day, and I
+regret for your sake that you have to return here. I know that the
+powerful interest of your life is gone. But I am glad that you have
+had five, six, seven, or eight hours of passionate pleasure"? Not a
+bit! His wife's face says to him: "I commiserate with you on all that
+you have been through. It is a great shame that you should be
+compelled to toil thus painfully. But I will try to make it up to you.
+I will soothe you. I will humour you. Forget anxiety and fatigue in my
+smiles." She does not fetch his comfortable slippers for him, partly
+because, in this century, wives do not do such things, and partly
+because comfortable slippers are no longer worn. But she does the
+equivalent--whatever the equivalent may happen to be in that
+particular household. And he expects the commiseration and the solace
+in her face. He would be very hurt did he not find it there.
+
+And even yet he is not relaxed. Even yet the appointed path stretches
+inexorably in front, and he cannot wander. For now he feels the cogs
+and cranks of the highly complex domestic machine. At breakfast he
+declined to hear them; they were shut off from him; he was too busy to
+be bothered with them. At evening he must be bothered with them. Was
+it not he who created the machine? He discovers, often to his
+astonishment, that his wife has an existence of her own, full of
+factors foreign to him, and he has to project himself, not only into
+his wife's existence, but into the existences of other minor
+personages. His daughter, for example, will persist in growing up. Not
+for a single day will she pause. He arrives one night and perceives
+that she is a woman and that he must treat her as a woman. He had not
+bargained for this. Peace, ease, relaxation in a home vibrating to the
+whir of such astounding phenomena? Impossible dream! These phenomena
+were originally meant by him to be the ornamentation of his career,
+but they are threatening to be the sole reason of his career. If his
+wife lives for him, it is certain that he lives just as much for his
+wife; and as for his daughter, while she emphatically does not live
+for him, he is bound to admit that he has just got to live for
+her--and she knows it!
+
+To gain money was exhausting; to spend it is precisely as exhausting.
+He cannot quit the appointed path nor lift the doom. Dinner is
+finished ere he has begun to recover from the varied shock of home.
+Then his daughter may negligently throw him a few moments of charming
+cajolery. He may gossip in simple idleness with his wife. He may
+gambol like any infant with the dog. A yawn. The shadow of the next
+day is upon him. He must not stay up too late, lest the vigour
+demanded by the next day should be impaired. Besides, he does not want
+to stay up. Naught is quite interesting enough to keep him up. And
+bed, too, is part of the appointed, unescapable path. To bed he goes,
+carrying ten million preoccupations. And of his state of mind the
+kindest that can be said is that he is philosophic enough to hope for
+the best.
+
+And after the night he wakes up, slowly or quickly according to his
+temperament, and greets the day with:
+
+"Oh, Lord! Another day! What a grind!"
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The interesting point about the whole situation is that the plain man
+seldom or never asks himself a really fundamental question about that
+appointed path of his--that path from which he dare not and could not
+wander.
+
+Once, perhaps in a parable, the plain man travelling met another
+traveller. And the plain man demanded of the traveller:
+
+"Where are you going to?"
+
+The traveller replied:
+
+"Now I come to think of it, I don't know."
+
+The plain man was ruffled by this insensate answer. He said:
+
+"But you are travelling?"
+
+The traveller replied:
+
+"Yes."
+
+The plain man, beginning to be annoyed, said:
+
+"Have you never asked yourself where you are going to?"
+
+"I have not."
+
+"But do you mean to tell me," protested the plain man, now irritated,
+"that you are putting yourself to all this trouble, peril, and expense
+of trains and steamers, without having asked yourself where you are
+going to?"
+
+"It never occurred to me," the traveller admitted. "I just had to
+start and I started."
+
+Whereupon the plain man was, as too often with us plain men, staggered
+and deeply affronted by the illogical absurdity of human nature. "Was
+it conceivable," he thought, "that this traveller, presumably in his
+senses--" etc. (You are familiar with the tone and the style, being a
+plain man yourself.) And he gave way to moral indignation.
+
+Now I must here, in parenthesis, firmly state that I happen to be a
+member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation. As
+such, I object to the plain man's moral indignation against the
+traveller; and I think that a liability to moral indignation is one of
+the plain man's most serious defects. As such, my endeavour is to
+avoid being staggered and deeply affronted, or even surprised, by
+human vagaries. There are too many plain people who are always
+rediscovering human nature--its turpitudes, fatuities, unreason. They
+live amid human nature as in a chamber of horrors. And yet, after all
+these years, we surely ought to have grown used to human nature! It
+may be extremely vile--that is not the point. The point is that it
+constitutes our environment, from which we cannot escape alive. The
+man who is capable of being deeply affronted by his inevitable
+environment ought to have the pluck of his convictions and shoot
+himself. The Society would with pleasure pay his funeral expenses and
+contribute to the support of his wife and children. Such a man is,
+without knowing it, a dire enemy of true progress, which can only be
+planned and executed in an atmosphere from which heated moral
+superiority is absent.
+
+I offer these parenthetical remarks as a guarantee that I shall not
+over-righteously sneer at the plain man for his share in the sequel to
+the conversation with the traveller. For there was a sequel to the
+conversation.
+
+"As questions are being asked, where are you going to?" said the
+traveller.
+
+The plain man answered with assurance:
+
+"Oh, I know exactly where I'm going to. I'm going to Timbuctoo."
+
+"Indeed!" said the traveller. "And why are you going to Timbuctoo?"
+
+Said the plain man: "I'm going because it's the proper place to go to.
+Every self-respecting person goes to Timbuctoo."
+
+"But why?"
+
+Said the plain man:
+
+"Well, it's supposed to be just about unique. You're contented there.
+You get what you've always wanted. The climate's wonderful."
+
+"Indeed!" said the traveller again. "Have you met anybody who's been
+there?"
+
+"Yes, I've met several. I've met a lot. And I've heard from people who
+are there."
+
+"And are their reports enthusiastic?"
+
+"Well--" The plain man hesitated.
+
+"Answer me. Are their reports enthusiastic?" the traveller insisted,
+rather bullyingly.
+
+"Not very," the plain man admitted. "Some say it's very disappointing.
+And some say it's much like other towns. Every one says the climate
+has grave drawbacks."
+
+The traveller demanded:
+
+"Then why are you going there?"
+
+Said the plain man:
+
+"It never occurred to me to ask why. As I say, Timbuctoo's supposed to
+be--"
+
+"Supposed by whom?"
+
+"Well--generally supposed," said the plain man, limply.
+
+"Not by the people who've been there?" the traveller persevered, with
+obstinacy.
+
+"Perhaps not," breathed the plain man. "But it's generally supposed--"
+He faltered. There was a silence, which was broken by the
+traveller, who inquired:
+
+"Any interesting places en route?"
+
+"I don't know. I never troubled about that," said the plain man.
+
+"But do you mean to tell me," the traveller exclaimed, "that you are
+putting yourself to all this trouble, peril, and expense of trains and
+steamers and camel-back without having asked yourself why, and without
+having satisfied yourself that the thing was worth while, and without
+having even ascertained the most agreeable route?"
+
+Said the plain man, weakly:
+
+"I just had to start for somewhere, so I started for Timbuctoo."
+
+Said the traveller:
+
+"Well, I'm of a forgiving disposition. Shake hands."
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The two individuals in the foregoing parable were worrying each other
+with fundamental questions. And what makes the parable unrealistic is
+the improbability of real individuals ever doing any such thing. If
+the plain man, for instance, has almost ceased to deal in fundamental
+questions in these days, the reason is not difficult to find. The
+reason lies in the modern perception that fundamental questions are
+getting very hard to answer. In a former time a dogmatic answer was
+ready waiting for every fundamental question. You asked the question,
+but before you asked it you knew the answer, and so there was no
+argument and nearly no anxiety. In that former time a mere child could
+glance at your conduct and tell you with certainty exactly what you
+would be doing and how you would be feeling ten thousand years hence,
+if you persisted in the said conduct. But knowledge has advanced since
+then, and the inconvenience of increased knowledge is that it
+intensifies the sense of ignorance, with the result that, though we
+know immensely more than our grandfathers knew, we feel immensely more
+ignorant than they ever felt. They were, indeed, too ignorant to be
+aware of ignorance--which is perhaps a comfortable state. Thus the
+plain man nowadays shirks fundamental questions. And assuredly no
+member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation shall
+blame him.
+
+All fundamental questions resolve themselves finally into the
+following assertion and inquiry about life: "I am now engaged in
+something rather tiresome. What do I stand to gain by it later on?"
+That is the basic query. It has forms of varying importance. In its
+supreme form the word "eternity" has to be employed. And the plain man
+is, to-day, so sensitive about this supreme form of the question that,
+far from asking and trying to answer it, he can scarcely bear to hear
+it even discussed--I mean discussed with candour. In practise a frank
+discussion of it usually tempts him to exhibitions of extraordinary
+heat and bitterness, and wisdom is thereby but obscured. Therefore he
+prefers the disadvantage of leaving it alone to the dissatisfaction of
+attempting to deal with it. The disadvantage of leaving it alone is
+obvious. Existence is, and must be, a compromise between the claims of
+the moment and the claims of the future--and how can that compromise
+be wisely established if one has not somehow made up one's mind about
+the future? It cannot. But--I repeat--I would not blame the plain man.
+I would only just hint to him, while respecting his sensitiveness,
+that the present hour is just as much a part of eternity as another
+hour ten thousand years off.
+
+The second--the most important--form of the fundamental question
+embraces the problem of old age. All plain men will admit, when
+faithfully cross-examined, a sort of belief that they are on their way
+to some Timbuctoo situate in the region of old age. It may be the
+Timbuctoo of a special ambition realized, or the Timbuctoo of luxury,
+or the Timbuctoo of material security, or the Timbuctoo of hale
+health, or the Timbuctoo of knowledge, or the Timbuctoo of power, or
+even the Timbuctoo of a good conscience. It is anyhow a recognizable
+and definable Timbuctoo. And the path leading to it is a straight,
+wide thoroughfare, clearly visible for a long distance ahead.
+
+The theory of the mortal journey is simple and seldom challenged. It
+is a twofold theory--first that the delight of achievement will
+compensate for the rigours and self-denials of the route, and second
+that the misery of non-achievement would outweigh the immediate
+pleasures of dallying. If this theory were not indestructible, for
+reasons connected with the secret nature of humanity, it would
+probably have been destroyed long ago by the mere cumulative battering
+of experience. For the earth's surface is everywhere thickly dotted
+with old men who have achieved ambition, old men drenched in luxury,
+old men as safe as Mont Blanc from overthrow, old men with the health
+of camels, old men who know more than anybody ever knew before, old
+men whose nod can ruin a thousand miles of railroad, and old men with
+consciences of pure snow; but who are not happy and cannot enjoy life.
+
+The theory, however, does happen to be indestructible, partly because
+old age is such a terrible long way off, partly because the young
+honestly believe themselves to have a monopoly of wisdom, partly
+because every plain man is convinced that his case will be different
+from all the other cases, and chiefly because endeavour--not any
+particular endeavour, but rather any endeavour!--is a habit that
+corresponds to a very profound instinct in the plain man. So the
+reputation of Timbuctoo as a pleasure resort remains entirely
+unimpaired, and the pilgrimages continue with unabated earnestness.
+
+And there is another and a paramount reason why the pilgrimages should
+continue. The two men in the parable both said that they just had to
+start--and they were right. We have to start, and, once started, we
+have to keep going. We must go somewhere. And at the moment of
+starting we have neither the sagacity nor the leisure to invent fresh
+places to start for, or to cut new paths. Everybody is going to
+Timbuctoo; the roads are well marked. And the plain man, with his
+honour of being peculiar, sets out for Timbuctoo also, following the
+signposts. The fear of not arriving keeps him on the trot, the fear of
+the unknown keeps him in the middle of the road and out of the forest
+on either side of it, and hope keeps up his courage.
+
+Will any member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral
+Indignation step forward and heatedly charge the plain man with
+culpable foolishness, ignorance, or gullibility; or even with
+cowardice in neglecting to find a convincing answer to the fundamental
+question about the other end of his life?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+There is, however, a third form of the fundamental question which is
+less unanswerable than the two forms already mentioned. The plain man
+may be excused for his remarkable indifference as to what his labour
+and his tedium will gain for him "later on," when "later on" means
+beyond the grave or thirty years hence. But we live also in the
+present, and if proper existence is a compromise between the claims of
+the present and the claims of the future the present must be
+considered, and the plain man ought surely to ask himself the
+fundamental question in such a form as the following: "I am now--this
+morning--engaged in something rather tiresome. What do I stand to gain
+by it this evening, to-morrow, this week--next week?" In this form the
+fundamental question, once put, can be immediately answered by
+experience and by experiment.
+
+But does the plain man put it? I mean--does he put it seriously and
+effectively? I think that very often, if not as a general rule, he
+does not. He may--in fact he does--gloomily and savagely mutter: "What
+pleasure do I get out of life?" But he fails to insist on a clear
+answer from himself, and even if he obtains a clear answer--even if he
+makes the candid admission, "No pleasure," or "Not enough
+pleasure"--even then he usually does not insist on modifying his life
+in accordance with the answer. He goes on ignoring all the interesting
+towns and oases on the way to his Timbuctoo. Excessively uncertain
+about future joy, and too breathlessly preoccupied to think about joy
+in the present, he just drives obstinately ahead, rather like a person
+in a trance. Singular conduct for a plain man priding himself on
+common sense!
+
+For the case of the plain man, conscientious and able, can only too
+frequently be summed up thus: Faced with the problem of existence,
+which is the problem of combining the largest possible amount of
+present satisfaction with the largest possible amount of security in
+the future, he has educated himself generally, and he has educated
+himself specially for a particular profession or trade; he has adopted
+the profession or trade, with all its risks and
+responsibilities--risks and responsibilities which often involve the
+felicity of others; he has bound himself to it for life, almost
+irrevocably; he labours for it so many hours a day, and it occupies
+his thoughts for so many hours more. Further, in the quest of
+satisfaction, he has taken a woman to wife and has had children. And
+here it is well to note frankly that his prime object in marrying was
+not the woman's happiness, but his own, and that the children came,
+not in order that they might be jolly little creatures, but as
+extensions of the father's individuality. The home, the environment
+gradually constructed for these secondary beings, constitutes another
+complex organization, which he superimposes on the complex
+organization of his profession or trade, and his brain has to carry
+and vitalize the two of them. All his energies are absorbed, and they
+are absorbed so utterly that once a year he is obliged to take a
+holiday lest he should break down, and even the organization of the
+holiday is complex and exhausting.
+
+Now assuming--a tremendous assumption!--that by all this he really is
+providing security for the future, what conscious direct, personal
+satisfaction in the present does the onerous programme actually yield?
+I admit that it yields the primitive satisfaction of keeping body and
+soul together. But a Hottentot in a kraal gets the same satisfaction
+at less expense. I admit also that it ought theoretically to yield the
+conscious satisfaction which accompanies any sustained effort of the
+faculties. I deny that in fact it does yield this satisfaction, for
+the reason that the man is too busy ever to examine the treasures of
+his soul. And what else does it yield? For what other immediate end is
+the colossal travail being accomplished?
+
+Well, it may, and does, occur that the plain man is practising
+physical and intellectual calisthenics, and running a vast business
+and sending ships and men to the horizons of the earth, and keeping a
+home in a park, and oscillating like a rapid shuttle daily between
+office and home, and lying awake at nights, and losing his eyesight
+and his digestion, and staking his health, and risking misery for the
+beings whom he cherishes, and enriching insurance companies, and
+providing joy-rides for nice young women whom he has never seen--and
+all his present profit therefrom is a game of golf with a free mind
+once a fortnight, or half an hour's intimacy with his wife and a free
+mind once a week or so, or a ten minutes' duel with that daughter of
+his and a free mind on an occasional evening! Nay, it may occur that
+after forty years of incessant labour, in answer to an inquiry as to
+where the genuine conscious fun comes in, he has the right only to
+answer: "Well, when I have time, I take the dog out for a walk. I
+enjoy larking with the dog."
+
+The estimable plain man, with his horror of self-examination, is apt
+to forget the immediate end of existence in the means. And so much so,
+that when the first distant end--that of a secure old age--approaches
+achievement, he is incapable of admitting it to be achieved, and goes
+on worrying and worrying about the means--from simple habit! And when
+he does admit the achievement of the desired end, and abandons the
+means, he has so badly prepared himself to relish the desired end that
+the mere change kills him! His epitaph ought to read: "Here lies the
+plain man of common sense, whose life was all means and no end."
+
+A remedy will be worth finding.
+
+
+
+
+II - THE TASTE FOR PLEASURE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+One evening--it is bound to happen in the evening when it does
+happen--the plain man whose case I endeavoured to analyse in the
+previous chapter will suddenly explode. The smouldering volcano within
+that placid and wise exterior will burst forth, and the surrounding
+country will be covered with the hot lava of his immense hidden
+grievance. The business day has perhaps been marked by an unusual
+succession of annoyances, exasperations, disappointments--but he has
+met them with fine philosophic calm; fatigue has overtaken him--but it
+has not overcome him; throughout the long ordeal at the office he has
+remained master of himself, a wondrous example to the young and the
+foolish. And then some entirely unimportant occurrence--say, an
+invitation to a golf foursome which his duties forbid him to accept--a
+trifle, a nothing, comes along and brings about the explosion, in a
+fashion excessively disconcerting to the onlooker, and he exclaims,
+acidly, savagely, with a profound pessimism:
+
+"What pleasure do I get out of life?" And in that single abrupt
+question (to which there is only one answer) he lays bare the central
+flaw of his existence.
+
+The onlooker will probably be his wife, and the tone employed will
+probably imply that she is somehow mysteriously to blame for the fact
+that his earthly days are not one unbroken series of joyous
+diversions. He has no pose to keep up with his wife. And, moreover, if
+he really loves her he will find a certain curious satisfaction in
+hurting her now and then, in being wilfully unjust to her, as he would
+never hurt or be unjust to a mere friend. (Herein is one of the
+mysterious differences between love and affection!) She is alarmed and
+secretly aghast, as well she may be. He also is secretly aghast. For
+he has confessed a fact which is an inconvenient fact; and
+Anglo-Saxons have such a horror of inconvenient facts that they prefer
+to ignore them even to themselves. To pretend that things are not what
+they are is regarded by Anglo-Saxons as a proof of strength of mind
+and wholesomeness of disposition; while to admit that things are
+indeed what they are is deemed to be either weakness or cynicism. The
+plain man is incapable of being a cynic; he feels, therefore, that he
+has been guilty of weakness, and this, of course, makes him very
+cross.
+
+"Can't something be done?" says his wife, meaning, "Can't something be
+done to ameliorate your hard lot?"
+
+(Misguided creature! It was the wrong phrase to use. And any phrase
+would have been the wrong phrase. She ought to have caressed him, for
+to a caress there is no answer.)
+
+"You know perfectly well that nothing can be done!" he snaps her up,
+like a tiger snapping at the fawn. And his eyes, challenging hers,
+seem to say: "Can I neglect my business? Can I shirk my
+responsibilities? Where would you be if I shirked them? Where would
+the children be? What about old age, sickness, death, quarter-day,
+rates, taxes, and your new hat? I have to provide for the rainy day
+and for the future. I am succeeding, moderately; but let there be no
+mistake--success means that I must sacrifice present pleasure.
+Pleasure is all very well for you others, but I--" And then he will
+finish aloud, with the air of an offended and sarcastic martyr:
+"Something be done, indeed!"
+
+She sighs. The domestic scene is over.
+
+Now, he may be honestly convinced that nothing can be done. Let us
+grant as much. But obviously it suits his pride to assume that nothing
+can be done. To admit the contrary would be to admit that he was
+leaving something undone, that he had organized his existence
+clumsily, even that he had made a fundamental miscalculation in the
+arrangement of his career. He has confessed to grave dissatisfaction.
+It behoves him, for the sake of his own dignity and reputation, to be
+quite sure that the grave dissatisfaction is unavoidable, inevitable,
+and that the blame for it rests with the scheme of the universe, and
+not with his particular private scheme. His rôle is that of the brave,
+strong, patient victim of an alleged natural law, by reason of which
+the present must ever be sacrificed to the future, and he discovers a
+peculiar miserable delight in the rôle. "Miserable" is the right
+adjective.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Nevertheless, in his quality of a wise plain man, he would never agree
+that any problem of human conduct, however hard and apparently
+hopeless, could not be solved by dint of sagacity and
+ingenuity--provided it was the problem of another person! He is quite
+fearfully good at solving the problems of his friends. Indeed, his
+friends, recognizing this, constantly go to him for advice. If a
+friend consulted him and said:
+
+"Look here, I'm engaged in an enterprise which will absorb all my
+energies for three years. It will enable me in the meantime to live
+and to keep my family, but I shall have scarcely a moment's freedom of
+mind. I may have a little leisure, but of what use is leisure without
+freedom of mind? As for pleasure, I shall simply forget what it is. My
+life will be one long struggle. The ultimate profit is extremely
+uncertain. It may be fairly good; on the other hand, it may be nothing
+at all."
+
+The plain man, being also blunt, would assuredly interrupt:
+
+"My dear fellow, what a fool you've been!"
+
+Yet this case is in essence the case of the wise plain man. The chief
+difference between the two cases is that the wise plain man has
+enslaved himself for about thirty years instead of three, with naught
+but a sheer gambling chance of final reward! Not being one of the rare
+individuals with whom business is a passion, but just an average plain
+man, he is labouring daily against the grain, stultifying daily one
+part of his nature, on the supposition that later he will be
+recompensed. In other words, he is preparing to live, so that at a
+distant date he may be in a condition to live. He has not effected a
+compromise between the present and the future. His own
+complaint--"What pleasure do I get out of life?"--proves that he is
+completely sacrificing the present to the future. And how elusive is
+the future! Like the horizon, it always recedes. If, when he was
+thirty, some one had foretold that at forty-five, with a sympathetic
+wife and family and an increasing income, he would be as far off
+happiness as ever, he would have smiled at the prophecy.
+
+The consulting friend, somewhat nettled by the plain man's bluntness,
+might retort:
+
+"I may or may not have been a fool. That's not the point. The point is
+that I am definitely in the enterprise, and can't get out of it. And
+there's nothing to be done."
+
+Whereupon the plain man, in an encouraging, enheartening, reasonable
+tone, would respond:
+
+"Don't say that, my dear chap. Of course, if you're in it, you're in
+it. But give me all the details. Let's examine the thing. And allow me
+to tell you that no case that looks bad is as bad as it looks."
+
+It is precisely in this spirit that the plain man should approach his
+own case. He should say to himself in that reasonable tone which he
+employs to his friend, and which is so impressive: "Let me examine the
+thing."
+
+And now the plain man who is reading this and unwillingly fitting the
+cap will irately protest: "Do you suppose I haven't examined my own
+case? Do you suppose I don't understand it? I understand it
+thoroughly. Who should understand it if I don't? I beg to inform you
+that I know absolutely all about it."
+
+Still the strong probability is that he has not examined it. The
+strong probability is that he has just lain awake of a night and felt
+extremely sorry for himself, and at the same time rather proud of his
+fortitude. Which process does not amount to an examination; it amounts
+merely to an indulgence. As for knowing absolutely all about it, he
+has not even noticed that the habit of feeling sorry for himself and
+proud of his fortitude is slowly growing on him, and tending to become
+his sole form of joy--a morbid habit and a sickly joy! He is sublimely
+unaware of that increasing irritability which others discuss behind
+his back. He has no suspicion that he is balefully affecting the
+general atmosphere of his home.
+
+Above all, he does not know that he is losing the capacity for
+pleasure. Indeed, if it were suggested that such a change was going on
+in him he would be vexed and distressed. He would cry out: "Don't you
+make any mistake! I could amuse myself as well as any man, if only I
+got the chance!" And yet, how many tens of thousands of plain and (as
+it is called) successful men have been staggered to discover, when
+ambition was achieved and the daily yoke thrown off and the direct
+search for immediate happiness commenced, that the relish for pleasure
+had faded unnoticed away--proof enough that they had neither examined
+nor understood themselves! There is no more ingenuous soul, in affairs
+of supreme personal importance than your wise plain man, whom all his
+friends consult for his sagacity.
+
+Mind, I am not hereby accusing the plain man of total spiritual
+blindness--any more than I would accuse him of total physical
+blindness because he cannot see how he looks to others when he walks
+into a room. For nobody can see all round himself, nor know absolutely
+all about his own case; and he who boasts that he can is no better
+than a fool, despite his wisdom; he is not even at the beginning of
+any really useful wisdom. But I do accuse my plain man of deliberately
+shutting his eyes, from pride and from sloth. I do say that he might
+know a great deal more about his case than he actually does know, if
+only he would cease from pitying and praising himself in the middle of
+the night, and tackle the business of self-examination in a rational,
+vigorous, and honest fashion--not in the dark, but in the sane
+sunlight. And I do further say that a self-examination thus properly
+conducted might have results which would stultify those outrageous
+remarks of his to his wife.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Few people--in fact, very few people indeed--ever realize the
+priceless value of the ancient counsel: "Know thyself." It seems so
+trite, so ordinary. It seems so easy to acquire, this knowledge. Does
+not every one possess it? Can it not be got by simply sitting down in
+a chair and yielding to a mood? And yet this knowledge is just about
+as difficult to acquire as a knowledge of Chinese. Certainly nine
+hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand reach the age of
+sixty before getting the rudiments of it. The majority of us die in
+almost complete ignorance of it. And none may be said to master it in
+all its exciting branches. Why, you can choose any of your
+friends--the wisest of them--and instantly tell him something
+glaringly obvious about his own character and actions--and be rewarded
+for your trouble by an indignantly sincere denial! You had noticed it;
+all his friends had noticed it. But he had not noticed it. Far from
+having noticed it, he is convinced that it exists only in your
+malicious imagination. For example, go to a friend whose sense of
+humour is notoriously imperfect, and say gently to him: "Your sense of
+humour is imperfect, my friend," and see how he will receive the
+information! So much for the rarity of self-knowledge.
+
+Self-knowledge is difficult because it demands intellectual honesty.
+It demands that one shall not blink the facts, that one shall not hide
+one's head in the sand, and that one shall not be afraid of anything
+that one may happen to see in looking round. It is rare because it
+demands that one shall always be able to distinguish between the man
+one thinks one ought to be and the man one actually is. And it is rare
+because it demands impartial detachment and a certain quality of fine
+shamelessness--the shamelessness which confesses openly to oneself and
+finds a legitimate pleasure in confessing. By way of compensation for
+its difficulty, the pursuit of self-knowledge happens to be one of the
+most entrancing of all pursuits, as those who have seriously practised
+it are well aware. Its interest is inexhaustible and grows steadily.
+Unhappily, the Anglo-Saxon racial temperament is inimical to it. The
+Latins like it better. To feel its charm one should listen to a
+highly-cultivated Frenchman analysing himself for the benefit of an
+intimate companion. Still, even Anglo-Saxons may try it with
+advantage.
+
+The branch of self-knowledge which is particularly required for the
+solution of the immediate case of the plain man now under
+consideration is not a very hard one. It does not involve the
+recognition of crimes or even of grave faults. It is simply the
+knowledge of what interests him and what bores him.
+
+Let him enter upon the first section of it with candour. Let him be
+himself. And let him be himself without shame. Let him ever remember
+that it is not a sin to be bored by what interests others, or to be
+interested in what bores others. Let him in this private inquiry give
+his natural instincts free play, for it is precisely the gradual
+suppression of his natural instincts which has brought him to his
+present pass. At first he will probably murmur in a fatigued voice
+that he cannot think of anything at all that interests him. Then let
+him dig down among his buried instincts. Let him recall his bright
+past of dreams, before he had become a victim imprisoned in the
+eternal groove. Everybody has, or has had, a secret desire, a hidden
+leaning. Let him discover what his is, or was--gardening, philosophy,
+reading, travel, billiards, raising animals, training animals, killing
+animals, yachting, collecting pictures or postage-stamps or autographs
+or snuff-boxes or scalps, astronomy, kite-flying, house-furnishing,
+foreign languages, cards, swimming, diary-keeping, the stage,
+politics, carpentry, riding or driving, music, staying up late,
+getting up early, tree-planting, tree-felling, town-planning, amateur
+soldiering, statics, entomology, botany, elocution, children-fancying,
+cigar-fancying, wife-fancying, placid domestic evenings, conjuring,
+bacteriology, thought-reading, mechanics, geology, sketching,
+bell-ringing, theosophy, his own soul, even golf....
+
+I mention a few of the ten million directions in which his secret
+desire may point or have pointed. I have probably not mentioned the
+right direction. But he can find it. He can perhaps find several right
+directions without too much trouble.
+
+And now he says:
+
+"I suppose you mean me to 'take up' one of these things?"
+
+I do, seeing that he has hitherto neglected so clear a duty. If he had
+attended to it earlier, and with perseverance he would not be in the
+humiliating situation of exclaiming bitterly that he has no pleasure
+in life.
+
+"But," he resists, "you know perfectly well that I have no time!"
+
+To which I am obliged to make reply:
+
+"My dear sir, it is not your wife you are talking to. Kindly be honest
+with me."
+
+I admit that his business is very exhausting and exigent. For the sake
+of argument I will grant that he cannot safely give it an instant's
+less time than he is now giving it. But even so his business does not
+absorb at the outside more than seventy hours of the hundred and ten
+hours during which he is wide awake each week. The rest of the time he
+spends either in performing necessary acts in a tedious way or in
+performing acts which are not only tedious to him, but utterly
+unnecessary (for his own hypothesis is that he gets no pleasure out of
+life)--visiting, dinner-giving, cards, newspaper-reading, placid
+domestic evenings, evenings out, bar-lounging, sitting aimlessly
+around, dandifying himself, week-ending, theatres, classical concerts,
+literature, suburban train-travelling, staying up late, being in the
+swim, even golf. In whatever manner he is whittling away his leisure,
+it is the wrong manner, for the sole reason that it bores him.
+Moreover, all whittling of leisure is a mistake. Leisure, like work,
+should be organized, and it should be organized in large pieces.
+
+The proper course clearly is to substitute acts which promise to be
+interesting for acts which have proved themselves to produce nothing
+but tedium, and to carry out the change with brains, in a business
+spirit. And the first essential is to recognize that something has
+definitely to go by the board.
+
+He protests:
+
+"But I do only the usual things--what everybody else does! And then
+it's time to go to bed."
+
+The case, however, is his case, not everybody else's case. Why should
+he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like
+everybody else?
+
+He continues in the same strain:
+
+"But you are asking me to change my whole life--at my age!"
+
+Nothing of the sort! I am only suggesting that he should begin to
+live.
+
+And then finally he cries:
+
+"It's too drastic. I haven't the pluck!"
+
+Now we are coming to the real point.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The machinery of his volition, in all directions save one, has been
+clogged, through persistent neglect, due to over-specialization. His
+mind needs to be cleared, and it can be cleared--it will clear
+itself--if regular periods of repose are enforced upon it. As things
+are, it practically never gets a holiday from business. I do not mean
+that the plain man is always thinking about his business; but I mean
+that he is always liable to think about his business, that his
+business is always present in his mind, even if dormant there, and
+that at every opportunity, if the mind happens to be inactive, it sits
+up querulously and insists on attention. The man's mind is indeed
+rather like an unfortunate domestic servant who, though not always at
+work, is never off duty, never night or day free from the menace of a
+damnable electric bell; and it is as stale as that servant. His
+business is capable of ringing the bell when the man is eating his
+soup, when he is sitting alone with his wife on a warm summer evening,
+and especially when he wakes just before dawn to pity and praise
+himself.
+
+But he defends the position:
+
+"My business demands much reflection--constant watchfulness."
+
+Well, in the first place, an enterprise which demands watchfulness day
+and night from the same individual is badly organized, and should be
+reorganized. It runs contrary to the common sense of Nature. And, in
+the second place, his defence is insincere. He does not submit to the
+eternal preoccupation because he thinks he ought, but simply because
+he cannot help it. How often, especially just before the dawn, has he
+not longed to be delivered from the perfectly futile preoccupation, so
+that he might go to sleep again--and failed to get free! How often, in
+the midst of some jolly gathering, has he not felt secretly desolate
+because the one tyrannic topic would run round and round in his mind,
+just like a clockwork mouse, accomplishing no useful end, and making
+impossible any genuine participation in the gaiety that environs him!
+
+Instead of being necessary to the success of his business, this morbid
+preoccupation is positively detrimental to his business. He would
+think much more usefully, more powerfully, more creatively, about his
+business if during at least thirteen consecutive hours each day he
+never thought of it at all.
+
+And there is still a further point in this connection. Let him imagine
+how delightful it must be for the people in the home which he has
+made, the loving people whom he loves and to whom in theory he is
+devoting his career, to feel continually that he only sees them
+obscurely through the haze emanating from his business!
+Why--worse!--even when he is sitting with his wife, he and she might
+as well be communicating with each other across a grille against which
+a turnkey is standing and listening to every word said! Let him
+imagine how flattering for her! She might be more flattered, at any
+rate more thrilled, if she knew that instead of thinking about his
+business he was thinking about another woman. Could he shut the front
+door every afternoon on his business, the effect would not only be
+beneficial upon it and upon him, but his wife would smile the warm
+smile of wisdom justified. Like most women, she has a firmer grasp of
+the essence of life than the man upon whom she is dependent. She knows
+with her heart (what he only knows with his brain) that business,
+politics, and "all that sort of thing" are secondary to real
+existence, the mere preliminaries of it. She would rejoice, in the
+blush of the compliment he was paying her, that he had at last begun
+to comprehend the ultimate values!
+
+So far as I am aware, there is no patent device for suddenly gaining
+that control of the mind which will enable one to free it from an
+obsession such as the obsession of the plain man. The desirable end
+can, however, be achieved by slow degrees, and by an obvious method
+which contains naught of the miraculous. If the victim of the
+obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to
+think of nothing at all--every time he catches himself in the act of
+thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or
+later--probably in about a fortnight--cure the obsession, or at least
+get the upper hand of it. The treatment demands perseverance, but it
+emphatically does not demand an impossibly powerful effort. It is an
+affair of trifling pertinacious touches.
+
+It is a treatment easier to practise during daylight, in company, when
+distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night.
+Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality
+is low and the egoism intensified, is extremely difficult. But the
+small persistent successes of the day will gradually have their
+indirect influence on the night. A great deal can also be done by
+simple resolute suggestion. Few persons seem to know--what is,
+nevertheless, a fact--that the most effective moment for making
+resolves is in the comatose calm which precedes going to sleep. The
+entire organism is then in a passive state, and more permanently
+receptive of the imprint of volition than at any other period of the
+twenty-four hours. If regularly at that moment the man says clearly
+and imperiously to himself, "I will not allow my business to preoccupy
+me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I
+will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home," he will be
+astonished at the results; which results, by the way, are reached by
+subconscious and therefore unperceived channels whose workings we can
+only guess at.
+
+And when the obsession is beaten, destroyed, he will find himself not
+merely fortified with the necessary pluck and initiative for importing
+a new interest into his existence. His instincts of their own accord
+will be asking for that interest, for they will have been set free.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+In choosing a distraction--that is to say, in choosing a rival to his
+business--he should select some pursuit whose nature differs as much
+as possible from the nature of his business, and which will bring into
+activity another side of his character. If his business is monotonous,
+demanding care and solicitude rather than irregular intense efforts of
+the brain, then let his distraction be such as will make a powerful
+call upon his brain. But if, on the other hand, the course of his
+business runs in crises that string up the brain to its tightest
+strain, then let his distraction be a foolish and merry one. Many men
+fall into the error of assuming that their hobbies must be as
+dignified and serious as their vocations, though surely the example of
+the greatest philosophers ought to have taught them better! They seem
+to imagine that they should continually be improving themselves, in
+either body or mind. If they take up a sport, it is because the sport
+may improve their health. And if the hobby is intellectual it must
+needs be employed to improve their brain. The fact is that their
+conception of self-improvement is too narrow. In their restricted
+sense of the phrase, they possibly don't need improving; they possibly
+are already improved to the point of being a nuisance to their
+fellow-creatures; possibly what they need is worsening. In the broad
+and full sense of the phrase self-improvement, a course of
+self-worsening might improve them. I have known men--and everybody has
+known them--who would approach nearer to perfection if they could only
+acquire a little carelessness, a little absent-mindedness, a little
+illogicalness, a little irrational and infantile gaiety, a little
+unscrupulousness in the matter of the time of day. These
+considerations should be weighed before certain hobbies are dismissed
+as being unworthy of a plain man's notice.
+
+Then comes the hour of decision, in which the wise plain man should
+exert all that force of will for which he is famous in his house. For
+this hour may be of supreme importance--may be the close of one epoch
+in his life and the beginning of another. The more volitional energy
+he can concentrate in it, the more likely is he to succeed in the fine
+enterprise of his own renaissance. He must resolve with as much
+intensity of will as he once put into the resolution which sent him to
+propose marriage to his wife. And, indeed, he must be ready to treat
+his hobby somewhat as though it were a woman desired--with splendid
+and uncalculating generosity. He must shower money on it, and, what is
+more, he must shower time on it. He must do the thing properly. A
+hobby is not a hobby until it is glorified, until some real sacrifice
+has been made for it. If he has chosen a hobby that is costly, both in
+money and in time, if it is a hobby difficult for a busy and prudent
+man to follow, all the better. If it demands that his business shall
+suffer a little, and that his life-long habits of industry shall seem
+to be jeopardized, again all the better. For, you know, despite his
+timid fears, his business will not suffer, and lifelong habits, even
+good ones, are not easily jeopardized. One of the most precious jewels
+of advice ever offered to the plain man was that he should acquire
+industrious habits, and then try to lose them! He will soon find that
+he cannot lose them, but the transient struggles against them will
+tend always to restore the sane balance of his nature.
+
+He must deliberately arrange pleasures for himself in connection with
+his hobby, and as often as possible. Once a week at least his
+programme should comprise some item of relaxation to which he can look
+forward with impatience because he has planned it, and because he has
+compelled seemingly more urgent matters to give way to it; and look
+forward to it he must, tasting it in advance, enjoying it twice over!
+Thus may the appetite for pleasure, the ability really to savour it,
+be restored--and incidentally kept in good trim for full use when old
+age arrives and he enters the lotus-land. And with it all, when the
+hour of enjoyment comes, he must insist on his mind being free;
+expelling every preoccupation, nonchalantly accepting risks like a
+youth, he must abandon himself to the hour. Let him practise
+lightheartedness as though it were charity. Indeed, it is charity--to
+his household, for instance. Ask his household.
+
+He says:
+
+"All this is very dangerous. My friends won't recognize me. I may go
+too far. I may become an idler and a spendthrift."
+
+Have no fear.
+
+
+
+
+III - THE RISKS OF LIFE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+By one of those coincidences for which destiny is sometimes
+responsible, the two very opposite plain men whom I am going to write
+about were most happily named Mr. Alpha and Mr. Omega; for, owing to a
+difference of temperament, they stood far apart, at the extreme ends
+of the scale.
+
+In youth, of course, the differences between them was not fully
+apparent; such differences seldom are fully apparent in youth. It
+first made itself felt in a dramatic way, on the evening when Mr.
+Alpha wanted to go to the theatre and Mr. Omega didn't. At this period
+they were both young and both married, and the two couples shared a
+flat together. Also, they were both getting on very well in their
+careers, by which is meant that they both had spare cash to rattle in
+the pockets of their admirably-creased trousers.
+
+"Come to the theatre with us to-night, Omega?" said Mr. Alpha.
+
+"I don't think we will," said Mr. Omega.
+
+"But we particularly want you to," insisted Mr. Alpha.
+
+"Well, it can't be done," said Mr. Omega.
+
+"Got another engagement?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then why won't you come? You don't mean to tell me you're hard up?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said Mr. Omega.
+
+"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. What have you been doing
+with your money lately?"
+
+"I've taken out a biggish life assurance policy, and the premiums will
+be a strain. I paid the first yesterday. I'm bled white."
+
+"Holy Moses!" exclaimed Mr. Alpha, shrugging his shoulders.
+
+The flat was shortly afterwards to let. The exclamation "Holy Moses!"
+may be in itself quite harmless, and innocuous to friendship, if it is
+pronounced in the right, friendly tone. Unfortunately Mr. Alpha used
+it with a sarcastic inflection, implying that he regarded Mr. Omega as
+a prig, a fussy old person, a miser, a spoilsport, and, indeed,
+something less than a man.
+
+"You can only live your life once," said Mr. Alpha.
+
+And they curved gradually apart. This was in 1893.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Nearly twenty years later--that is to say, not long since--I had a
+glimpse of Mr. Alpha at a Saturday lunch. Do not imagine that Mr.
+Alpha's Saturday lunch took place in a miserable garret, amid every
+circumstance of failure and shame. Success in life has very little to
+do with prudence. It has a great deal to do with courage, initiative,
+and individual force, and also it is not unconnected with sheer luck.
+
+Mr. Alpha had succeeded in life, and the lunch at which I assisted
+took place in a remarkably spacious and comfortable house surrounded
+by gardens, greenhouses, garages, stables, and all the minions
+necessary to the upkeep thereof. Mr. Alpha was a jolly, a
+kind-hearted, an immensely clever, and a prolific man. I call him
+prolific because he had five children. There he was, with his wife and
+the five children; and they were all enjoying the lunch and themselves
+to an extraordinary degree. It was a delight to be with them.
+
+It is necessarily a delight to be with people who are intelligent,
+sympathetic and lively, and who have ample money to satisfy their
+desires. Somehow you can hear the gold chinking, and the sound is good
+to the human ear. Even the youngest girl had money in her nice new
+purse, to do with it as she liked. For Mr. Alpha never stinted. He was
+generous by instinct, and he wanted everybody to be happy. In fact, he
+had turned out quite an unusual father. At the same time he fell short
+of being an absolute angel of acquiescence and compliance. For
+instance, his youngest child, a girl, broached the subject of music at
+that very lunch. She was fourteen, and had shown some of her father's
+cleverness at a school musical examination. She was rather uplifted
+about her music.
+
+"Can't I take it up seriously, dad?" she said, with the extreme
+gravity of her years.
+
+"Of course," said he. "The better you play, the more we shall all be
+pleased. Don't you think we deserve some reward for all we've suffered
+under your piano-practising?"
+
+She blushed.
+
+"But I mean seriously," she insisted.
+
+"Well, my pet," said he, "you don't reckon you could be a star
+pianist, do you? Fifteen hundred dollars a concert, and so on?" And,
+as she was sitting next to him, he affectionately pinched her
+delicious ear.
+
+"No," she admitted. "But I could teach. I should like to teach."
+
+"Teach!" He repeated the word in a changed tone. "Teach! What in
+Heaven's name should you want to teach for? I don't quite see a
+daughter of mine teaching."
+
+No more was said on the subject.
+
+The young woman and I are on rather confidential terms.
+
+"It is a shame, isn't it?" she said to me afterwards, with feeling.
+
+"Nothing to be done?" I inquired.
+
+"Nothing," said she. "I knew there wasn't before I started. The dad
+would never hear of me earning my own living."
+
+The two elder girls--twins--had no leaning towards music, and no
+leaning towards anything save family affection and social engagements.
+They had a grand time, and the grander the time they had the keener
+was the delight of Mr. Alpha in their paradisaical existence. Truly he
+was a pearl among fathers. The children themselves admitted it, and
+children can judge. The second son wished to be a painter. Many a
+father would have said, "I shall stand none of this nonsense about
+painting. The business is there, and into the business you'll go." But
+not Mr. Alpha. What Mr. Alpha said to his second son amounted to this:
+"I shall be charmed for a son of mine to be a painter. Go ahead. Don't
+worry. Don't hurry. I will give you an ample allowance to keep you
+afloat through the years of struggle. You shall not be like other
+beginners. You shall have nothing to think of but your profession. You
+shall be in a position to wait. Instead of you running after the
+dealers, you shall comfortably bide your time until the dealers run
+after you."
+
+This young man of eighteen was precocious and extravagant.
+
+"I say, mater," he said, over the cheese, "can you lend me fifty
+dollars?"
+
+Mr. Alpha broke in sharply:
+
+"What are you worrying your mother about money for? You know I won't
+have it. And I won't have you getting into debt either."
+
+"Well, dad, will you buy a picture from me?"
+
+"Do me a good sketch of your mother, and I'll give you fifty dollars
+for it."
+
+"Cash in advance?"
+
+"Yes--on your promise. But understand, no debts."
+
+The eldest son, fitly enough, was in the business. Not, however, too
+much in the business. He put in time at the office regularly. He was
+going to be a partner, and the business would ultimately descend to
+him. But the business wrinkled not his brow. Mr. Alpha was quite ready
+to assume every responsibility and care. He had brains and energy
+enough, and something considerable over. Enough over, indeed, to run
+the house and grounds. Mrs. Alpha could always sleep soundly at night
+secure in the thought that her husband would smooth away every
+difficulty for her. He could do all things so much more efficiently
+than she could, were it tackling a cook or a tradesman, or deciding
+about the pattern of flowers in a garden-bed.
+
+At the finish of the luncheon the painter, who had been meditative,
+suddenly raised his glass.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, with solemnity, "I beg to move
+that father be and hereby is a brick."
+
+"Carried nem. con.," said the eldest son.
+
+"Loud cheers!" said the more pert of the twins.
+
+And Mr. Alpha was enchanted with his home and his home-life.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+That luncheon was the latest and the most profound of a long series of
+impressions which had been influencing my mental attitude towards the
+excellent, the successful, the entirely agreeable Mr. Alpha. I walked
+home, a distance of some three miles, and then I walked another three
+miles or so on the worn carpet of my study, and at last the cup of my
+feelings began to run over, and I sat down and wrote a letter to my
+friend Alpha. The letter was thus couched:
+
+"My Dear Alpha,
+
+"I have long wanted to tell you something, and now I have decided to
+give vent to my desire. There are two ways of telling you. I might
+take the circuitous route by roundabout and gentle phrases, through
+hints and delicately undulating suggestions, and beneath the soft
+shadow of flattering cajoleries. Or I might dash straight ahead. The
+latter is the best, perhaps.
+
+"You are a scoundrel, my dear Alpha. I say it in the friendliest and
+most brutal manner. And you are not merely a scoundrel--you are the
+most dangerous sort of scoundrel--the smiling, benevolent scoundrel.
+
+"You know quite well that your house, with all that therein is, stands
+on the edge of a precipice, and that at any moment a landslip might
+topple it over into everlasting ruin. And yet you behave as though
+your house was planted in the midst of a vast and secure plain,
+sheltered from every imaginable havoc. I speak metaphorically, of
+course. It is not a material precipice that your house stands on the
+edge of; it is a metaphorical precipice. But the perils symbolized by
+that precipice are real enough.
+
+"It is, for example, a real chauffeur whose real wrist may by a single
+false movement transform you from the incomparable Alpha into an item
+in the books of the registrar of deaths. It is a real microbe who may
+at this very instant be industriously planning your swift destruction.
+And it is another real microbe who may have already made up his or her
+mind that you shall finish your days helpless and incapable on the
+flat of your back.
+
+"Suppose you to be dead--what would happen? You would leave debts,
+for, although you are solvent, you are only solvent because you have
+the knack of always putting your hand on money, and death would
+automatically make you insolvent. You are one of those brave, jolly
+fellows who live up to their income. It is true that, in deference to
+fashion, you are now insured, but for a trifling and inadequate sum
+which would not yield the hundredth part of your present income. It is
+true that there is your business. But your business would be naught
+without you. You are your business. Remove yourself from it, and the
+residue is negligible. Your son, left alone with it, would wreck it in
+a year through simple ignorance and clumsiness; for you have kept him
+in his inexperience like a maiden in her maidenhood. You say that you
+desired to spare him. Nothing of the kind. You were merely jealous, of
+your authority, and your indispensability. You desired fervently that
+all and everybody should depend on yourself....
+
+"Conceive that three years have passed and that you are in fact dead.
+You are buried; you are lying away over there in the cold dark. The
+funeral is done. The friends are gone. But your family is just as
+alive as ever. Disaster has not killed it, nor even diminished its
+vitality. It wants just as much to eat and drink as it did before
+sorrow passed over it. Look through the sod. Do you see that child
+there playing with a razor? It is your eldest son at grips with your
+business. Do you see that other youngster striving against a wolf with
+a lead pencil for weapon? It is your second son. Well, they are males,
+these two, and must manfully expect what they get. But do you see
+these four creatures with their hands cut off, thrust out into the
+infested desert? They are your wife and your daughters. You cut their
+hands off. You did it so kindly and persuasively. And that chiefly is
+why you are a scoundrel. ...
+
+"You educated all these women in a false and abominable doctrine. You
+made them believe, and you forced them to act up to the belief, that
+money was a magic thing, and that they had a magic power over it. All
+they had to do was to press a certain button, or to employ a certain
+pretty tone, and money would flow forth like water from the rock of
+Moses. And so far as they were concerned money actually did behave in
+this convenient fashion.
+
+"But all the time you were deceiving them by a conjuring-trick, just
+as priests of strange cults deceive their votaries.... And further,
+you taught them that money had but one use--to be spent. You
+may--though by a fluke--have left a quantity of money to your widow,
+but her sole skill is to spend it. She has heard that there is such a
+thing as investing money. She tries to invest it. But, bless you, you
+never said a word to her about that, and the money vanishes now as
+magically as it once magically appeared in her lap.
+
+"Yes, you compelled all these four women to live so that money and
+luxury and servants and idleness were absolutely essential to them if
+their existence was to be tolerable. And what is worse, you compelled
+them to live so that, deprived of magic money, they were incapable of
+existing at all, tolerably or intolerably. Either they must expire in
+misery--after their splendid career with you!--or they must earn
+existence by smiles and acquiescences and caresses. (For you cut their
+hands off.) They must beg for their food and raiment. There are
+different ways of begging.
+
+"But you protest that you did it out of kindness, and because you
+wanted them to have a real good time. My good Alpha, it is absurd for
+a man to argue that he cut off a woman's hands out of kindness. Human
+beings are so incredulous, so apt to think evil, that such arguments
+somehow fail to carry conviction. I am fairly credulous myself, but
+even I decline to accept the plea. And I say that if your conduct was
+meant kindly, it is a pity that you weren't born cruel. Cruelty would
+have been better. Was it out of kindness that you refused to allow
+your youngest to acquire the skill to earn her own living? Was it out
+of kindness that you thwarted her instinct and filled her soul with
+regret that may be eternal? It was not. I have already indicated, in
+speaking of your son, one of the real reasons. Another was that you
+took pride in having these purely ornamental and loving creatures
+about you, and you would not suffer them to have an interest stronger
+than their interest in you, or a function other than the function of
+completing your career and illustrating your success in the world. If
+the girl was to play the piano, she was to play it in order to perfect
+your home and minister to your pleasure and your vanity, and for
+naught else. You got what you wanted, and you infamously shut your
+eyes to the risks.
+
+"I hear you expostulate that you didn't shut your eyes to the risks,
+and that there will always be risks, and that it is impossible to
+provide fully against all of them.
+
+"Which is true, or half true, and the truth or half-truth of the
+statement only renders your case the blacker, O Alpha! Risks are an
+inevitable part of life. They are part of the fine savour and burden
+of life, and without the sense of them life is flat and tasteless. And
+yet you feigned to your women that risk was eliminated from the magic
+world in which you had put them. You deliberately deprived them of the
+most valuable factor in existence--genuine responsibility. You made
+them ridiculous in the esteem of all persons with a just perception of
+values. You slowly bled them of their self-respect. Had you been less
+egotistic, they might have been happier, even during your lifetime.
+Your wife would have been happier had she been permitted or compelled
+to feel the weight of the estate and to share understandingly the
+anxieties of your wonderful business. Your girls would have been
+happier had they been cast forcibly out of the magic world into the
+real world for a few hours every day during a few years in order to
+learn its geography, and its customs, and the terms on which food and
+raiment and respect can be obtained in it, and the ability to obtain
+them. And so would you have been happier, fool! You sent your girls on
+the grand tour, but you didn't send them into the real world.
+
+"Alpha, the man who cuts off another man's hands is a ruffian. The man
+who cuts off a woman's hands is a scoundrel. There is no excuse for
+him--none whatever. And the kinder he is the worse he is. I repeat
+that you are the worst sort of scoundrel. Your family mourns you, and
+every member of it says what an angel of a father you were. But you
+were a scoundrel all the same. And at heart every member of the family
+knows it and admits it. Which is rather distressing. And there are
+thousands just like you, Alpha. Yes, even in England there are tens of
+thousands just like you....
+
+"But you aren't dead yet. I was only asking you to conceive that you
+were.
+
+"Believe me, my dear Alpha,
+
+"Yours affectionately."
+
+A long and violent epistle perhaps. You inquire in what spirit Alpha
+received it. The truth is, he never did receive it.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+You naturally assume that before the letter could reach him Alpha had
+been mortally struck down by apoplexy, double pneumonia, bullet,
+automobile, or some such enemy of joy, and that all the dreadful
+things which I had foreseen might happen did in fact happen, thus
+proving once more what a very wise friend I was, and filling me with
+justifiable pride in my grief. But it was not so. Alpha was not struck
+down, nor did his agreeable house topple over the metaphorical
+precipice. According to poetical justice he ought to have been struck
+down, just to serve him right, and as a warning to others--only he was
+not. Not merely the wicked, but the improvident and the negligent,
+often flourish like the green bay tree, and they keep on flourishing,
+and setting wisdom and righteousness at defiance in the most
+successful manner. Which, indeed, makes the life of a philosopher and
+sagacious adviser extremely difficult and ungrateful.
+
+Alpha never received my letter because I never sent it. There are
+letters which one writes, not to send, but to ease one's mind. This
+letter was one of them. It would not have been proper to dispatch such
+a letter. Moreover, in the duties of friendship, as distinguished from
+the pleasures of friendship, speech is better, bolder, surer than
+writing. When two friends within hailing distance of each other get to
+exchanging epistles in order to settle a serious difference of
+opinion, the peril to their friendship is indeed grave; and the peril
+is intensified when one of them has adopted a superior moral
+attitude--as I had. The letters grow longer and longer, ruder and
+ruder, and the probability of the friendship surviving grows ever
+rapidly less and less. It is--usually, though not always--a mean act
+to write what you have not the pluck to say.
+
+So I just kept the letter as a specimen of what I could do--if I
+chose--in the high role of candid friend.
+
+I said to myself that I would take the first favourable occasion to
+hint to Mr. Alpha how profoundly, etc., etc.
+
+The occasion arrived sooner than I had feared. Alpha had an illness.
+It was not alarming, and yet it was sufficiently formidable. It began
+with colitis, and ended with appendicitis and an operation. Soon after
+Alpha had risen from his bed and was cheerfully but somewhat feebly
+about again I met him at a club. He was sitting in an arm-chair in one
+of the huge bay-windows of the club, and gazing with bright interest
+upon the varied spectacle of the street. The occasion was almost
+ideal. I took the other arm-chair in the semicircle of the window. I
+saw at once by his careless demeanour that his illness had taught him
+nothing, and I determined with all my notorious tact and
+persuasiveness to point a moral for him.
+
+And just as I was clearing my throat to begin he exclaimed, with a
+jerk of the elbow and a benevolently satiric smile:
+
+"See that girl?"
+
+A plainly-dressed young woman carrying a violin-case crossed the
+street in front of our window.
+
+"I see her," said I. "What about her?"
+
+"That's Omega's second daughter."
+
+"Oh, Omega," I murmured. "Haven't seen him for ages. What's he doing
+with himself? Do you ever meet him nowadays?"
+
+Said Mr. Alpha:
+
+"I happened to dine with him--it was chiefly on business--a couple of
+days before I fell ill. Remarkably strange cove, Omega--remarkably
+strange."
+
+"Why? How? And what's the matter with the cove's second daughter,
+anyway?"
+
+"Well," said Alpha, "it's all of a piece--him and his second daughter
+and the rest of the family. Funny case. It ought to interest you.
+Omega's got a mania."
+
+"What mania?"
+
+"Not too easy to describe. Call it the precaution mania."
+
+"The precaution mania? What's that?"
+
+"I'll tell you."
+
+And he told me.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"Odd thing," said Alpha, "that I should have been at Omega's just as I
+was sickening for appendicitis. He's great on appendicitis, is Omega."
+
+"Has he had it?"
+
+"Not he! He's never had anything. But he informed me that before he
+went to Mexico last year he took the precaution of having his appendix
+removed, lest he might have acute appendicitis in some wild part of
+the country where there might be no doctor just handy for an
+operation. He's like that, you know. I believe if he had his way there
+wouldn't be an appendix left in the entire family. He's inoculated
+against everything. They're all inoculated against everything. And he
+keeps an elaborate medicine-chest in his house, together with
+elaborate typewritten instructions which he forced his doctor to give
+him--in case anything awful should happen suddenly. Omega has only to
+read those instructions, and he could stitch a horrible wound, tie up
+a severed artery, or make an injection of morphia or salt water. He
+has a thermometer in every room and one in each bath. Also
+burglar-alarms at all doors and windows, and fire extinguishers on
+every floor. But that's nothing. You should hear about his insurance.
+Of course, he's insured his life and the lives of the whole family of
+them. He's insured against railway accidents and all other accidents,
+and against illness. The fidelity of all his clerks is insured. He's
+insured against burglary, naturally. Against fire, too. And against
+loss of rent through fire. His plate-glass is insured. His bunch of
+keys is insured. He's insured against employers' liability. He's
+insured against war. He's insured against loss of business profits.
+The interest on his mortgage securities is insured. His wretched
+little automobile is insured. I do believe he was once insured against
+the eventuality of twins."
+
+"He must feel safe," I said.
+
+"Not the least bit in the world," replied Alpha. "Life is a perfect
+burden to him. That wouldn't matter so much if he didn't make it a
+perfect burden to all his family as well. They've all got to be
+prepared against the worst happening. If he fell down dead his wife
+would know just what to do. She knows all the details of his financial
+position exactly. She has to; he sees to that. He keeps her up to date
+in them every day. And she has to show him detailed accounts of the
+house as though it was a business undertaking, because he's so afraid
+of her being left helpless and incapable. She just has to understand
+that 'life is real, life is earnest,' and death more so.
+
+"Then the children. They're all insured, of course. Each of the girls
+has to take charge of the house in turn. And they must all earn their
+own living--in case papa fell down dead. Take that second daughter.
+She hates music, but she has a certain mechanical facility with the
+fiddle, and so she must turn it into coin, in order to be on the safe
+side. Her instincts are for fine clothes, idleness, and
+responsibility. She'd take the risks cheerfully enough if he'd let
+her. But he won't. So she's miserable. I think they all are more or
+less."
+
+"But still," I put in, "to feel the burden of life is not a bad thing
+for people's characters."
+
+"Perhaps not," said Alpha. "But to be crushed under a cartload of
+bricks isn't likely to do one much good, is it? Why, Omega's a wealthy
+man, and d'you know, he must live on about a third of his income. The
+argument is, as usual, that he's liable to fall down dead--and
+insurance companies are only human--and anyhow, old age must be amply
+provided for. And then all his securities might fall simultaneously.
+And lastly, as he says, you never know what may happen. Ugh!"
+
+"Has anything happened up to now?"
+
+"Oh, yes. An appalling disaster. His drawing-room hearthrug caught
+fire six years ago and was utterly ruined. He got eleven dollars out
+of the insurance company for that, and was ecstatically delighted
+about it for three weeks. Nothing worse ever will happen to Omega. His
+business is one of the safest in the country. His constitution is that
+of a crocodile or a parrot. And he's as cute as they make 'em."
+
+"And I suppose you don't envy him?"
+
+"I don't," said Alpha.
+
+"Well," I ventured, "let me offer you a piece of advice. Never travel
+in the same train with Mr. Omega."
+
+"Never travel in the same train with him? Why not?"
+
+"Because if there were a railway accident, and you were both killed on
+the spot, the world might draw comparisons between the effect on your
+family and the effect on his, and your family wouldn't like it."
+
+We remained silent for a space, and the silence was dramatic.
+Nervously, I looked out of the window.
+
+At length Alpha said:
+
+"I suppose there is such a thing as the happy medium."
+
+"Good-bye, Alpha." I rose abruptly. "Sorry, but I've got to go at
+once."
+
+And I judiciously departed.
+
+
+
+
+IV - IN HER PLACE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The plain man is not always mature and successful, as I have hitherto
+regarded him. He may be unsuccessful in a worldly sense; but from my
+present point of view I do not much care whether he is unsuccessful in
+that sense. I know that plain men are seldom failures; their very
+plainness saves them from the alarming picturesqueness of the abject
+failure. On the other hand, I care greatly whether the plain man is
+mature or immature, old or young. I should prefer to catch him young.
+But he is difficult to catch young. The fact is that, just as he is
+seldom a failure, so he is seldom young. He becomes plain only with
+years. In youth, even in the thirties, he has fanciful capricious
+qualities which prevent him from being classed with the average
+sagacious plain man. He slowly loses these inconvenient qualities, and
+develops into part of the backbone of the nation. And then it is too
+late to tell him that he is not perfect, simply because he has
+forgotten to cultivate the master quality of all qualities--namely,
+imagination. For imagination must be cultivated early, and it is just
+the quality that these admirable plain men lack.
+
+By imagination I mean the power to conceive oneself in a situation
+which one is not actually in; for instance, in another person's place.
+It is among the sardonic humours of destiny that imagination, while
+positively dangerous in an ill-balanced mind and of the highest value
+in a well-balanced mind, is to be found rather in the former than in
+the latter. And anyhow, the quality is rare in Anglo-Saxon races,
+which are indeed both afraid and ashamed of it.
+
+And yet could the plain, the well-balanced Anglo-Saxon male acquire
+it, what a grand world we should live in! The most important thing in
+the world would be transformed. The most important thing in the world
+is, ultimately, married life, and the chief practical use of the
+quality of imagination is to ameliorate married life. But who in
+England or America (or elsewhere) thinks of it in that connection? The
+plain man considers that imagination is all very well for poets and
+novelists. Blockhead! Yes, despite my high esteem for him, I will
+apply to him the Johnsonian term of abuse. Blockhead! Imagination is
+super-eminently for himself, and was beyond doubt invented by
+Providence in order that the plain man might chiefly exercise it in
+the plain, drudging dailiness of married life. The day cometh, if
+tardily, when he will do so.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+These reflections have surged up in my brain as I contemplate the
+recent case of my acquaintance, Mr. Omicron, and they are preliminary
+to a study of that interesting case. Scarce a week ago Omicron was
+sitting in the Omicron drawing-room alone with Mrs. Omicron. It was an
+average Omicron evening. Omicron is aged thirty-two. He is neither
+successful nor unsuccessful, and no human perspicacity can say whether
+twenty years hence he will be successful or unsuccessful. But anybody
+can see that he is already on the way to be a plain, well-balanced
+man. Somewhat earlier than usual he is losing the fanciful capricious
+qualities and settling down into the stiff backbone of the nation.
+
+Conversation was not abundant.
+
+Said Mrs. Omicron suddenly, with an ingratiating accent:
+
+"What about that ring that I was to have?"
+
+There was a pause, in which every muscle of the man's body, and
+especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul,
+perceptibly stiffened. And then Omicron answered, curtly, rebuttingly,
+reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:
+
+"I don't know."
+
+And took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him
+from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch
+armour-plating.
+
+The subject was dropped.
+
+It had endured about ten seconds. But those ten seconds marked an
+epoch in Omicron's career as a husband--and he knew it not. He knew it
+not, but the whole of his conjugal future had hung evenly in the
+balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but
+definitely--to the wrong side.
+
+Of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface.
+At dinner the otherwise excellent leg of mutton had proved on cutting
+to be most noticeably underdone. Now, it is a monstrous shame that
+first-class mutton should be wasted through inefficient cookery; with
+third-class mutton the crime might have been deemed less awful.
+Moreover, four days previously another excellent dish had been
+rendered unfit for masculine consumption by precisely the same
+inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it.
+Nor was that all. The coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. The
+feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the
+kitchen at the last moment had discovered itself to be short of
+coffee. An entirely commonplace episode! Yes, but it is out of
+commonplace episodes that martyrs are made, and Omicron had been made
+a martyr. He, if none else, was fully aware that evening that he was a
+martyr. And the woman had selected just that evening to raise the
+question of rings, gauds, futile ornamentations! He had said little.
+But he had stood for the universal husband, and in Mrs. Omicron he saw
+the universal wife.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+His reflections ran somewhat thus:
+
+"Surely a simple matter to keep enough coffee in the house! A
+schoolgirl could do it! And yet they let themselves run short of
+coffee! I ask for nothing out of the way. I make no inordinate demands
+on the household. But I do like good coffee. And I can't have it!
+Strange! As for that mutton--one would think there was no clock in the
+kitchen. One would think that nobody had ever cooked a leg of mutton
+before. How many legs of mutton have they cooked between them in their
+lives? Scores; hundreds; I dare say thousands. And yet it hasn't yet
+dawned on them that a leg of mutton of a certain weight requires a
+certain time for cooking, and that if it is put down late one of two
+things must occur--either it will be undercooked or the dinner will be
+late! Simple enough! Logical enough! Four women in the house (three
+servants and the wicked, negligent Mrs. Omicron), and yet they must
+needs waste a leg of mutton through nothing but gross carelessness! It
+isn't as if it hadn't happened before! It isn't as if I hadn't pointed
+it out! But women are amateurs. All women are alike. All housekeeping
+is amateurish. She (Mrs. Omicron, the criminal) has nothing in this
+world to do but run the house--and see how she runs it! No order! No
+method! Has she ever studied housekeeping scientifically? Not she!
+Does she care? Not she! If she had any real sense of responsibility,
+if she had the slightest glimmering of her own short-comings, she
+wouldn't have started on the ring question. But there you are! She
+only thinks of spending, and titivating herself. I wish she had to do
+a little earning. She'd find out a thing or two then. She'd find out
+that life isn't all moonstones and motor-cars. Ring, indeed! It's the
+lack of tact that annoys me. I am an ill-used man. All husbands are
+ill-used men. The whole system wants altering. However, I must keep my
+end up. And I will keep my end up. Ring, indeed! No tact!"
+
+He fostered a secret fury. And he enjoyed fostering it. There was
+exaggeration in these thoughts, which, he would admit next day, were
+possibly too sweeping in their scope. But he would maintain the
+essential truth of them. He was not really and effectively furious
+against Mrs. Omicron; he did not, as a fact, class her with forgers
+and drunken chauffeurs; indeed, the fellow loved her in his fashion.
+But he did pass a mature judgment against her. He did wrap up his
+grudge in cotton-wool and put it in a drawer and examine it with
+perverse pleasure now and then. He did increase that secretion of
+poison which weakens the social health of nine hundred and ninety-nine
+in a thousand married lives--however delightful they may be. He did
+render more permanent a noxious habit of mind. He did appreciably and
+doubly and finally impair the conjugal happiness--for it must not be
+forgotten that in creating a grievance for himself he also gave his
+wife a grievance. He did, in fine, contribute to the general mass of
+misunderstanding between sex and sex.
+
+If he is reading this, as he assuredly is, Mr. Omicron will up and
+exclaim:
+
+"My wife a grievance! Absurd! The facts are incontrovertible. What
+grievance can she have?"
+
+The grievance that Mr. Omicron, becoming every day more and more the
+plain man, is not exercising imagination in the very field where it is
+most needed.
+
+What is a home, Mr. Omicron? You reply that a home is a home. You have
+always had a home. You were born in one. With luck you will die in
+one. And you have never regarded a home as anything but a home. Your
+leading idea has ever been that a home is emphatically not an office
+nor a manufactory. But suppose you were to unscale your eyes--that is
+to say, use your imagination--try to see that a home, in addition to
+being a home, is an office and manufactory for the supply of light,
+warmth, cleanliness, ease, and food to a given number of people?
+Suppose you were to allow it to occur to you that a home emphatically
+is an organization similar to an office and manufactory--and an
+extremely complicated and delicate one, with many diverse departments,
+functioning under extremely difficult conditions? For thus it in truth
+is. Could you once accomplish this feat of imaginative faculty, you
+would never again say, with that disdainful accent of yours: "Mrs.
+Omicron has nothing in the world to do but run the house." For really
+it would be just as clever for her to say: "Mr. Omicron has nothing in
+the world to do but run the office."
+
+I admit heartily that Mrs. Omicron is not perfect. She ought to be, of
+course; but she, alas! falls short of the ideal. Yet in some details
+she can and does show the way to that archangel, her husband. When her
+office and manufactory goes wrong, you, Mr. Omicron, are righteously
+indignant and superior. You majestically wonder that with four women
+in the house, etc., etc. But when you come home and complain that
+things are askew in your masculine establishment, and that a period of
+economy must set in, does she say to you with scorn: "Don't dare to
+mention coffee to-night. I really wonder that with fourteen (or a
+hundred and forty) grown men in your establishment you cannot produce
+an ample and regular income?" No; she makes the best of it. She is
+sympathetic. And you, Mr. Omicron, would be excessively startled and
+wounded if she were not sympathetic. Put your imagination to work and
+you will see how interesting are these comparisons.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+She is an amateur at her business, you say. Well, perhaps she is. But
+who brought her up to be an amateur? Are you not content to carry on
+the ancient tradition? As you meditate, and you often do meditate,
+upon that infant daughter of yours now sleeping in her cot, do you
+dream of giving her a scientific education in housekeeping, or do you
+dream of endowing her with the charms that music and foreign languages
+and physical grace can offer? Do you in your mind's eye see her
+cannily choosing beef at the butcher's, or shining for your pleasure
+in the drawing-room?
+
+And then Mrs. Omicron is, perhaps, not so much of an amateur as you
+assume. People learn by practice. Is there any reason in human nature
+why a complex machine such as a house may be worked with fewer
+breakdowns than an office or manufactory? Harness your imagination
+once more and transfer to your house the multitudinous minor
+catastrophes that happen in your office. Be sincere, and admit that
+the efficiency of the average office is naught but a pretty legend. A
+mistake or negligence or forgetfulness in an office is remedied and
+forgotten. Mrs. Omicron--my dear Mr. Omicron--never hears of it. Not
+so with Mrs. Omicron's office, as your aroused imagination will tell
+you. Mrs. Omicron's parlourmaid's duster fails to make contact with
+one small portion of the hall-table. Mr. Omicron walks in, and his
+godlike glance drops instantly on the dusty place, and Mr. Omicron
+ejaculates sardonically: "H'm! Four women in the house, and they can't
+even keep the hall-table respectable!"
+
+Mr. Omicron forgets a letter at the bottom of his unanswered-letter
+basket, and a week later an excited cable arrives from overseas, and
+that cable demands another cable. No real harm has been done. Ten
+dollars spent on cables have cured the ill. Mrs. Omicron, preoccupied
+with a rash on the back of the neck of Miss Omicron before-mentioned,
+actually comes back from town without having ordered the mutton. In
+the afternoon she realizes her horrid sin and rushes to the telephone.
+The butcher reassures her. He swears the desired leg shall arrive. But
+do you see that boy dallying at the street corner with his mate? He
+carries the leg of mutton, and he carries also, though he knows it not
+nor cares, the reputation and happiness of Mrs. Omicron. He is late.
+As you yourself remarked, Mr. Omicron, if a leg of mutton is put down
+late to roast, one of two things must occur--either it will be
+under-cooked or the dinner will be late.
+
+Now, if housekeeping was as simple as office-keeping, Mrs. Omicron
+would smile in tranquillity at the _contretemps_, and say to herself:
+"Never mind, I shall pay the late-posting fee--that will give me an
+extra forty minutes." _You_ say that, Mr. Omicron, about your letters,
+when you happen to have taken three hours for lunch and your dictation
+of correspondence is thereby postponed. Only there is no late-posting
+fee in Mrs. Omicron's world. If Mrs. Omicron flung four cents at you
+when you came home, and informed you that dinner would be forty
+minutes late and that she was paying the fee, what, Mr. Omicron, would
+be your state of mind?
+
+And your imagination, now very alert, will carry you even farther than
+this, Mr. Omicron, and disclose to you still more fearful difficulties
+which Mrs. Omicron has to face in the management of her office or
+manufactory. Her staff is uneducated, less educated even than yours.
+And her staff is universally characterized by certain peculiarities of
+mentality. For example, her staff will never, never, never, come and
+say to her: "Please, ma'am, there is only enough coffee left for two
+days." No! Her staff will placidly wait forty-eight hours, and then
+come at 7 p.m. and say: "Please, ma'am, there isn't enough coffee----"
+And worse! You, Mr. Omicron, can say roundly to a clerk: "Look here,
+if this occurs again I shall fling you into the street." You are
+aware, and he is aware, that a hundred clerks are waiting to take his
+place. On the other hand, a hundred mistresses are waiting to take the
+place of Mrs. Omicron with regard to her cook. Mrs. Omicron has to do
+as best she can. She has to speak softly and to temper discipline,
+because the supply of domestic servants is unequal to the demand. And
+there is still worse. The worst of all, the supreme disadvantage under
+which Mrs. Omicron suffers, is that most of her errors, lapses,
+crimes, directly affect a man in the stomach, and the man is a hungry
+man.
+
+Mr. Omicron, your imagination, now feverishly active, will thus
+demonstrate to you that your wife's earthly lot is not the velvet
+couch that you had unimaginatively assumed it to be, and that, indeed,
+you would not change places with her for a hundred thousand a year.
+Your attitude towards her human limitations will be modified, and the
+general mass of misunderstanding between sex and sex will tend to
+diminish.
+
+(And if even yet your attitude is not modified, let your imagination
+dwell for a few instants on the extraordinary number of bad and
+expensive hotels with which you are acquainted--managed, not by
+amateurish women, but by professional men. And on the obstinate
+mismanagement of the commissariat of your own club--of which you are
+continually complaining to members of the house-committee.)
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+I pass to another aspect of Mr. Omicron's private reflections
+consequent upon Mrs. Omicron's dreadful failure of tact in asking him
+about the ring after the mutton had proved to be underdone and the
+coffee to be inadequate. "She only thinks of spending," reflected Mr.
+Omicron, resentfully. A more or less true reflection, no doubt, but
+there would have been a different colour to it if Mr. Omicron had
+exercised the greatest of his faculties. Suppose you were to unscale
+your eyes, Mr. Omicron--that is to say, use your imagination--and try
+to see that so far as finance is concerned your wife's chief and
+proper occupation in life is to spend. Conceive what you would say if
+she announced one morning: "Henry, I am sick of spending. I am going
+out into the world to earn." Can you not hear yourself employing a
+classic phrase about "the woman's sphere"? In brief, there would occur
+an altercation and a shindy.
+
+Your imagination, once set in motion, will show you that your conjugal
+existence is divided into two great departments--the getting and the
+spending departments. Wordsworth chanted that in getting and spending
+we lay waste our powers. We could not lay waste our powers in a more
+satisfying manner. The two departments, mutually indispensable,
+balance each other. You organized them. You made yourself the head of
+one and your wife the head of the other. You might, of course, have
+organized them otherwise. It was open to you in the Hottentot style to
+decree that your wife should do the earning while you did the
+spending. But for some mysterious reason this arrangement did not
+appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and
+return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is
+firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the
+fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be
+spent--either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this
+theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need
+of spending in the future may be more imperious than is the need of
+spending at the moment.
+
+The whole of your own personal activity is a mere preliminary to the
+activity of Mrs. Omicron. Without hers, yours would be absurd,
+ridiculous, futile, supremely silly. By spending she completes and
+justifies your labour; she crowns your life by spending. You married
+her so that she might spend. You wanted some one to spend, and it was
+understood that she should fill the situation. She was brought up to
+spend, and you knew that she was brought up to spend. Spending is her
+vocation. And yet you turn round on her and complain, "She only thinks
+of spending."
+
+"Yes," you say, "but there is such a thing as moderation." There is; I
+admit it. The word "extravagance" is no idle word in the English
+language. It describes a quality which exists. Let it be an axiom that
+Mrs. Omicron is human. Just as the tendency to get may grow on you,
+until you become a rapacious and stingy money-grubber, so the tendency
+to spend may grow on her. One has known instances. A check-action must
+be occasionally employed. Agreed! But, Mr. Omicron, you should choose
+a time and a tone for employing it other than you chose on this
+evening that I have described. A man who mixes up jewelled rings with
+undertone mutton and feeble coffee is a clumsy man.
+
+Exercise your imagination to put yourself in the place of Mrs.
+Omicron, and you will perceive that she is constantly in the highly
+delicate difficulty of having to ask for money, or at any rate of
+having to suggest or insinuate that money should be given to her. It
+is her right and even her duty to ask for money, but the foolish,
+illogical creature--like most women, even those with generous and
+polite husbands--regards the process as a little humiliating for
+herself. You, Mr. Omicron, have perhaps never asked for money. But
+your imagination will probably be able to make you feel how it feels
+to ask for money. A woman whose business in life it is to spend money
+which she does not and cannot earn may sometimes have to face a
+refusal when she asks for money. But there is one thing from which she
+ought to be absolutely and eternally safe--and that is a snub.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+And finally, in his reflections as an ill-used man tied for life to a
+woman who knows not tact, Mr. Omicron asserted further that Mrs.
+Omicron only thought of spending and titivating herself. To assert
+that she only thought of spending did not satisfy his spleen; he must
+add "titivating herself." He would admit, of course, that she did as a
+fact sometimes think of other matters, but still he would uphold the
+gravamen of his charge. And yet--excellent Omicron!--you have but to
+look the truth in the face--as a plain common-sense man will--and to
+use your imagination, in order to perceive that there really is no
+gravamen in the charge.
+
+Why did you insist on marrying Mrs. Omicron? She had the reputation of
+being a good housekeeper (as girls go); she was a serious girl,
+kind-hearted, of irreproachable family, having agreeable financial
+expectations, clever, well-educated, good-tempered, pretty. But the
+truth is that you married her for none of these attributes. You
+married her because you were attracted to her; and what attracted you
+was a mysterious, never-to-be-defined quality about her--an effluence,
+an emanation, a lurking radiance, an entirely enigmatic charm. In the
+end "charm" is the one word that even roughly indicates that element
+in her personality which caused you to lose your head about her. A
+similar phenomenon is to be observed in all marriages of inclination.
+A similar phenomenon is at the bottom of most social movements. Why,
+the Men's League for Women's Suffrage itself certainly came into being
+through the strange workings of that same phenomenon! You married Mrs.
+Omicron doubtless because she was "suitable," but her "suitability,"
+for you, consisted in the way she breathed, the way she crossed a
+room, a transient gesture, a vibration in her voice, a blush, a
+glance, the curve of an arm--nothing, nothing--and yet everything!
+
+You may condescend towards this quality of hers, Mr. Omicron--you may
+try to dismiss it as "feminine charm," and have done with it. But you
+cannot have done with it. And the fact will ever remain that you are
+incapable of supplying it yourself, with all your talents and your
+divine common sense. You are an extremely wise and good man, but you
+cannot ravish the senses of a roomful of people by merely walking
+downstairs, by merely throwing a shawl over your shoulders, by a
+curious depression in the corner of one cheek. This gift of grace is
+not yours. Wise as you are, you will be still wiser if you do not
+treat it disdainfully. It is among the supreme things in the world. It
+has made a mighty lot of history, and not improbably will make some
+more--even yours.
+
+You were not the only person aware of the formidable power (for
+formidable it was) which she possessed over you. She, too, was aware
+of it, and is still. She knows that when she exists in a particular
+way, she will produce in your existence a sensation which, though
+fleeting, you prefer to all other sensations--a sensation unique. And
+this quality by which she disturbs and enchants you is her main
+resource in the adventure of life. Shall she not cherish this quality,
+adorn it, intensify it? On the contrary, you well know that you would
+be very upset and amazed if Mrs. Omicron were to show signs of
+neglecting this quality of hers which yearns for rings. And, if you
+have ever entered a necktie-shop and been dazzled by the spectacle of
+a fine necktie into "hanging expense"--if you have been through this
+wondrous experience, your imagination, duly prodded, will enable you
+to put yourself into Mrs. Omicron's place when she mentions the
+subject of rings. "Titivating herself?" Good heavens, she is helping
+the very earth to revolve! And you smote the defenceless creature with
+a lethal word--because the butcher's boy dallied at a street-corner!
+
+You insinuate that one frail hand may carry too many rings. You
+reproduce your favourite word "moderation." Mr. Omicron, I take you. I
+agree as to the danger. But if Mrs. Omicron is human, let us also bear
+in mind the profound truth that not one of us is more human than
+another.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Plain Man and His Wife, by Arnold Bennett
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