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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Leaves in the Wind
+
+Author: A. G. Gardiner
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2011 [EBook #37858]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEAVES IN THE WIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "There under some spreading oak or beech."]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WAYFARERS LIBRARY
+
+
+
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+
+
+Alpha of the Plough
+
+(A. G. Gardiner)
+
+
+
+LONDON & TORONTO: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
+
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY CHILDREN
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+This collection of essays, now republished in the "Wayfarers' Library,"
+were written during the war, and first appeared in book form during the
+war.  Like the preceding volume, _Pebbles on the Shore_, they were the
+literary diversions of a time of great public anxiety and heavy
+personal tasks.  The writing of them was a happy distraction from
+unhappy things, and now that the great wind has passed it is a pleasure
+to find the leaves it blew down gathered between the companionable
+covers of the "Wayfarer."  I leave them as they fell.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  A Fellow Traveller
+  On a Famous Sermon
+  On Pockets and Things
+  On a Country Platform
+  On a Distant View of a Pig
+  In Defence of Ignorance
+  On a Shiny Night
+  On Giving up Tobacco
+  The Great God Gun
+  On a Legend of the War
+  On Talk and Talkers
+  On a Vision of Eden
+  On a Comic Genius
+  On a Vanished Garden
+  All About a Dog
+  On the American Soldier
+  'Appy 'Einrich
+  On Fear
+  On Being Called Thompson
+  On Thinking for One's Self
+  On Sawing Wood
+  Variations on an Old Theme
+  On Clothes
+  The Duel that Failed
+  On Early Rising
+  On Being Known
+  On a Map of the Oberland
+  On a Talk in a Bus
+  On Virtues that don't Count
+  On Hate and the Soldier
+  On Taking the Call
+  A Dithyramb on a Dog
+  On Happy Faces in the Strand
+  On Word-Magic
+  Odin Grown Old
+  On a Smile in a Shaving Glass
+  On the Rule of the Road
+  On the Indifference of Nature
+  If Jeremy Came Back
+  On Sleep and Thought
+  On Mowing
+
+
+
+
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+
+
+
+
+A FELLOW TRAVELLER
+
+I do not know which of us got into the carriage first.  Indeed I did
+not know he was in the carriage at all for some time.  It was the last
+train from London to a Midland town--a stopping train, an infinitely
+leisurely train, one of those trains which give you an understanding of
+eternity.  It was tolerably full when it started, but as we stopped at
+the suburban stations the travellers alighted in ones and twos, and by
+the time we had left the outer ring of London behind I was alone--or,
+rather, I thought I was alone.
+
+There is a pleasant sense of freedom about being alone in a carriage
+that is jolting noisily through the night.  It is liberty and
+unrestraint in a very agreeable form.  You can do anything you like.
+You can talk to yourself as loud as you please and no one will hear
+you.  You can have that argument out with Jones and roll him
+triumphantly in the dust without fear of a counter-stroke.  You can
+stand on your head and no one will see you.  You can sing, or dance a
+two-step, or practise a golf stroke, or play marbles on the floor
+without let or hindrance.  You can open the window or shut it without
+provoking a protest.  You can open both windows or shut both.  Indeed,
+you can go on opening them and shutting them as a sort of festival of
+freedom.  You can have any corner you choose and try all of them in
+turn.  You can lie at full length on the cushions and enjoy the luxury
+of breaking the regulations and possibly the heart of D.O.R.A. herself.
+Only D.O.R.A. will not know that her heart is broken.  You have escaped
+even D.O.R.A.
+
+On this night I did not do any of these things.  They did not happen to
+occur to me.  What I did was much more ordinary.  When the last of my
+fellow-passengers had gone I put down my paper, stretched my arms and
+my legs, stood up and looked out of the window on the calm summer night
+through which I was journeying, noting the pale reminiscence of day
+that still lingered in the northern sky; crossed the carriage and
+looked out of the other window; lit a cigarette, sat down and began to
+read again.  It was then that I became aware of my fellow traveller.
+He came and sat on my nose....  He was one of those wingy, nippy,
+intrepid insects that we call, vaguely, mosquitoes.  I flicked him off
+my nose, and he made a tour of the compartment, investigated its three
+dimensions, visited each window, fluttered round the light, decided
+that there was nothing so interesting as that large animal in the
+corner, came and had a look at my neck.
+
+I flicked him off again.  He skipped away, took another jaunt round the
+compartment, returned, and seated himself impudently on the back of my
+hand.  It is enough, I said; magnanimity has its limits.  Twice you
+have been warned that I am someone in particular, that my august person
+resents the tickling impertinences of strangers.  I assume the black
+cap.  I condemn you to death.  Justice demands it, and the court awards
+it.  The counts against you are many.  You are a vagrant; you are a
+public nuisance; you are travelling without a ticket; you have no meat
+coupon.  For these and many other misdemeanours you are about to die.
+I struck a swift, lethal blow with my right hand.  He dodged the attack
+with an insolent ease that humiliated me.  My personal vanity was
+aroused.  I lunged at him with my hand, with my paper; I jumped on the
+seat and pursued him round the lamp; I adopted tactics of feline
+cunning, waiting till he had alighted, approaching with a horrible
+stealthiness, striking with a sudden and terrible swiftness.
+
+It was all in vain.  He played with me, openly and ostentatiously, like
+a skilful matador finessing round an infuriated bull.  It was obvious
+that he was enjoying himself, that it was for this that he had
+disturbed my repose.  He wanted a little sport, and what sport like
+being chased by this huge, lumbering windmill of a creature, who tasted
+so good and seemed so helpless and so stupid?  I began to enter into
+the spirit of the fellow.  He was no longer a mere insect.  He was
+developing into a personality, an intelligence that challenged the
+possession of this compartment with me on equal terms.  I felt my heart
+warming towards him and the sense of superiority fading.  How could I
+feel superior to a creature who was so manifestly my master in the only
+competition in which we had ever engaged?  Why not be magnanimous
+again?  Magnanimity and mercy were the noblest attributes of man.  In
+the exercise of these high qualities I could recover my prestige.  At
+present I was a ridiculous figure, a thing for laughter and derision.
+By being merciful I could reassert the moral dignity of man and go back
+to my corner with honour.  I withdraw the sentence of death, I said,
+returning to my seat.  I cannot kill you, but I can reprieve you.  I do
+it.
+
+I took up my paper and he came and sat on it.  Foolish fellow, I said,
+you have delivered yourself into my hands.  I have but to give this
+respectable weekly organ of opinion a smack on both covers and you are
+a corpse, neatly sandwiched between an article on "Peace Traps" and
+another on "The Modesty of Mr. Hughes."  But I shall not do it.  I have
+reprieved you, and I will satisfy you that when this large animal says
+a thing he means it.  Moreover, I no longer desire to kill you.
+Through knowing you better I have come to feel--shall I say?--a sort of
+affection for you.  I fancy that St. Francis would have called you
+"little brother."  I cannot go so far as that in Christian charity and
+civility.  But I recognise a more distant relationship.  Fortune has
+made us fellow travellers on this summer night.  I have interested you
+and you have entertained me.  The obligation is mutual and it is
+founded on the fundamental fact that we are fellow mortals.  The
+miracle of life is ours in common and its mystery too.  I suppose you
+don't know anything about your journey.  I'm not sure that I know much
+about mine.  We are really, when you come to think of it, a good deal
+alike--just apparitions that are and then are not, coming out of the
+night into the lighted carriage, fluttering about the lamp for a while
+and going out into the night again.  Perhaps...
+
+"Going on to-night, sir?" said a voice at the window.  It was a
+friendly porter giving me a hint that this was my station.  I thanked
+him and said I must have been dozing.  And seizing my hat and stick I
+went out into the cool summer night.  As I closed the door of the
+compartment I saw my fellow traveller fluttering round the lamp....
+
+
+
+
+ON A FAMOUS SERMON
+
+I see that Queen Alexandra has made a further distribution among
+charities of the profits from the sale of the late Canon Fleming's
+sermon, "On Recognition in Eternity."  The sermon was preached on the
+occasion of the death of the Duke of Clarence, and judging from its
+popularity I have no doubt it is a good sermon.  But I am tempted to
+write on the subject by a mischievous thought suggested by the
+authorship of this famous sermon.  There is no idea which makes so
+universal an appeal to the deepest instincts of humanity as the idea
+that when we awake from the dream of life we shall pass into the
+companionship of those who have shared and lightened our pilgrimage
+here.  The intellect may dismiss the idea as unscientific, but, as
+Newman says, the finite can tell us nothing about the infinite Creator,
+and the Quaker poet's serene assurance--
+
+  Yet love will hope and faith will trust
+  (Since He Who knows our needs is just)
+  That somehow, somewhere, meet we must--
+
+defies all the buffetings of reason.
+
+Even Shelley, for all his aggressive Atheism, could not, as Francis
+Thompson points out, escape the instinct of personal immortality.  In
+his glorious elegy on Keats he implicitly assumes the personal
+immortality which the poem explicitly denies, as when, to greet the
+dead youth,
+
+  The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
+  Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
+  Far in the unapparent.
+
+And it is on the same note that the poem reaches its sublime and
+prophetic close:--
+
+  I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
+  Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
+  The soul of Adonais like a star
+  Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
+
+The ink of that immortal strain was hardly dry upon the page when the
+vision was fulfilled, for only a few months elapsed between the death
+of Keats and the drowning of Shelley, and in the interval the great
+monody had been written.
+
+I refuse, for the sake of the feelings of Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr.
+Foote and the other stern old dogmatists of Rationalism, to deny myself
+the pleasure of imagining the meeting of Shelley and Keats in the
+Elysian Fields.  If Shelley, "borne darkly, fearfully afar" beyond the
+confines of reason, could feel that grand assurance, why should I, who
+dislike the dogmatists of Rationalism as much as the dogmatists of
+Orthodoxy, deny myself that beautiful solace?  I like to think of those
+passionate spirits in eternal comradeship, pausing in their eager talk
+to salute deep-browed Homer as, perchance, he passes in grave discourse
+with the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies."  I like to think of
+Dante meeting Beatrice by some crystal stream, of Lincoln wandering
+side by side with Lee, of poor Mary Lamb reunited to the mother she
+loved and whom she slew in one of her fits of insanity, and of an
+innumerable host of humbler recognitions no less sweet.
+
+But Canon Fleming's name reminds me that all the recognitions will not
+be agreeable.  I cannot imagine that eminent Court preacher showing any
+eagerness to recognise or be recognised by that other eminent preacher,
+Dr. Talmage.  For it was Talmage's sermon on the wickedness of great
+cities that Fleming so unblushingly preached _and published_ as his
+own, simply altering the names of American cities to those of European
+cities.  Some cruel editor printed the two sermons side by side, I
+think in the old _St. James's Gazette_, and the poor Canon's excuse
+only made matters rather worse.  The incident did not prevent him
+securing preferment, and his sermon on "Recognition in Eternity" still
+goes on selling.  But he will not be comfortable when he sees Talmage
+coming his way across the Elysian Fields.  I do not think he will offer
+him the very unconvincing explanation he offered to the British public.
+He will make a frank confession and Talmage will no doubt give him
+absolution.  There will be many such awkward meetings.  With what
+emotions of shame, for example, will Charles I. see Strafford
+approaching.  "Not a hair of your head shall be touched by Parliament"
+was his promise to that instrument of his despotic rule, but when
+Parliament demanded the head itself he endorsed the verdict that sent
+Strafford to the scaffold.  And I can imagine there will be a little
+coldness between Cromwell and Charles when they pass, though in the
+larger understanding of that world Charles, I fancy, will see that he
+was quite impossible, and that he left the grim old Puritan no other
+way.
+
+It is this thought of the larger understanding that will come when we
+have put off the coarse vesture of things that makes this speculation
+reasonable.  That admirable woman, Mrs. Berry, in "Richard Feverel,"
+had the recognitions of eternity in her mind when she declared that
+widows ought not to remarry.  "And to think," she said, "o' two
+(husbands) claimin' o' me then, it makes me hot all over."  Mrs.
+Berry's mistake was in thinking of Elysium in the terms of earth.  It
+is precisely because we shall have escaped from the encumbering flesh
+and all the bewilderments of this clumsy world that we cannot merely
+tolerate the idea, but can find in it a promised explanation of the
+inexplicable.
+
+It is the same mistake that I find in Mr. Belloc, who, I see from
+yesterday's paper, has been denouncing the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism, and describing the miracles of Lourdes as "a special
+providential act designed to convert, change, upset, and disintegrate
+the materialism of the nineteenth century."  I want to see the
+materialism of the nineteenth century converted, changed, upset and
+disintegrated, as much as Mr. Belloc does, but I have as little regard
+for the instrument he trusts in as for the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism.  And when he goes on to denounce a Miss Posthlethwaite, a
+Catholic spiritualist, for having declared that in the next world she
+found people of all religions and did not find that Mohammedans
+suffered more than others, I feel that he is as materialistic as Mrs.
+Berry.  He sees heaven in the terms of the troublesome little
+sectarianisms of the earth, with an ascendancy party in possession, and
+no non-alcoholic Puritans, Jews, or Mohammedans visible to his august
+eye.  They will all be in another place, and very uncomfortable indeed.
+He really has not advanced beyond that infantile partisanship
+satirised, I think, by Swift:--
+
+  We are God's chosen few,
+  All others will be damned.
+  There is no place in heaven for you,
+  We can't have heaven crammed.
+
+
+No, no, Mr. Belloc.  The judgments of eternity will not be so vulgar as
+this, nor the companionship so painfully exclusive.  You will not walk
+the infinite meadows of heaven alone with the sect you adorned on
+earth.  You will find all sorts of people there regardless of the
+quaint little creeds they professed in the elementary school of life.
+I am sure you will find Mrs. Berry there, for that simple woman had the
+root of the true gospel in her.  "I think it's al'ays the plan in a
+dielemma," she said, "to pray God and walk forward."  I think it is
+possible that in the larger atmosphere you will discover that she was a
+wiser pupil in the elementary school than you were.
+
+
+
+
+ON POCKETS AND THINGS
+
+I suppose most men felt, as I felt, the reasonableness of Mr. Justice
+Bray's remarks the other day on the preference of women for bags
+instead of pockets.  A case was before him in which a woman had gone
+into a shop, had put down her satchel containing her money and
+valuables, turned to pick it up a little later, found it had been
+stolen, and thereupon brought an action against the owners of the shop
+for the recovery of her losses.  The jury were unsympathetic, found
+that in the circumstances the woman was responsible, and gave a verdict
+against her.
+
+Of course the jury were men, all of them prejudiced on this subject of
+pockets.  At a guess I should say that there were not fewer than 150
+pockets in that jury-box, _and not one satchel_.  You, madam, may
+retort that this is only another instance of the scandal of this
+man-ridden world.  Why were there no women in that jury-box?  Why are
+all the decisions of the courts, from the High Court to the coroner's
+court, left to the judgment of men?  Madam, I share your indignation.
+I would "comb-out" the jury-box.  I would send half the jurymen, if not
+into the trenches, at least to hoe turnips, and fill their places with
+a row of women.  Women are just as capable as men of forming an opinion
+about facts, they have at least as much time to spare, and their point
+of view is as essential to justice.  What can there be more ridiculous,
+for example, than a jury of men sitting for a whole day to decide the
+question of the cut of a gown without a single woman's expert opinion
+to guide them, or more unjust than to leave an issue between a man and
+a woman entirely in the hands of men?  Yes, certainly madam, I am with
+you on the general question.
+
+But when we come to the subject of pockets, I am bound to confess that
+I am with the jury.  If I had been on that jury I should have voted
+with fervour for making the woman responsible for her own loss.  If it
+were possible for women to put their satchels down on counters, or the
+seats of buses, or any odd place they thought of, and then to make some
+innocent person responsible because they were stolen, there would be no
+security for anybody.  It would be a travesty of justice--a premium
+upon recklessness and even fraud.  Moreover, people who won't wear
+pockets deserve to be punished.  They ask for trouble and ought not to
+complain when they get it.
+
+I have never been able to fathom the obduracy of women in this matter
+of pockets.  It is not the only reflection upon their common-sense
+which is implicit in their dress.  If we were to pass judgment on the
+relative intelligence of the sexes by their codes of costume, sanity
+would pronounce overwhelmingly in favour of men.  Imagine a man who
+buttoned his coat and waistcoat down the back, so that he was dependent
+on someone else to help dress him in the morning and unfasten him at
+night, or who relied on such abominations as hooks-and-eyes scattered
+over unattainable places, in order to keep his garments in position.
+You cannot imagine such a man.  Yet women submit to these incredible
+tyrannies of fashion without a murmur, and talk about them as though it
+was the hand of fate upon them.  I have a good deal of sympathy with
+the view of a friend of mine who says that no woman ought to have a
+vote until she has won the enfranchisement of her own buttons.
+
+Or take high-heeled boots.  Is there any sight more ludicrous than the
+spectacle of a woman stumbling along on a pair of high heels, flung out
+of the perpendicular and painfully struggling to preserve her
+equilibrium, condemned to take finicking little steps lest she should
+topple over, all the grace and freedom of movement lost in an ugly
+acrobatic feat?  And when the feet turn in, and the high heels turn
+over--heavens!  I confess I never see high heels without looking for a
+mindless face, and I rarely look in vain.
+
+But the puzzle about the pockets is that quite sensible women go about
+in a pocketless condition.  I turned to Jane just now--she was sitting
+by the fire knitting--and asked how many pockets she had when she was
+fully dressed.  "None," she said.  "Pockets haven't been worn for years
+and years, but now they are coming in--in an ornamental way."  "In an
+ornamental way?" said I.  "Won't they carry anything?"  "Well, you can
+trust a handkerchief to them."  "Not a purse?"  "Good gracious, no.  It
+would simply ask to be stolen, and if it wasn't stolen in five minutes
+it would fall out in ten."  The case was stranger than I had thought.
+Not to have pockets was bad enough; but to have sham pockets!  Think of
+it!  We have been at war for three and a half years, and women are now
+beginning to wear pockets "in an ornamental way," not for use but as a
+pretty fal-lal, much as they might put on another row of useless
+buttons to button nothing.  And what is the result?  Jane (I have full
+permission to mention her in order to give actuality to this moral
+discourse) spends hours looking for her glasses, for her keys, for the
+letter that came this morning, for her purse, for her bag, for all that
+is hers.  And we, the devoted members of the family, spend hours in
+looking for them too, exploring dark corners, probing the interstices
+of sofas and chairs, rummaging the dishevelled drawers anew,
+discovering the thing that disappeared so mysteriously last week or
+last month and that we no longer want, but rarely the article that is
+the very hub of the immediate wheel of things.
+
+Now, I am different.  I am pockets all over.  I am simply agape with
+pockets.  I am like a pillar-box walking about, waiting for the postman
+to come and collect things.  All told, I carry sixteen pockets--none of
+them ornamental, every one as practical as a time-table--pockets for
+letters, for watch, for keys, for handkerchiefs, for tickets, for
+spectacles (two pairs, long and short distance), for loose money, for
+note-wallet, for diary and pocket-book--why, bless me, you can hardly
+mention a thing I haven't a pocket for.  And I would not do without one
+of them, madam--not one.  Do I ever lose things?  Of course I lose
+things.  I lose them in my pockets.  You can't possibly have as many
+pockets as I have got without losing things in them.  But then you have
+them all the time.
+
+That is the splendid thing about losing your property in your own
+pockets.  It always turns up in the end, and that lady's satchel left
+on the counter will never turn up.  And think of the surprises you get
+when rummaging in your pockets--the letters you haven't answered, the
+bills you haven't paid, the odd money that has somehow got into the
+wrong pocket.  When I have nothing else to do I just search my
+pockets--all my pockets, those in the brown suit, and the grey suit,
+and the serge suit, and my "Sunday best"--there must be fifty pockets
+in all, and every one of them full of something, of ghosts of
+engagements I haven't kept, and duties I haven't performed, and friends
+I have neglected, of pipes that I have mourned as lost, and half
+packets of cigarettes that by some miracle I have not smoked, and all
+the litter of a casual and disorderly life.  I would not part with
+these secrecies for all the satchels in Oxford Street.  I am my own
+book of mysteries.  I bulge with mysteries.  I can surprise myself at
+any moment I like by simply exploring my pockets.  If I avoid exploring
+them I know I am not very well.  I know I am not in a condition to face
+the things that I might find there.  I just leave them there till I am
+stronger--not lost, madam, as they would be in your satchel, but just
+forgotten, comfortably forgotten.  Why should one always be disturbing
+the sleeping dogs in the kennels of one's pockets?  Why not let them
+sleep?  Are there not enough troubles in life that one must go seeking
+them in one's own pockets?  And I have a precedent, look you.  Did not
+Napoleon say that if you did not look at your letters for a fortnight
+you generally found that they had answered themselves?
+
+And may I not in this connection recall the practice of Sir Andrew
+Clarke, the physician of Mr. Gladstone, as recorded in the
+reminiscences of Mr. Henry Holiday?  At dinner one night Sir Andrew was
+observed to be drinking champagne, and was asked why he allowed himself
+an indulgence which he so rigorously denied to his patients.  "Yes," he
+said, "but you do not understand my case.  When I go from here I shall
+find a pile of fifty or sixty letters awaiting answers."  "But will
+champagne help you to answer them?" asked the other.  "Not at all,"
+said Sir Andrew, "not at all; but it puts you in the frame of mind in
+which you don't care a damn whether they are answered or not."  I do
+not offer this story for the imitation of youth, but for the solace of
+the people like myself who have long reached the years of discretion
+without becoming discreet, and who like to feel that their weaknesses
+have been shared by the eminent and the wise.
+
+And, to conclude, the wisdom of the pocket habit is not to be judged by
+its abuse, but by its obvious convenience and safety.  I trust that
+some energetic woman will be moved to inaugurate a crusade for the
+redemption of her sex from its pocketless condition.  A Society for the
+Propagation of Pockets Among Women (S.P.P.A.W.) is a real need of the
+time.  It should be a part of the great work of after-the-war
+reconstruction.  It should organise opinion, distribute leaflets and
+hold meetings, with the Mayor in the chair and experts, rich in pockets
+and the lore of the subject, to light the fire of rebellion throughout
+the land.  Women have won the vote from the tyrant man.  Let them win
+their pockets from the tyrant dressmaker.
+
+
+
+
+ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM
+
+The fields lie cheek-by-jowl with the station, and a group of high
+elms, in which dwells a colony of rooks, throws its ample shade over
+the "down" platform.
+
+From the cornfield that marches side by side with the station there
+comes the cheerful music of the reaper and the sound of the voices of
+the harvesters, old men, some women and more children--for half of the
+field has been reaped and is being gathered and gleaned.  They are so
+near that the engine-driver of the "local" train exchanges gossip with
+them in the intervals of oiling his engine.  They talk of the crops and
+the bad weather there has been and the change that has come with
+September, and the news of boys who are fighting or have fallen....
+
+A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the "up" platform.  They are in
+civilian dress, but behind them walks a sergeant who ejaculates
+"left--left--left" like the flick of a whip.  They are the latest
+trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, most of them mere
+boys.  They have the self-consciousness of obscure country youths who
+have suddenly been thrust into the public eye and are aware that all
+glances are turned critically upon their awkward movements.  They
+shamble along with a grotesque caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and
+laugh loud and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with
+themselves and the world.  It is hollow gaiety and suggests the
+animation of a trout with a hook in its throat.
+
+The booking-clerk, lounging at the door of the booking-office, passes a
+half-contemptuous remark upon them to a companion.
+
+"Wait till they come for you, Jimmy," says the other.  "You won't find
+it so funny then."
+
+Jimmy's face falls at the reminder, for he is nearly ripe for the great
+harvest, and the reaper will soon come his way....
+
+A few people drift in from outside as the time for the departure of the
+London train approaches.  Among them, a young woman, hot and flushed
+and carrying a country basket, is greeted by an acquaintance with
+surprise.
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I'm going to London--just as I am---a telegram from Tom--he's got
+leave from the front--isn't it glorious--and all so
+unexpected--couldn't change, or even drop my basket--the messenger met
+me in the street--hadn't a moment to lose to catch the train." ...
+
+A little group brushes by her with far other emotions.  A stalwart
+soldier, a bronzed, good-looking fellow, with three stripes, who has
+evidently seen much service, is returning from leave.  His wife, neatly
+dressed and with head down, wheels a perambulator beside him.  Inside
+the perambulator is a child of three years or so.  Two other children,
+of perhaps five and six, walk with the soldier, each clasping a hand.
+The little procession passes in silence to the end of the platform,
+full of that misery which seeks to be alone with itself....
+
+Over the wooden bridge that connects the two platforms comes a solitary
+soldier, laden with his belongings.  He has come in from some other
+village by the local train.  He flings himself down on the form and
+stares gloomily at the elms and the cornfield and the sunshine.  A
+comfortable-looking, elderly man, who has a copy of the _London Corn
+Circular_ in his hand, turns to him with that amiable desire to be
+friendly which elderly people have in the presence of soldiers.
+
+"And how long have you been out at the war, sonny?" he asks, much as he
+might ask how long holiday he had had.
+
+"I'm sick of the bloody war," says the soldier, without even turning
+his head.
+
+The comfortable, elderly man collapses into silence and the _Corn
+Circular_....
+
+A young officer who has been driven up in a dog-cart comes on to the
+platform accompanied by a dog with tongue lolling from its mouth and
+with the large, brown, affectionate eyes of the Airedale.
+
+The train thunders in, and the officer opens a carriage door.  The dog
+tries to enter with his master.
+
+"No, no, old chap," says the latter, gently patting him and pulling him
+back.  "Go home.  They don't want you where I'm going."
+
+The dog stands for a moment on the platform, panting and gazing at his
+master as if hoping that he will relent.  Then he turns and trots away,
+throwing occasional glances back on the off-chance of a whistle of
+recall....
+
+The moment has come for the separation of the little family at the end
+of the platform.  The soldier leans from the carriage window and his
+wife clings about his neck.  The two children stand by the
+perambulator.  They are brave little girls and remember that they have
+not to cry.  The train begins to move and the woman unclasps herself,
+leaving her husband at the window, smiling his hardest and throwing
+kisses to the children.  The train gathers speed and takes a curve and
+the soldier has vanished.  The mother turns to the perambulator and
+seeks to hide her face as she hurries with her little charges along the
+platform and through the gate.  The two little girls stifle their sobs
+in their aprons, but the child in the carriage knows nothing of public
+behaviour.  He knows in that dim way that is the affliction of
+childhood that something terrible is happening, and as the forlorn
+little group hurries by to escape into the lane hard by where grief can
+have its fill he rends the air with his sobs and cries of "Poor dada,
+poor dada!"
+
+Poor little mite, he is beginning his apprenticeship to this rough,
+insane world betimes....
+
+And now the platform is empty, and the only sound of life is the whirr
+of the reaping machine and the voices from the harvest field.  Through
+the meadow that leads to the village the dog is slowly trotting home,
+still casting occasional glances backwards on the chance....
+
+
+
+
+ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG
+
+Yes, I would certainly keep a pig.  The idea came to me while I was
+digging.  I find that there is no occupation that stimulates thought
+more than digging if you choose your soil well.  Digging in the London
+clay does not stimulate thought; it deadens thought.  It is good
+exercise for the body, but it is no exercise for the mind.  You can't
+play with your fancies as you plunge your spade into this stiff and
+stubborn medium.  But in the light, porous soil of my garden on the
+chalk hills digging goes with a swing and a rhythm that set the
+thoughts singing like the birds.  I feel I could win battles when I'm
+digging, or write plays or lyrics that would stun the world, or make
+speeches that would stir a post to action.  Ideas seem as plentiful as
+blackberries in the autumn, and if only I could put down the spade and
+capture them red-hot I feel that I could make _The Star_ simply blaze
+with glory.
+
+It was in one of these prolific moments that I thought of the pig.
+Like all great ideas there was something inevitable about it.  The
+calculations of Le Verrier and Adams proved the existence of Neptune
+before that orb was discovered.  They knew it was there before they
+found it.  My pig was born without my knowledge.  In the furnace of my
+mind he took shape merely by the friction of facts.  He was a sort of
+pig by divine right.  It happened thus.  In the midst of my digging Jim
+Squire, passing up the lane, had paused on the other side of the hedge
+to discuss last night's frost.  I straightened my back for a talk, and
+naturally we talked about potatoes.  If you want to get the best out of
+Jim Squire you must touch him on potatoes.  There are some people who
+find Jim an unresponsive and suspicious yokel.  That is because they do
+not know how to draw him out.  Mention potatoes, or carrots, or the
+best way of dealing with slugs, or the right manure for a hot-bed, or
+any sensible subject like these, and he simply flows with wisdom and
+urbanity.
+
+He observed that I should have a tidy few potatoes, what with the
+garden I was digging, and the piece I'd turned over in the orchard, and
+that there bit o' waste land on the hillside which he _had_ heard as I
+was getting Mestur Wistock to plough up for me.  Yes, there'd be a
+niceish lot.  And he _did_ hear I was going to set King Edwards and
+Arran Chiefs.  Rare and fine potatoes they were too.  He had some King
+Edwards last year--turned out wonderful, they did.  One root he pulled
+up weighed 12 lb.  Yes, Miss Mary weighed 'em for him in the scale at
+the farm--just for a hobby like as you might say.  It was like this.
+He'd seen a bit in the paper about a man as had 8 lb. on a root, and he
+(Jim) said to himself, "This root beats that by a long chalk _I_ know."
+And Miss Mary come by and she said she'd weigh 'em.  And she did.  And
+it was 12 lb. full, she said.  If anything, she said, 'twas a shade
+over.  _She_ said as they'd have took a prize anywhere--that's what she
+said....  Well, you couldn't have too many potatoes these days.
+Wonderful good food they were, for man _and_ pig....
+
+As he went on up the lane my spade took up that word like a refrain.
+At every rhythmic stroke it seemed to cry "pig" with increasing
+vehemence.
+
+  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
+  When a new planet swims into his ken.
+
+A pig?  Why not?--and I straightened my back again.  I felt that
+something prodigious was taking shape.  My eye wandered across the
+orchard.  There were the hives standing in a row--three of them, to be
+increased to twelve as fast as the expert, who has set up her
+carpenter's shop in the barn, can get the parts to put together.  And
+beyond the hives three sheds--one for poultry, one for the hot-bed for
+mushrooms, the third--why, the very thing....  Concrete the floor and
+it would be a very palace for a pig.
+
+I took a turn up the garden to look this thing squarely in the face,
+and at the gate I saw the farmer's wife coming down the lane.  We
+stopped, and she talked about her cows and about an order she had got
+from the Government to plough up more pasture, and then--as if echoing
+the very thought that was drumming in my head--about the litter of pigs
+she was expecting and of her wish to get the cottagers to keep pigs.
+Why, this was a very conspiracy of circumstance, thought I.  It seemed
+as though man and events alike were engaged in a plot to make me keep a
+pig.
+
+With an air of idle curiosity I encouraged the farmer's wife to talk on
+the thrilling theme, and she responded with enthusiasm.  The pig, I
+found, was a grossly maligned animal.  It had lain uncomplainingly
+under imputations that were foul slanders on its innocent and lovable
+character.  Yes, lovable.  She had had pigs who were as affectionate as
+any dog--pigs that followed her about in sheer friendliness.  And as
+for the charge of filthiness, who was to blame?  We gave them dirty
+styes and then called them dirty pigs.  But the pig was a clean animal,
+loved cleanliness, thrived on cleanliness.  It was man the dirty who
+kept the pig foul and then called him unclean.  And what a profitable
+animal.  She had had a sow which had produced 108 pigs and 102 of them
+came to maturity.  What an example to Shoreditch, I said.  Perhaps they
+don't give them clean styes in Shoreditch, she said.  No, I replied,
+they give them dirty styes....
+
+I went indoors, suffused with the vision of the transfigured pig, the
+affectionate, cleanly, intelligent pig, and took up a paper, and the
+first thing my eye encountered was an article on "The Cottager's Pig."
+I read it with the frenzy of a new religion and rose filled to the brim
+with lore about the animal to whose existence (except in the shape of
+bacon) I had been indifferent so long.  And now, fully seized with the
+idea, it seemed that the world talked of nothing but pig.  It was only
+that my ears were unstopped and my eyes unsealed by an awakened
+curiosity; but it seemed to me that the pig had suddenly been born into
+the universe, and that the air was filled with the rumour of his
+coming.  I encountered the subject at every turn.  In the _Times_ I
+read a touching lament over the disappearance of the little black pig.
+Elsewhere I saw a facsimile letter from Lord Rhondda, in which he
+declared his loyalty to the pig and denied that he had ever spoken evil
+of him.
+
+It was a patriotic duty to keep a pig.  He was an ally in the war.  I
+saw the whole German General Staff turning pale at his name, as Mazarin
+was said to turn pale at the name of Cromwell.  Arriving in town I met
+the eminent politician Mr. R---- and he began to tell me how he had
+started all his cottagers in the North growing pig.  By nightfall I
+could have held my own without shame or discredit in any company of pig
+dealers, and in my dreams I saw the great globe itself resting on the
+back, not of an elephant, but of a pig with a beautiful curly tail.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Later: I have ordered the pig.
+
+
+
+
+IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE
+
+A young man wrote to me the other day lamenting his ignorance and
+requesting me to tell him what books to read and what to do in order to
+become learned and wise.  I sent him a civil answer and such advice as
+occurred to me.  But I confess that the more I thought of the matter
+the less assured I felt of my competence for the task.  I ceased to be
+flattered by the implied tribute to my omniscience, and felt rather
+like a person who gives up a third-class ticket after he has ridden in
+a first-class carriage might feel.  I surveyed my title to this
+reputation for learning, and was shocked at the poverty of my estate.
+As I contrasted the mountain of things I didn't know with the molehill
+of things I did know, my self-esteem sank to zero.  Why, my dear young
+sir, thought I, I cannot pay twopence in the pound.  I am nothing but
+the possessor of a wide-spread ignorance.  Why should you come to me
+for a loan?
+
+I begin with myself--this body of me that is carried about on a pair of
+cunningly-devised stilts and waves a couple of branches with five
+flexible twigs at the end of each, and is surmounted by a large round
+knob with wonderful little orifices, and glittering jewels, and a sort
+of mat for a covering, and which utters strange noises and speaks and
+sings and laughs and cries.  Bless me, said I, what do I know about it?
+I am a mere bundle of mysteries in coat and breeches.  I couldn't tell
+you where my epiglottis is or what it does without looking in a
+dictionary.  I have been told, but I always forget.  I am little better
+than the boy in the class.  "Where is the diaphragm?" asked the
+teacher.  "Please sir, in North Staffordshire."  said the boy.  I may
+laugh at the boy, but any young medical student would laugh just as
+much at me if I told him honestly what I do not know about the
+diaphragm.  And when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of this
+aggregation of atoms which we call the human body the medical student
+and, indeed, the whole Medical Faculty would be found to be nearly as
+ignorant as the boy was about the diaphragm.
+
+From myself I pass to all the phenomena of life, and wherever I turn I
+find myself exploring what Carlyle calls the "great, deep sea of
+Nescience on which we float like exhalations that are and then are
+not."  I see Orion striding across the southern heavens, and feel the
+wonder and the majesty of that stupendous spectacle, but if I ask
+myself what I know about it I have no answer.  And even the knowledge
+of the most learned astronomer only touches the fringe of the
+immensity.  What is beyond--beyond---beyond?  His mind is balked, as
+mine is, almost at the threshold of the mighty paradox of a universe
+which we can conceive neither as finite nor as infinite, which is
+unthinkable as having limits and unthinkable as having no limits.  As
+the flowers come on in summer I always learn their names, but I know
+that I shall have to learn them again next year.  And as to the mystery
+of their being, by what miracle they grow and transmute the secretions
+of the earth and air into life and beauty--why, my dear young sir, I am
+no more communicative than the needy knife-grinder.  "Story?  God bless
+you, I have none to tell, sir."
+
+I cannot put my hand to anything outside my little routine without
+finding myself meddling with things I don't understand.  I was digging
+in the garden just now and came upon a patch of ground with roots deep
+down.  Some villainous pest, said I, some enemy of my carrots and
+potatoes.  Have at them!  I felt like a knight charging to the rescue
+of innocence.  I plunged the fork deeper and deeper and tore at the
+roots, and grew breathless and perspiring.  Even now I ache with the
+agonies of that titanic combat.  And the more I fought the more
+infinite became the ramifications of those roots.  And so I called for
+the expert advice of the young person who was giving some candy to her
+bees in the orchard.  She came, took a glance into the depths, and
+said: "Yes, you are pulling up that tree."  And she pointed to an
+ivy-grown tree in the hedge a dozen yards away.  Did I feel foolish,
+young sir?  Of course I felt foolish, but not more foolish than I have
+felt on a thousand other occasions.  And you ask me for advice.
+
+I recall one among many of these occasions for my chastening.  When I
+was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an
+old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire.  As
+we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he
+spoke of it as a poplar.  "Not a poplar," said I with the easy
+assurance of youth, and I described to him for his information the
+characters of what I conceived to be the poplar.  "Ah," he said "you
+are thinking of the Lombardy poplar.  That tree is the Egyptian
+poplar."  And then he went on to tell me of a score of other
+poplars--their appearance, their habits, and their origins--quite
+kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had
+fallen upon my cocksure ignorance.  I found that he had spent his life
+in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke.  And I had
+explained to him what a poplar was like!  But I think he did me good,
+and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other
+people information that they possibly do not need.
+
+And the books I haven't read, and the sciences I don't know, and the
+languages I don't speak, and the things I can't do--young man, if you
+knew all this you would be amazed.  But it does not make me unhappy.
+On the contrary I find myself growing cheerful in the contemplation of
+these vast undeveloped estates.  I feel like a fellow who has inherited
+a continent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny corner
+of the inheritance.  The rest I just wander through like a boy in
+wonderland.  Some day I will know about all these things.  I will
+develop all these immensities.  I will search out all these mysteries.
+In my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort.  I know that when
+the curtain rings down I shall be digging the same tiny plot.  But it
+is pleasant to dream of future conquests that you won't make.
+
+And, after all, aren't we all allotment holders of the mind,
+cultivating our own little patch and surrounded by the wonderland of
+the unknown?  Even the most learned of us is ignorant when his
+knowledge is measured by the infinite sum of things.  And the riches of
+knowledge themselves are much more widely diffused than we are apt to
+think.  There are few people who are not better informed about
+something than we are, who have not gathered their own peculiar sheaf
+of wisdom or knowledge in this vast harvest field of experience.  That
+is at once a comfortable and a humbling thought.  It checks a too
+soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abasement on the other.
+The fund of knowledge is a collective sum.  No one has all the items,
+nor a fraction of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not to
+have some.  If I were to walk out into the street now I fancy I should
+not meet a soul, man or woman, who could not fill in some blank of my
+mind.  And I think--for I must not let humility go too far--I think I
+could fill some blank in theirs.  Our carrying capacity varies
+infinitely, but we all carry something, and it differs from the store
+of any one else on earth.  And, moreover, the mere knowledge of things
+is not necessary to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom.
+There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day which were hidden
+from Plato and Cæsar and Dante, but the ploughboy is not wiser than
+they.  Sir Thomas Browne, in his book on "Vulgar Errors," declared that
+the idea that the earth went round the sun was too foolish to be
+controverted.  I know better, but that doesn't make me a wiser man than
+Browne.  Wisdom does not depend on these things.  I suppose that, on
+the whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally sane man who
+ever took a great part in the affairs of this planet.  Yet compared
+with the average undergraduate he was utterly unlearned.
+
+Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying your eagerness to know.
+Learn all you can, my boy, about this wonderful caravan on which we
+make our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quarrel and fight
+with such crazy ferocity as we go.  But at the end of all your learning
+you will be astonished at how little you know, and will rejoice that
+the pleasure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the
+accumulation of facts.  There was a good deal of truth in that saying
+of Savonarola that "a little old woman who kept the faith knew more
+than Plato or Aristotle."
+
+
+
+
+ON A SHINY NIGHT
+
+The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about midnight.  It is then
+that I leave the throbbing heart of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to
+the last bus bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer the back corner
+seat.  If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near as I can and watch
+the enemy who possesses it with a vigilant eye.  When he rises I pounce
+on the quarry like a kestrel on its prey.  I love the back seat, not
+only because it is the most comfortable, but also because it gives you
+the sense of solitude in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the most
+enjoyable sensations I know.  To see, and not be seen, to watch the
+human comedy unobserved, save by the friendly stars who look down very
+searchingly but never blab, to have the advantages of both solitude and
+society in one breath, as it were--this is my idea of enjoyment.
+
+But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night,
+when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making
+all the earth a wonder of romance.  The garish day is of the earth,
+"the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is seen and the
+constellations blaze in unimaginable space is of the eternal; but here
+in this magic glamour of the moon where night and day are wedded is the
+realm of romance.  You may wander all day in the beech woods and never
+catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult coming down the glades or hear an
+echo of Robin Hood's horn; but walk in the beech woods by moonlight and
+every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends
+of long ago.
+
+That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion for "Cumnor Hall."
+"After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked
+in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never
+weary of repeating the first stanza:
+
+  The dews of summer night did fall--
+    The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
+  Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
+    And many an oak that stood thereby."
+
+There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter.  He was the King
+of the Moonlighters.  He was a man who would have been my most dreaded
+rival on the midnight bus.  He would have wanted the back seat, I know,
+and there he would have sat and chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and
+watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and
+turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.
+
+There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a
+shiny night."  There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous
+Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:
+
+  Oh, 'tis my delight
+  On a shiny night,
+  In the season of the year.
+
+I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure
+that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night
+because he was a poacher.  I never could affect any indignation about
+poachers.  I suspect that I rather like them.  Anyhow, there is no
+stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:
+
+  Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire,
+  Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.
+  Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.
+        Oh, 'tis my delight, etc.
+
+And there was Dick Turpin.  He, too, loved the moonlight for very
+practical reasons.  He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but
+because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with
+Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.
+
+And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of
+moonlight.  The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy.  The
+sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied.
+Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast
+between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the
+invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast
+between degrees of brightness.  Everything is bright, but some things
+are more bright than others.  But in the moonlight the world is etched
+in black and white.  The shadows are flat and unrevealing.  They have
+none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the
+shadows of the day.  They are as secret as the grave; distinct
+personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere
+passages of colour tuned to a lower key.  And the quality of the
+encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast.  The moon does not
+bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:
+
+        .... Strange she is, and secret.
+  Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.
+
+See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful
+effect of black and white that it creates.  Under the play of the
+moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries.  The lights seem lighter
+than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker.
+That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may
+lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is
+the soul of romance.
+
+Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that
+you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks
+which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar
+scenes.  Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott,
+knew those impenetrable shadows well:
+
+        .... tender is the night,
+  And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,
+  Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
+    But here there is no light,
+  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
+  Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
+
+In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the
+unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the
+other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to
+escape the prying eyes of Shylock.  Hence through all time it has been
+the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent
+horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,
+
+  To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
+  Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.
+
+Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to
+the magic of the moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+ON GIVING UP TOBACCO
+
+This evening I am morally a little unapproachable.  I feel too good to
+be true.  Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of
+Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world
+that is not quite up to my moral handicap.  For I have given up
+tobacco.  For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my
+lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over
+me....  For a whole day!  I had not realised how long a day could be.
+It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into
+eternity.  I once heard a man say: "Dear me!  How time flies!"  It
+struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have
+often repeated it since.  But now I know it to be false.  I know that
+that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that
+gives the illusion of the flight of time.  If he had the moral courage
+to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!"  He would say,
+as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the
+mantel-piece), "How time stands still!"  He would find that a day can
+seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is
+terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.
+
+I have been contemplating this thing for years.  Some day, I have said
+to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant
+Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service.  Long have I borne his
+yoke--ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket
+pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger.  (How
+well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the
+sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable
+feeling of physical nausea.)  I have kicked against the tyranny of a
+habit that I knew had become my master.  It was not the tobacco I
+disliked.  Far from it.  I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of
+tobacco.  The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit
+and to lose our freedom--to cease to be masters of our own actions.
+"Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a
+character in some play, and the saying has a wide application.  I did
+not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me.  I did not say
+with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good
+dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco."  It was the
+pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions."  And though as the
+result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and
+resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was
+the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise.  The old dog in a new coat,
+as Johnson used to say.
+
+There are some people who approach the question frivolously.  The young
+man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example.  When the lady
+in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the
+young man John agreed.  Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said,
+and he was going to burn them all.  The lady in bombazine rejoiced.
+Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said.  "That ain't
+my way," replied the young man called John.  "I burn 'em one at a
+time--little end in my mouth, big end outside."  Similarly wanting in
+seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared
+that it prolonged life.  "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said.
+"None of them smoked, _and they are all dead_."  Others again discover
+virtues to conceal the tyranny.  Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign
+Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco
+smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work.  "The art of
+diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco."  No
+one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no
+very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous
+fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the
+council chamber at Berlin.
+
+There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and
+others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse.
+It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling
+that the spirit of communion is broken.  That was the case of Carlyle
+and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and
+silent to boot.  They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep
+for words.  And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy
+of words in wreaths of smoke:
+
+  The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,
+  Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
+  The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
+  Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.
+
+
+And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for
+thought and inspiration.  "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says
+Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the
+good gift to our shores.  Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we
+who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother
+Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister.  Homer
+and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help
+of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had
+the true spirit of the tobacco cult.  Had he been born a couple of
+thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have
+mingled with his praises of Falernian!
+
+But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not
+for this or that respectable reason--not always even because we enjoy
+it--but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it.
+And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more
+than the thing yielded to that is the mischief.  All the great systems
+of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to
+his habits.  The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all
+events, to keep the will master of the appetites.  They are
+intended--altogether apart from the question of salvation by works--to
+serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway,
+reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
+
+It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day.  I shall
+not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the
+tobacconists' shops--and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there
+are!--the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly
+after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar
+as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of
+refusal.  For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism.  You do
+not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on
+your way.  You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf
+to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other
+syrens that beckon you from the shop windows.  And now evening has come
+and the victory is mine.  I have singed the beard of the giant.  I am
+no longer his thrall.  To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear
+conscience--with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice,
+and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....
+
+How I shall enjoy to-morrow!
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT GOD GUN
+
+A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun.  The goddess
+Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the
+sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath
+of fire--fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as
+they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
+
+Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming.  We stood in
+a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even
+less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave.  The exterior of
+the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless
+walls faced with corrugated iron.  Within was a maze of immense
+mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits
+descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the
+dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily
+overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
+
+The signal was given.  Two shadowy figures that appeared in the
+darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations.  A giant
+crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the
+orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell
+within.  Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps
+only an electric button, was touched.  But at that touch the whole
+front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back
+slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty
+feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from
+whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing.  And as the door
+opened the Cyclops above--strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in
+the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace--set the crane in
+motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god,
+suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers
+of a hand.
+
+It emerged slowly like a column of solid light--mystic, wonderful.  All
+night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of
+incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as
+white as the furnace within.  The great hand of the crane bore it
+forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of
+the pits.  I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled
+nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid.  It was a pit of oil--tens of
+thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil.  It was the second bath of
+the god.
+
+The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused
+above the pit.  Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that
+held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil.  The
+breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the
+liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great
+tongues of flame.  As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit
+the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the
+ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces.  But it would not let go.
+Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he
+stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.
+
+And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the
+oil hungrily through his burning pores.  Soon he will be caught up in
+the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an
+empty pit near by.  And upon him will descend another tube, that has
+passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits
+the body.  And then in due course he will be provided with yet another
+coat.  Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put
+on at a tension of unthinkable resistance.  And even then there remains
+his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk.
+After that he will be equipped with his brain--all the wonderful
+mechanism of breech and cradle--and then one day he will be carried to
+the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his
+manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan
+fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his
+message of death and destruction.
+
+The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and
+stone."  Poor savage!  If we could only take him, with his childlike
+intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and
+industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men
+could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts
+are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the
+hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue
+thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles--how ashamed
+the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone!  How he would
+abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!
+
+And what a voracious deity he is!  Here in the great arsenal of
+Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities,
+foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a
+caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first
+crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames
+of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and
+perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as
+they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped
+like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar
+of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god
+is passing through a multitude of preparations more delicate than any
+known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave
+scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where
+mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate
+instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so
+precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious
+chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are
+filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not
+drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working
+(for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings,
+themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous
+observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.
+
+A great town--a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour
+of a city like Leeds--all devoted to the service of the god who lies
+there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men.  I see
+the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone.
+And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions.  All
+over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his
+glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day
+and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.
+
+You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers
+beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the
+chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel.
+You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men
+toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win
+that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to
+forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts.
+You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our
+universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the
+proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery
+coal-tar.  You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in
+proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god.  And
+behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night
+to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth
+into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the
+uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.
+
+And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits
+you--
+
+        ... where Rhine unto the sea,
+  And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,
+  And where great armies glitter in the sun,
+  And great kings rule and men are boasted free.
+
+Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the
+harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves
+chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him
+more lavishly with the food of death.  You cannot escape the great
+traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth.  The
+horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep
+of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of
+Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas
+is broken by the throbbing of his chariots.  As a neutral, good savage,
+you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than
+these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to
+the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God
+Gun will greet your astonished eyes.
+
+Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message;
+on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty
+thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land
+where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are
+mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by
+that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger
+rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in
+autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines
+of the god.  At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs
+his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed.  He has
+spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock.
+And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black,
+billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has
+blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass
+that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his
+last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden
+the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.
+
+And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets
+of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an
+abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine
+to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues
+(a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your
+simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in
+satire--
+
+  That civilisation doos git forrad
+  Sometimes upon a powder cart--
+
+were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.
+
+I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with
+mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone.
+Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness.  Perhaps he will
+be perplexed and puzzled.  For he may have heard of another religion
+that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind
+to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.
+
+
+
+
+ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR
+
+I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into
+conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave.  He was a
+reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who
+had been called up at the beginning of the war.  He had many
+interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic,
+matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier.  But something
+he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener,
+and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.
+
+"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"
+
+"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Well, he hadn't no escort.  You're not going to make me believe he
+didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no
+escort.  It stands to reason.  He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you
+might say.  He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he
+had.  He could look ahead.  That's what he could do.  He could look
+ahead.  What did he say about the war?  Three years, he said, or the
+duration, and he was about right.  He wasn't the man to get drowned by
+an oversight--not him.  Stands to reason.
+
+"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme.  "He's
+alive right enough.  He's fighting for the Germans.  Why, I know a man
+who see him in a German uniform before the war began.  I should know
+him if I see him.  He inspected me often.  He made a fool of himself at
+Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new
+start, as you might say.
+
+"And look at Hamel.  He ain't dead--course not.  He went to
+Germany--that's what he did.  Stands to reason."
+
+"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked.  "Is he fighting for the
+Germans too?"
+
+Well no.  That was too tall an order even for his credulity.  He
+boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:
+
+"He's laying by--that's what he's doing.  He's laying by.  You see,
+he'd done his job.  He raised his army and made the whole job, as you
+may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a
+corner.  Not him.  Stands to reason.  Why should he?  And him done all
+what he had done.  So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted
+again.  Then he'll turn up all right.  You'll see."
+
+"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of
+survivors came to shore.  There were 800 men who perished with Lord
+Kitchener.  Not one has been heard of.  Are they all 'laying by'?  And
+where are they hiding?  And why?  And were they all in Lord Kitchener's
+secret?"
+
+He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.
+
+"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man
+who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could.
+"I can't do it....  With his foresight and all....  And no escort, mind
+you....  No, I can't believe it....  Stands to reason."
+
+And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the
+legend of Kitchener had passed beyond the challenge of death.  I had
+heard much of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in
+Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted
+that that man's name was--well, whose would you think?  Why, of
+course....  But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity
+and absoluteness.  It did not rest upon fact.  It defied all facts and
+all evidence.  It was an act of tyrannic faith.  He was not dead,
+because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead.  And so he
+was alive.  And there you are.
+
+No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end
+that helped the growth of the myth.  He filled so vast a place in the
+public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed
+unthinkable.  No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his
+body in death.  He had just walked out into the night, and from the
+night he would return.
+
+But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to
+the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the
+popular mind.  It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural.
+In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who
+could daunt death itself.  And when death stabbed him suddenly in the
+dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the
+wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of
+blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy.  "Stands to
+reason."  That's all.  It just "stands to reason."
+
+It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief
+to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent
+foolishness.  It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps,"
+expresses over his fallen comrade--
+
+  O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
+  Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!
+
+There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple
+mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into
+material terms.  Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he
+lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."
+
+  Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
+  Call him when your powder's running low--
+      "If the Dons sight Devon
+      I'll leave the port of Heaven,
+  And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."
+
+And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after,
+in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear
+that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death.  The torch of
+a great spirit never goes out.  It is handed on from generation to
+generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest.  And that I
+think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate
+credulity.  Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that
+cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material
+immortality to give his faith an anchorage.  And so, out in the vague
+shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his
+post--"laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening
+for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.
+
+As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out
+into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't
+never believe that he's dead....  Stands to reason."  And as he bade me
+"Good-night," I said, "I think you are right.  I think he is living,
+too."  And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."
+
+
+
+
+ON TALK AND TALKERS
+
+The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the
+conversation.  I confess that I found the experience a little trying.
+In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person.  The talk I
+like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that
+"that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the
+laughter abundant."  I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to
+be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics.  I like to talk in my slippers, as
+it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all
+the evening before me.  Above all, I like the company of people who
+talk for enjoyment and not for admiration.  "I am none of those who
+sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the
+secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song.  But at this dinner
+table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning.  It was
+so staccato and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand.  It
+was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of
+touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and
+shuttlecock, or demon patience, or anything you like that is
+intellectually and physically breathless and baffling.  I thought of a
+bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting
+away from the mark that I never got it out.  It had grown stale and out
+of date before I could invest it with the artistic merit that would
+enable it to appear in such brilliant company.  And so, mentally out of
+breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch
+the drift of the sparkling dialogue.  But I looked as wise as possible,
+just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the
+things I did not say were quite worth saying.  That was Henry Irving's
+way when the conversation got beyond him.  He just looked wise and said
+nothing.
+
+There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but
+this was not good talk.  It was clever talk, which is quite a different
+thing.  There was no "stuff" in it.  It was like trying to make a meal
+off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack
+of geniality.  It reminded me of the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice
+Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court
+from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate quotations.
+The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of
+fellowship.  Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of
+wit, but wit alone never made good conversation.  It is like mint sauce
+without the lamb.
+
+Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists.  Macaulay
+talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as
+though he were engaged in an argument with space and eternity.  "If any
+of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at
+breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a
+chance.  Macaulay is coming."  And you remember that whimsical story of
+Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the
+garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning
+in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and
+seeing the poet with the button between forefinger and thumb still
+talking into space.  His life was an unending monologue.  "I think,
+Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking
+of his pulpit days.  "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you
+do anything else."
+
+Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a
+clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of
+the encounter.  He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of
+Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he
+had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of hearty conversation.
+He quarrelled heartily and forgave heartily--as in that heated scene at
+Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing
+and had come under his sledge hammer.  Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a
+short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy;--Johnson: Give me
+your hand, Sir.  You were too tedious and I was too short.--Mr. ----:
+Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way.--Johnson: Come, Sir,
+let's have no more of it.  We offend one another by our contention; let
+us not offend the company by our compliments."  He always had the
+company in mind.  He no more thought of talking alone than a boxer
+would think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think of
+rushing up to the net for a rally alone.  He wanted something to hit
+and something to parry, and the harder he hit and the quicker he
+parried the more he loved the other fellow.  That is the way with all
+the good talkers of our own time.  Perhaps Mr. Belloc is too cyclonic
+and scornful for perfect conversation, but his energy and wit are
+irresistible.  I find Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less
+aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the platform.  But the
+princes of the art, in my experience, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and
+Mr. Richard Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, the
+second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his thought, the third for
+the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk.
+I would add Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist.  He is too
+interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested in others.  When
+he is well under way you simply sit round and listen.  It is capital
+amusement, but it is not conversation.
+
+It is not the man who talks abundantly who alone keeps the pot of
+conversation boiling.  Some of the best talkers talk little.  They save
+their shots for critical moments and come in with sudden and
+devastating effect.  Lamb had that art, and his stammer was the perfect
+vehicle of his brilliant sallies.  Mr. Arnold Bennett in our time uses
+the same hesitation with delightful effect--sometimes with a shattering
+truthfulness that seems to gain immensely from the preliminary
+obstruction that has to be overcome.  And I like in my company of
+talkers the good listener, the man who contributes an eloquent silence
+which envelops conversation in an atmosphere of vigilant but friendly
+criticism.  Addison had this quality of eloquent silence.  Goldsmith,
+on the other hand, would have liked to shine, but had not the gift of
+talk.  Among the eloquent listeners of our day I place that fine writer
+and critic, Mr. Robert Lynd, whose quiet has a certain benignant
+graciousness, a tolerant yet vigilant watchfulness, that adds its
+flavour to the more eager talk of others.
+
+It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that "perhaps in the next
+world the use of words may be dispensed with--that our thoughts may
+stream into each other's minds without any verbal communication."  It
+is an idea which has its attractions.  It would save time and effort,
+and would preserve us from the misunderstandings which the clumsy
+instrument of speech involves.  I think, as I sit here in the orchard
+by the beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad functions
+with such disciplined certainty, that there must be the possibility of
+mutual understanding without speech--an understanding such as that
+which Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered and exploited
+if it had been created mute.
+
+And yet I do not share Rogers's hope.  I fancy the next world will be
+like this, only better.  I think it will resound with the familiar
+speech of our earthly pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among
+any of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we may light upon
+the great talkers of history, and share in their eternal disputation.
+There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle
+and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down
+the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or
+Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid
+Tavern described by Fuller--the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish
+galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English
+frigate--or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on
+an eternal May morning.  It is a comfortable thought, but I cannot
+conceive it without the odd, cheerful din of contending tongues.  I
+fancy edging myself into those enchanted circles, and having a modest
+share in the glorious pow-wows of the masters.  I hope they won't vote
+me a bore and scatter at my approach.
+
+
+
+
+ON A VISION OF EDEN
+
+I had a glimpse of Eden last night.  It came, as visions should come,
+out of the misery of things.  In all these tragic years no night spent
+in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its
+sense of impending peril, its disquieting _communiqué_, Wytschaate
+lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever
+retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a
+sick and foreboding heart--and then out into the night with the burden
+of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul.  And as I stood in the
+dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering
+towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast
+furnaces on a dark hillside.  It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding
+through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the
+darkness with its jovial lamps.  Heavens, thought I, what strangers we
+are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant,
+for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear.  The bus stopped and I
+got inside, and inside it was radiant too--so brilliant that you could
+not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and
+blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read
+the paper with luxurious ease.
+
+But I did not read the paper.  I didn't want to read the paper.  I only
+wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit
+bus.  It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and
+bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into
+the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told.  One day,
+I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this.  All the
+buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight
+through streets as bright as day.  The gloom will have vanished from
+Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter
+once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and
+Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills.  We shall
+look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be
+afraid.  The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor
+slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.
+
+And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this
+intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is
+past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that
+was lost and that we yearn to regain.  Yes, I think I should fall on my
+knees.  I think we shall all want to fall on our knees.  What other
+attitude will there be for us?  Even my barber will fall on his knees.
+"If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other
+day, "I'd fall on my knees _this very night_."  He spoke as though
+nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of
+thing.  I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond
+me.  It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who
+when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts
+if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and
+blew their temple down.  But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of
+the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.
+
+But then--what then?  Well I should want to get on to some high and
+solitary place--alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be
+silent and when to talk--there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of
+horror.  I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick.  And in
+the dawn of a golden day--it must be a golden day--I would see the sun
+
+  Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye
+
+and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater for glorious Sty Head
+and hear the murmurs from Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up
+Great Gable and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the green
+pastures of Langdale.  And there in that sanctuary with its starry dome
+and its encompassing hills I should find the thing I sought.
+
+Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do something desperate.  I
+shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if I know my
+companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his
+craft of the mountains and together we will
+
+  Leave our rags on Pavey Ark,
+  Our cards on Pillar grim.
+
+And then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world
+that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its Paradise
+Regained....  Why, here is St. John's Wood already.  And Lord's!  Of
+course, I _must_ have a day at Lord's.  It will be a part of the ritual
+of reconciliation.  The old players will not be there, for the gulf
+with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on
+distant fields.  But we must recapture their music and pay homage to
+their memory.  Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's--or perchance the
+Oval--and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball,
+and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket,
+and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of
+the doughty things we have seen them do.  Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz
+and Jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be
+forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the
+goodly game--"W.G." and Ranji, Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and
+Bonner, Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host.
+We'll not forget one of them.  Not one.  For a whole day we will go it,
+hammer and tongs.
+
+And there are ever so many more things I shall want to do.  I shall
+want to go and see the chestnuts at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday.  I
+shall want to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the Fifth,
+and make my young friends April fools on the First, and feel what a
+tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on Good Friday and
+pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.  I shall want to go and sit on the sands
+and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the
+Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from
+our hands nearly four years ago.  In short, I shall plunge into all the
+old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no
+heart for, no use for to-day.
+
+But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of Eden into the snow and
+the slush and the never-ending night.  The magic chariot goes on with
+its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision
+in darkness.
+
+
+
+
+ON A COMIC GENIUS
+
+"Like to see Harry Lauder?  Of course I should like to see Harry
+Lauder.  But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord
+Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that
+extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands
+to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have,
+as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan?  Do you
+realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry
+Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls,
+buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans?  Now, on a
+conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to----"
+
+"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed £52,000 to the War Loan.
+In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan.
+You are making him your agent.  You pass the cash on to him and he
+passes the bullets on to the Germans.  It is a patriotic duty to go and
+see Harry Lauder."
+
+I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a
+good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went.  It was a poor setting
+for the great man--one of those dismal things called revues, that are
+neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger
+contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially
+anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster
+young women.  I confess that I prefer my Harry without these
+accompaniments.  I like him to have the stage to himself.  I like Miss
+Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about.  I do not want
+anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I
+want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time
+with his foot and humming the melody.
+
+And for the same reason.  The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of
+art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed
+by any intrusive and alien note.  And it is this faculty of creating a
+state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the
+characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the
+extraordinary influence he exercises over his public.  If you are
+susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the
+Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike
+anything else on the stage or in life.  Like Bottom, you are
+translated.  Your defences are carried by storm, your severities
+disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the
+world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other
+boys to the piping of the magician.  The burden has fallen off your
+back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of
+light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the
+sunshine.
+
+This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the
+professional sense.  It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is
+not an actor at all.  Contrast him with the other great figure of the
+music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will
+understand what I mean.  Chevalier is never himself, but always
+somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real--an
+incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man
+celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch."  With his great powers of
+observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type.
+He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to
+you.  If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.
+
+But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage.  You do not
+want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself.  It
+doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often
+you have seen him do it.  In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it
+the better you like it.  His jokes may be old, but they are never
+stale.  They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and
+old port that grow better with age.  His songs may be simple and
+threadbare.  You don't care.  You just want him to go on singing them,
+singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the
+heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to
+you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring."  You want to
+see him walk, you want to see him skip--oh, the incomparable drollery
+of that demure little step!--you want to hear him talk, you want to
+hear him laugh.  In short, you just want him to be there doing anything
+he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful
+of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.
+
+He has art, of course--great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of
+voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate
+sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a
+sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a
+genial satire.  And his figure and his face add to his equipment.  His
+walk is priceless.  His legs--oh, who shall describe those legs, those
+exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive?  Clothed in his kilt and
+his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical,
+droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery.  Your first impulse
+is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with
+him.  You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for
+his laugh is irresistible.  It is so friendly and companionable, so
+full of intimacies, so open and sunny.
+
+He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his pockets and tells
+you the history of the contents, or gossips of the ways of sailors, and
+you gather round like children at a fair.  The sense of the theatre has
+vanished.  You are not listening to an actor, but to an old friend who
+is getting nearer and nearer to you all the time, until he seems to
+have got you by the button and to be telling his drolleries to you
+personally and chuckling in your own private ear.  There is nothing
+comparable to this intimacy between the man and his audience.  It is
+the triumph of a personality, so expansive, so rich in the humanities,
+so near to the general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort
+of spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all-pervasive.
+
+But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the spell.  If so, be not
+scornful of us who have.  Be sorry for yourself.  Believe me, you have
+missed one of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world.
+
+
+
+
+ON A VANISHED GARDEN
+
+I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road the other evening,
+talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked: "What
+is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome
+of the war?"
+
+"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," I replied.  "Come
+this way and I'll show it to you."
+
+He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I
+turned from the road and led him through the gorse and the trees
+towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of
+allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures,
+men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion
+beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches
+and looking at the fruits of their labour springing from the soil.
+"There," I said, "is the most important result of the war."
+
+He laughed, but not contemptuously.  He knew what I meant, and I think
+he more than half agreed.
+
+And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider what that stretch
+of allotments means.  It is the symptom of the most important revival,
+the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations.
+Wherever you go that symptom meets you.  Here in Hampstead allotments
+are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.  A friend of mine who lives
+in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish.  In the
+neighbourhood of London there must be many thousands.  In the country
+as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands.  If dear old Joseph
+Pels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening,
+see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and
+potato patches, what joy would be his!  He was the forerunner of the
+revival, the passionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel
+fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened
+the sleeper.
+
+Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can
+be measured in terms of food.  That is important, but it is not the
+most important thing.  The allotment movement will add appreciably to
+our food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual resources
+of the nation.  It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is
+blighting our people.  What is wrong with us?  What is the root of our
+social and spiritual ailment?  Is it not the divorce of the people from
+the soil?  For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has
+been sucked into the great towns, and we have seen grow up a vast
+machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of
+the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the
+slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature
+implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the
+streets.  Can you walk through a London working-class district or a
+Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a
+feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous
+perversion of life into the arid channels of death?  Can you take pride
+in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts
+in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?
+
+And now the sun is going to rise.  We have started a revolution that
+will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of
+the people.  The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken.  The
+dead hand is going to be lifted from the land.  Yes, you say, but these
+people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the
+courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and
+so on.  That is true.  But the movement must get hold of the
+_intelligenzia_ first.  The important thing is that the breach in the
+prison is made: the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born--not
+still-born, but born a living thing.  It is a way of salvation that
+will not be lost, and that all will traverse.
+
+This is not mere dithyrambic enthusiasm.  Take a man out of the street
+and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him.  I
+have seen the miracle again and again.  I know a bus conductor, for
+example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind.  But one night I
+touched the key of his soul, mentioned allotments, and discovered that
+this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of
+his garden triumphs.  He had got a new purpose in life.  He had got the
+spirit of the earth in his bones.  It is not only the humanising
+influence of the garden, it is its democratising influence too.
+
+  When Adam delved and Eve span,
+  Where was then the gentleman?
+
+You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss gardens.  I know
+a distinguished public servant and scholar whose allotment is next to
+that of a bricklayer.  They have become fast friends, and the
+bricklayer, being the better man at the job, has unconsciously assumed
+the role of a kindly master encouraging a well-meaning but not very
+competent pupil.
+
+And think of the cleansing influence of all this.  Light and air and
+labour--these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul.
+It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the
+great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets
+and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no
+name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the
+compass of our speech.  In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual
+disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the
+moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that
+ancient fable.  Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of
+soul that is found in gardens.  He must find his way back to Eden if he
+is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though Eden is but a
+twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a hundred other twenty-pole
+allotments, he will find it as full of wonder and refreshment as the
+garden of Epicurus.  He will not find much help from the God that Mr.
+Wells has discovered, or invented, but the God that dwells in gardens
+is sufficient for all our needs--let the theologians say what they will.
+
+  Not God in gardens?  When the eve is cool?
+  Nay, but I have a sign--
+  'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
+
+
+No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt the sign, or lose
+its impress through all his days.  I know, for I was once a child whose
+world was a garden.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It lay a mile away from the little country town, shut out from the road
+by a noble hedge, so high that even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver,
+the wonder and the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so thick
+that no eye could peer through.  It was a garden of plenty, but also a
+garden of the fancy, with neglected corners, rich in tangled growths
+and full of romantic possibilities.  It was in this wilder terrain that
+I had found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow-worm's delicate
+light, and here, with my brain excited by "The Story of the Hundred
+Days," that I knew the Frenchmen lurked in ambush while I at the head
+of my gallant troop of the Black Watch was careering with magnificent
+courage across the open country where the potatoes and the rhubarb and
+the celery grew.
+
+It was ever the Black Watch.  Something in the name thrilled me.  And
+when one day I packed a little handbag with a nightgown and started out
+to the town where the railway station was, it was to Scotland I was
+bound and the Black Watch in which I meant to enlist.  It occurred to
+me on the road that I needed money and I returned gravely and asked my
+mother for half a crown.  She was a practical woman and brought me back
+to the prose of things with arguments suitable to a very youthful mind.
+
+The side windows of the house commanded the whole length of the garden
+to where at the end stood the pump whence issued delicious ice-cold
+water brought up from a well so deep that you could imagine Australia
+to be not far from the bottom.
+
+If only I could get to Australia!  I knew it lay there under my feet
+with people walking along head downwards and kangaroos hopping about
+with their young in their pockets.  It was merely a question of digging
+to get there.  I chose a sequestered corner and worked all a summer
+morning with a heavy spade in the fury of this high emprise, but I only
+got the length of the spade on the journey and retired from the task
+with a sense of the bitter futility of life.
+
+Never was there a garden more rich in fruit.  Around the western wall
+of the house was trained a noble pear tree that flung its arms with
+engaging confidence right up to my bedroom window.  They were hard
+pears that ripened only in keeping, and at Christmas melted rich and
+luscious in the mouth.  They were kept locked up in the tool-shed, but
+love laughs at locksmiths, and my brother found it possible to remove
+the lock without unlocking it by tearing out the whole staple from its
+socket.  My father was greatly puzzled by the tendency of the pears to
+diminish, but he was a kindly, unsuspecting man who made no
+disagreeable inquiries.
+
+Over the tool-shed grew a grape vine.  The roof of the shed was
+accessible by a filbert tree, the first of half a dozen that lined the
+garden on the side remote from the road.  On sunny days there was no
+pleasanter place to lie than the top of the shed, with the grapes,
+small but pleasant to the thirsty palate, ripening thick around you.  A
+point in favour of the spot was that it was visible from no window.
+One could lie there and eat the fruit without annoying interruptions.
+
+Equally retired was the little grass-grown path that branched off from
+the central gravelled path which divided the vegetable from the fruit
+garden.  Here, by stooping down, one was hidden from prying eyes that
+looked from the windows by the thick rows of gooseberry bushes and
+raspberry canes that lined the path.  It was my favourite spot, for
+there grew a delicious gooseberry that I counted above all
+gooseberries, small and hairy and yellow, with a delicate flavour that
+is as vivid to-day as if the forty years that lie between now and then
+were but a day.  By this path, too, grew the greengage trees.  With
+caution, one could safely sample the fruit, and at the worst one was
+sure to find some windfalls among the strawberry beds beyond the
+gooseberry bushes.
+
+I loved that little grass-grown path for its seclusion as well as for
+its fruit.  Here, with "Monte Cristo" or "Hereward the Wake," or "The
+Yellow Frigate," or a drawing-board, one could forget the tyrannies of
+school and all the buffets of the world.  Here was the place to take
+one's griefs.  Here it was that I wept hot tears at the news of
+Landseer's death--Landseer, the god of my young idolatry, whose dogs
+and horses, deer and birds I knew line by line through delighted
+imitation.  It seemed on that day as though the sun had gone out of the
+heavens, as though the pillars of the firmament had suddenly given way.
+Landseer dead!  What then was the worth of living?  But the wave of
+grief passed.  I realised that the path was now clear before me.  While
+Landseer lived I was cribbed, cabined, confined; but now----  My eyes
+cleared as I surveyed the magnificent horizon opening out before me.  I
+must have room to live with this revelation.  The garden was too narrow
+for such limitless thoughts to breathe in.  I stole from the gate that
+led to the road by the pump and sought the wide meadows and the
+riverside to look this vast business squarely in the face.  And for
+days the great secret of my future that I carried with me made the
+burden of a dull, unappreciative world light.  Little did those who
+treated me as an ordinary idle boy know.  Little did my elder brother,
+who ruled me with a rod of iron, realise that one day, when I was
+knighted and my pictures hung thick on the Academy walls, he would
+regret his harsh treatment!
+
+But to return to the garden.  The egg-plum tree had no favour in my
+sight.  Its position was too open and palpable.  And indeed I cared not
+for the fruit.  It was too large and fleshy for my taste.  But the
+apple trees!  These were the chief glory of the garden.  Winter apple
+trees with fruit that ripened in secret; paysin trees with fruit that
+ripened on the branches, fruit small with rich crimson splashes on the
+dark green ground; hawthorndean trees with fruit, large, yellow-green,
+into which the teeth crunched with crisp and juicy joy.  There was one
+hawthorndean most thoughtfully situated behind the tool-shed.  And near
+by stood some props providentially placed there for domestic purposes.
+They were the keys with which I unlocked the treasure house.
+
+A large quince tree grew on the other side of the hedge at the end of
+the garden.  It threw its arms in a generous, neighbourly way over the
+hedge, and I knew its austere fruit well.  Some of it came to me from
+its owner, an ancient man, "old Mr. Lake," who on summer days used to
+toss me largess from his abundance.  The odour of a quince always
+brings back to me the memory of a sunny garden and a little old man
+over the hedge crying, "Here, my boy, catch!"
+
+I have said nothing of that side of the garden where the vegetables
+grew.  It was dull prose, relieved only by an occasional apple tree.
+The flowers in the fruit garden and by the paths were old-fashioned
+favourites, wallflowers and mignonette, stocks and roses.  And over the
+garden gate grew a spreading lilac whose tassels the bold militiamen,
+who camped not far away, would gaily pluck as they passed on the bright
+May days.  I did not resent it.  I was proud that these brave fellows
+in their red coats should levy tribute on our garden.  It seemed
+somehow to link me up with the romance of war.  By the kitchen door
+grew an elderberry tree, whose heavy and unpleasant odour was borne for
+the sake of the coming winter nights, when around the fire we sat with
+our hot elderberry wine and dipped our toast into the rich, steaming
+product of that odorous tree--nights when the winter apples came out
+from the chest, no longer hard and sour, but mellow and luscious as a
+King William pear in August, and when out in the garden all was dark
+and mysterious, gaunt trees standing out against the sky, where in the
+far distance a thin luminance told of the vast city beneath.
+
+I passed by the old road recently, and sought the garden of my
+childhood.  I sought in vain.  A big factory had come into the little
+town, and workmen's dwellings had sprung up in its train.  Where the
+garden had been there was now a school, surrounded by cottages, and
+children played on the doorsteps or in the little back yards, which
+looked on to other little back yards and cottages beyond.  My garden
+with its noble hedge and its solitude, its companionable trees and
+grass-grown paths, had vanished.  It was the garden of a dream.
+
+
+
+
+ALL ABOUT A DOG
+
+It was a bitterly cold night, and even at the far end of the bus the
+east wind that raved along the street cut like a knife.  The bus
+stopped, and two women and a man got in together and filled the vacant
+places.  The younger woman was dressed in sealskin, and carried one of
+those little Pekinese dogs that women in sealskin like to carry in
+their laps.  The conductor came in and took the fares.  Then his eye
+rested with cold malice on the beady-eyed toy dog.  I saw trouble
+brewing.  This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting, and
+he intended to make the most of it.  I had marked him as the type of
+what Mr. Wells has called the Resentful Employee, the man with a
+general vague grievance against everything and a particular grievance
+against passengers who came and sat in his bus while he shivered at the
+door.
+
+"You must take that dog out," he said with sour venom.
+
+"I shall certainly do nothing of the kind.  You can take my name and
+address," said the woman, who had evidently expected the challenge and
+knew the reply.
+
+"You must take that dog out--that's my orders."
+
+"I won't go on the top in such weather.  It would kill me," said the
+woman.
+
+"Certainly not," said her lady companion.  "You've got a cough as it
+is."
+
+"It's nonsense," said her male companion.  The conductor pulled the
+bell and the bus stopped.  "This bus doesn't go on until that dog is
+brought out."  And he stepped on to the pavement and waited.  It was
+his moment of triumph.  He had the law on his side and a whole busful
+of angry people under the harrow.  His embittered soul was having a
+real holiday.
+
+The storm inside rose high.  "Shameful"; "He's no better than a
+German"; "Why isn't he in the Army?"; "Call the police"; "Let's all
+report him"; "Let's make him give us our fares back"; "Yes, that's it,
+let's make him give us our fares back."  For everybody was on the side
+of the lady and the dog.
+
+That little animal sat blinking at the dim lights in happy
+unconsciousness of the rumpus of which he was the cause.
+
+The conductor came to the door.  "What's your number?" said one, taking
+out a pocketbook with a gesture of terrible things.  "There's my
+number," said the conductor imperturbably.  "Give us our fares
+back--you've engaged to carry us--you can't leave us here all night."
+"No fares back," said the conductor.
+
+Two or three passengers got out and disappeared into the night.  The
+conductor took another turn on the pavement, then went and had a talk
+with the driver.  Another bus, the last on the road, sailed by
+indifferent to the shouts of the passengers to stop.  "They stick by
+each other--the villains," was the comment.
+
+Someone pulled the bell violently.  That brought the driver round to
+the door.  "Who's conductor of this bus?" he said, and paused for a
+reply.  None coming, he returned to his seat and resumed beating his
+arms across his chest.  There was no hope in that quarter.  A policeman
+strolled up and looked in at the door.  An avalanche of indignant
+protests and appeals burst on him.  "Well, he's got his rules, you
+know," he said genially.  "Give your name and address."  "That's what
+he's been offered, and he won't take it."  "Oh," said the policeman,
+and he went away and took his stand a few yards down the street, where
+he was joined by two more constables.
+
+And still the little dog blinked at the lights, and the conductor
+walked to and fro on the pavement like a captain on the quarter-deck in
+the hour of victory.  A young woman, whose voice had risen high above
+the gale inside, descended on him with an air of threatening and
+slaughter.  He was immovable--as cold as the night and hard as the
+pavement.  She passed on in a fury of impotence to the three policemen,
+who stood like a group of statuary up the street watching the drama.
+Then she came back, imperiously beckoned to her "young man" who had sat
+a silent witness of her rage, and vanished.  Others followed.  The bus
+was emptying.  Even the dashing young fellow who had demanded the
+number, and who had declared he would see this thing through if he sat
+there all night, had taken an opportunity to slip away.
+
+Meanwhile the Pekinese party were passing through every stage of
+resistance to abject surrender.  "I'll go on the top," said the
+sealskin lady at last.  "You mustn't."  "I will."  "You'll have
+pneumonia."  "Let me take it."  (This from the man.)  "Certainly
+not"--she would die with her dog.  When she had disappeared up the
+stairs, the conductor came back, pulled the bell, and the bus went on.
+He stood sourly triumphant while his conduct was savagely discussed in
+his face by the remnant of the party.
+
+Then the engine struck work, and the conductor went to the help of the
+driver.  It was a long job, and presently the lady with the dog stole
+down the stairs and re-entered the bus.  When the engine was put right
+the conductor came back and pulled the bell.  Then his eye fell on the
+dog, and his hand went to the bell-rope again.  The driver looked
+round, the conductor pointed to the dog, the bus stopped, and the
+struggle recommenced with all the original features, the conductor
+walking the pavement, the driver smacking his arm on the box, the
+little dog blinking at the lights, the sealskin lady declaring that she
+would not go on the top--and finally going....
+
+"I've got my rules," said the conductor to me when I was the last
+passenger left behind.  He had won his victory, but felt that he would
+like to justify himself to somebody.
+
+"Rules," I said, "are necessary things, but there are rules and rules.
+Some are hard and fast rules, like the rule of the road, which cannot
+be broken without danger to life and limb.  But some are only rules for
+your guidance, which you can apply or wink at, as common sense
+dictates--like that rule about the dogs.  They are not a whip put in
+your hand to scourge your passengers with, but an authority for an
+emergency.  They are meant to be observed in the spirit, not in the
+letter--for the comfort and not the discomfort of the passengers.  You
+have kept the rule and broken its spirit.  You want to mix your rules
+with a little goodwill and good temper."
+
+He took it very well, and when I got off the bus he said "Good night"
+quite amiably.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
+
+I hope the young American soldier, with whom we are becoming so
+familiar in the street, the tube and the omnibus, has found us as
+agreeable as we have found him.  We were not quite sure whether we
+should like him, but the verdict is very decisively in the affirmative.
+It has been my fortune to know many Americans in the past, but they
+were for the most part selected Americans, elderly persons, statesmen,
+writers, diplomatists, journalists, and so on.  Not having been in
+America I had not realised what the plain, average citizen, especially
+the young citizen, was like.  Now he is here, walking our streets and
+rubbing shoulders with us in sufficient numbers for a general
+impression to be taken.  It is a pleasant impression.  I like the air
+of plenty that he carries with him, the well-nourished body, the sense
+of ease with himself and the world, the fund of good nature that he
+seems to have at command, the frankness of bearing, and, what was least
+expected, the touch of self-conscious modesty that is rarely absent.
+
+If I may say so without offending him, he seems extraordinarily
+English.  Physically he is rather bulkier than the average English
+youth, and his accent distinguishes him; but these differences only
+serve to sharpen the impression that he is one of ourselves who has
+been away somewhere--in a civilised land, where the larder is full, the
+schools plenty, and the family life homely and cordial.  It is very
+rare that you see what you would call a foreign face in the uniform.
+This is singular in view of the mighty stream of immigration from
+Continental countries that has been flowing for three-quarters of a
+century into the melting pot of the United States; but I do not think
+the fact can be doubted.  The blood is more mixed than ours, but the
+main current is emphatically British.
+
+Perhaps the difference that is observable could be expressed by saying
+that the American is not so much reminiscent of ourselves as of our
+forebears.  He suggests a former generation rather than this.  We have
+grown sophisticated, urban, and cynical; he still has the note of the
+country and of the older fashions that persist in the country.  Lowell
+long ago pointed out that many of the phrases which we regarded as
+American slang were good old East Anglian words which had been taken
+out by the early settlers in New England and persisted there after they
+had been forgotten by us.  And in the same way the moral tone of the
+American to-day is like an echo from our past.  He preserves the
+fervour for ideals which we seem to have lost.  There is something of
+the revivalist in him, something elemental and primitive that responds
+to a moral appeal.
+
+It is this abiding strain of English Puritanism which is responsible
+for the tidal wave of temperance that has swept the United States.
+Already nearly half the States have gone "bone dry," and it is
+calculated that, perhaps in two years, certainly in five, with the
+present temper in being, the whole of the Union will have banished the
+liquor traffic.  A moral phenomenon of this sort might have been
+possible in the England of two or three generations ago; it is
+unthinkable in the moral atmosphere of to-day.  The industrial machine
+has dried up the spring of moral enthusiasm.  It will only return by a
+new way of life.  Perhaps the new way of life is beginning in the
+allotment movement which is restoring to us the primal sanities of
+nature.  We may find salvation in digging.
+
+It is sometimes said that the American is crude.  It would be truer to
+say that he is young.  He has not suffered the disenchantment of an old
+and thoroughly exploited society.  We have the qualities of a middle
+aged people who have lost our visions and are rather ashamed to be
+reminded that we ever had any.  But a youthful ardour and buoyancy is
+the note of the American.  He may think too much in the terms of
+dollars, but he has freshness and vitality, faith in himself, a boyish
+belief in his future and a boyish zest in living.  His good temper is
+inexhaustible, and he has the easy-going manner of one who has plenty
+of time and plenty of elbow-room in the world.
+
+For contrary to the common conception of him as a hurrying, bustling,
+get-on-or-get-out young man, he is leisurely both in speech and action,
+cool and unworried, equable of mood, little subject to the extremes of
+emotion, bearing himself with a solid deliberateness that suggests
+confidence in himself and inspires confidence in him.  You feel that he
+will neither surprise you, nor let you down.
+
+Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his accessibility.  The
+common language, of course, is a great help, and the common traditions
+also.  You are rarely quite at home with a man who thinks in another
+language than your own.  The Tower of Babel was a great misfortune for
+humanity.  But it is not these things which give the American his
+quality of immediate and easy intercourse.  There is no ice to break
+before you get at him.  There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and
+hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what
+social footing you are to stand.  You are on him at once--or rather he
+is on you.  He comes into the open, without reserves of manner, and
+talks "right ahead" with the candour and ease of a man who is at home
+in the world and at home with you.  He is free alike from intellectual
+priggishness and social aloofness.  He is just a plain man talking to a
+plain man on equal terms.
+
+It is the manner of the New World and of a democratic society in which
+the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of
+a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private
+citizen next year.  It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick
+Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln.  "He treated me as a
+man," said Douglass after his visit to the President.  "He did not let
+me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our
+skins."  It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had
+to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners.  He
+treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and an
+equal, and because the difference in the colour of their skins had no
+more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the
+colour of their ties or the shape of their boots.
+
+The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of
+his traits.  It gives the sense of a man who is born free--free from
+the irritating restraints, embarrassments and artificialities of a
+society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they
+still prevail in most European countries.  Perhaps Germany is the most
+flagrant example.  It used to be said by Goethe that there were
+twenty-seven different social castes in Germany, and that none of them
+would speak to the caste below.  And Mr. Gerard's description of the
+Rat system suggests that the stratification of society has increased
+rather than diminished since the days of Goethe.
+
+The disease is not so bad in this country; but we cannot pretend that
+we have the pure milk of democracy.  No people which tolerates titles,
+and so deliberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and
+false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, unobstructed
+intercourse of a real democracy like that of America.  It was said long
+ago by Daniel O'Connell that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a
+poker except its occasional warmth."  It is a caricature, of course,
+but there is truth in it.  We are icy because we are uncertain about
+each other--not about each other as human beings, but about each
+other's social status.  We have got the spirit of feudalism still in
+our bones, and our public school system, our titles, and our
+established Church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up
+society into social orders which are the negation of democracy.
+
+And as if we had not enough of the abomination, we are imitating the
+German Rat system with the grotesque O.B.E.  We shall get stiffer than
+ever under this rain of sham jewellery, and shall not be fit to speak
+to our American friends.  But we shall still be able to admire and envy
+the fine freedom and human friendliness which is the conspicuous gift
+of these stalwart young fellows who walk our streets in their
+flat-brimmed hats.
+
+Perhaps when the account of the war is made up we shall find that the
+biggest credit entry of all is this fact that they did walk our streets
+as comrades of our own sons.  For over a century we two peoples,
+talking the same language and cherishing the same traditions of
+liberty, have walked on opposites sides of the way, remembering old
+grudges, forgetting our common heritage, forgetting even that we gave
+the world its first and its grandest lead in peace by proclaiming the
+disarmament of the Canadian-United States frontier.  Now the grudges
+are forgotten, and we have found a reconciliation that will never again
+be broken, and that will be the corner-stone of the new world-order
+that is taking shape in the furnace of these days.
+
+
+
+
+'APPY 'EINRICH
+
+The waiter certainly was rather slow, or perhaps it was that we were
+hungry and impatient.  In any case, I apologised to my guest, a young
+fellow home on leave, and explained that the waiter was entitled to be
+a little absent-minded, for he had lost two sons in the war and his
+only remaining son had been invalided out of the Army, a permanent
+wreck.
+
+"He tells me," I said, "that the boy never talks about the war or his
+experiences.  He just seems silent and numbed.  All that they know is
+that he killed five Germans, and that he is sorry for one of them.  It
+happened while he was on patrol.  There had been a good deal of
+indignation at that part of the line because there had been cases
+reported in which 'hands up' had been a trick for ensnaring some of our
+men, and the order had been given that the signal was to be ignored and
+those making it shot at sight.  It was twilight and a young German
+soldier was seen running forward with his hands up.  The patrol fired
+and he fell.  He was quite unarmed and alone.  On his body they found
+letters from his sweetheart in England--old letters that he had
+apparently carried with him all through the war.  They showed that he
+had been at work at some place in London and had been engaged to be
+married when the war broke out."
+
+"Yes," said my companion, as the waiter came up with the fish.  "Yes,
+when the enemy turns from an abstraction to an individual you generally
+find there's something that makes you hate this killing business.  I
+don't know that I have felt more sorry for any man's death in this war
+than for that of a German.
+
+"You've been to F----, haven't you?  You know that bit of line north of
+the M---- road that you reach by the communication trench that is
+always up to your knees in mud no matter how dry the weather is.  You
+remember how close the lines are to each other at that point--not forty
+yards apart?  I was there in a dull season."
+
+"You were lucky," I said.  "It isn't often dull there."
+
+"No, but it was then.  The Boche would drop over an occasional
+whiz-bang as a reminder, and he'd have his usual afternoon cock-shy
+over our heads at the last pinnacle standing on the ruins of the
+cathedral in the town behind us.  But really there was nothing doing,
+and we got rather chummy with the fellows over the way.  We'd put up a
+target for them, and they'd do the same for us.  They'd got some decent
+singers among them, and we'd shout for the 'Hate' song or 'Wacht am
+Rhein' or 'Tannenbaum' or something of that sort and they always
+obliged, and we gave them the best we had back.
+
+"Yes, we got quite friendly, and one morning one of their men got up on
+the parapet over the way, bowed very low, and shouted 'Goot morning.'
+Our men answered, 'Morgen, Fritz.  How goes it?' and so on.  He was a
+big fat fellow, with glasses, and a good-humoured face, and to our
+great joy he began to sing a song in broken English.  And after he had
+finished we called for more.  He had a real gift for comedy; seemed one
+of those fellows who are sent into the world with their happiness ready
+made.  He laughed a great gurgling laugh that made you laugh to hear
+it.  Our chaps gave him no end of applause, and called for his name.
+He beamed and bowed, said 'Thank you, genteelmen,' and said that his
+name was Heinrich something or other.
+
+"So we called him 'Appy 'Einrich,' and whenever our men were bored and
+things had gone to sleep someone would sing out 'We want 'Einrich.
+Send us 'Appy 'Einrich to give us a song.'  And up would come Heinrich
+on to the parapet, red and smiling and bowing like a _prima donna_.
+And off he would start with his programme.  He always seemed willing
+and evidently greatly enjoyed his popularity with our fellows.
+
+"This went on for some time, and then one day we got the news that we
+were to be relieved at once.  We were to clear out that night and our
+place was to be taken by a Scotch regiment.  You need not be told that
+we were glad.  Life in the trenches when there is nothing doing is
+about as deadly a weariness as man has invented.  We got our kit
+together and when night fell and our relief had come we marched back
+under the stars through F---- towards B----.
+
+"We had been too much occupied with the prospect of release to give a
+thought to the fellows over the road or to Heinrich.  I remembered him
+afterwards and hoped that someone had told the new men that Heinrich
+was a good sort and would always give them a bit of fun, if he was
+asked, or even if he wasn't asked.
+
+"Some weeks afterwards at B---- I ran across a man in the Scotch
+regiment which had followed us in the trenches on the M---- road, and
+we talked about things there.  'And how did you get on with Heinrich?'
+I asked.  'Heinrich?' he said, 'Who is he?'  'Why, surely,' said I,
+'you know Heinrich, the fat fellow across the way, who gets up on the
+parapet and says "Goot morning," and sings comic songs?'  'Never heard
+of him,' he said.  'Ah,' I said, 'he would have heard we were relieved
+and didn't find you so responsive a crowd as we were.'  'Never heard of
+him,' he repeated--then, after a pause, he added, 'There was an
+incident the morning after we took over the line.  Some of our fellows
+saw a bulky Boche climbing on to the parapet just across the way and
+had a little target practice, and he went down in a heap.'  'That was
+him,' I said, 'that was 'Appy 'Einrich.  What a beastly business war
+is, and what ungrateful beggars we were to forget him!'
+
+"Yes, a beastly business, killing men," he added.  "I don't wonder the
+waiter's son doesn't want to talk about it.  We shall all be glad to
+forget when we come out of hell."
+
+
+
+
+ON FEAR
+
+I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no
+fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who
+fight their battles at the base.  He is invented because these naïve
+people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a
+hero.  But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being
+brave if you had no fear.  The real victory of the hero is not over
+outward circumstance, but over himself.  One of the bravest men of our
+time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of
+apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his
+fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going
+out of his way to meet the things he dreaded.  By sheer will he beat
+down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man
+who knew no fear.  But the very essence of his heroism was that he had
+fought fear and won.
+
+It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything
+discreditable in knowing fear.  You might as well say that there is
+something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood.  The
+virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to
+lie and yet telling the truth.  And the more you are tempted the more
+splendid is the resistance.  Without temptation you may make a plaster
+saint, but not a human hero.  That is why the familiar story of Nelson
+when a boy--"Fear! grandmother.  I never saw fear.  What is it?"--is so
+essentially false.  Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by
+man.  They were brave to the brink of recklessness.  The whole episode
+of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the
+dictates of prudence.  On the facts one would be compelled to admit
+that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one
+incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals
+his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance.  When the issue
+was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster,
+he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore.
+It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call
+camouflage.  When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he
+ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter
+with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used.  "This," said
+he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal."  With such triumphant
+self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in
+view.  But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as
+anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in
+Southey's "Life of Nelson."
+
+That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle
+of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well.  At the
+age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to
+climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance
+of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed."
+He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
+
+"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing,
+and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory
+to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my
+boy.'  I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I
+tried?  'But you won't do it again?' she said.  I replied, 'Of course
+not--where would be the fun?'"
+
+It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince
+himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came.
+Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense
+in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
+
+Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind.  I
+was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the
+country the other day.  It had been empty since the beginning of the
+war.  Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade.
+On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried,
+"We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined."  Then he went out and
+shot himself.  Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would
+have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck
+to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any
+other.
+
+In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason
+from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that
+grows by brooding.  There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates
+how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling
+upon fear.  He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who
+had stared insolently at a lady who was with him.  His action led to a
+challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning.
+When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his
+foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold
+assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors
+as a marksman.  As the night advanced he passed through all the stages
+from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn
+he found a corpse.  Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape
+the terrors of his mind.
+
+It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear.  Give them only
+a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference
+of disastrous consequences.  It is not a bad thing in this world to be
+born a little dull and unimaginative.  You will have a much more
+comfortable time.  And if you have not taken that precaution, you will
+do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies.
+Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom.  In the romantic theatre of his
+mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always
+Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master
+with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON
+
+Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its
+contents, but by its address.  My name (for the purposes of this
+article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson.
+Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p."  When I see it
+wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance
+altogether disproportioned to the fact.  I know that taken in the lump
+the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons.  There is not a pin to
+choose between us.  In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or
+other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson
+and that man called himself Thompson.  Why he should have spatchcocked
+a "p" into his name I don't know.  I daresay it was pride on his part,
+just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
+
+Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist.
+He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the
+Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding.  When the novelist was asked
+to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs,
+he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell."  That is probably
+the case of the Thompsons.  They don't know how to spell.
+
+But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own
+forms with obstinate pride.  We feel an outrage on our names as if it
+were an outrage on our persons.  It was such an outrage that led to one
+of Stevenson's most angry outbursts.  Some American publisher had
+pirated one of his books.  But it was not the theft that angered him so
+much as the misspelling of his name.  "I saw my book advertised as the
+work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled.  It is so easy
+to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is
+full length on the title-page of your booty.  But no, damn him, not he!
+He calls me Stephenson."  I am grateful to Stevenson for that word.  It
+expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson.
+Thompson, indeed!
+
+I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir
+Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford.  He was
+addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers
+(whoever they may have been) boiled within him.  "Do I look like a
+person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on.  And
+as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like
+a person of the name of Thompson?  Now do I?"  And yet I suppose one
+may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of
+Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own.  I should like to try the
+experiment on Sir F. E. Smith.  I should like to address him as Sir
+Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
+
+It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys
+us when people play tricks with our names.  We want to be ourselves and
+not somebody else.  We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and
+the fathers that begat us.  We may not know much about our ancestors,
+and may not care much about them.  Most of us, I suppose, are in the
+position of Sydney Smith.  "I found my neighbours," he said, "were
+looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I
+only got as far back as my great-grandfather, _who disappeared
+somewhere about the time of the Assizes_."  If we go far enough back we
+shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes,
+or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't.  But, such as
+they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those
+fellows, the Thompsons.
+
+And there is another reason for the annoyance.  To misspell a man's
+name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do
+not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that
+you need not trouble to find out.  It is to offer him the subtlest of
+all insults--especially if he is a Scotsman.  The old prides and
+hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and
+I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by
+calling him Mr. M'Donald or _vice versa_.  Indeed, I recall the case of
+a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a
+political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he
+knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as
+Thompson makes me boil.
+
+Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity.  I like a
+man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or
+steals another.  I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the
+author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was
+Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and
+went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house
+of the Duke of Northumberland.  He even put the Percy arms on his
+monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own
+name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche.
+I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
+
+There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for
+reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and
+so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually
+"something rotten about him," as Johnson would say.  He stamps himself
+as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste."
+When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de
+Sisac)."  On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and
+put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac."  Changing residence again, he
+dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
+
+It is possible of course to go to the other extreme--to err, as it
+were, on the side of honesty.  I know a lady who began life with the
+maiden name of Bloomer.  She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs.
+Bloomer-Watlington.  Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd,
+whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd.  She is
+still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health.
+Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into
+a single line on the envelope.  I see the time approaching when I shall
+have to turn over and write, let us say,
+
+[Illustration: handwritten "Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd"]
+
+There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all
+this.  It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may
+have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others.
+After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it
+is the better.
+
+But the spirit of the thing is right.  Let us avoid disguises.  Let us
+stick to our names, be they ever so humble.  Let us follow the great
+example of Cicero.  His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick
+or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a
+vetch--_cicer_.  When he was standing for public office some anxious
+friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but
+he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious
+than the Scauri or Catuli.  And grandly did he redeem the promise.  The
+Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once
+mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next
+door neighbour.  It is a good precedent for Thomson.  I have a mind to
+make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the
+Pyramids.  And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."
+
+
+
+
+ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF
+
+A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes
+think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the
+other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as
+significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day.  He observed
+two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape.  It was quite a
+nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant.
+Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue.  "Why, this is not the
+Leader picture at all," said she.  "It is No. So-and-so."  And
+forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been
+admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures
+before that.
+
+Now I am not going to make fun of these people.  I am not going to make
+fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their
+infirmity.  If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the
+people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous
+people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain.  We are most of us
+second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all.
+Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own
+thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to
+think.  They had the luck to find themselves out.  Probably it did not
+do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they
+were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to
+be.  They had been taught--heaven help them!--to admire those vacant
+prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired
+anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
+
+It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long
+and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at
+last they fought a duel.  And as they lay dying on the ground one of
+them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of
+them."  "Nor I either," said the other.  Then they expired.  I do not
+suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit.  Men are
+always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have
+inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand.
+Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of
+our own on any subject of the mind.  We think in flocks and once in the
+flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
+
+It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of
+mind.  Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he
+thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were
+the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he
+behaved to the poet like a cad.  Yet the poems were far more wonderful
+as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would
+have been as the productions of a man of sixty.  The literary world of
+the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but
+when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture
+into the deepest pit of oblivion.  Yet, as poetry, it was as good or
+bad--I have never read it--in the one case as in the other.
+
+There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this
+subject.  In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the
+candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page.  It was
+printed in the papers as an example of bad French.  "Wherever did these
+military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and
+ridiculous phrases?"  In his own literary circles Anatole France
+himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters.  The
+critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of
+Michelet.  Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at
+his best, from Michelet in his finest period.  How the great sceptic
+must have enjoyed that evening!
+
+It is not that we cannot think.  It is that we are afraid to think.  It
+is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with
+the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it.  Even
+some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed
+in thinking independently.  We only succeed in getting into other
+flocks.  Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some
+years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and
+other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the
+"advanced" people singing their praises.  They were not real praises
+that expressed genuine feeling.  They were the artificial enthusiasms
+of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion.  They would rave
+over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion--rather
+than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had
+no meaning.
+
+We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or
+our own judgment.  We want some authority to lean up against, and when
+we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent
+thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table.  I would rather a
+man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo.  I
+once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of
+Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that
+writer."  I smiled at his naïveté, but I respected his courage.  He
+couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend
+that he could.  That is far better than the affectations with which men
+conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
+
+In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of
+being burned.  Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a
+description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical
+established thought can be.  Aristotle was almost as sacred as the
+Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters
+who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five
+shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed
+against the Logic of the Organon."  We have liberated thought from the
+restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in
+liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and
+integrity.  We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease
+to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we
+follow the fashions in hats.
+
+The evil, I suppose, lies in our education.  We standardise our
+children.  We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching
+them to be themselves--new incarnations of the human spirit, new
+prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world.
+We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than
+in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in
+knowledge but poor in wisdom.  They are not in fear of the stake, but
+they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title
+to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day.
+The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom.  It only
+thrives under suppression.  We need to have our liberties taken away
+from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.
+
+
+
+
+ON SAWING WOOD
+
+I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art
+of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in
+that task.  It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me
+that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn.
+The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the
+shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which
+David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the
+potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard.  I carried some of
+the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice
+and had forgotten the trick.  The saw would go askew, the points would
+dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
+
+Then I remembered.  You are over-doing it, I said.  You are making a
+mess of the job by too much energy--misdirected energy.  The trick of
+sawing wood is to work within your strength.  You are starting at it as
+if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke.  It is the
+mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania.  They bit off more
+than they could chew.  You are biting off more than you can chew, and
+you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you
+see.  The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand,
+to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the
+surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the
+wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to
+take your time and to avoid too much energy.  "Gently does it," is the
+motto.
+
+It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting.  I suppose I am one
+of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit.  We want a
+thing done, but we cannot wait to do it.  We rush at the task with all
+our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't
+surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance
+against the perversity of things.  It reminds me of the remark which a
+professional made to me at the practice nets long ago.  He was watching
+a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a
+whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself.  "He would make a
+good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three
+balls at once."  Recall any really great bowler you have known and you
+will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of
+ease and reserve power.  He was never spending up to the hilt.  There
+was always something left in the bank.  I do not speak of the
+medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless
+grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast
+bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth.  With all their
+physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had
+something in hand.  There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
+
+And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art
+consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically.  The
+temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab
+the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility.
+And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of
+the art reveal itself.  He will mow for three hours on end with never a
+pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his
+hip pocket.  What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful
+leisureliness of his action!  You could go to sleep watching him, and
+you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother
+falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning.  There is the experience
+of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the
+secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its
+patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the
+waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis.  At the bottom, all that John
+Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once.  He is
+always master of his job.
+
+And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when
+you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it
+were, too high?  You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go
+on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your
+futility.  You are playing over your strength.  You are screaming at
+the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly.  Then
+perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers,
+and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right
+flight and just the right direction and just the right length.  And you
+purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is
+moderation.
+
+It is so in all things.  The man who wins is the man who keeps cool,
+whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the
+impression that there is more in him than ever comes out.  I have seen
+many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but
+because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting
+it.  What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount
+Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of
+his style?  There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble
+disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same
+authority and finality of speech.  He conveys the sense of a mind
+disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest,
+understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves
+controversy silent.  Take his indictment of Germany as an example.  It
+was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany.
+Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a
+word of extravagance or violence.  It was the naked truthfulness of it
+that was so terrible and unanswerable.
+
+And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of
+war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his
+experiences in the first great battle of the Somme.  Yet the
+characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any
+straining after effect.  He just left the thing he described to speak
+for itself in all its bare horror.  It was a lesson we people who write
+would do well to remember.  Let us have fewer adjectives, good people,
+fewer epithets.  Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun.  It
+is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the
+argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable.  Was it not
+Stendhal who used to read the _Code Napoléon_ once a year to teach him
+its severity of style?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It is still raining.  I will return to the barn and practise the
+philosophy of moderation on those logs.
+
+
+
+
+VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME
+
+I
+
+A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most
+unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got
+caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left
+corrupting in the sun.  "It isn't healthy," he said.  There was no
+affectation of bravado in the remark.  He made it quite simply, as if
+he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating
+of the carriage.  It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected
+him, but its insanitariness.  Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane
+man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile.  "It
+makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war.
+"I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I
+shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though
+recalling the past.
+
+I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has
+been struck by this attitude of mind towards death.  I remember a
+friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the
+Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling
+me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the
+subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown
+to pieces by his side.  "It is as though war develops another
+integument," he said.  "Your sensibilities are atrophied.  Your nerve
+ends are deadened.  Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part
+of a machine that has no feelings--only functions."
+
+In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of
+us.  There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years
+ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the
+last two and a half years.  If the ghostly army of the slain were to
+file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that
+elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years
+without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by.  And if
+behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally
+shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the
+vast procession would not be in sight.  If we had been asked three
+years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of
+death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was
+incredible.  Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the
+shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance
+of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of
+dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers--such of them as
+trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
+
+It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts.  That is
+certainly done.  You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and
+come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a
+skilfully arranged entertainment--in which one attractive "turn"
+follows another in swift succession.  Once they actually showed a man
+falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage.
+Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us
+of the reality behind this pictured imposture.  There has never been a
+lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all
+its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
+
+But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the
+Red Harvest.  We are like the dyer's hand.  We are subdued to what we
+work in.  Even those who have been directly stricken find that they
+bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves.  We have got into
+a new habit of thought about death--in a sense a truer habit of
+thought.  It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in
+hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible
+divinity.  It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent.  We
+accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud
+of tragic fear and strangeness.  The heart seems steeled to the blows
+of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the
+individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of
+years that, at the most, is soon told.
+
+It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by
+events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings
+will resume their sway.  But it will be long before they recover their
+former tyranny over the mind.  This generation has companioned Death
+too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old.  And
+that, I think, is a gain.  I have always felt that Johnson's morbid
+attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and
+that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of
+mental disease.  Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the
+imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered
+something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he
+should not reach home alive.  But he was quite healthy in his thought.
+It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught
+unawares.
+
+In this, as in most things, Cæsar shone with that grand sanity that
+makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history.  He
+neither sought death nor shunned it.  When Hirtius and Pansa
+remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he
+answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of
+death."  That is the common-sense attitude--as remote from the spirit
+of the miser as from that of the spendthrift.  And that other comment
+of his on death is equally deserving of recall.  He was dining the
+night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined
+the conspiracy against him.  As he sat dispatching his letters, the
+others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable.
+One of the group asked Cæsar what death he would prefer.  He looked up
+from his papers and said, "That which is least expected."  This was not
+an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland,
+the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I
+envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died
+suddenly."  It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an
+incident of the journey.
+
+Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory.
+As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch
+entered to ask the watchword.  "Æquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and
+with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his
+face to the everlasting shadow."
+
+With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its
+noblest expression.  It faced the shadow without illusions and without
+fear.  It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an
+implacable fact to be faced implacably.  Sir Thomas More met it like a
+bridegroom.  In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable
+with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower.  Who can read that
+moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's
+wife) without catching its pity and its glory?  "In good faythe,
+Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was
+ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my
+harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me
+that should rather have comforted him."  And when Sir Thomas Pope comes
+early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine
+o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings--"Quiet
+yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for
+I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where
+we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse
+eternally."  And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene
+invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste
+apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it
+off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common
+fellow: the executioner).  What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall
+I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a
+benefitt?  Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would
+accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his
+executyoner thirtye peeces of golde....  And soe was he by Maister
+Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the
+place of execution.  Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake
+that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I
+praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge
+down let me shift for myselfe.  Then desired he all the people there
+aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now
+there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke
+Churche.  Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed,
+turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus
+unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe
+thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou
+strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.'  So passed Sir Thomas
+More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of
+St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
+
+The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may
+be left to share the crown of noble dying.
+
+
+II
+
+I had rather a shock to-day.  I was sitting down to write an article on
+a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point
+of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor of
+_The Star_, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more
+attractive hare.  It was a letter announcing my lamented demise.  There
+was no doubt about it.  There was the date and there was the name (a
+nice name, too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black
+and white.  And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no
+obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had
+adorned.
+
+Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous
+remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated."  I am not dead.
+I am not half dead.  I am not even feeling poorly.  I had a tooth out a
+week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for
+ever so long.  I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long
+ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance.  Moreover, as all the
+people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even
+if I had been on board.  And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the
+previous port of call.  It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend
+that I wasn't saved.  I was.  But though I am most flagrantly and
+aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of
+myself as if I were dead.  I find it quite an agreeable diversion.  Not
+that I am morbid.  I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed
+in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for
+Beginners."  You may remember the chapter.  If not, it is short enough
+to repeat:
+
+  What I like about Clive
+  Is that he is no longer alive.
+  There's something to be said
+  For being dead.
+
+That is overdoing the thing.  What I find agreeable is being alive and
+thinking I am dead.  You have the advantage of both worlds, so to
+speak.  In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears
+over myself.  I have wept at my own grave-side.  I have composed my own
+obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving
+piece of work.  I have met my friends and condoled with them over my
+decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they
+were quite nice.  Some of them made me think that I might write up the
+obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late
+lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the
+few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous,
+kindly, wise, humorous, generous character--in a word, let myself go a
+bit more.  Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should
+be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I
+was one of the people that he could do without.  But then Old
+Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead.  I
+discounted Grumpington.  I took no notice of Grumpington--the beast.
+
+And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the
+contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case
+no subject for tears.  After all, said I, the world is not such a gay
+place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it.  I have
+left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate, too,
+in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me.  "What
+dreams may come!"  Well, so be it.  I have no fear of the dreams of
+death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like
+a nightmare.  If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better
+dreams.  If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks.
+If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well.  "I see no
+such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters,
+"and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not
+make tiresome."  And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the
+circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament....
+
+Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you.  If you prick me I shall
+still bleed.  If you tickle me I shall still laugh.  And with due
+encouragement I shall still write.
+
+
+III
+
+I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my
+companion pointed to a group--a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper,
+two women and a child--sitting on a seat on the platform.  "There they
+are," he said.  "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless,
+you'll find them sitting there."  "What for?" I asked.  "Oh, in case
+there's a raid.  They are taking things in time; they are running no
+risks.  You'll see a few at most stations."  And as the train passed
+from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the
+platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular,
+and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.
+
+There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger,
+but these good people carry apprehension to excess.  We need not
+underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves
+ridiculous about them.  So far as the average individual life is
+concerned they are almost negligible.  Assuming that the circumference
+of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop
+two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated
+that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone
+of danger.  But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor
+twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs.  Let us assume, however, that
+they get up to an average of twenty bombs.  It will be over three
+hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril.  I do
+not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the
+streets when a raid is on.  It is true I may not get my turn for three
+hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my
+turn has come.  So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody.  It is
+foolish to take risks that you need not take.  But it is not less
+foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform,
+not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.
+
+This is carrying the fear of death to extremities.  I have referred to
+Cæsar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what
+seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger.  In the end he
+was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is
+one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live.  You may, of
+course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess.  Smalley,
+in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of
+Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the
+late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that
+champagne."  "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington.  "Then why
+do you do it?"  "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather
+be ill now and then than always taking care of myself."  "Oh, you think
+that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?"  "Sir, if
+you will ask me then I will tell you.  I do not anticipate."
+
+I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the
+example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms.  He was
+not refusing, like Cæsar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the
+sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain
+misery.  It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living,
+which is quite another thing.  But at least he got a present pleasure
+for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers,
+and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at
+all.  They only exist.  They are like Chesterfield in his later years.
+"I am become a vegetable," he said.  "I have been dead twelve years,
+but I don't want any one to know about it."  Those people in the Tube
+are quite dead, although they don't know about it.  What is more, they
+have never been alive.
+
+You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly.  You know that the
+Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps
+quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves
+of the past.  Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your
+heels.  A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or
+a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window.  You can't take a
+ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at
+the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy.  I have
+myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his
+companion at the wicket.  Why, those people so forlornly dodging death
+in the Tube were not out of the danger zone.  They were probably in
+more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality,
+and incubating death than they would have been going about their
+reasonable tasks in the fresh air above.  You may die from the fear of
+death.  I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously."
+There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going
+about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you
+are.  The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously.  Life is a
+dangerous calling, full of pitfalls.  You, getting the coal in the mine
+by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at
+hand.  You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the
+engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the
+ship stoking the fire--all alike are in an adventure that may terminate
+at any moment.  Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like
+men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in,
+not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand,
+declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our
+steps.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not
+fixed but fluctuating.  Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high;
+sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low.  There are people, no
+doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any
+appreciable difference to the fund.  It is as inexhaustible as the horn
+of Skrymir.  And there are others whose humility is so established that
+no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them.  But the generality of us go
+up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a
+hundred trifles good or bad.  We are like corks on the wave, sometimes
+borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circumstance, then
+sinking into the trough of the billows.  At this moment I am in the
+trough.  I have been passing through one of those chastening
+experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world.
+When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and
+push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous
+fellows.  However would the world get on without us? we say.  What
+would become of the office?  Who could put those schemes through that I
+have in hand?  What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without
+my judgment to lean on?  What would become of Jones if he no longer met
+me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk?  How
+would _The Star_ survive without...
+
+And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that
+we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with
+us there will be a mournful vacuum in society.  Then some day the
+bubble of our vanity is pricked.  We are gently laid aside, deflated
+and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.  Our empire has
+shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild
+dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic
+shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with
+dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back
+defeated and helpless.  And then follow the days--those peaceful
+days--of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look
+hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing,
+and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have
+had a bad shaking."
+
+These are the days of illumination.  Outside the buses rumble by, and
+you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from
+the great whirlpool.  And you realise that the mighty world is
+thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you.
+Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your
+absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul;
+Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though
+nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as
+happy with Brown; and _The Star_--well, _The Star_ ... yes, the painful
+fact has to be faced....  _The Star_ goes on its radiant path as though
+you had only been a fly on its wheel.
+
+It is a humbling experience.  This, then, was all your high-blown pride
+amounted to.  You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the
+river--a moment there, then gone for ever.  This is the foretaste of
+death.  When that comes the waters will just close over your head as
+they have closed now--a comment here and there, perhaps friendly,
+perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and--oblivion.  It is an old
+story--old as humanity.  You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the
+news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was
+received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part.
+It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."
+
+  "The Dean is dead (pray what is trumps?)"
+  Then "Lord have mercy on his soul!
+  (Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.)
+  Six deans, they say, must bear the pall,
+  (I wish I knew what king to call).
+  Madam, your husband will attend
+  The funeral of so good a friend?"
+  "No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight;
+  And he's engaged to-morrow night;
+  My Lady Club will take it ill
+  If he should fail her at quadrille.
+  He loved the Dean (I lead a heart);
+  But dearest friends, they say, must part.
+
+That is the way of it.  Your friend is dead: you heave a sigh and lead
+a heart.
+
+Listen to that thrush outside.  How he is going it!  He, too, on this
+bright March morning sings of the world's indifference--the
+indifference of the joyous, living world to those who have crept to
+their holes.  I hear in his voice the news of the coming of spring, and
+know that down at "the cottage" the crocuses are out in the garden and
+the dark beech woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing up
+into the blue like a flame of song.  How I have loved this pageantry of
+nature, these days of revelation and promise.  I used to think that I
+was a part of them, but now I know that the pageant goes forward in
+sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer in the audience.
+
+And so I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble and disillusioned.
+I have discovered that the world goes on very well without me, and I am
+not sure that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed to learn
+that salutary lesson.  When I return to the world I fancy I shall have
+lost some of my ancient swagger.  I shall feel like a modest intruder
+upon a society that has shown it has no need for me.  I may recover my
+feeling of importance in time, but in my secret heart I shall know that
+I am not the hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things.  I can
+skip off and no one is any the wiser.
+
+
+
+
+ON CLOTHES
+
+There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure
+of relief.  It is no longer necessary to lie awake o' nights thinking
+about your clothes.  There are some people, of course, who like
+thinking about their clothes.  They seem to regard themselves as
+perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you
+take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt.  When
+I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help
+overhearing snatches of a conversation which was going on between two
+women in the seat behind me.  It was conducted with great volubility
+and seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, I don't
+like that shade....  I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So's at
+Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always
+looks ... No, brocaded..."  And so on without a pause for the space of
+half an hour.
+
+I don't offer that conversation as representative.  I imagine that in
+the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely
+ornamental point of view than they ever did.  If you spend twelve hours
+a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a
+Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou'wester, or filling shells
+in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over
+your thoughts.  You will think more about comfort and less about
+finery.  And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a
+higher intelligence.  The more barbaric you are the more you regard
+dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of
+view of utility.  It is a hard saying for the West End of life.
+Spencer, to illustrate his point, mentions that the African attendants
+of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the
+weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up,
+and went about naked and shivering in the rain.
+
+A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible
+among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery.
+It is not good form among them to talk about dress--that is all.  But
+that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less
+continuously, is certain.  Pepys' Diary is strewn with such
+self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with
+gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God
+to make me able to pay for it."  He ought to have thought of that
+earlier.  No one is entitled to order fine clothes and then throw the
+responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty.  At least he might
+have prayed to God on the subject before approaching the tailor.  The
+case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous.  He was as vain as a
+peacock, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear
+bright clothes.  And his spirit is not dead among men.  Who can look
+upon the large white spats of ---- ---- as he comes down the floor of
+the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.
+
+I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not
+mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence).  I would be well-dressed
+myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way.  Like Squire
+Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion.  I find that with
+rare exceptions I dislike new fashions.  They disturb my tranquillity.
+They give me a nasty jolt.  I suspect that the explanation is that
+beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental
+conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old
+grass-grown turnpikes of habit.  It is no uncommon paradox.  Spurgeon
+had it like many others.  He was once rebuked by a friend for his
+political activity on the Liberal side.  Why did he yield to this
+weakness?  "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend.  "I do
+mortify him," said Spurgeon.  "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make
+him vote Liberal.  That mortifies him."  I am conscious of the same
+conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an
+easy winner.
+
+It was so with Carlyle.  He raged like a bear with a sore head against
+the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes
+he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply
+wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him
+to send another "as before."  And so, by taking no thought about the
+matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who
+worry about clothes do not achieve.  The flavour of the antique world
+hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord
+Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our
+grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous
+generation.
+
+I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past.  I am just an
+ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the
+main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it
+were, a forlorn relic of the year before last.  My taste in ties, I am
+assured, is execrable.  My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots
+have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness.  I put on whatever is
+handiest without a thought of artistic design.  My pockets bulge with
+letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people
+that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned.  I am perfectly
+happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who
+has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial
+poem.  I lunched with such a man a few days ago.  I could not help
+envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his
+eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him
+shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder.  It may have
+been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything
+that it oughtn't to have been.  I shall never know.
+
+And it is a great joy to be able not to care.  The war has lightened
+the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no
+matter how much we try.  It is no longer an offence to appear a little
+secondhand.  It is almost a virtue.  You may wear your oldest clothes
+and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments.  You may
+claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of
+patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the
+coffin of the Kaiser.  A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has
+sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a
+suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in
+believing the statement.
+
+That is the sort of example that makes me happy.  It gives me the
+feeling that I am at last really in the fashion--the fashion of old and
+unconsidered clothes.  It is a very comfortable fashion.  It saves you
+worry and it saves you money.  I hope it will continue when the war has
+become a memory.  And if we want a literary or historical warrant for
+it we may go to old Montaigne.  When he was a young fellow without
+means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to
+show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to
+his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his
+châteaux to speak for him.  That is the way of us unfashionable folk.
+We leave our estates and our châteaux to speak for us.
+
+
+
+
+THE DUEL THAT FAILED
+
+"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know
+they are beaten.  No, that is not quite so banal a prophecy as it
+seems.  Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat.  They only
+end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing.  The
+Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were
+beaten.  All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth
+of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain.  But the man or the
+nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the
+certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat.  I have
+never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall.
+The French are at their best in the hour of defeat.  There was nothing
+so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of
+1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost
+that was the most heroic phase of the war.  But the bully collapses
+when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.
+
+"Let me tell you a story.  In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went
+to Heidelberg--_alt Heidelberg du feine_.  You know that jolly city,
+and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with
+the scars of old sword cuts.  I was one of a group of young fellows
+from different countries who were studying at the University, and who
+fraternised in a strange land.
+
+"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in
+England, and one of our group, a young Polish nobleman who had a great
+passion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London.
+If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the
+kind that had appeared in Heidelberg.  You may remember how strange it
+seemed even to the English public when it first came out.  We had got
+accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' looked ridiculous
+and babyish by comparison.
+
+"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his 'Safety'
+created something like a sensation.  The sports of the 'Englander' were
+held in contempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the last
+straw.  It was the very symbol of the childishness of a nation given
+over to the sport of babes.
+
+"One day the Pole was riding out on his bicycle when he passed a couple
+of students, who shouted opprobrious epithets at the 'Englander' and
+his preposterous vehicle.  The Pole turned round, flung some verbal
+change back at them, and rode on his way.
+
+"That evening as he sat in his room he heard steps ascending the
+stairs, and there entered two students clothed in all the formality of
+grave business.  They had brought the Pole a challenge to a duel from
+each of the two young fellows with whom he had exchanged words on the
+road.  The challenges were couched in the most ruthless terms.  This
+was to be no mere nominal satisfaction of honour.  It was to be a duel
+without guards or any of those restrictions that are common in such
+affairs.  The weapon was the sword, and the time-limit eight days.
+
+"The seconds having fulfilled their errand went away, leaving the Pole
+in no cheerful frame of mind.  He was only a very indifferent
+swordsman, and had never cultivated the sport of duelling.  Now
+suddenly he was faced with the necessity of fighting a duel in which he
+would certainly be beaten, and might be killed, for he understood the
+intentions of the challengers.  It was clearly not possible for him to
+acquire in a week such expertness with the sword as would give him a
+chance of victory.
+
+"In this emergency he came along to the little group of which I have
+spoken.  We were playing cards when he entered, but stopped when we saw
+that something unusual had happened.  He told us the story of the
+bicycle ride and the sequel.  What was he to do?  He must fight, of
+course, but how was he to get a dog's chance?
+
+"Now the oldest of our group, and by far the most worldly wise, was an
+American.  He listened to the Pole and agreed that there was no time
+for him to become sufficiently expert with the sword.  'But can you
+shoot?' he asked the Pole.  Yes, he was not a bad shot.  The American
+took up an ace from a pack of cards and held it up.  'Could you,
+standing where you are, hit that ace with a revolver?'  'I am not sure
+that I could hit it,' answered the Pole, 'but I should come very near
+it.'  'That's all right,' said the American.  'Now to business.  These
+fellows have forgotten something.  They're so used to fighting with the
+sword that they've forgotten there's such a thing as the revolver.  And
+they're trying to bluff you into their own terms.  They've forgotten,
+or don't choose to remember, that, as the challenged party, you have
+choice of weapons.  Now we'll draw up an answer to this letter,
+accepting the challenge, claiming the choice of weapons, choosing the
+revolver, and putting the conditions as stiff as we can make 'em.'
+
+"So we sat around the American and composed the reply.  And I can
+assure you it had a very ugly look.  The Pole signed it with great
+delight, and the American and I as seconds delivered it.
+
+"Then we waited.  One day passed without an answer--two, three, four,
+five, six.  Still no answer.  We were enjoying ourselves.  On the
+evening of the seventh day the seconds reappeared at the Pole's rooms.
+They brought no acceptance of his challenge, but an impudent demand for
+the original conditions.  The Pole came along to us with the news.
+'That's all right,' said the American.  'We've got them on the run.
+Now to clinch the business.'  And once more we sat round in great glee
+to draft the reply.  It was as hot as we knew how to make it.  It
+breathed death in every syllable, and it gave the Germans eight days to
+prepare for the end at the muzzle of the revolver.
+
+"Again we waited, and again the days passed without a sign.  Then on
+the eve of the eighth day the seconds once more appeared.  I was
+present with the Pole at the time.  I have never seen a more forlorn
+pair than those seconds made as they entered.  Their principals, driven
+into a corner, faced with the alternative of fighting with weapons
+which did not assure them of victory or of accepting the humiliation of
+running away, had decided to run away.  They would not fight on the
+conditions offered by the Pole, and the seconds were a spectacle of
+humiliation.  Their apologies to us struggled with their indignation at
+their principals and they went away a chastened spectacle.  That night
+we had a gay gathering with the American in the chair, and I think the
+incident must have got wind abroad, for thenceforward the Pole rode his
+Safety in peace and in triumph....
+
+"You may think that story is a trifle.  Well, it is.  But I think it
+has some bearing on the end of the war."
+
+
+
+
+ON EARLY RISING
+
+There is no period of the year when my spirit is so much at war with
+the flesh as this.  For the winter is over, and the woods are browning
+and the choristers of the fields are calling me to matins--and I do not
+go.  Spiritually I am an early riser.  I have a passion for the dawn
+and the dew on the grass, and the "early pipe of half-awakened birds."
+On the rare occasions on which I have gone out to meet the sun upon the
+upland lawn or on the mountain tops I have experienced an emotion that
+perhaps no other experience can give.  I remember a morning in the
+Tyrol when I had climbed Kitzbulhorn to see the sun rise.  I saw the
+darkness changing to chill grey, but no beam of sunlight came through
+the massed clouds that barred the east.  Feeling that my night climb
+had been in vain, I turned round to the west, and there, by a sort of
+magical reflection, I saw the sunrise.  A beam of light, invisible to
+the east, had pierced the clouds and struck the mountains in the west.
+It seemed to turn them to molten gold, and as it moved along the black
+mass it was as though a vast torch was setting the world aflame.  And I
+remembered that fine stanza of Clough's:
+
+  And not through eastern windows only,
+    When morning comes, comes in the light.
+  In front the dawn breaks slow, how slowly.
+    But westward, look, the land is bright.
+
+And there was that other dawn which I saw, from the icy ridge of the
+Petersgrat, turning the snow-clad summits of the Matterhorn, the
+Weisshorn, and Mont Blanc to a magic realm of rose-tinted battlements.
+
+And there are others.  But they are few, for though I am spiritually a
+son of the morning, I am physically a sluggard.  There are some people
+who are born with a gift for early rising.  I was born with a genius
+for lying in bed.  I can go to bed as late as anybody, and have no joy
+in a company that begins to yawn and grow drowsy about ten o'clock.
+But in the early rising handicap I am not a starter.  A merciful
+providence has given me a task that keeps me working far into the night
+and makes breakfast and the newspaper in bed a matter of duty.  No
+words can express the sense of secret satisfaction with which I wake
+and realise that I haven't to get up, that stern duty bids me lie a
+little longer, listening to the comfortable household noises down below
+and the cheerful songs outside, studying anew the pattern of the
+wall-paper and taking the problems of life "lying-down" in no craven
+sense.
+
+I know there are many people who have to catch early morning buses and
+trams who would envy me if they knew my luck.  For the ignoble family
+of sluggards is numerous.  It includes many distinguished men.  It
+includes saints as well as sages.  That moral paragon, Dr. Arnold, was
+one of them; Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," was
+another.  Bishop Selwyn even put the duty of lying in bed on a moral
+plane.  "I did once rise early," he said, "but I felt so vain all the
+morning and so sleepy all the afternoon that I determined not to do it
+again."  He stayed in bed to mortify his pride, to make himself humble.
+And is not humility one of the cardinal virtues of a good Christian?  I
+have fancied myself that people who rise early are slightly
+self-righteous.  They can't help feeling a little scornful of us
+sluggards.  And we know it.  Humility is the badge of all our tribe.
+We are not proud of lying in bed.  We are ashamed--and happy.  The
+noblest sluggard of us all has stated our case for us.  "No man
+practises so well as he writes," said Dr. Johnson.  "I have all my life
+been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with
+great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any
+good."
+
+Of course we pay the penalty.  We do not catch the early worm.  When we
+turn out all the bargains have gone, and we are left only with the odds
+and ends.  From a practical point of view, we have no defence.  We know
+that an early start is the secret of success.  It used to be said of
+the Duke of Newcastle that he always went about as though he had got up
+half an hour late, and was trying all day to catch it up.  And history
+has recorded what a grotesque failure he was in politics.  When someone
+asked Nelson for the secret of his success he replied: "Well, you see,
+I always manage to be a quarter of an hour in front of the other
+fellow."  And the recipe holds good to-day.  When the inner history of
+the battle of the Falkland Islands is told in detail it will be found
+that it was the early start insisted on by the one man of military
+genius and vision we have produced in this war that gave us that
+priceless victory.
+
+And if you have ever been on a walking tour or a cycling tour you know
+that early rising is the key of the business.  Start early and you are
+master of your programme and your fate.  You can linger by the way,
+take a dip in the mountain tarn, lie under the shadow of a great rock
+in the hot afternoon, and arrive at the valley inn in comfortable time
+for the evening meal.  Start late and you are the slave of the hours.
+You chase them with weary feet, pass the tarn with the haste of a
+dispatch bearer though you are dying for a bathe, and arrive when the
+roast and boiled are cleared away and the merry company are doing a
+"traverse" around the skirting board of the billiard room.  Happy
+reader, if you know the inn I mean--the jolly inn at Wasdale Head.
+
+No, whether from the point of view of business or pleasure, worldly
+wisdom or spiritual satisfaction, there is nothing to be said in our
+defence.  All that we can say for lying in bed is what Foote--I think
+it was Foote--said about the rum.  "I went into a public-house," he
+said, "and heard one man call for some rum because he was hot, and
+another call for some rum because he was cold.  Then I called for some
+rum because I liked it."  We sluggards had better make the same clean
+breast of the business.  We lie in bed because we like it.  Just that.
+Nothing more.  We like it.  We claim no virtue, ask no indulgence,
+accept with humility the rebukes of the strenuous.
+
+As for me, I have a licence--nay, I have more; I have a duty.  It is my
+duty to lie in bed o' mornings until the day is well aired.  For I burn
+the midnight oil, and the early blackbird--the first of our choir to
+awake--has often saluted me on my way home.  Therefore I lie in bed in
+the morning looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the
+busy world without a twinge of conscience.  If you were listening, you
+would hear me laugh softly to myself as I give the pillow another shake
+and thank providence for having given me a job that enables me to enjoy
+the privileges of the sluggard without incurring the odium that he so
+richly deserves.
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING KNOWN
+
+I went into a tailor's in the West End the other day to order some
+clothes.  My shadow rarely darkens a tailor's door, and this tailor's
+door it had never darkened before.  I was surprised therefore, when,
+after the preliminaries of measurement were finished, the attendant, in
+reply to a question about a deposit, said "No deposit is necessary.
+The name is good enough."  I confess I felt the compliment as an
+agreeable shock.  The request for a deposit always jars on me.  I know
+that "business is business" and that in this wilderness of London it is
+no dishonour to be unknown and no discredit to be formally discredited;
+but yet ... And here was a man I had never seen before and who had
+never seen me, who was prepared to execute my order without any sordid
+assurances of character on my side--simply on my name.  Such a tribute
+needed some recognition.  "It will save trouble," said I, "if I pay the
+account now."  And I did so.  I fancy the action was a little childish,
+but I couldn't help it.  I really couldn't.  I simply had to do
+something civil, and this was the only civil thing that occurred to me.
+
+And then I went out of the shop feeling that I had come suddenly into
+an unexpected and pleasing inheritance.  I knew now something of the
+emotion of Mr. Sholes, the eminent author:
+
+  Whenever down Fleet Street he strolls
+    The policemen look hurriedly up
+  And say "There's the great Mr. Sholes,
+    Who writes such delectable gup."
+
+I might not be able to write such delectable gup as Mr. Sholes, but I
+could write gup good enough to make that fellow in the shop trust me
+for a six-guinea suit.  I did not observe that the policeman took any
+particular notice of me as I passed along.  But--"Give me time," said
+I, addressing the shade of Mr. Sholes.  "Give me time.  I have made a
+start in the handicap of the famous.  I am known to that excellent
+shopman.  I may yet be known (favourably and admiringly) to the police.
+I may yet walk the Strand with a nimbus that will challenge Mr. Horatio
+Bottomley and Mr. Pemberton Billing and the illustrious great.  I may
+yet have the agreeable consciousness that heads are turning in my
+direction, and that the habitual Londoner is saying to his country
+cousin: 'That, my dear Jane, is the eminent Mr. Alpha of the Plough who
+writes those articles in _The Star_.' ... Give me time, Mr. Sholes.
+Give me time."
+
+But as I walked on and as that momentary flash of the limelight faded
+from me I became less confident that I wanted to live in it.  I became
+sensible of the pleasures of obscurity.  I strolled along untroubled by
+the curious, and enjoyed the pageant of the pavement, the display of
+dress, the diversity of faces, the play of light in the eyes, the
+incidents of the streets.  I paused in front of shops and fell into a
+reverie before the window of the incomparable Mr. Bumpus--the window of
+stately books in noble bindings.  I was submerged in the tide of the
+common life and felt the enfranchisement of the obscure.  I could walk
+which way I pleased and no one would remark me; pause when I liked and
+be unobserved.  But--why, here is Lord French of Ypres coming along.
+See how heads are turning and fingers are pointing and tongues are
+wagging--"That, my dear Jane..."  What a nuisance this limelight must
+be!
+
+And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust yourself out of
+doors--unless you have the courage of John Burns, who does not care two
+pins who sees him or talks about him.  The King, poor man, could no
+more walk along this pavement as I am doing, rubbing shoulders with the
+people and enjoying the comedy of life, than he could write to the
+newspapers, or address a crowd from the plinth of the Nelson Monument,
+or go to a booking-office and take a ticket for the Tube, or into an
+A.B.C. shop and ask for a cup of tea, or any of the thousand and one
+things that I am at liberty to do and enjoy doing without let or
+hindrance, comment or disturbance.  He is the prisoner of publicity.
+He is pursued by the limelight, as the fleeing soul of the poet was
+pursued by the hound of heaven.  He can't look in Bumpus's.  He can't
+go on to an allotment and dig undisturbed.  You cannot have limelight
+playing about an allotment.  In fact, the more one thinks of it the
+more impoverished his life seems, and so in a lesser degree with all
+the eminent people who are pursued by the photographer, mobbed in the
+streets, fawned on by their friends, slandered by their enemies,
+exalted or defamed in the Press, and dissected in every club
+smoking-room and bar parlour.
+
+But, you will say, think of the glory of having your name handed down
+to posterity.  It is a very questionable privilege.  I am not much
+concerned about posterity.  I respect it, as Wordsworth respected it.
+"What has posterity done for me that I should consider it?" some one
+said to him, and he replied, "No, but the past has done much for you."
+It was a just reminder of our obligations.  But it is a lean ambition
+to pose for posterity.  I cannot thrill to the vision of the trumpeter
+Fame blowing my name down the corridors of time while I sleep on
+unheeding in
+
+  My patrimony of a little mould
+  And entail of four planks.
+
+I am not warmed by the idea of a marble image standing with
+outstretched arm in the Abbey or sitting on a horse for ever in the
+streets, wet or fine, or perched up on a towering column to be a
+convenience to vagrant birds.  If fame is often a nuisance to the
+living, it is only an empty echo for the dead.  Spare me marble
+trappings, good friends, and give me the peace of forgetfulness.
+
+By the time I had reached the end of my walk and my ruminations, I felt
+less cordial towards that man in the shop.  I wished, on the whole,
+that he had asked for the deposit.
+
+
+
+
+ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND
+
+I was rummaging among my books this morning when I came across Frey's
+map of the Bernese Oberland, and forthwith forgot the object of my
+search in the presence of this exhilarating discovery.  Mr. Chesterton,
+I think, once described how he evoked the emotions of a holiday by
+calling a cab, piling it up with luggage, and driving to the station.
+Then, having had his sensation, he drove home again.  It seemed to me
+rather a poor way of taking an imaginative holiday.  One might as well
+heat an empty oven in order to imagine a feast.  The true medium of the
+spiritual holiday is the map.  That is the magic carpet that whisks you
+away from this sodden earth and unhappy present to sunny lands and
+serener days.
+
+There are times when books offer no escape from the burden of things,
+when, as Mr. Biglow says
+
+  I'm as unsoshul as a stone,
+  And kind o' suffercate to be alone;
+
+but there are no circumstances in which a map will not do the trick.  I
+do not care whether it is a map of the known or the unknown, the
+visited or the unvisited, the real or the fanciful.  It was the jolly
+map which Stevenson invented in an idle hour which became the seed of
+"Treasure Island."  That is how a map stimulated his fancy and sent it
+out on a career of immortal adventure.  And though you have not
+Stevenson's genius for describing the adventure, that is what a map
+will do for you if you have a spark of the boy's love of romance left
+in your soul.  It is the "magic casement" of the poet.  I have never
+crossed the Atlantic in the flesh, but, lord, what spiritual adventures
+I have had with maps in the enchanted world on the other side!  I have
+sailed with Drake in Nombre Dios Bay, and navigated the grim straits
+with Magellan, and lived with the Incas of Peru and the bloody Pizarro,
+and gone up the broad bosom of the Amazon into fathomless forests, and
+sailed through the Golden Gates on golden afternoons, and stood with
+Cortes "silent upon a peak in Darien."  I know the Shenandoah Valley
+far better than I know Wimbledon Common, and have fought over every
+inch of it by the side of Stonewall Jackson, just as I have lived in
+the mazes of the Wilderness with Grant and Lee.
+
+Do not tell me I have never been to these places and a thousand others
+like them.  I swear that I have.  I have traversed them all in the
+kingdom of the mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy day
+(like this) I will go on a holiday more entrancing than any that Mr.
+Cook ever planned.  It is not taking tickets that makes the traveller.
+I have known people who have gone round the world without seeing
+anything, while Thoreau could stay in his back garden and entertain the
+universe.
+
+But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic of romance in them,
+maps of the places you have known have a fascination no less rich and
+deep.  They, too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of
+memory and not of the imagination.  You are back with yourself in other
+days and in other places and with other friends.  You may tell me that
+this was a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it looking out
+over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields with their stricken
+crops.  Nothing of the sort.  I spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with
+an incomparable companion.  Three weeks I put in, sir, three weeks on
+the glaciers.  See, there, on this glorious map of Frey's, is Mürren,
+from whence we started.  In front is the mighty snow mass of the
+Jungfrau, the Mönch and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes
+whither we are bound.
+
+There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg and there is the
+Mütthorn hut, standing on the bit of barren rock that sticks out from
+the great ice-billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier.  Do you remember,
+companion of mine, the mighty bowls of steaming tea we drank when we
+reached that haven of refuge?  And do you remember our start from the
+hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with our guide and with our
+lanterns lit--and the silence of our march over the snow and ice
+beneath the glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant
+avalanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over the ice-fields,
+and the unforgettable view as we reached the ridge of the Petersgrat
+and saw across the Rhone Valley the great mountain masses beyond--the
+Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest--touched to an
+unearthly beauty by the flush of the new-risen sun?  And the scramble
+up the Tschingelhorn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the
+moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal?  And then the days that
+followed in the great ice region behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent
+marches over pathless snows and by yawning crevasses, the struggle up
+peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, sometimes with other
+climbers who blew in across the snows from some remote adventure,
+sometimes alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where we
+paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood to boil our kettle?
+
+There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of a dizzy precipice.
+Do you remember the sunset we saw from thence, when out of the general
+gloom of the conquering night one beam from the vanished sun caught the
+summit of the Dom and made it gleam like a palace in the heavens or
+like the towers of the radiant city that Christian saw across the dark
+river?  And there at the end of the journey is the great glacier that
+leaps down, seven thousand feet, between the Schreckhorn and the
+Wetterhorn, to the gracious valley of Grindelwald.  How innocent it
+looks on this map, but what a day of gathering menace was that when we
+got caught between the impassable crevasses, and night came on and the
+rain came down and ... But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here....
+
+It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking Glass leapt up from our
+bed of hay in the Dolfuss hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the
+breakfast.  Outside, the rain fell in torrents and the clouds hung
+thick and low over glacier and peaks.  Our early start for the
+Gleckstein hut was thwarted.  Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and
+still the rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and ice.  Then
+the crest of the Finstraarhorn appeared through a rent in the clouds,
+patches of blue broke up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased.
+Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and plates and swept
+the floor of the hut, and then, shouldering our rucksacks and closing
+the door of the empty hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier.
+
+It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven hours' journey to
+the Gleckstein.  That seemed to leave ample margin; but do not trust
+guide-books in a season of drought when the crevasses are open.
+
+This wisdom, however, came later.  All through the morning we made
+excellent progress.  The sun shone, the clouds hung lightly about the
+peaks, the ice was in excellent condition.  Heinrich, who brought up
+the rear, occasionally broke into song.  Now, when Heinrich sings you
+know that all is well.  When he whistles you are in a tight place.  For
+the rest he is silent.  Otmar, his brother, is less communicative.  He
+goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting crevasses,
+testing snow-bridges to see if they will bear, occasionally pausing to
+consult his maps.  Once only did he burst into song that day--but of
+that later.  Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks.  In the hut
+he will make your tea and oil your boots and help Heinrich to wash your
+cups and sweep the floor.  But out in the open he is your master.  If
+you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear.  If you suggest a
+second breakfast before it is due his silence as he pounds forward
+ahead humiliates you.  If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the
+taut insistence of the rope.
+
+It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and sardines (white wine
+for Otmar and Heinrich).  The pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of
+taking out his pocket looking-glass and touching up his moustache ends
+and giving a flick to his eye-brows.  Heinrich is as big and brawny as
+an ox, but he has the soul of a dandy.
+
+It had been easy going on the furrowed face of the ice, but when we
+came to the snow slope that leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace
+slackened.  The snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our
+shins.  Otmar eased the passage up the slope by zigzagging, but it was
+one o'clock when we came face to face with the wall of snow, flanked by
+walls of rock, which form the "saddle."  Otmar led my companion over
+the rocks; but decided that Heinrich should bring me up the snow face.
+Step cutting is slow work, and though Otmar, having reached the top of
+the saddle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed round his
+waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible wall was surmounted, and
+we could look down the great glacier that plunged seven thousand feet
+down into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red roofs and
+pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists.
+
+We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pass; but we seemed,
+nevertheless, to have the day well in hand.  Four thousand feet down on
+a spur of the Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleckstein
+hut.  It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, but in these vast
+solitudes of ice and snow and rock, vision is deceptive.  The distant
+seems incredibly near, for the familiar measurements of the eye are
+wanting.
+
+The weather had changed again.  Clouds had settled on the mighty cliffs
+of the Schreckhorn on our left and the Wetterhorn on our right.  Mist
+was rolling over the pass; rain began to fall.  We cut short our lunch
+(cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our descent, making a
+wide detour of the glacier to the right in the direction of the
+Wetterhorn.  We descended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier,
+crossed an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and came in view
+of Grindelwald, lying like a picture postcard far down below--so
+immediately below that it seemed that one might fling a stone down into
+its midst.
+
+At half-past three it began to dawn on me that things were not going
+well.  Otmar had, during the past three weeks, been the most skilful of
+guides over most of the great glacier passes of the Oberland and up
+many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like the condition of the
+Grindtlwaldfirn.  The appalling slope of this great sea of ice makes a
+descent in normal times a task of difficulty.  But this year the long
+drought had left open all the yawning crevasses with which it is
+seamed, and its perils were infinitely increased.
+
+Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the maze, taking us across
+perilous snow bridges and cutting steps on knife-edges of ice where one
+looked down the glittering slope on one side, and into the merciless
+green-blue depths of the crevasse on the other.  But wherever he turned
+he was baulked.  Always the path led to some vast fissure which could
+be neither leapt nor bridged.  Once we seemed to have escaped and
+glissaded swiftly down.  Then the slope got steeper and we
+walked--steeper and Otmar began cutting steps in the ice--steeper and
+Otmar paused and looked down the leap of the glacier.  We stood silent
+for his verdict.  "It will not go."  We turned on the rope without a
+word, and began remounting our steps.
+
+It was half-past four.  The mist was thickening, the rain falling
+steadily.  Below, the red roofs and green pastures of Grindelwald
+gleamed in the sunlight of the valley.  Nearer, the slate roof of the
+Gleckstein on its spur of rock was still visible.  Two hours before it
+had seemed but a step to either.  Now they seemed to have receded to
+another hemisphere.
+
+For the first time there flashed through the mind the thought that
+possibly we should not reach the hut after all.  A night on the
+glacier, or rather on the dark ridges of the Wetterhorn!  A wet night,
+too.
+
+The same thought was working in Otmar's mind.  No word came from him,
+no hint that he was concerned.  But the whole bearing of the man was
+changed.  In the long hours of the morning he had led us listlessly and
+silently; now he was like a hound on the trail.  The tug of the rope
+became more insistent.  He made us face difficulties that he had
+skirted before; took us on to snow-bridges that made the mind reel;
+slashed steps with his ice axe with a swift haste that spoke in every
+stroke of the coming night.  Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge
+that came to a point between two crevasses, slipped back, and found
+myself in the crevasse, with my feet dancing upon nothing.  The rope
+held; Otmar hauled me out without a word, and we resumed our march.
+
+Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to prospect from above for a
+possible way out.  We followed at his call, but he led us into new
+mazes, down into a great cavern in the glacier, where we passed over
+the ruined walls and buttresses of an ice cathedral, emerging on the
+surface of the glacier again, only to find ourselves once more checked
+by impassable gulfs.
+
+It was now half-past five.  We had been three and a half hours in
+vainly attempting to find a way down the ice.  The mist had come thick
+upon us.  The peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; the
+hut was no longer visible.  Only an hour and a half of light remained,
+and the whole problem was still unsolved.  The possibility of a night
+on the ice or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty.  My
+strength was giving out, and I slipped again and again in the ice
+steps.  A kind of dull resignation had taken possession of the mind.
+One went forward in a stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but
+indifferent to all else.
+
+Otmar was now really concerned.  He came from a valley south of the
+Rhone, and was unfamiliar with this pass; but he is of a great strain
+of Alpine guides, is proud of his achievements--he had led in the first
+ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year--and to be
+benighted on a glacier would have been a deadly blow to his pride.
+
+He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direction of the ridge of
+the Wetterhorn that plunged down on our right.  We watched him skimming
+across crevasses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice for
+foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and vanishing into a couloir
+of the mountain--first depositing his rucksack on the rocks to await
+his return.  Five minutes passed--ten.  Heinrich startled the silence
+with an halloo--no answer.  A quarter of an hour--then, from far below,
+a faint cry came.
+
+"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on."  We hurried across the
+intervening ice, and met Otmar returning like a cat up the rocks.  Down
+that narrow slit in the mountain we descended with headlong speed.
+There were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to cross with
+negligible foot and hand holds, passages of loose rock where a careless
+move would have sent great stones thundering on the heads of those
+before.  Once Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a
+smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet.  Once he cried: "Quick: it is
+dangerous," and looking up at the crest of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge
+block of ice poised perilously above our downward path.
+
+The night was now upon us.  We were wet to the skin.  A thunderstorm of
+exceptional violence added to the grimness of the setting.  But we were
+down the ridge at last.  We raced across a narrow tongue of the glacier
+and were safe on the spur of rocks where we knew the Gleckstein hut to
+be.  But there was no light to guide us.  We scrambled breathlessly
+over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, each of us
+hardly visible to the other in the thickening mist, save when the blaze
+of lightning flashed the scene into sudden and spectral clearness.  At
+last we struck a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted
+the latch of the hut.
+
+"What is the time, Heinrich?"
+
+"Half-past eight."
+
+"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had been benighted?"
+
+Otmar did not hear.  But as he got the wood and made the fire, and
+emptied the rucksacks of our provisions, he began to sing in a pleasant
+tenor voice.  And Heinrich joined in with his full bass.
+
+And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and wrapped in blankets, we
+sat down to a glorious meal of steaming tea--in an iron teapot as large
+as a pail--tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam.
+
+"That was a narrow escape from a night on the mountains," I said.
+
+"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich.
+
+Otmar said nothing.
+
+Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of hay.
+
+"It is fine," he said.  "The Wetterhorn will go."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves still stand in the
+sodden fields.  But I have been a journey.  I have had three weeks in
+the Oberland--three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, the
+world that seems like a dream we once had, so remote has it become and
+so incredible.  I roll up my magic carpet and bless the man who
+invented maps for the solace of men.
+
+
+
+
+ON A TALK IN A BUS
+
+I jumped on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening and took a seat
+against the door.  Opposite me sat a young woman in a conductor's
+dress, who carried on a lively conversation with the woman conductor in
+charge of the bus.  There were the usual criticisms of the habits and
+wickedness of passengers, and then the conductor inside asked the other
+at the door how "Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was
+"sticking it out."
+
+"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said.
+
+"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," replied the other.
+
+"Have you seen her when she has her hat off?  She's pretty then."
+
+"Can't see what difference that would make."
+
+"She's got nice eyes."
+
+"Never see anything particular about her eyes."
+
+"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway."
+
+"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the pretty about
+her--not a little bit.  Pretty!"  She tossed her head and looked
+indignant, almost hurt, as though she had received some secret personal
+affront.
+
+I do not think she had.  It was more probable that on a subject about
+which she felt deeply she had suffered a painful shock.  She liked
+"Flo," thought her "a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not
+be permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sacred subject like
+"prettiness."
+
+The little incident interested me because it illustrated one of the
+great differences between the sexes.  You have only to try to turn that
+conversation into masculine terms to see how wide that difference is.
+Tom and Bill might have a hundred things to say about Jack.  They might
+agree that he was a liar or an honest chap, that he drank too much or
+didn't drink enough, that he was mean or generous; but there is one
+thing it would never occur to them to discuss.  It would never occur to
+them to discuss his looks, to talk about his eyes, to consider whether
+he was more beautiful with or without his hat.  They might say that he
+looked merry or miserable, sulky or pleasant, but that would have
+reference to Jack's character and moral aptitudes and not to any
+æsthetic consideration.
+
+But this conversation about "Flo" was entirely æsthetic.  The question
+of her moral traits only came in as a means of dodging the main issue.
+The main issue was whether she was pretty, and it was evidently a very
+important issue indeed.
+
+It is this interest of women in their own sex as works of art that
+distinguishes them from men.  Men have no interest in their own sex in
+that sense.  Sit on a bus and see what interests the male passenger.
+It is not his fellow males.  He does not sit and study their clothes,
+and make mental notes on their claims to beauty.  If he is interested
+in his fellow passengers at all it is the other sex that appeals to
+him.  His own sex has no pictorial attraction for him.  But a woman is
+interested in women and women only.  It is their clothes that her eye
+wanders over with mild envy or disapproval.  You almost hear her mind
+recording the price of that muff, those furs, the hat and the boots.
+At the end of her survey you feel that she knows what everything cost,
+what are the wearer's ambitions, social status, place of residence--in
+fact, all about her.  And she is equally concerned about her physical
+qualities.  She will watch a pretty face with open admiration, and pay
+it the same sort of tribute that she would pay to a beautiful picture
+or any other work of art.  "What a pretty woman!"  "What lovely hair
+that girl has!"
+
+This is not a peculiarity of our own people alone.  Not long ago I went
+with two French officers over a great munitions factory near Paris.  We
+were accompanied by a clever little woman who was secretary to the head
+of one of the departments, and who acted as guide.  We went through
+great shops where thousands of women were working, and as we passed
+along I noticed that every eye fell on the little woman.  I became so
+interested in this human fact that I forgot to give my attention to the
+machinery.  And to be honest I am always ready to turn away from
+machinery, which to me is much less interesting than human nature.  I
+think I can say with truth that not one woman in all those thousands
+failed to scan our guide or bothered to give one glance at the
+officers.  Yet they were fine fellows and obviously important persons,
+while the guide was commonplace in appearance and quite plainly dressed.
+
+There are of course women who dress and comport themselves with an eye
+to male admiration as well as female envy and appreciation.  They are
+the women of the bold eye, which is not the same thing as the brave
+eye.  But taking women in the lump, it is their own sex they are
+interested in.  They devote enormous attention to dress, but they do so
+for each other's enjoyment.  They have a passion for personal beauty,
+but it is the personal beauty of their own sex that appeals to them.
+No doubt there is a sexual motive underlying this fact.  It is the
+motive expressed in "'My face is my fortune, sir,' she said."  The
+desire to be pretty is ultimately the desire to be matrimonially
+fortunate.  Bill's success in life has no relation to his looks.  He
+may be as ugly as sin, but if he has strong arms, a good digestion, and
+a sound mind he will do as well as another.  Some of the plainest men
+in England have sat on the Woolsack.  Plain women, it is true, have
+come to eminence.  Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., is a
+case in point.  She herself was puzzled to explain her influence over
+that sour fanatic-libertine, for, as she said, "I have no beauty and he
+has not the faculty to appreciate my intelligence."  But the exceptions
+prove the rule.  Prettiness is the woman's commodity.  It is the badge
+of her servitude.  And behind that little conversation in the bus about
+"Flo's" claims to prettiness was a very practical, though unformed,
+consideration of her prospects in life.
+
+What will be the effect of the war upon "Flo" and her kind?  She has
+found that she has an independent, non-sexual importance to society,
+that she has a career which has nothing to do with prettiness, that she
+can win her bread with her mental and physical faculties as easily as a
+man.  She has tasted freedom and discovered herself.  The discovery
+will give her a new independence of outlook, a more self-confident view
+of her place in society, a greater respect for the hard practical
+things of life.  She will still desire to be pretty and to have the
+admiration of her sex, but the desire will have a sounder foundation
+than in the past It will no longer be her career.  It will be her
+ornament.  It will decorate the fact that she can run a bus as well as
+a man.
+
+
+
+
+ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT
+
+I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we
+shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall
+find against our names in the ledger of our life.  We shall discover
+that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping
+credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our
+failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on
+the credit side.  The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at
+all.  They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.
+
+
+Take Smithson Spinks--everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type.  What a
+reputation for generosity the fellow has!  What a grandeur of giving he
+exhales!  How noble his scorn for mean fellows!  How royal the flash of
+his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man,
+or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself!  No one hesitates
+to ask Smithson Spinks for anything.  He likes to be asked.  He would
+be hurt if he were not asked.  And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's
+generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside
+out.  The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but
+love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and
+envy of others.  You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the
+real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles
+when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle
+perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the
+part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad.  He believes in his own
+fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock.
+He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written
+in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY
+in plain black on the debit side.
+
+And I--let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person.
+But am I?  What will the ledger say?  I have a dreadful suspicion that
+it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve.
+I may--who knows?--only be truthful because I haven't courage enough
+for dissimulation.  It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but
+only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit.  It needs great courage
+to tell a lie which you have got to face out.  I could no more do it
+than I could dance on the point of a needle.
+
+Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton--the sheer
+unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing
+Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing
+judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous
+inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of
+exposure.  A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what
+courage!
+
+Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a
+chance.  I have no gift of dissimulation.  If I tried it I should
+flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates.  I could not bluff a
+rabbit.  No one would believe me if I told him a lie.  My eye would
+return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would
+refuse its office.  And therein is the worm that eats at my
+self-respect.  May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due
+to my fear of the eleventh commandment--that cynical rescript which
+runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"?  I hope it is not so, but I must
+prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of
+Jehoshaphat.  For they will be as candid about me and you as about
+Smithson Spinks.
+
+You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have
+shipped him, figuratively,
+
+  ... somewhere east of Suez
+  Where the best is like the worst,
+  Where there aren't no ten commandments,
+  And a man can raise a thirst--
+
+until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him
+from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with
+minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled
+governance of himself.  Then it will be found whether the virtues are
+diamonds or paste--whether they spring out of the ten commandments or
+out of the eleventh.  The lord Angelo in _Measure for Measure_ passed
+for a strict and saintly person--and I have no doubt believed himself
+to be a strict and saintly person--so long as he was under control, but
+when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared.  And note that
+subtle touch of Shakespeare's.  Angelo was not an ordinary libertine.
+He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only
+by virtue.  Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:
+
+  ... What is't I dream on?
+  O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
+  With saints dost bait thy hook!  Most dangerous
+  Is that temptation that doth goad us on
+  To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
+  With all her double vigour, art and nature
+  Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
+  Subdues me quite.
+
+His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the
+floodgates of viciousness.  What a paradox is man!  I think I have
+known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better
+than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.
+
+That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of
+sobriety.  Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into
+great trouble for saying so.  He was addressing a temperance meeting at
+a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have
+never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence
+of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who
+have fallen."  It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the
+stern teetotalers present.  "It's a shame," said one, "that he should
+be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord."  They did not
+like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and
+even got drunk.  They expected to have a large credit entry for not
+tippling.  Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale."
+If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from
+them you were virtuous.  It was a beautifully simple moral code, but
+virtue is not so easily catalogued.  It is not a negative thing, but a
+positive thing.  It is not measured by its antipathies but by its
+sympathies.  Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its
+names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before
+"religion and piety."
+
+And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling
+what virtue is there in not tippling?  The virtue is often with the
+tippler.  I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless,
+had been an heroic struggle with his enemy.  He was always falling, but
+he never ceased fighting.  And it is the fighting, I think, he will
+find recorded in the ledger--greatly to his surprise, for he had the
+most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral
+infirmity.
+
+It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a
+Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to
+steal half-a-crown.  He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no
+virtue in not stealing what you don't want.  That was what was wrong
+with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were
+the best:
+
+  Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steäls,
+  Them as 'as coäts to their backs an' taäkes their regular meäls.
+  Noä, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meäl's to be 'ad--
+  Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.
+
+It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the
+temptation.  He will have found a much more complex system of
+book-keeping where he has gone.  I imagine him standing painfully
+puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the
+"valley of decision."
+
+
+
+
+ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER
+
+"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the
+man in the corner.
+
+"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.
+
+"I mean those Huns," said the other.
+
+"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier.  "He
+can't help hisself.  He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as
+we are, and he does the job same as we do.  But he'd jolly well like to
+chuck the business and go home.  Course he would.  Stands to reason.
+Anybody would."
+
+It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously
+felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier--a
+personal hatred of the individual enemy.  This man clearly did not hate
+the enemy.  Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant
+reason.  He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four
+times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice.  It was
+two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to
+see his people in the West of England.  He talked about his experiences
+with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things,
+quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of
+egotism.  He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at
+G----.  "Nobody can hold it," he said.  "We take it when we like, and
+Fritz, he takes it when _he_ likes.  That's all there is about it."  It
+was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always
+without any appearance of personal animus.
+
+I do not record the incident as unusual.  I record it as usual.  No one
+who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank
+or file, will dispute this.  In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse
+a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to
+do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters.  You
+have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate.  I
+have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more
+bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have
+heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of
+utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be
+found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the
+studies of be-spectacled professors.
+
+The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and
+suffering too close, to be consumed with hate.  If he could envy the
+other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him.  But he sees
+that Fritz is in no better plight than himself.  He is living in the
+mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine
+of war as himself.  He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering
+the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No
+Man's Land.  It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow.
+And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion.  The chord
+of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his
+enemy he ceases to hate him.
+
+But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this
+means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in
+consequence.  The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is
+an infantile delusion.  I should have much more confidence in that
+quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I
+should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and
+prove their patriotism by the violence of their language.  I have known
+many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I
+cannot recall one--not one--who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.
+
+The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the
+soldier's gospel at all.  There have been few greater soldiers in
+history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man.  He fought
+literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the
+doctrine of hate.  When the minister in the course of a sermon had
+expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor,
+there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.'  Do you think
+that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that
+teaching?"  And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I
+wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so?
+Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and
+leaving us to do the same."  And Lee stated his attitude generally when
+he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I
+believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights.  But
+I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never
+seen the day when I did not pray for them."
+
+There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's
+and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day.  In the
+current issue of _Punch_ I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of
+that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which
+he said:
+
+  But where you have met your equals,
+    Gun for gun and man for man,
+  We have noticed other sequels,
+    It was always you that ran.
+
+
+In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a
+report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:
+
+
+Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquières were obtained by a
+German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a
+field gun single-handed until killed at his gun.  The great bravery of
+this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.
+
+
+The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain
+Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman.  He was
+little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled
+career of victory in the air.  He fought with a terrible skill, but he
+had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for
+the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary.  In one of
+his letters to his father he said:
+
+
+You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight.  Yes, I always let
+them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils.  I only
+scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the
+Huns.  He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his
+best.  Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but
+you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case
+of _them_.
+
+
+And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in
+another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual
+laughter:
+
+
+We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition.  There was
+nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing.  We
+couldn't help it--it was so ridiculous.  We flew side by side laughing
+at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other
+and went off.  He was a real sport was that Hun.
+
+
+That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited
+boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty,
+failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry
+laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.
+
+And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I
+shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day,
+even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there
+are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something
+nobler than hate.  The letter appeared in the _Cologne Gazette_ early
+in the war, and was as follows:
+
+
+Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these
+lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly.
+I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal
+packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French,
+English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.
+
+The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy.
+Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary,
+everyone expresses his displeasure.
+
+This is natural when one considers the position.  We know how victories
+are won.  We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained.
+We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield.  We
+rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection
+of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.
+
+And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not
+deserved to be derided in such a way.  Had they not fought so bravely
+we should not have had to register such losses.
+
+Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect
+here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is
+only calculated to cause disgust.  Such postcards are as much out of
+place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral.  Perhaps these
+lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards
+sent to our troops.
+
+
+I do not suppose they did.  I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home
+went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at
+the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit.  But it is not.
+There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not
+against the victims of war, but against the institution of war.  That
+is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+ON TAKING THE CALL
+
+Jane came home from the theatre last night overflowing with an
+indignation that even the beauty of a ride on the top of a bus in the
+air of these divine summer nights had not cooled.  It was not
+dissatisfaction with the play or the performance that made her boil
+with volcanic wrath.  It was the vanity of the insufferable
+actor-manager, who would insist on "taking the call" all the time and
+every time.  There were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed,
+but the more the audience called for them the more the preposterous
+"old-clo'" man of the stage came smirking before the curtain, rubbing
+his fat hands and creasing his fat cheeks.  "It was disgusting," said
+Jane.  "The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all night,
+and the audience were trying to level things up a bit by giving the
+interesting people a show, and this greedy cormorant snatched every
+crumb for himself.  I hate him.  He is a Hun."
+
+The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard about another
+actor-manager.  At the end of the play he went on the stage and found
+his company bending down in a circle and gazing intently at something
+on the floor.  "What are you looking at?" he asked.  "Oh," they chanted
+in chorus, "we're looking at a spot we've never seen before.  It's the
+centre of the stage."
+
+There are, of course, people who carry the centre of the stage with
+them.  It does not matter where they go or what they play: they
+dominate the scene.  "Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table,"
+and where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage.  He needed no
+placard to remind you that he was someone in particular.  You would no
+more have thought of turning the limelight on to him than you would
+have thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or the sun at
+midday.  He just appeared and everyone else became accessory to that
+commanding presence: he spoke and all other voices seemed like the
+chirping of sparrows.
+
+And so in other spheres.  Take the case of Mr. Asquith, for example, in
+relation to the House of Commons.  It does not matter where he sits.
+He may go to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre of
+the stage will go with him.  When he had sat down after delivering his
+first speech in opposition, one of the ablest observers in Parliament
+turned to me and said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of the
+House."  And that exactly expressed the feeling created by that
+authoritative manner, that masculine voice, that air of high detachment
+from the mere squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game.  He never
+seemed greater to the House than in the moment when he had
+fallen--never more its intellectual master, its most authentic voice,
+its wisest and most disinterested counsellor.
+
+It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, who come sprinting
+before the curtain after drenching themselves in the limelight on the
+stage.  They hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the
+applause.  The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking the call" are
+quite another breed.  You know the type, both on the stage and off.
+Take that eminent actor, Bluffington Phelps.  He shambles about the
+stage, his words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's
+under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances at the man with
+the limelight he is straining to catch the voice of the prompter at the
+flies.  But when it comes to "taking the call" there is not his
+superior on the stage.  He monopolises the applause as he monopolises
+the limelight; and by these artifices he has persuaded the public that
+he is an actor.  It is a glorious joke--
+
+  Hood an ass in reverend purple,
+  So that you hide his too ambitious ears,
+  And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
+
+
+It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some of the people all
+the time.  Mr. Bluffington Phelps knows that it is true.  He knows that
+there is a large part of the public, possibly the majority of the
+public, which is born to be fooled, which will believe anything because
+it hasn't the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd and
+which will always follow the ass with the longest ears and the loudest
+bray.
+
+It is the same off the stage.  The art of politics is the art of
+"taking the call."  Harley knew the trick perfectly.  Where anything
+was to be got, it was said of him, he always knew how to wriggle
+himself in; when any misfortune threatened he knew how to wriggle
+himself out.  He took the cheers and passed the kicks on to his
+colleagues.  His chivalrous spirit is not dead.  It is familiar in
+every country, but most of all in democratic countries.  We all know
+the type of politician who has the true genius for the limelight.  If
+the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is miserable.  "What has
+happened to the publicity department?  Has the fellow in charge of the
+limelight gone to sleep?  Wake him up.  Don't let the public forget me.
+If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em that my hat is two sizes
+larger than it was a year ago.  Tell 'em about my famous smile.  Tell
+'em about my dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable piety.
+Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every morning and never leave
+it until half-past seven the next morning.  Tell 'em anything you
+like--only tell 'em."
+
+If things go right, and there is applause in the house, he skips in
+front of the curtain to take the call.  "Thank you, gentlemen--and
+ladies.  Thank you.  Yes, alone I did it.  Nobody else in the company
+had a hand in it--nor a finger.  No, not a finger."  If anything goes
+wrong and the audience hiss, does he shirk the ordeal?  Not at all.  He
+comes before the curtain with indignant sorrow.  "Yes, ladies and
+gentlemen, I agree with you.  Most scandalous failure.  It was all
+Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's.  I went down on my bended
+knees to them, but they wouldn't listen to me--wouldn't listen.  And
+now you see what's happened.  Hear the anguish in my voice.  Look at
+the tears in my broken-hearted eyes.  Oh, the pity of it, ladies and
+gentlemen--the pity of it.  And I tried so hard--I really did.  But
+they wouldn't listen--they wouldn't l-l-listen."  (Breaks down in sobs.)
+
+I recall a legend that seems apposite.  A certain politician of
+antiquity--let us all call him Eurysthenes--hit on a happy idea for
+making himself famous.  He bought a lot of parrots and taught them to
+shriek "Great is Eurysthenes!"  Then he turned them all out into the
+woods, and there they sat and squawked "Great is Eurysthenes!"  And the
+Athenians, astonished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried,
+"Great is Eurysthenes."  And Eurysthenes, who was waiting in the flies,
+so to speak, took the call and was famous ever after.
+
+
+
+
+A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG
+
+Chum, roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking at the universe in
+general and at the cows in the paddock beyond the orchard in
+particular.  Occasionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which
+the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but he soon tires of
+this diversion and resumes his loud-voiced demand to share in the good
+things that are going.  For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting
+over the valley, and the woods are calling him to unknown adventures.
+They shall not call in vain.  Work shall be suspended and this morning
+shall be dedicated to his service.  For this is the day of deliverance.
+The word is spoken and the shadow of the sword is lifted.  The battle
+for his biscuit is won.
+
+He does not know what a narrow shave he has had.  He does not know that
+for weeks past he has been under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a
+luxury that this savage world of men could no longer afford; that
+having taken away his bones we were about to take away his biscuits and
+leave his cheerful companionship a memory of the dream world we lived
+in before the Great Killing began.  All this he does not know.  That is
+one of the numerous advantages of being a dog.  He knows nothing of the
+infamies of men or of the incertitudes of life.  He does not look
+before and after and pine for what is not.  He has no yesterday and no
+to-morrow--only the happy or the unhappy present.  He does not, as
+Whitman says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or lamenting
+his past or worrying about his future.  His bereavements do not disturb
+him and he doesn't care twopence about his career.  He has no debts and
+hungers for no honours.  He would rather have a bone than a baronetcy.
+He does not turn over old albums, with their pictured records of
+forgotten holidays and happy scenes and yearn for the "tender grace of
+a day that is dead," or wonder whether he will keep his job and what
+will become of his "poor old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he
+doesn't, or speculate whether the war will end this year, next year,
+some time, or never.  He doesn't even know there is a war.  Think of
+it!  He doesn't know there is a war.  O happy dog!  Give him a bone, a
+biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, and his cup of joy is
+full.  Would that my needs were as few and as easily satisfied.
+
+And now his biscuit is safe and I have the rare privilege of rejoicing
+with Sir Frederick Banbury.  I do not know that I should go as far as
+he seems to go, for in that touching little speech of his at the Cannon
+Street Hotel he indicated that nothing in the heavens above or in the
+earth beneath should stand between him and his dogs.  "In August,
+1914," he said, "my son went to France.  The night before he left he
+said, 'Father, look after my dogs and horses while I am away.'  I said,
+'Don't you worry about them.'  He was killed in December, and I have
+got the horses and dogs now.  As I said to Mr. Bonar Law last year, I
+should like to see the man who would tell me I have not to look after
+my son's dogs and horses."  Well, I suppose that if the choice were
+between a German victory and a dog biscuit, the dog biscuit would have
+to go, Sir Frederick.  But I rejoice with you that we have not to make
+the choice.  I rejoice that the sentence of death has passed from your
+dead son's horses and dogs and from that noble creature under the
+cherry tree.
+
+Look at him, barking now at the cows, now with eloquent appeal at me,
+and then, having caught my eye, turning sportively to worry the hated
+rope.  He knows that my intentions this morning are honourable.  I
+think he feels that, in spite of appearances, I am in that humour in
+which at any radiant moment the magic word "Walk" may leap from my
+lips.  What a word that is!  No sleep so sound that it will not
+penetrate its depths and bring him, passionately awake, to his feet.
+He would sacrifice the whole dictionary for that one electric syllable.
+That and its brother "Bones."  Give him these good, sound, sensible
+words, and all the fancies of the poets and all the rhetoric of the
+statesmen may whistle down the winds.  He has no use for them.  "Walk"
+and "Bones"--that is the speech a fellow can understand.
+
+Yes, Chum knows very well that I am thinking about him and thinking
+about him in an uncommonly friendly way.  That is the secret of the
+strange intimacy between us.  We may love other animals, and other
+animals may respond to our affection.  But the dog is the only animal
+who has a reciprocal intelligence.  As Coleridge says, he is the only
+animal that _looks upward_ to man, strains to catch his meanings,
+hungers for his approval.  Stroke a cat or a horse, and it will have a
+physical pleasure; but pat Chum and call him "Good dog!" and he has a
+spiritual pleasure.  He feels good.  He is pleased because you are
+pleased.  His tail, his eyebrows, every part of him, proclaim that
+"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," and that he himself
+is on the side of the angels.
+
+And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he has the sense of
+sin.  A cat may be taught not to do certain things, but if it is caught
+out and flees, it flees not from shame, but from fear.  But the shame
+of a dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any human emotion.
+He has fallen out of the state of grace, and nothing but the absolution
+and remission of his sin will restore him to happiness.  By his
+association with man he seems to have caught something of his capacity
+for spiritual misery.  I had an Airedale once who had moods of
+despondency as abysmal as my own.  He was as sentimental as any minor
+poet, and at the sound of certain tunes on the piano he would break
+into paroxysms of grief, whining and moaning as if in one moment of
+concentrated anguish he recalled every bereavement he had endured,
+every bone he had lost, every stone heaved at him by his hated enemy,
+the butcher's boy.  Indeed, there are times when the dog approximates
+so close to our intelligence that he seems to be of us, a sort of
+humble relation of ourselves, with our elementary feelings but not our
+gift of expression, our joy but not our laughter, our misery but not
+our tears, our thoughts but not our speech.  To sentence him to death
+would be almost like homicide, and the day of his reprieve should be
+celebrated as a festival....
+
+Come, old friend.  Let us away to the woods.  "Walk" ...
+
+
+
+
+ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND
+
+I was walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago and had a singular
+impression of a cheerful world.  The Strand is to me always the most
+attractive street I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun
+is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light glints and dances
+in the eyes of the crowd moving westward.  Then it is that I seem to
+see the wayfarers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pursuit of
+some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am almost persuaded to turn
+round and catch with them the flash of vision that gleams in their
+eyes.  But the thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual
+gaiety of the people.  It seemed to me that I had never seen such a
+procession of laughing, happy faces.  Probably it was due to the fact
+that it was about the time when the afternoon theatres were emptying.
+Probably also the impression on my mind was all the sharper because it
+was a day of depressing tidings--bad news from Russia, from Italy, from
+everywhere.  I did not suppose that these merry people were ignorant of
+the news or indifferent to it.  They were simply obeying the impulse of
+healthy minds and good digestions to be cheerful--_quand même_.
+
+And as I passed along I wondered whether, in spite of all the tragedy
+in which our life is cast, our fund of personal happiness is
+undiminished.  Do we come into the world with a certain capacity for
+pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our external
+circumstances may be?  Johnson took that view and expressed it in the
+familiar lines incorporated in Goldsmith's "Traveller"--the only lines
+of Johnson's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort of
+immortality:
+
+  How small, of all that human hearts endure,
+  That part which kings or laws can cause or cure.
+  Still to ourselves in every place consigned
+  Our own felicity we make or find.
+
+In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse.
+Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but
+distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform.
+And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation
+to the conditions in which we live.
+
+It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the
+slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by
+exploiting others.  And like most falsities there is a sense in which
+it is true.  The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and
+probably experiences as much animal happiness--assuming it is
+sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm--as the boy in the Eton
+playing-fields.  It is a mercy it is so.  It is a mercy that we have
+this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and
+bitter blows of outward circumstance.  But he who advances this fact as
+a political argument is not a wise man.  Is the quality of happiness
+nothing?  Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a
+pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the
+infinite fields of the mind's adventures?  Is it nothing to society?
+We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.
+
+But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects,
+there is much truth in Johnson's lines.  Happiness is an entirely
+personal affair.  We have it in large measure or in small, but in so
+far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of
+fortune.  I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not
+lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of
+happiness.  If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will
+afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may
+be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction.  I hope
+it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on
+the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer
+physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less
+to-day than in normal times.
+
+I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed
+satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most
+"interesting" period of the world's history.  There was an indignant
+protest against the word from another member of the company; but the
+author insisted.  Yes, interesting.  Could not tragedy be interesting
+as well as comedy?  Could not one feel all the horror and misery and
+insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's
+part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the
+mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and
+pronounce it--yes, interesting?  His own record of unselfish service
+during the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and ordered world
+were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.
+
+And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough.  There has never
+been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the
+energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we
+are living.  It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours
+everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks
+up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe,
+and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships.  I can fancy
+that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of
+their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the
+tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has
+overtaken us.  In a sense they will be right.  In another sense they
+will be wrong.  We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our
+dreams.  The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to
+plunge us individually in despair.  But it doesn't.  Individually we
+seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, snatch our pleasures with a
+sharpened appetite, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the
+lightnings that stab the tortured earth.
+
+As I look up I see the buses passing and read the announcements on the
+knife-boards.  You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in
+the most light-hearted of worlds.  There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at
+one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing
+Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to
+"Zig-Zag."  These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with
+which England amused itself in the time of the tempest.  And do not
+forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept
+the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy.  Perhaps
+without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled
+renown.  For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties--a
+violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of
+things even.  The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little
+wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into
+the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its
+equilibrium throughout.
+
+We are seen both at our best and our worst--stripped naked as it were
+to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves
+and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both.  Our nerve-ends
+are bare, and our reactions to circumstance are violent and irrational.
+We are at once more generous and more bitter.  We are the sport even of
+the weather.  If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more
+brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a
+more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush
+of our winter nights.  I could not help associating with the procession
+of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I
+witnessed in a bus the other night.  It seemed the reverse side of the
+same shield.  A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of
+the darkness and the sleet.  They were both rather large, and there was
+not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with
+an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no
+nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to
+waste on anybody.  You know the sort of people.  If you don't get out
+of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you.  They do
+not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?"  That would be a sign
+of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness,
+except in other people.  They expect it in other people.
+
+"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.
+
+"Victoria," said the man with a snap.
+
+"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.
+
+"I've told you six times," snapped the man.
+
+"What a bully you are," retorted the woman.  Then they subsided into
+silence.  Husband and wife, I thought--bursting with bad temper to such
+an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people.  Probably
+they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will
+go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.
+
+But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust.
+They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the
+gloom of the London night in their souls.  Most of us get it in our
+souls more or less.  It makes us ill-humoured and depressed.  In the
+early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and
+some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so
+beautiful before.  They even wrote poems about it.  When you blundered
+into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled
+against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but
+substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across
+Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure
+of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating.  But three
+winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made
+London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make
+it a debauch of another kind.
+
+But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is
+no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves
+and our tempers.  We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since
+we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on
+each other.  The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and
+there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust
+rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore.  We
+have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are
+subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed.
+Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is
+worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards.  I heard the other
+day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who
+mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining
+with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
+
+In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case
+gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the
+million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their
+excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers.  When Mars is
+abroad Venus must be abroad, too.  Murder is the sole business of the
+world and lust is its proper pastime.  Take a glance at any bookstall
+and note the garbage which lines its shelves.  Dip into the morass of
+the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and
+see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly
+intellectual bath.  The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has
+overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable
+tragedy.
+
+It is no new phenomenon.  In time of peril humanity always reveals
+these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of
+the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the
+background of a city perishing of plague.  We live at once more
+intensely and more frivolously.  The pendulum of our emotions swings
+violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers
+the mood of depression and anxiety.  I can conceive that that couple in
+the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and
+read that Vimy Ridge had been won.  There is, in Pepys' Diary, a
+delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in
+times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise.  It is the 10th of
+September (Lord's Day), 1665.  The plague is at its worst and the whole
+city seems doomed.  The war with the Dutch is going badly.  Mrs.
+Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black.  But there comes
+news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord
+Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich--
+
+
+--where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the
+receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it
+inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that
+in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this
+night.  Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made
+up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it
+so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did
+make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir
+J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so
+out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself
+out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
+
+
+Isn't that a wonderful picture?  And think of the grave John Evelyn
+having this gaiety in him!  You will read the whole of his Diary and
+not get one smile from his severe countenance.  I had the curiosity to
+turn to his own record of the same time.  He has no entry for the 10th,
+but two days before, he says:
+
+
+Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however,
+I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's,
+a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the
+streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful
+silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
+
+
+And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is
+seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest
+evening of his life.  And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
+
+The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that
+the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of
+circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the
+surface.  There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage
+in that great and moving book "Under Fire"--the most tremendous picture
+of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man.  One of the squad
+of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near
+Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.  It is before the English had taken over
+that part of the line.  There is a quiet time and some of the men get
+on companionable terms with the enemy.  This man's wife and child are
+in Lens, just behind the German lines.  He has not seen them for
+eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend
+him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into
+Lens.  He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own
+house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a
+comrade sitting at their work.  In the room with them are two German
+non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
+
+But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife
+is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.--"Not a forced smile, not a
+debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave."
+He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness
+had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the
+adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words
+of extraordinary beauty:
+
+
+"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six.  She can't hold her
+youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in
+the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst
+out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat.
+It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of
+herself.  It's life.  She lives.  Ah, yes, she lives and that's all.
+It isn't her fault if she lives.  You wouldn't have her die?  Very
+well, what do you want her to do?  Cry all day on account of me and the
+Boches?  Grouse?  One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen
+months.  Can't be done.  It's too long, I tell you.  That's all there
+is to it."
+
+
+In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter.  We live.  And,
+living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of
+ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the
+unspeakable tragedy of things.  We may wonder that we can be happy and
+may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our
+natures.  We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out
+the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become
+mad.  We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges
+that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things.  There was a
+good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that
+"Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood."  The wild
+current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our
+separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private
+distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of
+events.  Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic
+wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event.
+She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little
+callously.  And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had
+the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz
+and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the
+battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits
+of the Infant Roscius.  It is well that we have this faculty of
+detachment and independent life.  If there were no private relief for
+this public tragedy the world would have gone mad.  But perhaps you
+will say it has gone mad....
+
+
+Let me recall by way of _envoi_ that fine story in Montaigne.  When the
+town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was
+stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner.  And as he was led
+away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest
+that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich
+and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."
+
+
+
+
+ON WORD-MAGIC
+
+I see that a discussion has arisen in the _Spectator_ on the "Canadian
+Boat Song."  It appeared in _Blackwood's_ nearly a century ago, and
+ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent
+controversy.  The author may have been "Christopher North," or his
+brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of
+Eglinton, or none of these.  We shall never know.  It is one of those
+pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius
+Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be
+exhausted because they can never be solved.  I am not going to offer an
+opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate
+the magic of a word.  The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
+
+  From the lone shieling of the misty island
+    Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas--
+  Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.
+    And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
+
+It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this
+strong music.  The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never
+been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the
+same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and
+ending:
+
+  Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.
+    Hills of home, and to hear again the call.
+  Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying--
+    And hear no more at all.
+
+But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm.
+The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother
+shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the
+note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of
+that word "Hebrides."
+
+It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its
+perfect setting.  It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord
+of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons.
+It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with
+extraordinary effect.  Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many
+beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the
+couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland
+girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the
+cuckoo's call
+
+  Breaking the silence of the seas
+  Among the farthest Hebrides.
+
+
+Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in
+poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and
+significant beauty.  The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the
+closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
+
+  But on old age serene and bright,
+  And lovely as a Lapland night,
+  Shall lead thee to thy grave.
+
+"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in
+this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the
+heavens of poetry.  And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically
+beautiful.  Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the
+greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
+
+  Silent--upon a peak--in Dar--ien.
+
+
+And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words
+themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use.
+Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony--
+
+  I am dying, Egypt, dying.
+
+It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of
+Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the
+usage in Plutarch.  It is a stroke of sheer word-magic.  It summons up
+with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in
+the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly
+glories that are fading into the darkness of death.  The whole tragedy
+seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the
+action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
+
+Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just
+as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the
+craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself
+at the touch of the master.  "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and
+few are more frequently on our lips.  Yet what wonderful effects
+Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
+
+  It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
+  The holy time is quiet as a nun,
+  Breathless with adoration.
+
+The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary
+word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence,
+filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace.  And so with
+Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
+
+  Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.
+
+Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
+
+  Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
+  To take into the air my quiet breath.
+
+
+And again:
+
+  Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
+  Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.
+
+
+There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer
+instinct for the precious word than he had.  Byron had none of this
+magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his
+spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the
+energy of his thought.  Tennyson was much more of the artificer in
+words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of
+Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats.  Compare the use of adjectives in
+two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the
+Nightingale," and the difference is startling.  Both are incomparable,
+but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture
+that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its
+jewelled word.  "_Embalmèd_ darkness," "_Verdurous_ glooms," "Now more
+than ever seems it _rich_ to die."  "Cooled a long age in the
+_deep-delvèd_ earth." "_Darkling_ I listen."  "She stood in tears amid
+the _alien_ corn."  "Oh, for a beaker full of the _warm south_."  "With
+beaded bubbles _winking_ at the brim."  "No _hungry_ generations tread
+thee down."  And so on.  Such a casket of jewels can be found in no
+other poet that has used our tongue.  If Keats's vocabulary had a
+defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like
+the touch of his hand, spoke of death.  It lacked the fresh, happy,
+sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
+
+Word-magic belongs to poetry.  In prose it is an intrusion.  That was
+the view of Coleridge.  It was because, among its other qualities,
+Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that
+Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose.  The
+modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear
+and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a
+brilliant writer this fellow is."  And that is the true triumph of the
+art.  It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the
+emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.
+
+
+
+
+ODIN GROWN OLD
+
+I had a strange dream last night.  Like most dreams, it was a sort of
+wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours.
+We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from
+day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of
+impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could
+overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found
+out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless
+as the guesses of the foolish.  Ah, if we could only get behind this
+grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten
+years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give?  What a
+strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging,
+blood-stained Europe.  With what a shock we should discover the meaning
+of the terror.  But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable
+secrecy.  We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot
+tell a syllable that it will write....
+
+You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this....
+
+When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of
+myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless
+centuries.  It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and
+now stood far beyond the confines of Time.  I was alone in the world.
+I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I
+came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once
+to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained
+great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay
+rotting in garments of seaweed and slime.  I seemed, with the magic of
+dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map.  I
+traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they
+were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to
+continent, from desolation to desolation.  Again and again I cried out
+in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a
+solitude that was infinite.  Time seemed to have no meaning in this
+appalling vacancy.  I did not live hours or days, but centuries, æons,
+eternities.  Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see
+anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable
+backward of time.  Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I
+saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern
+Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
+
+And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man.  He seemed stricken with
+unthinkable years.  His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his
+figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity.  He sat at the foot of the
+Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in
+an infantile treble.  As I approached he peered at me through his dim
+eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy
+voice:
+
+"I am Odin--hee! hee!  I possess the earth, the whole earth ... I and
+my sword ... we own it all ... we and the Sphinx ... we own it all....
+All ... hee! hee!..."  And he turned and began to fondle his sword
+again.
+
+"But where are the others?  What happened to them?"
+
+"Gone ... hee! hee! .... All gone....  It took thousands of years to do
+it, but they've all gone.  It never would have been done if man hadn't
+become civilised.  For centuries and centuries men tried to kill
+themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they
+couldn't do it.  Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better.
+The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered
+modern science.  He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water,
+and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills
+into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms
+of heat and power.  And all the time he went on saying what a good
+world he was making ... hee! hee!  Such a wonderful Machine....  Such a
+peaceful Machine ... hee! hee! ... Age of Reason, he said....  Age of
+universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said.... hee! hee! ...
+We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we
+have found Him.  We have made Him ourselves--out of our own heads.  We
+got tired of looking for Him in the soul.  Now we have found Him in the
+laboratory.  We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth.
+Great is our God of the Machine.  Honour, blessing, glory, power--power
+of things.  Power!  Power!  Power!"
+
+His voice rose to a senile shriek.
+
+"And all the time ... hee, hee! ... all the time he was making the
+Machine for me--me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings,
+the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men.  I laughed ... hee,
+hee! ... I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for
+the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him
+more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel.  What
+a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said.  What a friend
+of Man.  How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of
+Benevolence...
+
+"And it was mine ... hee, hee! ... Mine.  And when it was completed I
+handed it over to my servants.  And the Machine of Benevolence became
+the Monster of Destruction.  First one tyrant seized it and fell; then
+another and he fell.  This white race got the Machine for a season,
+then another white race got it; then the yellow race.  And they all
+perished ... hee, hee!  ... They all perished....  And with every
+victory the Machine grew more deadly.  All the gifts of the earth and
+all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger.  It devoured its
+creators by thousands, by millions, by nations.  It slew, it poisoned,
+it burned, it starved.  The whole earth became a desolation....
+
+"And now I own it all ... hee, hee! ... I and my sword.  We own it
+all....  We and the Sphinx."  His voice, which had grown strong with
+excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
+
+"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked.  "And what will you do
+with your victory?"
+
+"The meaning ... the meaning ... I don't know....  I've come to ask the
+Sphinx.  I've sat here for years, centuries ... oh, so long.  But she
+says nothing--only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm,
+as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it....  Look ...
+look now....  Aren't her lips..."
+
+His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry.  The sword shook in his palsied
+hands.  His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
+
+I looked up, too....  Yes, surely the lips were moving.  They were
+about to open.  I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the
+strange beings who made a God that slew them....  The lips were open
+now ... there was a rattling in throat....
+
+But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there
+came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the
+desert.  It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things.  The
+Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the
+Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of
+nothingness....
+
+
+
+
+ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS
+
+As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this
+morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face.
+I was surprised.  Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the
+contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness--a little
+patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution.  But
+I have not been hilarious for a week past.  There is not much to be
+hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping
+back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes
+burdened with dark tidings.  I find the light-hearted person a trial,
+and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad
+agony of Lear.
+
+Why, then, this smiling face in the glass?  Only last night, coming up
+on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat
+man who came and sat in front of me.  He looked up at the brilliant
+moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to
+himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness.  When he
+was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more
+intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier.  Hang the fellow,
+thought I, what is he humming and whistling about?  This moon that is
+touching the London streets with beauty--what scenes of horror and
+carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away!  What nameless
+heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in
+security and ease!  What mighty issues are in the balance! ... And this
+fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day.
+Perhaps he is a profiteer.  Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down
+the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air....  Yet this
+face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as
+readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
+
+It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible.  The
+beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge
+my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of
+resentment.  They are like a satire on our tragedy--like marriage
+garments robing the skeleton of death.  Moreover, they are a practical
+as well as a spiritual grievance.  They are the ally of the enemy.
+They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last
+autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men
+floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud.  No, most
+Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you.  I would you would hide your face
+from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even
+justice between the disputants in this great argument....  No, this
+smile cannot be for you.  And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter
+that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the
+honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of
+his first leave and plunged into this hell of death.  Dated Saturday.
+All well up to Saturday.  The first two terrible days survived.  Those
+who love him can breathe more freely.
+
+But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the
+smile.  Ah, I had got it!  It was that paragraph I had read in the
+newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of
+his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar
+blasphemy, "God is with us."  I find that when I am cheerless a message
+from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the
+Almighty gives me confidence.  This crude, humourless vanity cannot be
+destined to win the world.  It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so
+grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and
+of the system of which he is the symbol.  I know that other warriors
+have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in
+virtue of the claim.  Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it
+to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the
+Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to
+the warriors of Israel.  Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible
+for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his
+conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the
+sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the
+name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive
+beauty.
+
+You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf
+between their piety and this vulgar impiety.  And the reason is simple.
+They believed in the spiritual governance of human life.  Cromwell may
+have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the
+spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving
+the spiritual redemption of men.  The material victory was nothing to
+him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of
+man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression.
+But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is
+spiritual and humane.  He talks of his God as if he were a brigand
+chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a
+family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern,
+to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness
+to adorn a triumph.  It is the negation of the God of the spirit.  It
+is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the
+garden of the soul in man.  It is the God of materialism at war with
+all that is spiritual.  In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God
+is not God at all.  It is the Devil.
+
+On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our
+human quarrels, the best attitude is silence.  Lincoln, with his
+unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady
+asked him for the assurance that God was on their side.  "The important
+thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are
+on the side of God."  This attitude will save us from blasphemous
+arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity.  For when we claim that
+God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into
+difficulties.  We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite
+purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of
+the Almighty will be sustained.  And what will you do then?  Will you,
+when things go wrong, ask with the poet,
+
+  Is he deaf and blind, our God? ... Is he indeed at all?
+
+
+The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the
+most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides.
+They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were
+neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side.  Vulcan
+could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn
+him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom,
+but neither could save him.  This guess at the spiritual world supplied
+a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the
+human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the
+mind.
+
+We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our
+life.  We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast
+rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are
+engulfed.  No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky.
+The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither
+comfort nor revelation.  But within us we feel the impulse of the human
+spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and
+reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun.  And in
+that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we
+move.  We cannot doubt its validity.  It is the authentic,
+indestructible note of humanity.  We may falter in the measure, stumble
+in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and
+unintelligible things.  But the spiritual movement goes on, like the
+Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world.  It
+may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it
+wins--in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle.
+The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for
+righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of
+violence.  It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser
+appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine
+prerogative of freedom.  Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his
+altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries,
+"Oh, Baal, hear us."  And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and
+stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in
+the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.
+
+That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught in the shaving
+glass this morning.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD
+
+That was a jolly story which Mr. Arthur Ransome told the other day in
+one of his messages from Petrograd.  A stout old lady was walking with
+her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great
+confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself.  It was
+pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for foot-passengers,
+but she replied: "I'm going to walk where I like.  We've got liberty
+now."  It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled
+the foot-passenger to walk down the middle of the road it also entitled
+the cab-driver to drive on the pavement, and that the end of such
+liberty would be universal chaos.  Everybody would be getting in
+everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere.  Individual liberty
+would have become social anarchy.
+
+There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like
+the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind
+ourselves of what the rule of the road means.  It means that in order
+that the liberties of all may be preserved the liberties of everybody
+must be curtailed.  When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus steps
+into the middle of the road and puts up his hand, he is the symbol not
+of tyranny, but of liberty.  You may not think so.  You may, being in a
+hurry and seeing your motor-car pulled up by this insolence of office,
+feel that your liberty has been outraged.  How dare this fellow
+interfere with your free use of the public highway?  Then, if you are a
+reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not, incidentally,
+interfere with you he would interfere with no one, and the result would
+be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never
+cross at all.  You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty
+in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a
+reality.
+
+Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract.  It is an
+accommodation of interests.  In matters which do not touch anybody
+else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like.  If I choose to
+go down the Strand in a dressing-gown, with long hair and bare feet,
+who shall say me nay?  You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have
+liberty to be indifferent to you.  And if I have a fancy for dyeing my
+hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing a tall
+hat, a frock-coat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up
+early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission.  I shall
+not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton.  I may
+like mustard with my mutton.  And you will not ask me whether you may
+be a Protestant or a Catholic, whether you may marry the dark lady or
+the fair lady, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to
+Wordsworth, or champagne to shandygaff.
+
+In all these and a thousand other details you and I please ourselves
+and ask no one's leave.  We have a whole kingdom in which we rule
+alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy,
+conventional or odd.  But directly we step out of that kingdom our
+personal liberty of action becomes qualified by other people's liberty.
+I might like to practise on the trombone from midnight till three in
+the morning.  If I went on to the top of Helvellyn to do it I could
+please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and
+if I do it out in the streets the neighbours will remind me that my
+liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to
+sleep in quiet.  There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to
+accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
+
+We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately we are much more
+conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our
+own.
+
+I got into a railway carriage at a country station the other morning
+and settled down for what the schoolboys would call an hour's "swot" at
+a Blue-book.  I was not reading it for pleasure.  The truth is that I
+never do read Blue-books for pleasure.  I read them as a barrister
+reads a brief, for the very humble purpose of turning an honest penny
+out of them.  Now, if you are reading a book for pleasure it doesn't
+matter what is going on around you.  I think I could enjoy "Tristram
+Shandy" or "Treasure Island" in the midst of an earthquake.
+
+But when you are reading a thing as a task you need reasonable quiet,
+and that is what I didn't get, for at the next station in came a couple
+of men, one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the journey in
+a loud and pompous voice.  He was one of those people who remind one of
+that story of Home Tooke who, meeting a person of immense swagger in
+the street, stopped him and said, "Excuse me, sir, but are you someone
+in particular?"  This gentleman was someone in particular.  As I
+wrestled with clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale, and his
+family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, and his criticisms of
+the generals and the politicians submerged my poor attempts to hang on
+to my job.  I shut up the Blue-book, looked out of the window, and
+listened wearily while the voice thundered on with themes like these:
+"Now what French ought to have done..."  "The mistake the Germans
+made..."  "If only Asquith had..."  You know the sort of stuff.  I had
+heard it all before, oh, so often.  It was like a barrel-organ groaning
+out some banal song of long ago.
+
+If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in a lower tone I daresay
+he would have thought I was a very rude fellow.  It did not occur to
+him that anybody could have anything better to do than to listen to
+him, and I have no doubt he left the carriage convinced that everybody
+in it had, thanks to him, had a very illuminating journey, and would
+carry away a pleasing impression of his encyclopædic range.  He was
+obviously a well-intentioned person.  The thing that was wrong with him
+was that he had not the social sense.  He was not "a clubbable man."
+
+A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the
+foundation of social conduct.  It is commonly alleged against women
+that in this respect they are less civilised than men, and I am bound
+to confess that in my experience it is the woman--the well-dressed
+woman--who thrusts herself in front of you at the ticket office.  The
+man would not attempt it, partly because he knows the thing would not
+be tolerated from him, but also because he has been better drilled in
+the small give-and-take of social relationships.  He has lived more in
+the broad current of the world, where you have to learn to accommodate
+yourself to the general standard of conduct, and his school life, his
+club life, and his games have in this respect given him a training that
+women are only now beginning to enjoy.
+
+I believe that the rights of small people and quiet people are as
+important to preserve as the rights of small nationalities.  When I
+hear the aggressive, bullying horn which some motorists deliberately
+use, I confess that I feel something boiling up in me which is very
+like what I felt when Germany came trampling like a bully over Belgium.
+By what right, my dear sir, do you go along our highways uttering that
+hideous curse on all who impede your path?  Cannot you announce your
+coming like a gentleman?  Cannot you take your turn?  Are you someone
+in particular or are you simply a hot gospeller of the prophet
+Nietzsche?  I find myself wondering what sort of a person it is who can
+sit behind that hog-like outrage without realising that he is the
+spirit of Prussia incarnate, and a very ugly spectacle in a civilised
+world.
+
+And there is the more harmless person who has bought a very blatant
+gramophone, and on Sunday afternoon sets the thing going, opens the
+windows and fills the street with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" or some
+similar banality.  What are the right limits of social behaviour in a
+matter of this sort?  Let us take the trombone as an illustration
+again.  Hazlitt said that a man who wanted to learn that fearsome
+instrument was entitled to learn it in his own house, even though he
+was a nuisance to his neighbours, but it was his business to make the
+nuisance as slight as possible.  He must practise in the attic, and
+shut the window.  He had no right to sit in his front room, open the
+window, and blow his noise into his neighbours' ears with the maximum
+of violence.  And so with the gramophone.  If you like the gramophone
+you are entitled to have it, but you are interfering with the liberties
+of your neighbours if you don't do what you can to limit the noise to
+your own household.  Your neighbours may not like "Keep the Home Fires
+Burning."  They may prefer to have their Sunday afternoon undisturbed,
+and it is as great an impertinence for you to wilfully trespass on
+their peace as it would be to go, unasked, into their gardens and
+trample on their flower beds.
+
+There are cases, of course, where the clash of liberties seems to defy
+compromise.  My dear old friend X., who lives in a West End square and
+who is an amazing mixture of good nature and irascibility, flies into a
+passion when he hears a street piano, and rushes out to order it away.
+But near by lives a distinguished lady of romantic picaresque tastes,
+who dotes on street pianos, and attracts them as wasps are attracted to
+a jar of jam.  Whose liberty in this case should surrender to the
+other?  For the life of me I cannot say.  It is as reasonable to like
+street pianos as to dislike them--and vice versa.  I would give much to
+hear Sancho Panza's solution of such a nice riddle.
+
+I suppose the fact is that we can be neither complete anarchists nor
+complete Socialists in this complex world--or rather we must be a
+judicious mixture of both.  We have both liberties to preserve--our
+individual liberty and our social liberty.  We must watch the
+bureaucrat on the one side and warn off the anarchist on the other.  I
+am neither a Marxist, nor a Tolstoyan, but a compromise.  I shall not
+permit any authority to say that my child must go to this school or
+that, shall specialise in science or arts, shall play rugger or soccer.
+These things are personal.  But if I proceed to say that my child shall
+have no education at all, that he shall be brought up as a primeval
+savage, or at Mr. Fagin's academy for pickpockets, then Society will
+politely but firmly tell me that it has no use for primeval savages and
+a very stern objection to pickpockets, and that my child must have a
+certain minimum of education whether I like it or not.  I cannot have
+the liberty to be a nuisance to my neighbours or make my child a burden
+and a danger to the commonwealth.
+
+It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of
+the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are
+civilised or uncivilised.  The great moments of heroism and sacrifice
+are rare.  It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make
+up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey.  I
+hope my friend in the railway carriage will reflect on this.  Then he
+will not cease, I am sure, to explain to his neighbour where French
+went wrong and where the Germans went ditto; but he will do it in a way
+that will permit me to read my Blue-book undisturbed.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE
+
+There has never, I suppose, been a time when the moon had such a vogue
+as during the past ten days.  For centuries, for thousands of years,
+for I know not what uncounted ages, she has been sailing the sky,
+"clustered around with all her starry fays."  She has seen this
+tragi-comedy of man since the beginning, and I daresay will outlive its
+end.  What she thinks of it all we shall never know.  Perhaps she
+laughs at it, perhaps she weeps over it, perhaps she does both in
+turns, as you and I do.  Perhaps she is only indifferent.  Yes, I
+suppose she is indifferent, for she holds up her lamp for the just and
+the unjust and lights the assassin's way as readily as the lover's and
+the shepherd's.
+
+But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying ball to which we
+cling with our feet she has never been a subject of such painful
+concern as now.  Love-sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have
+studied her countenance and made maps of her hills and her valleys, and
+children have been lulled to sleep with legends of the old man in the
+moon and the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks.  But for
+most of us she had no more serious import than a Chinese lantern hung
+on a Christmas tree to please the children.
+
+And suddenly she has become the most sensational fact of our lives.
+From the King in his palace to the pauper in his workhouse we have all
+been talking of the moon, and watching the moon and studying the phases
+of the moon.  There are seven millions of Londoners who know more about
+the moon to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, or than
+they ever dreamed that they would want to know.  John Bright once said
+that the only virtue of war was that it taught people geography, but
+even he did not think of the geography of the moon and of the
+firmament.  But in the intense school of these days we are learning
+about everything in heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the
+waters under the earth.  Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and
+now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon.  We are not so
+grateful as we might be.
+
+But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, is that Nature does
+not take sides in our affairs.  We all like to think that she does take
+sides--that is, our side--that a special providence watches over us,
+and that invisible powers will see us through.  It is a common
+weakness.  The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it in its most grotesque
+assumption.  He does really believe--or did, for dreadful doubts must
+be invading the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Cæsar--that
+God and Nature are his Imperial agents.
+
+And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, pin our faith to
+some special providence.  We are so important to ourselves that we
+cannot conceive that we are unimportant to whatever powers there be.
+Others may fall, but we have charmed lives.  Our cause must prevail
+because, being ours, it is beyond mortal challenge.  A distinguished
+General was telling me not long ago of an incident in the second battle
+of Ypres.  He stood with another General, since killed, watching the
+battle at its most critical phase.  They saw the British line yield,
+and the Germans advance, and all seemed over.  My friend put up his
+glasses with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come.  His
+companion turned to him and said, "God will never allow those ---- to
+win."  It was an odd expression of faith, but it represents the
+conviction latent in most of us that we can count on invisible allies
+who, like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in straits,
+and fling a cloud between us and the foe.
+
+This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources of power in men
+of primitive and intense faith.  Cromwell was a practical mystic and
+never forgot to keep his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord
+visibly at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest, and that
+conviction added a fervour to his terrible sword.  In his letter to
+Speaker Lenthall on the battle of Dunbar he tells how in marching from
+Musselburgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear-forlorn of our
+horse" and "had like to have engaged our rear brigade of horse with
+their whole army--_had not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over
+the moon_, hereby giving us opportunity to draw off those horse to the
+rest of our army."
+
+In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed God Himself in the
+tempest that scattered the Armada, and a hundred years later the people
+saw the same Divine sanction in the winds that brought William Prince
+of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers away.  "The weather had
+indeed served the Protestant cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some
+men of more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary laws of
+nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty and
+religion of England.  Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the
+Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God.
+Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the
+obedient elements had fought for the good cause.  The wind had blown
+strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel,
+had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a
+calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was
+completed, had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the face."
+
+If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our cause, we should, in
+spite of Macaulay, allow our piety to have the better of our judgment.
+Indeed, there have been those who in the absence of more solid evidence
+have accepted the Angels of Mons with as touching and unquestioning a
+faith as they accepted the legend of the Army of Russians from
+Archangel.  Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that accounts
+for this credulity.  In its more degraded form it is responsible for
+such phenomena as the revival of fortune-telling and the emergence of
+the Prophet Bottomley.  In its more reputable expression it springs
+from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the dominion of the
+spiritual over the material and of the witness of that dominion in the
+operations of Nature.
+
+Then comes this wonderful harvest moon with its clear sky and its still
+air to light our enemies to their villainous work and to remind us
+that, however virtuous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us.
+She is indifferent whether we win or lose.  She is not against us, but
+she is not for us.  Sometimes she helps the enemy, and sometimes she
+helps us.  She blew a snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most
+critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great adventure.  In
+August last she came out on the side of the enemy.  She rained and blew
+ceaselessly, and disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack
+on which so much depended was driven perilously late into the year.
+And even the brilliant moon and the cloudless nights that have been so
+disturbing to us in London speak the same language of Nature's
+impartiality.  They serve the enemy here, but they are serving us far
+more just across the sea, where every bright day and moonlit night
+snatched from the mud and rain of the coming winter is of priceless
+value to our Army.  That consideration should enable us to bear our
+affliction with fortitude as we crowd the "tubes" or listen to the roar
+of the guns from under the domestic table.
+
+But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature does not care twopence
+who wins, and is as unconcerned about our affairs as we are about the
+affairs of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing that we have
+trodden on it.  She is beyond good and evil.  She has no morals and is
+indifferent about justice and what men call right and wrong.  She
+blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish.
+
+      Nature, with equal mind
+      Sees all her sons at play;
+      Sees man control the wind,
+      The wind sweep man away;
+  Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque.
+
+It is a chill, but a chastening thought.  It leaves us with a sense of
+loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of
+the unconquerable human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant,
+reaching out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of
+attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, but still
+stumbling forward by its half-lights in search of some Land of Promise
+that always skips just beyond the horizon.
+
+Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon too.  Frankly, we have
+seen enough of her face to last us for a long time.  When she comes out
+again let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and bring the winds in
+her train.  We do not like to think of her as a mere flunkey of the
+Kaiser and the torch-bearer of his assassins.
+
+
+
+
+IF JEREMY CAME BACK
+
+It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is a rounded
+tale.  We pay our money at the box, go in, see the story begin,
+progress and end, sadly or cheerfully, and come away with the discords
+resolved, virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled skein of
+things neatly unravelled.  And so home, content.  But on the stage of
+life there is none of this satisfying completeness and finish.  We
+enter in the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years in trying
+to pick up the threads and purport of the action, and go as
+inopportunely as we came.  The curtain does not descend punctually upon
+an exhausted plot and an accomplished purpose.  It descends upon a
+thrilling but unfinished tale.  You have got, perhaps, into the most
+breathless part of the action, seized at last the clue that will
+assuredly explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally the light
+fails, and for you the theatre is dark for ever.  Your emotions have
+been stirred, your curiosity awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain.
+Even the episode you have been permitted to witness is left with ragged
+ends and unfinished judgments.  How did it proceed and how did it end,
+and what was the sequel?  Was virtue or villainy triumphant?  Who was
+the real hero?  Were your sympathies on the right side or the wrong?
+And, more personally, what of those shoots of life you have thrown out
+to the challenge of the future?  Did they wilt or flourish, and what
+was their fortune?  These are among the thousand questions to which we
+should like an answer, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking
+that we may have an answer.
+
+It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of us to have the
+privilege which Jeremy Bentham confessed that he would like to enjoy.
+That amiable and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless life
+in the development of his comfortable gospel of the "greatest good of
+the greatest number," entertained the pleasant fancy of returning to
+the scene of his labours once in every hundred years to see humanity
+marching triumphantly to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism, along the
+straight and smooth turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease
+and direction.  He had the touching confidence of the idealist that
+humanity only had to be shown the way out of the wilderness to plunge
+into it with joyous shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm.
+And since he had shown the way all would henceforth be well.  It is
+this confidence which makes the idealist an object of pity to the
+cynic.  For the cynic is often only the idealist turned sour.  He is
+the idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, but in
+humanity.
+
+This is about the time when Jeremy might be expected back on his first
+centennial visit to see how we have got along the road to human
+perfectibility.  I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking
+with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which a century of time
+has given to his anticipations.  This, the New Jerusalem of his
+confident vision?  This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of
+progress?  And the cynic beside him, tapping his ghostly snuff-box,
+observes dryly, "They don't seem to have got very far on the way,
+friend Jeremy; not very far on the way."  I can conceive the
+philosopher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering whether,
+after all, these visits are worth while.  If this is the achievement of
+a hundred years' enjoyment of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what
+unthinkable revelation may await him on his next visit!  Perhaps ...
+yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.
+
+But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting.  It is
+probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit
+immensely.  He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous
+mind.  I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child
+and as fondly as a parent.  For among his multitudinous activities he
+experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish.  Why,
+asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?
+What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons?  And Benjamin
+made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?"  If he
+is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost
+as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby"
+has grown to.  He will be astonished at other things.  He will recall
+the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the
+delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the
+great--was it not in Downing Street?--and was spat upon by the noble
+lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the
+Atlantic was undecipherable.  He will recall how he put his outraged
+garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the
+Declaration of Independence.  And now, what miracle is this?  England
+and America reconciled at last.  England, no less than France,
+straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening
+to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by
+whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....
+Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide
+of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin,
+who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody.  But the noble
+lords who spat on him!...
+
+And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the
+spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How
+now, gentlemen?  What do you say to the steamboat now?"  Poor wretches,
+how humiliated they will be.  For when Napoleon asked the Academie des
+Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented
+steamboat, their verdict was, "Idée folle, erreur grossière,
+absurdité."  They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby
+destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas
+of the world to-day.
+
+But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before
+the revelations that await them.  They will look on with the
+complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.
+Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky
+man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the
+intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of
+his wit at their foolish experiments.  They will have lost the very
+human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those
+shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so
+well-directed and piercing.  Perhaps they will read this to him:
+
+
+Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone
+and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day.  Some
+register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
+is changeable.  There are men yet more profound, who have heard that
+two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold
+bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce
+the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.
+
+
+Admirable old boy!  What wit you had!  We can still enjoy it even
+though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your
+own breast.  All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out.  All
+your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see
+of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your
+Olympian mind with scorn.  But you will have your compensations.  Even
+you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long
+after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street.
+You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the
+Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the
+faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past.
+Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well
+content with your visit.
+
+And it may be that the victory of the scientists will assuage the
+disappointment of Jeremy himself.  It is possible that when, back once
+more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he
+begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits.
+This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to
+his astonishing intellectual victory.  I forgot that stage in the
+journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism.  This century that has
+passed has witnessed that stage.  It has been a period of inconceivable
+triumph over matter.  Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth
+and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things.  His moral and
+social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless
+material development.  He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst
+of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned.  He has become
+the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his
+invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind
+effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the
+machine has imposed on him.  The great parturition is upon him and he
+is shedding gouts of blood in his agony.  But he will emerge from his
+pains.  The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the
+machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will
+revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past.  The march is longer
+than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense
+overthrow.  The road I built was only premature.  Man was not ready to
+take it.  But it is still there--a little grass-grown and neglected,
+but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise.  When he rises from
+his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take
+it....  Yes, I think I shall go back after all....
+
+Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.
+
+
+
+
+ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT
+
+In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly and quite acutely
+awake.  It is an unusual experience for me.  I knew the disturbance had
+not come from without myself, but from within--from some low but
+persistent knocking at the remote door of consciousness.  Who was the
+knocker?  I ran over the possible visitors before opening the door just
+as one sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address before opening
+a letter.  Ah, yes, the disquieting discovery I had made
+yesterday--that was the intruder.  And, saying this, I opened the door
+and let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it over me in the
+darkness.  I had succeeded in suppressing him before I went to
+bed--burying him beneath talk about this and that, some variations of
+Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from Korbay's collection, so
+incomparable in their fierce energy and passion, and so on; the mound
+nicely rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and the headstone
+of sleep duly erected.  Now, I thought, I shall hear nothing more of
+him until I face him squarely to-morrow.  And here, up from the depths
+he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone itself.
+
+It is with sleep as with affairs.  One cracked bell will shatter a
+whole ring; one scheming, predatory power will set the whole world in
+flames.  And one disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole comity
+of sleep.  He will neither slumber forgetfully nor play with the others
+in dreams, turning the realities and solemnities of the day into a wild
+travesty of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible seems
+as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your head on the cross of St.
+Paul's or walk up the Strand carrying your head under your arm without
+any sense of surprise or impropriety.  Nor is he one of those obliging
+subjects of the mind who obey their orders like a sensible house-dog,
+sleeping with one eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything
+goes wrong.  You know that sort of decent fellow.  You say to him
+overnight, "Now, remember, I have that train to catch in the morning,
+and I must be awake without fail at seven."  Or it may be six, or four.
+And whatever the hour you name, sure enough the good dog barks in time.
+If he has a failing, it is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss
+the nice question whether you dare go to sleep again or whether you had
+better remain awake.  In the midst of which you probably go to sleep
+again and miss your train.
+
+This control of the kingdom of sleep by the apparently dormant
+consciousness can be carried far.  A friend of mine tells me that he
+has even learned to put his dreams under the check of conscious or
+sub-conscious thought.  He had one persistent dream which took the form
+of missing the train.  Sometimes his wife was on board, and he rushed
+on to the platform just in time to see the train in motion and her head
+out of the window with agony written on her face.  Sometimes he was in
+the train and his wife just missed it.  Sometimes they were both
+inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too late.  Sometimes the
+luggage got in and they didn't.  Always something went wrong.  He
+determined to have that dream regularised.  And so before going to bed
+he thought hard of catching the train.  He saturated himself with the
+idea of catching the train.  And the thing worked like a charm.  He
+never misses a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage.  They all
+steam away on their dream journeys together without a hitch.  So he
+tells me, and I believe him, for he is a truthful man.
+
+You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had evidences of this
+sub-conscious operation in sleep.  That it is common enough is shown by
+the familiar saying, "I will sleep on it."  I have gone to bed more
+than once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have fallen to
+sleep, and have wakened in the morning with the course so clear that I
+have wondered how I could have been in doubt.  And Sir Edward Clarke in
+his reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over his briefs
+he would go to bed with his way through the tangle obscure and
+perplexing, and would wake from sleep with the path plain as a
+pikestaff.  The phenomenon is doubtless due in some measure to rest.
+The mind clears in sleeping as muddy waters clear in standing.  But
+this is not the whole explanation.  Some process has taken place in the
+interval far down in the hinterlands of thought.  You may observe this
+even in your waking hours.  Lord Leverhulme, who I suppose has one of
+the biggest letter-bags in the country, once told me that his habit in
+dealing with his correspondence is to answer at once those letters he
+can reply to off-hand, and to put aside those that need consideration.
+When he turns to the latter he finds the answers have fashioned
+themselves without any conscious act of thought.  This experience is
+not uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the maximum of
+activity it disposes of the idea that rest is the complete explanation.
+
+More goes on in us than we know.  At this moment I am conscious of at
+least six strata of thought.  I am attending to this writing, the
+shaping of the letters, the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I
+shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing outside, and that
+the sun is shining; this pervades my mind with the glow of the thought
+that in a few days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this happy
+glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last night forces himself on my
+attention; down below there is the boom of the great misery of the
+world that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the double bass
+in the orchestra.  And out of sight and consciousness there are, I
+suspect, deeper and more obscure functions shaping all sorts of things
+in the unfathomed caves of the mind.  The results will come to the
+surface in due course, and I shall wonder where they came from.  It is
+a mistake to suppose that we can only think of one thing at a time.
+The mind can keep as many balls circulating as Cinquevalli.  It can
+keep some of them circulating even without knowing that they exist.
+
+But these profound functions of the mind that know no sleep, and yet do
+not disturb our sleep, are not to be confused with that imp of the
+pillow.  He is a brawler of the day.  He brings the noisy world of fact
+into the cloistered calm or the playground of sleep.  He is known to
+all of us, but most of all to the criminal who has still got a
+conscience.  Macbeth knew him--"Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the
+innocent sleep."  Eugene Aram knew him:
+
+  And a mighty wind had swept the leaves
+    And still the corpse was bare.
+
+
+I know him ... And that reminds me.  It is time I went and had it out
+with my imp of the pillow in the daylight.
+
+
+
+
+ON MOWING
+
+I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its
+praises.  And if you doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme,
+come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes
+where they lie and note the workmanship.  Yes, I admit that over there
+by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt,
+dishevelled appearance about the grass as though it had been stabbed
+and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe.  It is true.  It
+has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal.  It was there that I
+began.  It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered.
+It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should
+disapprove.  It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the
+scythe.  But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause
+here where the orchard slopes to the paddock.  I do not care who looks
+at this bit.  I am prepared to stand or fall by it.  It speaks for
+itself.  The signature of the master hand is here.  It is my signature.
+
+And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier
+spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the _Nation_.  He was returning to
+England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish
+landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as
+though I should like to cut grass all the rest of my life."  I do not
+know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke.  Perhaps it was
+only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the
+squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him.
+But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo.  I
+echo them.  I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of
+sunny days and illimitable fields of waving grass and just go on mowing
+and mowing and mowing for ever.  I am chilled by the thought that you
+can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year.  I
+look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted
+opportunities.  What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy
+of it!
+
+For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear.  When
+once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is
+intoxicating.  The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a
+tool, gradually changes its character.  It becomes an instrument of
+infinite flexibility and delicacy.  The lines that seemed so uncouth
+and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time.  What
+centuries of accumulated experience under the suns of what diverse
+lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the
+fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at
+so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to
+the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses
+the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth,
+almost instinctive motion.  It is like an extension of yourself, with a
+touch as fine as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold
+and resistless as the sweep of a cataract.  It is no longer a clumsy,
+blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious
+as your touch.  You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching,
+with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a
+forest of stalwart grasses.
+
+And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself.
+The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as
+serene as a pastoral symphony.  You feel the rhythm taking shape, and
+as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task.  You are no
+longer manipulating a tool.  You and the tool have become magically
+one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether
+you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong,
+swimming stroke.  The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of
+delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have
+a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the
+stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently
+flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as
+the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is
+true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it
+clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the
+moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next
+stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel.  A frog hops out
+in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep grasses.
+You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are
+drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its
+imperious current.  You are no longer a man, but a motion.  The frog
+must take his chance.  Swish--swish--swish----
+
+Not that the rhythm is unrelieved.  It has its "accidentals."  You
+repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of
+pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the
+theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray
+flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the
+pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so
+deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone.  But all the time
+the song of the scythe goes on.  It fills your mind and courses through
+your blood.  Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish--swish--swish, and
+to that measure you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees
+and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through
+which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.
+
+The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally
+overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain.  You mark the
+shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees.  A thrush
+sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other
+side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and
+begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the
+west.  Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their
+evening meal.  Presently they descend and chase each other over the
+orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to
+the symphony of late summer evenings.  You are pleasantly conscious of
+these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe,
+and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches of old
+song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on
+his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving
+grasses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more
+august harvest....  The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall
+on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the
+valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in
+the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one
+final note of the white-throat....  There is still light for this last
+slope to the paddock.  Swish--swish--swish....
+
+
+
+
+The Temple Press, Letchworth
+
+ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
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+The Project Gutenberg E-text of Leaves in the Wind, by Alpha of the Plough
+</TITLE>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Leaves in the Wind
+
+Author: A. G. Gardiner
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2011 [EBook #37858]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEAVES IN THE WIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="&quot;There under some spreading oak or beech.&quot;" BORDER="2">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center">
+&quot;There under some spreading oak or beech.&quot;
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+THE WAYFARERS LIBRARY
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t1">
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+Alpha of the Plough
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+(A. G. Gardiner)
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+LONDON &amp; TORONTO: J. M. DENT &amp; SONS, Ltd.
+<BR>
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON &amp; CO.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t3">
+TO
+<BR>
+MY CHILDREN
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+PREFATORY NOTE
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This collection of essays, now republished in the "Wayfarers' Library,"
+were written during the war, and first appeared in book form during the
+war.  Like the preceding volume, <I>Pebbles on the Shore</I>, they were the
+literary diversions of a time of great public anxiety and heavy
+personal tasks.  The writing of them was a happy distraction from
+unhappy things, and now that the great wind has passed it is a pleasure
+to find the leaves it blew down gathered between the companionable
+covers of the "Wayfarer."  I leave them as they fell.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t2">
+CONTENTS
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" STYLE="margin-left: 10%">
+<A HREF="#chap01">A Fellow Traveller</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap02">On a Famous Sermon</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap03">On Pockets and Things</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap04">On a Country Platform</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap05">On a Distant View of a Pig</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap06">In Defence of Ignorance</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap07">On a Shiny Night</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap08">On Giving up Tobacco</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap09">The Great God Gun</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap10">On a Legend of the War</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap11">On Talk and Talkers</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap12">On a Vision of Eden</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap13">On a Comic Genius</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap14">On a Vanished Garden</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap15">All About a Dog</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap16">On the American Soldier</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap17">'Appy 'Einrich</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap18">On Fear</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap19">On Being Called Thompson</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap20">On Thinking for One's Self</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap21">On Sawing Wood</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap22">Variations on an Old Theme</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap23">On Clothes</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap24">The Duel that Failed</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap25">On Early Rising</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap26">On Being Known</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap27">On a Map of the Oberland</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap28">On a Talk in a Bus</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap29">On Virtues that don't Count</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap30">On Hate and the Soldier</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap31">On Taking the Call</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap32">A Dithyramb on a Dog</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap33">On Happy Faces in the Strand</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap34">On Word-Magic</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap35">Odin Grown Old</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap36">On a Smile in a Shaving Glass</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap37">On the Rule of the Road</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap38">On the Indifference of Nature</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap39">If Jeremy Came Back</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap40">On Sleep and Thought</A><BR>
+<A HREF="#chap41">On Mowing</A><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A FELLOW TRAVELLER
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I do not know which of us got into the carriage first.  Indeed I did
+not know he was in the carriage at all for some time.  It was the last
+train from London to a Midland town&mdash;a stopping train, an infinitely
+leisurely train, one of those trains which give you an understanding of
+eternity.  It was tolerably full when it started, but as we stopped at
+the suburban stations the travellers alighted in ones and twos, and by
+the time we had left the outer ring of London behind I was alone&mdash;or,
+rather, I thought I was alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a pleasant sense of freedom about being alone in a carriage
+that is jolting noisily through the night.  It is liberty and
+unrestraint in a very agreeable form.  You can do anything you like.
+You can talk to yourself as loud as you please and no one will hear
+you.  You can have that argument out with Jones and roll him
+triumphantly in the dust without fear of a counter-stroke.  You can
+stand on your head and no one will see you.  You can sing, or dance a
+two-step, or practise a golf stroke, or play marbles on the floor
+without let or hindrance.  You can open the window or shut it without
+provoking a protest.  You can open both windows or shut both.  Indeed,
+you can go on opening them and shutting them as a sort of festival of
+freedom.  You can have any corner you choose and try all of them in
+turn.  You can lie at full length on the cushions and enjoy the luxury
+of breaking the regulations and possibly the heart of D.O.R.A. herself.
+Only D.O.R.A. will not know that her heart is broken.  You have escaped
+even D.O.R.A.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On this night I did not do any of these things.  They did not happen to
+occur to me.  What I did was much more ordinary.  When the last of my
+fellow-passengers had gone I put down my paper, stretched my arms and
+my legs, stood up and looked out of the window on the calm summer night
+through which I was journeying, noting the pale reminiscence of day
+that still lingered in the northern sky; crossed the carriage and
+looked out of the other window; lit a cigarette, sat down and began to
+read again.  It was then that I became aware of my fellow traveller.
+He came and sat on my nose....  He was one of those wingy, nippy,
+intrepid insects that we call, vaguely, mosquitoes.  I flicked him off
+my nose, and he made a tour of the compartment, investigated its three
+dimensions, visited each window, fluttered round the light, decided
+that there was nothing so interesting as that large animal in the
+corner, came and had a look at my neck.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I flicked him off again.  He skipped away, took another jaunt round the
+compartment, returned, and seated himself impudently on the back of my
+hand.  It is enough, I said; magnanimity has its limits.  Twice you
+have been warned that I am someone in particular, that my august person
+resents the tickling impertinences of strangers.  I assume the black
+cap.  I condemn you to death.  Justice demands it, and the court awards
+it.  The counts against you are many.  You are a vagrant; you are a
+public nuisance; you are travelling without a ticket; you have no meat
+coupon.  For these and many other misdemeanours you are about to die.
+I struck a swift, lethal blow with my right hand.  He dodged the attack
+with an insolent ease that humiliated me.  My personal vanity was
+aroused.  I lunged at him with my hand, with my paper; I jumped on the
+seat and pursued him round the lamp; I adopted tactics of feline
+cunning, waiting till he had alighted, approaching with a horrible
+stealthiness, striking with a sudden and terrible swiftness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was all in vain.  He played with me, openly and ostentatiously, like
+a skilful matador finessing round an infuriated bull.  It was obvious
+that he was enjoying himself, that it was for this that he had
+disturbed my repose.  He wanted a little sport, and what sport like
+being chased by this huge, lumbering windmill of a creature, who tasted
+so good and seemed so helpless and so stupid?  I began to enter into
+the spirit of the fellow.  He was no longer a mere insect.  He was
+developing into a personality, an intelligence that challenged the
+possession of this compartment with me on equal terms.  I felt my heart
+warming towards him and the sense of superiority fading.  How could I
+feel superior to a creature who was so manifestly my master in the only
+competition in which we had ever engaged?  Why not be magnanimous
+again?  Magnanimity and mercy were the noblest attributes of man.  In
+the exercise of these high qualities I could recover my prestige.  At
+present I was a ridiculous figure, a thing for laughter and derision.
+By being merciful I could reassert the moral dignity of man and go back
+to my corner with honour.  I withdraw the sentence of death, I said,
+returning to my seat.  I cannot kill you, but I can reprieve you.  I do
+it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took up my paper and he came and sat on it.  Foolish fellow, I said,
+you have delivered yourself into my hands.  I have but to give this
+respectable weekly organ of opinion a smack on both covers and you are
+a corpse, neatly sandwiched between an article on "Peace Traps" and
+another on "The Modesty of Mr. Hughes."  But I shall not do it.  I have
+reprieved you, and I will satisfy you that when this large animal says
+a thing he means it.  Moreover, I no longer desire to kill you.
+Through knowing you better I have come to feel&mdash;shall I say?&mdash;a sort of
+affection for you.  I fancy that St. Francis would have called you
+"little brother."  I cannot go so far as that in Christian charity and
+civility.  But I recognise a more distant relationship.  Fortune has
+made us fellow travellers on this summer night.  I have interested you
+and you have entertained me.  The obligation is mutual and it is
+founded on the fundamental fact that we are fellow mortals.  The
+miracle of life is ours in common and its mystery too.  I suppose you
+don't know anything about your journey.  I'm not sure that I know much
+about mine.  We are really, when you come to think of it, a good deal
+alike&mdash;just apparitions that are and then are not, coming out of the
+night into the lighted carriage, fluttering about the lamp for a while
+and going out into the night again.  Perhaps...
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Going on to-night, sir?" said a voice at the window.  It was a
+friendly porter giving me a hint that this was my station.  I thanked
+him and said I must have been dozing.  And seizing my hat and stick I
+went out into the cool summer night.  As I closed the door of the
+compartment I saw my fellow traveller fluttering round the lamp....
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A FAMOUS SERMON
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I see that Queen Alexandra has made a further distribution among
+charities of the profits from the sale of the late Canon Fleming's
+sermon, "On Recognition in Eternity."  The sermon was preached on the
+occasion of the death of the Duke of Clarence, and judging from its
+popularity I have no doubt it is a good sermon.  But I am tempted to
+write on the subject by a mischievous thought suggested by the
+authorship of this famous sermon.  There is no idea which makes so
+universal an appeal to the deepest instincts of humanity as the idea
+that when we awake from the dream of life we shall pass into the
+companionship of those who have shared and lightened our pilgrimage
+here.  The intellect may dismiss the idea as unscientific, but, as
+Newman says, the finite can tell us nothing about the infinite Creator,
+and the Quaker poet's serene assurance&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Yet love will hope and faith will trust<BR>
+(Since He Who knows our needs is just)<BR>
+That somehow, somewhere, meet we must&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+defies all the buffetings of reason.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even Shelley, for all his aggressive Atheism, could not, as Francis
+Thompson points out, escape the instinct of personal immortality.  In
+his glorious elegy on Keats he implicitly assumes the personal
+immortality which the poem explicitly denies, as when, to greet the
+dead youth,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The inheritors of unfulfilled renown<BR>
+Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought<BR>
+Far in the unapparent.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And it is on the same note that the poem reaches its sublime and
+prophetic close:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;<BR>
+Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,<BR>
+The soul of Adonais like a star<BR>
+Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The ink of that immortal strain was hardly dry upon the page when the
+vision was fulfilled, for only a few months elapsed between the death
+of Keats and the drowning of Shelley, and in the interval the great
+monody had been written.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I refuse, for the sake of the feelings of Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr.
+Foote and the other stern old dogmatists of Rationalism, to deny myself
+the pleasure of imagining the meeting of Shelley and Keats in the
+Elysian Fields.  If Shelley, "borne darkly, fearfully afar" beyond the
+confines of reason, could feel that grand assurance, why should I, who
+dislike the dogmatists of Rationalism as much as the dogmatists of
+Orthodoxy, deny myself that beautiful solace?  I like to think of those
+passionate spirits in eternal comradeship, pausing in their eager talk
+to salute deep-browed Homer as, perchance, he passes in grave discourse
+with the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies."  I like to think of
+Dante meeting Beatrice by some crystal stream, of Lincoln wandering
+side by side with Lee, of poor Mary Lamb reunited to the mother she
+loved and whom she slew in one of her fits of insanity, and of an
+innumerable host of humbler recognitions no less sweet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Canon Fleming's name reminds me that all the recognitions will not
+be agreeable.  I cannot imagine that eminent Court preacher showing any
+eagerness to recognise or be recognised by that other eminent preacher,
+Dr. Talmage.  For it was Talmage's sermon on the wickedness of great
+cities that Fleming so unblushingly preached <I>and published</I> as his
+own, simply altering the names of American cities to those of European
+cities.  Some cruel editor printed the two sermons side by side, I
+think in the old <I>St. James's Gazette</I>, and the poor Canon's excuse
+only made matters rather worse.  The incident did not prevent him
+securing preferment, and his sermon on "Recognition in Eternity" still
+goes on selling.  But he will not be comfortable when he sees Talmage
+coming his way across the Elysian Fields.  I do not think he will offer
+him the very unconvincing explanation he offered to the British public.
+He will make a frank confession and Talmage will no doubt give him
+absolution.  There will be many such awkward meetings.  With what
+emotions of shame, for example, will Charles I. see Strafford
+approaching.  "Not a hair of your head shall be touched by Parliament"
+was his promise to that instrument of his despotic rule, but when
+Parliament demanded the head itself he endorsed the verdict that sent
+Strafford to the scaffold.  And I can imagine there will be a little
+coldness between Cromwell and Charles when they pass, though in the
+larger understanding of that world Charles, I fancy, will see that he
+was quite impossible, and that he left the grim old Puritan no other
+way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is this thought of the larger understanding that will come when we
+have put off the coarse vesture of things that makes this speculation
+reasonable.  That admirable woman, Mrs. Berry, in "Richard Feverel,"
+had the recognitions of eternity in her mind when she declared that
+widows ought not to remarry.  "And to think," she said, "o' two
+(husbands) claimin' o' me then, it makes me hot all over."  Mrs.
+Berry's mistake was in thinking of Elysium in the terms of earth.  It
+is precisely because we shall have escaped from the encumbering flesh
+and all the bewilderments of this clumsy world that we cannot merely
+tolerate the idea, but can find in it a promised explanation of the
+inexplicable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the same mistake that I find in Mr. Belloc, who, I see from
+yesterday's paper, has been denouncing the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism, and describing the miracles of Lourdes as "a special
+providential act designed to convert, change, upset, and disintegrate
+the materialism of the nineteenth century."  I want to see the
+materialism of the nineteenth century converted, changed, upset and
+disintegrated, as much as Mr. Belloc does, but I have as little regard
+for the instrument he trusts in as for the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism.  And when he goes on to denounce a Miss Posthlethwaite, a
+Catholic spiritualist, for having declared that in the next world she
+found people of all religions and did not find that Mohammedans
+suffered more than others, I feel that he is as materialistic as Mrs.
+Berry.  He sees heaven in the terms of the troublesome little
+sectarianisms of the earth, with an ascendancy party in possession, and
+no non-alcoholic Puritans, Jews, or Mohammedans visible to his august
+eye.  They will all be in another place, and very uncomfortable indeed.
+He really has not advanced beyond that infantile partisanship
+satirised, I think, by Swift:&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+We are God's chosen few,<BR>
+All others will be damned.<BR>
+There is no place in heaven for you,<BR>
+We can't have heaven crammed.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+No, no, Mr. Belloc.  The judgments of eternity will not be so vulgar as
+this, nor the companionship so painfully exclusive.  You will not walk
+the infinite meadows of heaven alone with the sect you adorned on
+earth.  You will find all sorts of people there regardless of the
+quaint little creeds they professed in the elementary school of life.
+I am sure you will find Mrs. Berry there, for that simple woman had the
+root of the true gospel in her.  "I think it's al'ays the plan in a
+dielemma," she said, "to pray God and walk forward."  I think it is
+possible that in the larger atmosphere you will discover that she was a
+wiser pupil in the elementary school than you were.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON POCKETS AND THINGS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I suppose most men felt, as I felt, the reasonableness of Mr. Justice
+Bray's remarks the other day on the preference of women for bags
+instead of pockets.  A case was before him in which a woman had gone
+into a shop, had put down her satchel containing her money and
+valuables, turned to pick it up a little later, found it had been
+stolen, and thereupon brought an action against the owners of the shop
+for the recovery of her losses.  The jury were unsympathetic, found
+that in the circumstances the woman was responsible, and gave a verdict
+against her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of course the jury were men, all of them prejudiced on this subject of
+pockets.  At a guess I should say that there were not fewer than 150
+pockets in that jury-box, <I>and not one satchel</I>.  You, madam, may
+retort that this is only another instance of the scandal of this
+man-ridden world.  Why were there no women in that jury-box?  Why are
+all the decisions of the courts, from the High Court to the coroner's
+court, left to the judgment of men?  Madam, I share your indignation.
+I would "comb-out" the jury-box.  I would send half the jurymen, if not
+into the trenches, at least to hoe turnips, and fill their places with
+a row of women.  Women are just as capable as men of forming an opinion
+about facts, they have at least as much time to spare, and their point
+of view is as essential to justice.  What can there be more ridiculous,
+for example, than a jury of men sitting for a whole day to decide the
+question of the cut of a gown without a single woman's expert opinion
+to guide them, or more unjust than to leave an issue between a man and
+a woman entirely in the hands of men?  Yes, certainly madam, I am with
+you on the general question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But when we come to the subject of pockets, I am bound to confess that
+I am with the jury.  If I had been on that jury I should have voted
+with fervour for making the woman responsible for her own loss.  If it
+were possible for women to put their satchels down on counters, or the
+seats of buses, or any odd place they thought of, and then to make some
+innocent person responsible because they were stolen, there would be no
+security for anybody.  It would be a travesty of justice&mdash;a premium
+upon recklessness and even fraud.  Moreover, people who won't wear
+pockets deserve to be punished.  They ask for trouble and ought not to
+complain when they get it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have never been able to fathom the obduracy of women in this matter
+of pockets.  It is not the only reflection upon their common-sense
+which is implicit in their dress.  If we were to pass judgment on the
+relative intelligence of the sexes by their codes of costume, sanity
+would pronounce overwhelmingly in favour of men.  Imagine a man who
+buttoned his coat and waistcoat down the back, so that he was dependent
+on someone else to help dress him in the morning and unfasten him at
+night, or who relied on such abominations as hooks-and-eyes scattered
+over unattainable places, in order to keep his garments in position.
+You cannot imagine such a man.  Yet women submit to these incredible
+tyrannies of fashion without a murmur, and talk about them as though it
+was the hand of fate upon them.  I have a good deal of sympathy with
+the view of a friend of mine who says that no woman ought to have a
+vote until she has won the enfranchisement of her own buttons.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Or take high-heeled boots.  Is there any sight more ludicrous than the
+spectacle of a woman stumbling along on a pair of high heels, flung out
+of the perpendicular and painfully struggling to preserve her
+equilibrium, condemned to take finicking little steps lest she should
+topple over, all the grace and freedom of movement lost in an ugly
+acrobatic feat?  And when the feet turn in, and the high heels turn
+over&mdash;heavens!  I confess I never see high heels without looking for a
+mindless face, and I rarely look in vain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the puzzle about the pockets is that quite sensible women go about
+in a pocketless condition.  I turned to Jane just now&mdash;she was sitting
+by the fire knitting&mdash;and asked how many pockets she had when she was
+fully dressed.  "None," she said.  "Pockets haven't been worn for years
+and years, but now they are coming in&mdash;in an ornamental way."  "In an
+ornamental way?" said I.  "Won't they carry anything?"  "Well, you can
+trust a handkerchief to them."  "Not a purse?"  "Good gracious, no.  It
+would simply ask to be stolen, and if it wasn't stolen in five minutes
+it would fall out in ten."  The case was stranger than I had thought.
+Not to have pockets was bad enough; but to have sham pockets!  Think of
+it!  We have been at war for three and a half years, and women are now
+beginning to wear pockets "in an ornamental way," not for use but as a
+pretty fal-lal, much as they might put on another row of useless
+buttons to button nothing.  And what is the result?  Jane (I have full
+permission to mention her in order to give actuality to this moral
+discourse) spends hours looking for her glasses, for her keys, for the
+letter that came this morning, for her purse, for her bag, for all that
+is hers.  And we, the devoted members of the family, spend hours in
+looking for them too, exploring dark corners, probing the interstices
+of sofas and chairs, rummaging the dishevelled drawers anew,
+discovering the thing that disappeared so mysteriously last week or
+last month and that we no longer want, but rarely the article that is
+the very hub of the immediate wheel of things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now, I am different.  I am pockets all over.  I am simply agape with
+pockets.  I am like a pillar-box walking about, waiting for the postman
+to come and collect things.  All told, I carry sixteen pockets&mdash;none of
+them ornamental, every one as practical as a time-table&mdash;pockets for
+letters, for watch, for keys, for handkerchiefs, for tickets, for
+spectacles (two pairs, long and short distance), for loose money, for
+note-wallet, for diary and pocket-book&mdash;why, bless me, you can hardly
+mention a thing I haven't a pocket for.  And I would not do without one
+of them, madam&mdash;not one.  Do I ever lose things?  Of course I lose
+things.  I lose them in my pockets.  You can't possibly have as many
+pockets as I have got without losing things in them.  But then you have
+them all the time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is the splendid thing about losing your property in your own
+pockets.  It always turns up in the end, and that lady's satchel left
+on the counter will never turn up.  And think of the surprises you get
+when rummaging in your pockets&mdash;the letters you haven't answered, the
+bills you haven't paid, the odd money that has somehow got into the
+wrong pocket.  When I have nothing else to do I just search my
+pockets&mdash;all my pockets, those in the brown suit, and the grey suit,
+and the serge suit, and my "Sunday best"&mdash;there must be fifty pockets
+in all, and every one of them full of something, of ghosts of
+engagements I haven't kept, and duties I haven't performed, and friends
+I have neglected, of pipes that I have mourned as lost, and half
+packets of cigarettes that by some miracle I have not smoked, and all
+the litter of a casual and disorderly life.  I would not part with
+these secrecies for all the satchels in Oxford Street.  I am my own
+book of mysteries.  I bulge with mysteries.  I can surprise myself at
+any moment I like by simply exploring my pockets.  If I avoid exploring
+them I know I am not very well.  I know I am not in a condition to face
+the things that I might find there.  I just leave them there till I am
+stronger&mdash;not lost, madam, as they would be in your satchel, but just
+forgotten, comfortably forgotten.  Why should one always be disturbing
+the sleeping dogs in the kennels of one's pockets?  Why not let them
+sleep?  Are there not enough troubles in life that one must go seeking
+them in one's own pockets?  And I have a precedent, look you.  Did not
+Napoleon say that if you did not look at your letters for a fortnight
+you generally found that they had answered themselves?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And may I not in this connection recall the practice of Sir Andrew
+Clarke, the physician of Mr. Gladstone, as recorded in the
+reminiscences of Mr. Henry Holiday?  At dinner one night Sir Andrew was
+observed to be drinking champagne, and was asked why he allowed himself
+an indulgence which he so rigorously denied to his patients.  "Yes," he
+said, "but you do not understand my case.  When I go from here I shall
+find a pile of fifty or sixty letters awaiting answers."  "But will
+champagne help you to answer them?" asked the other.  "Not at all,"
+said Sir Andrew, "not at all; but it puts you in the frame of mind in
+which you don't care a damn whether they are answered or not."  I do
+not offer this story for the imitation of youth, but for the solace of
+the people like myself who have long reached the years of discretion
+without becoming discreet, and who like to feel that their weaknesses
+have been shared by the eminent and the wise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, to conclude, the wisdom of the pocket habit is not to be judged by
+its abuse, but by its obvious convenience and safety.  I trust that
+some energetic woman will be moved to inaugurate a crusade for the
+redemption of her sex from its pocketless condition.  A Society for the
+Propagation of Pockets Among Women (S.P.P.A.W.) is a real need of the
+time.  It should be a part of the great work of after-the-war
+reconstruction.  It should organise opinion, distribute leaflets and
+hold meetings, with the Mayor in the chair and experts, rich in pockets
+and the lore of the subject, to light the fire of rebellion throughout
+the land.  Women have won the vote from the tyrant man.  Let them win
+their pockets from the tyrant dressmaker.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The fields lie cheek-by-jowl with the station, and a group of high
+elms, in which dwells a colony of rooks, throws its ample shade over
+the "down" platform.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the cornfield that marches side by side with the station there
+comes the cheerful music of the reaper and the sound of the voices of
+the harvesters, old men, some women and more children&mdash;for half of the
+field has been reaped and is being gathered and gleaned.  They are so
+near that the engine-driver of the "local" train exchanges gossip with
+them in the intervals of oiling his engine.  They talk of the crops and
+the bad weather there has been and the change that has come with
+September, and the news of boys who are fighting or have fallen....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the "up" platform.  They are in
+civilian dress, but behind them walks a sergeant who ejaculates
+"left&mdash;left&mdash;left" like the flick of a whip.  They are the latest
+trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, most of them mere
+boys.  They have the self-consciousness of obscure country youths who
+have suddenly been thrust into the public eye and are aware that all
+glances are turned critically upon their awkward movements.  They
+shamble along with a grotesque caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and
+laugh loud and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with
+themselves and the world.  It is hollow gaiety and suggests the
+animation of a trout with a hook in its throat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The booking-clerk, lounging at the door of the booking-office, passes a
+half-contemptuous remark upon them to a companion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wait till they come for you, Jimmy," says the other.  "You won't find
+it so funny then."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Jimmy's face falls at the reminder, for he is nearly ripe for the great
+harvest, and the reaper will soon come his way....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A few people drift in from outside as the time for the departure of the
+London train approaches.  Among them, a young woman, hot and flushed
+and carrying a country basket, is greeted by an acquaintance with
+surprise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What are you doing here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going to London&mdash;just as I am&mdash;-a telegram from Tom&mdash;he's got
+leave from the front&mdash;isn't it glorious&mdash;and all so
+unexpected&mdash;couldn't change, or even drop my basket&mdash;the messenger met
+me in the street&mdash;hadn't a moment to lose to catch the train." ...
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A little group brushes by her with far other emotions.  A stalwart
+soldier, a bronzed, good-looking fellow, with three stripes, who has
+evidently seen much service, is returning from leave.  His wife, neatly
+dressed and with head down, wheels a perambulator beside him.  Inside
+the perambulator is a child of three years or so.  Two other children,
+of perhaps five and six, walk with the soldier, each clasping a hand.
+The little procession passes in silence to the end of the platform,
+full of that misery which seeks to be alone with itself....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Over the wooden bridge that connects the two platforms comes a solitary
+soldier, laden with his belongings.  He has come in from some other
+village by the local train.  He flings himself down on the form and
+stares gloomily at the elms and the cornfield and the sunshine.  A
+comfortable-looking, elderly man, who has a copy of the <I>London Corn
+Circular</I> in his hand, turns to him with that amiable desire to be
+friendly which elderly people have in the presence of soldiers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And how long have you been out at the war, sonny?" he asks, much as he
+might ask how long holiday he had had.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sick of the bloody war," says the soldier, without even turning
+his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The comfortable, elderly man collapses into silence and the <I>Corn
+Circular</I>....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A young officer who has been driven up in a dog-cart comes on to the
+platform accompanied by a dog with tongue lolling from its mouth and
+with the large, brown, affectionate eyes of the Airedale.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The train thunders in, and the officer opens a carriage door.  The dog
+tries to enter with his master.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, no, old chap," says the latter, gently patting him and pulling him
+back.  "Go home.  They don't want you where I'm going."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dog stands for a moment on the platform, panting and gazing at his
+master as if hoping that he will relent.  Then he turns and trots away,
+throwing occasional glances back on the off-chance of a whistle of
+recall....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The moment has come for the separation of the little family at the end
+of the platform.  The soldier leans from the carriage window and his
+wife clings about his neck.  The two children stand by the
+perambulator.  They are brave little girls and remember that they have
+not to cry.  The train begins to move and the woman unclasps herself,
+leaving her husband at the window, smiling his hardest and throwing
+kisses to the children.  The train gathers speed and takes a curve and
+the soldier has vanished.  The mother turns to the perambulator and
+seeks to hide her face as she hurries with her little charges along the
+platform and through the gate.  The two little girls stifle their sobs
+in their aprons, but the child in the carriage knows nothing of public
+behaviour.  He knows in that dim way that is the affliction of
+childhood that something terrible is happening, and as the forlorn
+little group hurries by to escape into the lane hard by where grief can
+have its fill he rends the air with his sobs and cries of "Poor dada,
+poor dada!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Poor little mite, he is beginning his apprenticeship to this rough,
+insane world betimes....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now the platform is empty, and the only sound of life is the whirr
+of the reaping machine and the voices from the harvest field.  Through
+the meadow that leads to the village the dog is slowly trotting home,
+still casting occasional glances backwards on the chance....
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Yes, I would certainly keep a pig.  The idea came to me while I was
+digging.  I find that there is no occupation that stimulates thought
+more than digging if you choose your soil well.  Digging in the London
+clay does not stimulate thought; it deadens thought.  It is good
+exercise for the body, but it is no exercise for the mind.  You can't
+play with your fancies as you plunge your spade into this stiff and
+stubborn medium.  But in the light, porous soil of my garden on the
+chalk hills digging goes with a swing and a rhythm that set the
+thoughts singing like the birds.  I feel I could win battles when I'm
+digging, or write plays or lyrics that would stun the world, or make
+speeches that would stir a post to action.  Ideas seem as plentiful as
+blackberries in the autumn, and if only I could put down the spade and
+capture them red-hot I feel that I could make <I>The Star</I> simply blaze
+with glory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was in one of these prolific moments that I thought of the pig.
+Like all great ideas there was something inevitable about it.  The
+calculations of Le Verrier and Adams proved the existence of Neptune
+before that orb was discovered.  They knew it was there before they
+found it.  My pig was born without my knowledge.  In the furnace of my
+mind he took shape merely by the friction of facts.  He was a sort of
+pig by divine right.  It happened thus.  In the midst of my digging Jim
+Squire, passing up the lane, had paused on the other side of the hedge
+to discuss last night's frost.  I straightened my back for a talk, and
+naturally we talked about potatoes.  If you want to get the best out of
+Jim Squire you must touch him on potatoes.  There are some people who
+find Jim an unresponsive and suspicious yokel.  That is because they do
+not know how to draw him out.  Mention potatoes, or carrots, or the
+best way of dealing with slugs, or the right manure for a hot-bed, or
+any sensible subject like these, and he simply flows with wisdom and
+urbanity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He observed that I should have a tidy few potatoes, what with the
+garden I was digging, and the piece I'd turned over in the orchard, and
+that there bit o' waste land on the hillside which he <I>had</I> heard as I
+was getting Mestur Wistock to plough up for me.  Yes, there'd be a
+niceish lot.  And he <I>did</I> hear I was going to set King Edwards and
+Arran Chiefs.  Rare and fine potatoes they were too.  He had some King
+Edwards last year&mdash;turned out wonderful, they did.  One root he pulled
+up weighed 12 lb.  Yes, Miss Mary weighed 'em for him in the scale at
+the farm&mdash;just for a hobby like as you might say.  It was like this.
+He'd seen a bit in the paper about a man as had 8 lb. on a root, and he
+(Jim) said to himself, "This root beats that by a long chalk <I>I</I> know."
+And Miss Mary come by and she said she'd weigh 'em.  And she did.  And
+it was 12 lb. full, she said.  If anything, she said, 'twas a shade
+over.  <I>She</I> said as they'd have took a prize anywhere&mdash;that's what she
+said....  Well, you couldn't have too many potatoes these days.
+Wonderful good food they were, for man <I>and</I> pig....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As he went on up the lane my spade took up that word like a refrain.
+At every rhythmic stroke it seemed to cry "pig" with increasing
+vehemence.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,<BR>
+When a new planet swims into his ken.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+A pig?  Why not?&mdash;and I straightened my back again.  I felt that
+something prodigious was taking shape.  My eye wandered across the
+orchard.  There were the hives standing in a row&mdash;three of them, to be
+increased to twelve as fast as the expert, who has set up her
+carpenter's shop in the barn, can get the parts to put together.  And
+beyond the hives three sheds&mdash;one for poultry, one for the hot-bed for
+mushrooms, the third&mdash;why, the very thing....  Concrete the floor and
+it would be a very palace for a pig.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I took a turn up the garden to look this thing squarely in the face,
+and at the gate I saw the farmer's wife coming down the lane.  We
+stopped, and she talked about her cows and about an order she had got
+from the Government to plough up more pasture, and then&mdash;as if echoing
+the very thought that was drumming in my head&mdash;about the litter of pigs
+she was expecting and of her wish to get the cottagers to keep pigs.
+Why, this was a very conspiracy of circumstance, thought I.  It seemed
+as though man and events alike were engaged in a plot to make me keep a
+pig.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With an air of idle curiosity I encouraged the farmer's wife to talk on
+the thrilling theme, and she responded with enthusiasm.  The pig, I
+found, was a grossly maligned animal.  It had lain uncomplainingly
+under imputations that were foul slanders on its innocent and lovable
+character.  Yes, lovable.  She had had pigs who were as affectionate as
+any dog&mdash;pigs that followed her about in sheer friendliness.  And as
+for the charge of filthiness, who was to blame?  We gave them dirty
+styes and then called them dirty pigs.  But the pig was a clean animal,
+loved cleanliness, thrived on cleanliness.  It was man the dirty who
+kept the pig foul and then called him unclean.  And what a profitable
+animal.  She had had a sow which had produced 108 pigs and 102 of them
+came to maturity.  What an example to Shoreditch, I said.  Perhaps they
+don't give them clean styes in Shoreditch, she said.  No, I replied,
+they give them dirty styes....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I went indoors, suffused with the vision of the transfigured pig, the
+affectionate, cleanly, intelligent pig, and took up a paper, and the
+first thing my eye encountered was an article on "The Cottager's Pig."
+I read it with the frenzy of a new religion and rose filled to the brim
+with lore about the animal to whose existence (except in the shape of
+bacon) I had been indifferent so long.  And now, fully seized with the
+idea, it seemed that the world talked of nothing but pig.  It was only
+that my ears were unstopped and my eyes unsealed by an awakened
+curiosity; but it seemed to me that the pig had suddenly been born into
+the universe, and that the air was filled with the rumour of his
+coming.  I encountered the subject at every turn.  In the <I>Times</I> I
+read a touching lament over the disappearance of the little black pig.
+Elsewhere I saw a facsimile letter from Lord Rhondda, in which he
+declared his loyalty to the pig and denied that he had ever spoken evil
+of him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a patriotic duty to keep a pig.  He was an ally in the war.  I
+saw the whole German General Staff turning pale at his name, as Mazarin
+was said to turn pale at the name of Cromwell.  Arriving in town I met
+the eminent politician Mr. R&mdash;&mdash; and he began to tell me how he had
+started all his cottagers in the North growing pig.  By nightfall I
+could have held my own without shame or discredit in any company of pig
+dealers, and in my dreams I saw the great globe itself resting on the
+back, not of an elephant, but of a pig with a beautiful curly tail.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Later: I have ordered the pig.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A young man wrote to me the other day lamenting his ignorance and
+requesting me to tell him what books to read and what to do in order to
+become learned and wise.  I sent him a civil answer and such advice as
+occurred to me.  But I confess that the more I thought of the matter
+the less assured I felt of my competence for the task.  I ceased to be
+flattered by the implied tribute to my omniscience, and felt rather
+like a person who gives up a third-class ticket after he has ridden in
+a first-class carriage might feel.  I surveyed my title to this
+reputation for learning, and was shocked at the poverty of my estate.
+As I contrasted the mountain of things I didn't know with the molehill
+of things I did know, my self-esteem sank to zero.  Why, my dear young
+sir, thought I, I cannot pay twopence in the pound.  I am nothing but
+the possessor of a wide-spread ignorance.  Why should you come to me
+for a loan?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I begin with myself&mdash;this body of me that is carried about on a pair of
+cunningly-devised stilts and waves a couple of branches with five
+flexible twigs at the end of each, and is surmounted by a large round
+knob with wonderful little orifices, and glittering jewels, and a sort
+of mat for a covering, and which utters strange noises and speaks and
+sings and laughs and cries.  Bless me, said I, what do I know about it?
+I am a mere bundle of mysteries in coat and breeches.  I couldn't tell
+you where my epiglottis is or what it does without looking in a
+dictionary.  I have been told, but I always forget.  I am little better
+than the boy in the class.  "Where is the diaphragm?" asked the
+teacher.  "Please sir, in North Staffordshire."  said the boy.  I may
+laugh at the boy, but any young medical student would laugh just as
+much at me if I told him honestly what I do not know about the
+diaphragm.  And when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of this
+aggregation of atoms which we call the human body the medical student
+and, indeed, the whole Medical Faculty would be found to be nearly as
+ignorant as the boy was about the diaphragm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From myself I pass to all the phenomena of life, and wherever I turn I
+find myself exploring what Carlyle calls the "great, deep sea of
+Nescience on which we float like exhalations that are and then are
+not."  I see Orion striding across the southern heavens, and feel the
+wonder and the majesty of that stupendous spectacle, but if I ask
+myself what I know about it I have no answer.  And even the knowledge
+of the most learned astronomer only touches the fringe of the
+immensity.  What is beyond&mdash;beyond&mdash;-beyond?  His mind is balked, as
+mine is, almost at the threshold of the mighty paradox of a universe
+which we can conceive neither as finite nor as infinite, which is
+unthinkable as having limits and unthinkable as having no limits.  As
+the flowers come on in summer I always learn their names, but I know
+that I shall have to learn them again next year.  And as to the mystery
+of their being, by what miracle they grow and transmute the secretions
+of the earth and air into life and beauty&mdash;why, my dear young sir, I am
+no more communicative than the needy knife-grinder.  "Story?  God bless
+you, I have none to tell, sir."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I cannot put my hand to anything outside my little routine without
+finding myself meddling with things I don't understand.  I was digging
+in the garden just now and came upon a patch of ground with roots deep
+down.  Some villainous pest, said I, some enemy of my carrots and
+potatoes.  Have at them!  I felt like a knight charging to the rescue
+of innocence.  I plunged the fork deeper and deeper and tore at the
+roots, and grew breathless and perspiring.  Even now I ache with the
+agonies of that titanic combat.  And the more I fought the more
+infinite became the ramifications of those roots.  And so I called for
+the expert advice of the young person who was giving some candy to her
+bees in the orchard.  She came, took a glance into the depths, and
+said: "Yes, you are pulling up that tree."  And she pointed to an
+ivy-grown tree in the hedge a dozen yards away.  Did I feel foolish,
+young sir?  Of course I felt foolish, but not more foolish than I have
+felt on a thousand other occasions.  And you ask me for advice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I recall one among many of these occasions for my chastening.  When I
+was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an
+old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire.  As
+we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he
+spoke of it as a poplar.  "Not a poplar," said I with the easy
+assurance of youth, and I described to him for his information the
+characters of what I conceived to be the poplar.  "Ah," he said "you
+are thinking of the Lombardy poplar.  That tree is the Egyptian
+poplar."  And then he went on to tell me of a score of other
+poplars&mdash;their appearance, their habits, and their origins&mdash;quite
+kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had
+fallen upon my cocksure ignorance.  I found that he had spent his life
+in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke.  And I had
+explained to him what a poplar was like!  But I think he did me good,
+and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other
+people information that they possibly do not need.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the books I haven't read, and the sciences I don't know, and the
+languages I don't speak, and the things I can't do&mdash;young man, if you
+knew all this you would be amazed.  But it does not make me unhappy.
+On the contrary I find myself growing cheerful in the contemplation of
+these vast undeveloped estates.  I feel like a fellow who has inherited
+a continent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny corner
+of the inheritance.  The rest I just wander through like a boy in
+wonderland.  Some day I will know about all these things.  I will
+develop all these immensities.  I will search out all these mysteries.
+In my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort.  I know that when
+the curtain rings down I shall be digging the same tiny plot.  But it
+is pleasant to dream of future conquests that you won't make.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, after all, aren't we all allotment holders of the mind,
+cultivating our own little patch and surrounded by the wonderland of
+the unknown?  Even the most learned of us is ignorant when his
+knowledge is measured by the infinite sum of things.  And the riches of
+knowledge themselves are much more widely diffused than we are apt to
+think.  There are few people who are not better informed about
+something than we are, who have not gathered their own peculiar sheaf
+of wisdom or knowledge in this vast harvest field of experience.  That
+is at once a comfortable and a humbling thought.  It checks a too
+soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abasement on the other.
+The fund of knowledge is a collective sum.  No one has all the items,
+nor a fraction of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not to
+have some.  If I were to walk out into the street now I fancy I should
+not meet a soul, man or woman, who could not fill in some blank of my
+mind.  And I think&mdash;for I must not let humility go too far&mdash;I think I
+could fill some blank in theirs.  Our carrying capacity varies
+infinitely, but we all carry something, and it differs from the store
+of any one else on earth.  And, moreover, the mere knowledge of things
+is not necessary to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom.
+There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day which were hidden
+from Plato and Cæsar and Dante, but the ploughboy is not wiser than
+they.  Sir Thomas Browne, in his book on "Vulgar Errors," declared that
+the idea that the earth went round the sun was too foolish to be
+controverted.  I know better, but that doesn't make me a wiser man than
+Browne.  Wisdom does not depend on these things.  I suppose that, on
+the whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally sane man who
+ever took a great part in the affairs of this planet.  Yet compared
+with the average undergraduate he was utterly unlearned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying your eagerness to know.
+Learn all you can, my boy, about this wonderful caravan on which we
+make our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quarrel and fight
+with such crazy ferocity as we go.  But at the end of all your learning
+you will be astonished at how little you know, and will rejoice that
+the pleasure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the
+accumulation of facts.  There was a good deal of truth in that saying
+of Savonarola that "a little old woman who kept the faith knew more
+than Plato or Aristotle."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A SHINY NIGHT
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about midnight.  It is then
+that I leave the throbbing heart of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to
+the last bus bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer the back corner
+seat.  If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near as I can and watch
+the enemy who possesses it with a vigilant eye.  When he rises I pounce
+on the quarry like a kestrel on its prey.  I love the back seat, not
+only because it is the most comfortable, but also because it gives you
+the sense of solitude in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the most
+enjoyable sensations I know.  To see, and not be seen, to watch the
+human comedy unobserved, save by the friendly stars who look down very
+searchingly but never blab, to have the advantages of both solitude and
+society in one breath, as it were&mdash;this is my idea of enjoyment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night,
+when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making
+all the earth a wonder of romance.  The garish day is of the earth,
+"the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is seen and the
+constellations blaze in unimaginable space is of the eternal; but here
+in this magic glamour of the moon where night and day are wedded is the
+realm of romance.  You may wander all day in the beech woods and never
+catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult coming down the glades or hear an
+echo of Robin Hood's horn; but walk in the beech woods by moonlight and
+every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends
+of long ago.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion for "Cumnor Hall."
+"After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked
+in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never
+weary of repeating the first stanza:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The dews of summer night did fall&mdash;<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The moon, sweet regent of the sky,<BR>
+Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And many an oak that stood thereby."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter.  He was the King
+of the Moonlighters.  He was a man who would have been my most dreaded
+rival on the midnight bus.  He would have wanted the back seat, I know,
+and there he would have sat and chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and
+watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and
+turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a
+shiny night."  There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous
+Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Oh, 'tis my delight<BR>
+On a shiny night,<BR>
+In the season of the year.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure
+that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night
+because he was a poacher.  I never could affect any indignation about
+poachers.  I suspect that I rather like them.  Anyhow, there is no
+stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire,<BR>
+Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.<BR>
+Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Oh, 'tis my delight, etc.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And there was Dick Turpin.  He, too, loved the moonlight for very
+practical reasons.  He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but
+because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with
+Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of
+moonlight.  The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy.  The
+sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied.
+Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast
+between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the
+invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast
+between degrees of brightness.  Everything is bright, but some things
+are more bright than others.  But in the moonlight the world is etched
+in black and white.  The shadows are flat and unrevealing.  They have
+none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the
+shadows of the day.  They are as secret as the grave; distinct
+personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere
+passages of colour tuned to a lower key.  And the quality of the
+encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast.  The moon does not
+bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.... Strange she is, and secret.<BR>
+Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful
+effect of black and white that it creates.  Under the play of the
+moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries.  The lights seem lighter
+than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker.
+That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may
+lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is
+the soul of romance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that
+you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks
+which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar
+scenes.  Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott,
+knew those impenetrable shadows well:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;.... tender is the night,<BR>
+And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,<BR>
+Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But here there is no light,<BR>
+Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown<BR>
+Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the
+unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the
+other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to
+escape the prying eyes of Shylock.  Hence through all time it has been
+the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent
+horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+To whose bright image nightly by the moon,<BR>
+Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to
+the magic of the moonlight.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON GIVING UP TOBACCO
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+This evening I am morally a little unapproachable.  I feel too good to
+be true.  Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of
+Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world
+that is not quite up to my moral handicap.  For I have given up
+tobacco.  For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my
+lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over
+me....  For a whole day!  I had not realised how long a day could be.
+It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into
+eternity.  I once heard a man say: "Dear me!  How time flies!"  It
+struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have
+often repeated it since.  But now I know it to be false.  I know that
+that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that
+gives the illusion of the flight of time.  If he had the moral courage
+to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!"  He would say,
+as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the
+mantel-piece), "How time stands still!"  He would find that a day can
+seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is
+terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have been contemplating this thing for years.  Some day, I have said
+to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant
+Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service.  Long have I borne his
+yoke&mdash;ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket
+pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger.  (How
+well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the
+sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable
+feeling of physical nausea.)  I have kicked against the tyranny of a
+habit that I knew had become my master.  It was not the tobacco I
+disliked.  Far from it.  I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of
+tobacco.  The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit
+and to lose our freedom&mdash;to cease to be masters of our own actions.
+"Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a
+character in some play, and the saying has a wide application.  I did
+not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me.  I did not say
+with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good
+dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco."  It was the
+pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions."  And though as the
+result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and
+resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was
+the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise.  The old dog in a new coat,
+as Johnson used to say.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are some people who approach the question frivolously.  The young
+man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example.  When the lady
+in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the
+young man John agreed.  Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said,
+and he was going to burn them all.  The lady in bombazine rejoiced.
+Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said.  "That ain't
+my way," replied the young man called John.  "I burn 'em one at a
+time&mdash;little end in my mouth, big end outside."  Similarly wanting in
+seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared
+that it prolonged life.  "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said.
+"None of them smoked, <I>and they are all dead</I>."  Others again discover
+virtues to conceal the tyranny.  Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign
+Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco
+smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work.  "The art of
+diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco."  No
+one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no
+very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous
+fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the
+council chamber at Berlin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and
+others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse.
+It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling
+that the spirit of communion is broken.  That was the case of Carlyle
+and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and
+silent to boot.  They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep
+for words.  And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy
+of words in wreaths of smoke:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,<BR>
+Makes half a sentence at a time enough;<BR>
+The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,<BR>
+Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for
+thought and inspiration.  "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says
+Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the
+good gift to our shores.  Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we
+who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother
+Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister.  Homer
+and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help
+of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had
+the true spirit of the tobacco cult.  Had he been born a couple of
+thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have
+mingled with his praises of Falernian!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not
+for this or that respectable reason&mdash;not always even because we enjoy
+it&mdash;but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it.
+And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more
+than the thing yielded to that is the mischief.  All the great systems
+of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to
+his habits.  The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all
+events, to keep the will master of the appetites.  They are
+intended&mdash;altogether apart from the question of salvation by works&mdash;to
+serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway,
+reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day.  I shall
+not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the
+tobacconists' shops&mdash;and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there
+are!&mdash;the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly
+after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar
+as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of
+refusal.  For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism.  You do
+not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on
+your way.  You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf
+to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other
+syrens that beckon you from the shop windows.  And now evening has come
+and the victory is mine.  I have singed the beard of the giant.  I am
+no longer his thrall.  To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear
+conscience&mdash;with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice,
+and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How I shall enjoy to-morrow!
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE GREAT GOD GUN
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun.  The goddess
+Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the
+sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath
+of fire&mdash;fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as
+they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming.  We stood in
+a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even
+less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave.  The exterior of
+the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless
+walls faced with corrugated iron.  Within was a maze of immense
+mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits
+descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the
+dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily
+overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The signal was given.  Two shadowy figures that appeared in the
+darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations.  A giant
+crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the
+orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell
+within.  Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps
+only an electric button, was touched.  But at that touch the whole
+front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back
+slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty
+feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from
+whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing.  And as the door
+opened the Cyclops above&mdash;strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in
+the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace&mdash;set the crane in
+motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god,
+suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers
+of a hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It emerged slowly like a column of solid light&mdash;mystic, wonderful.  All
+night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of
+incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as
+white as the furnace within.  The great hand of the crane bore it
+forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of
+the pits.  I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled
+nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid.  It was a pit of oil&mdash;tens of
+thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil.  It was the second bath of
+the god.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused
+above the pit.  Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that
+held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil.  The
+breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the
+liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great
+tongues of flame.  As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit
+the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the
+ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces.  But it would not let go.
+Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he
+stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the
+oil hungrily through his burning pores.  Soon he will be caught up in
+the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an
+empty pit near by.  And upon him will descend another tube, that has
+passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits
+the body.  And then in due course he will be provided with yet another
+coat.  Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put
+on at a tension of unthinkable resistance.  And even then there remains
+his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk.
+After that he will be equipped with his brain&mdash;all the wonderful
+mechanism of breech and cradle&mdash;and then one day he will be carried to
+the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his
+manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan
+fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his
+message of death and destruction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and
+stone."  Poor savage!  If we could only take him, with his childlike
+intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and
+industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men
+could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts
+are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the
+hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue
+thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles&mdash;how ashamed
+the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone!  How he would
+abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And what a voracious deity he is!  Here in the great arsenal of
+Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities,
+foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a
+caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first
+crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames
+of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and
+perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as
+they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped
+like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar
+of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god
+is passing through a multitude of preparations more delicate than any
+known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave
+scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where
+mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate
+instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so
+precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious
+chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are
+filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not
+drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working
+(for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings,
+themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous
+observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A great town&mdash;a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour
+of a city like Leeds&mdash;all devoted to the service of the god who lies
+there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men.  I see
+the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone.
+And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions.  All
+over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his
+glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day
+and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers
+beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the
+chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel.
+You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men
+toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win
+that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to
+forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts.
+You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our
+universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the
+proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery
+coal-tar.  You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in
+proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god.  And
+behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night
+to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth
+into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the
+uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits
+you&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;... where Rhine unto the sea,<BR>
+And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,<BR>
+And where great armies glitter in the sun,<BR>
+And great kings rule and men are boasted free.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the
+harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves
+chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him
+more lavishly with the food of death.  You cannot escape the great
+traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth.  The
+horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep
+of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of
+Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas
+is broken by the throbbing of his chariots.  As a neutral, good savage,
+you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than
+these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to
+the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God
+Gun will greet your astonished eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message;
+on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty
+thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land
+where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are
+mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by
+that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger
+rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in
+autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines
+of the god.  At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs
+his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed.  He has
+spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock.
+And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black,
+billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has
+blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass
+that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his
+last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden
+the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets
+of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an
+abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine
+to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues
+(a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your
+simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in
+satire&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+That civilisation doos git forrad<BR>
+Sometimes upon a powder cart&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with
+mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone.
+Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness.  Perhaps he will
+be perplexed and puzzled.  For he may have heard of another religion
+that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind
+to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into
+conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave.  He was a
+reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who
+had been called up at the beginning of the war.  He had many
+interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic,
+matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier.  But something
+he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener,
+and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But why?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, he hadn't no escort.  You're not going to make me believe he
+didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no
+escort.  It stands to reason.  He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you
+might say.  He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he
+had.  He could look ahead.  That's what he could do.  He could look
+ahead.  What did he say about the war?  Three years, he said, or the
+duration, and he was about right.  He wasn't the man to get drowned by
+an oversight&mdash;not him.  Stands to reason.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme.  "He's
+alive right enough.  He's fighting for the Germans.  Why, I know a man
+who see him in a German uniform before the war began.  I should know
+him if I see him.  He inspected me often.  He made a fool of himself at
+Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new
+start, as you might say.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And look at Hamel.  He ain't dead&mdash;course not.  He went to
+Germany&mdash;that's what he did.  Stands to reason."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked.  "Is he fighting for the
+Germans too?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Well no.  That was too tall an order even for his credulity.  He
+boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's laying by&mdash;that's what he's doing.  He's laying by.  You see,
+he'd done his job.  He raised his army and made the whole job, as you
+may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a
+corner.  Not him.  Stands to reason.  Why should he?  And him done all
+what he had done.  So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted
+again.  Then he'll turn up all right.  You'll see."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of
+survivors came to shore.  There were 800 men who perished with Lord
+Kitchener.  Not one has been heard of.  Are they all 'laying by'?  And
+where are they hiding?  And why?  And were they all in Lord Kitchener's
+secret?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man
+who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could.
+"I can't do it....  With his foresight and all....  And no escort, mind
+you....  No, I can't believe it....  Stands to reason."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the
+legend of Kitchener had passed beyond the challenge of death.  I had
+heard much of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in
+Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted
+that that man's name was&mdash;well, whose would you think?  Why, of
+course....  But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity
+and absoluteness.  It did not rest upon fact.  It defied all facts and
+all evidence.  It was an act of tyrannic faith.  He was not dead,
+because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead.  And so he
+was alive.  And there you are.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end
+that helped the growth of the myth.  He filled so vast a place in the
+public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed
+unthinkable.  No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his
+body in death.  He had just walked out into the night, and from the
+night he would return.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to
+the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the
+popular mind.  It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural.
+In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who
+could daunt death itself.  And when death stabbed him suddenly in the
+dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the
+wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of
+blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy.  "Stands to
+reason."  That's all.  It just "stands to reason."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief
+to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent
+foolishness.  It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps,"
+expresses over his fallen comrade&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,<BR>
+Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple
+mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into
+material terms.  Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he
+lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,<BR>
+Call him when your powder's running low&mdash;<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"If the Dons sight Devon<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I'll leave the port of Heaven,<BR>
+And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after,
+in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear
+that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death.  The torch of
+a great spirit never goes out.  It is handed on from generation to
+generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest.  And that I
+think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate
+credulity.  Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that
+cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material
+immortality to give his faith an anchorage.  And so, out in the vague
+shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his
+post&mdash;"laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening
+for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out
+into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't
+never believe that he's dead....  Stands to reason."  And as he bade me
+"Good-night," I said, "I think you are right.  I think he is living,
+too."  And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON TALK AND TALKERS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the
+conversation.  I confess that I found the experience a little trying.
+In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person.  The talk I
+like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that
+"that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the
+laughter abundant."  I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to
+be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics.  I like to talk in my slippers, as
+it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all
+the evening before me.  Above all, I like the company of people who
+talk for enjoyment and not for admiration.  "I am none of those who
+sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the
+secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song.  But at this dinner
+table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning.  It was
+so staccato and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand.  It
+was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of
+touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and
+shuttlecock, or demon patience, or anything you like that is
+intellectually and physically breathless and baffling.  I thought of a
+bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting
+away from the mark that I never got it out.  It had grown stale and out
+of date before I could invest it with the artistic merit that would
+enable it to appear in such brilliant company.  And so, mentally out of
+breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch
+the drift of the sparkling dialogue.  But I looked as wise as possible,
+just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the
+things I did not say were quite worth saying.  That was Henry Irving's
+way when the conversation got beyond him.  He just looked wise and said
+nothing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but
+this was not good talk.  It was clever talk, which is quite a different
+thing.  There was no "stuff" in it.  It was like trying to make a meal
+off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack
+of geniality.  It reminded me of the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice
+Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court
+from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate quotations.
+The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of
+fellowship.  Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of
+wit, but wit alone never made good conversation.  It is like mint sauce
+without the lamb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists.  Macaulay
+talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as
+though he were engaged in an argument with space and eternity.  "If any
+of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at
+breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a
+chance.  Macaulay is coming."  And you remember that whimsical story of
+Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the
+garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning
+in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and
+seeing the poet with the button between forefinger and thumb still
+talking into space.  His life was an unending monologue.  "I think,
+Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking
+of his pulpit days.  "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you
+do anything else."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a
+clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of
+the encounter.  He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of
+Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he
+had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of hearty conversation.
+He quarrelled heartily and forgave heartily&mdash;as in that heated scene at
+Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing
+and had come under his sledge hammer.  Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a
+short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy;&mdash;Johnson: Give me
+your hand, Sir.  You were too tedious and I was too short.&mdash;Mr. &mdash;&mdash;:
+Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way.&mdash;Johnson: Come, Sir,
+let's have no more of it.  We offend one another by our contention; let
+us not offend the company by our compliments."  He always had the
+company in mind.  He no more thought of talking alone than a boxer
+would think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think of
+rushing up to the net for a rally alone.  He wanted something to hit
+and something to parry, and the harder he hit and the quicker he
+parried the more he loved the other fellow.  That is the way with all
+the good talkers of our own time.  Perhaps Mr. Belloc is too cyclonic
+and scornful for perfect conversation, but his energy and wit are
+irresistible.  I find Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less
+aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the platform.  But the
+princes of the art, in my experience, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and
+Mr. Richard Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, the
+second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his thought, the third for
+the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk.
+I would add Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist.  He is too
+interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested in others.  When
+he is well under way you simply sit round and listen.  It is capital
+amusement, but it is not conversation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not the man who talks abundantly who alone keeps the pot of
+conversation boiling.  Some of the best talkers talk little.  They save
+their shots for critical moments and come in with sudden and
+devastating effect.  Lamb had that art, and his stammer was the perfect
+vehicle of his brilliant sallies.  Mr. Arnold Bennett in our time uses
+the same hesitation with delightful effect&mdash;sometimes with a shattering
+truthfulness that seems to gain immensely from the preliminary
+obstruction that has to be overcome.  And I like in my company of
+talkers the good listener, the man who contributes an eloquent silence
+which envelops conversation in an atmosphere of vigilant but friendly
+criticism.  Addison had this quality of eloquent silence.  Goldsmith,
+on the other hand, would have liked to shine, but had not the gift of
+talk.  Among the eloquent listeners of our day I place that fine writer
+and critic, Mr. Robert Lynd, whose quiet has a certain benignant
+graciousness, a tolerant yet vigilant watchfulness, that adds its
+flavour to the more eager talk of others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that "perhaps in the next
+world the use of words may be dispensed with&mdash;that our thoughts may
+stream into each other's minds without any verbal communication."  It
+is an idea which has its attractions.  It would save time and effort,
+and would preserve us from the misunderstandings which the clumsy
+instrument of speech involves.  I think, as I sit here in the orchard
+by the beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad functions
+with such disciplined certainty, that there must be the possibility of
+mutual understanding without speech&mdash;an understanding such as that
+which Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered and exploited
+if it had been created mute.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet I do not share Rogers's hope.  I fancy the next world will be
+like this, only better.  I think it will resound with the familiar
+speech of our earthly pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among
+any of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we may light upon
+the great talkers of history, and share in their eternal disputation.
+There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle
+and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down
+the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or
+Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid
+Tavern described by Fuller&mdash;the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish
+galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English
+frigate&mdash;or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on
+an eternal May morning.  It is a comfortable thought, but I cannot
+conceive it without the odd, cheerful din of contending tongues.  I
+fancy edging myself into those enchanted circles, and having a modest
+share in the glorious pow-wows of the masters.  I hope they won't vote
+me a bore and scatter at my approach.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A VISION OF EDEN
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I had a glimpse of Eden last night.  It came, as visions should come,
+out of the misery of things.  In all these tragic years no night spent
+in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its
+sense of impending peril, its disquieting <I>communiqué</I>, Wytschaate
+lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever
+retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a
+sick and foreboding heart&mdash;and then out into the night with the burden
+of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul.  And as I stood in the
+dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering
+towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast
+furnaces on a dark hillside.  It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding
+through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the
+darkness with its jovial lamps.  Heavens, thought I, what strangers we
+are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant,
+for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear.  The bus stopped and I
+got inside, and inside it was radiant too&mdash;so brilliant that you could
+not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and
+blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read
+the paper with luxurious ease.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But I did not read the paper.  I didn't want to read the paper.  I only
+wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit
+bus.  It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and
+bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into
+the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told.  One day,
+I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this.  All the
+buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight
+through streets as bright as day.  The gloom will have vanished from
+Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter
+once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and
+Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills.  We shall
+look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be
+afraid.  The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor
+slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this
+intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is
+past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that
+was lost and that we yearn to regain.  Yes, I think I should fall on my
+knees.  I think we shall all want to fall on our knees.  What other
+attitude will there be for us?  Even my barber will fall on his knees.
+"If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other
+day, "I'd fall on my knees <I>this very night</I>."  He spoke as though
+nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of
+thing.  I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond
+me.  It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who
+when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts
+if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and
+blew their temple down.  But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of
+the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But then&mdash;what then?  Well I should want to get on to some high and
+solitary place&mdash;alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be
+silent and when to talk&mdash;there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of
+horror.  I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick.  And in
+the dawn of a golden day&mdash;it must be a golden day&mdash;I would see the sun
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater for glorious Sty Head
+and hear the murmurs from Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up
+Great Gable and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the green
+pastures of Langdale.  And there in that sanctuary with its starry dome
+and its encompassing hills I should find the thing I sought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do something desperate.  I
+shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if I know my
+companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his
+craft of the mountains and together we will
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Leave our rags on Pavey Ark,<BR>
+Our cards on Pillar grim.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world
+that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its Paradise
+Regained....  Why, here is St. John's Wood already.  And Lord's!  Of
+course, I <I>must</I> have a day at Lord's.  It will be a part of the ritual
+of reconciliation.  The old players will not be there, for the gulf
+with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on
+distant fields.  But we must recapture their music and pay homage to
+their memory.  Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's&mdash;or perchance the
+Oval&mdash;and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball,
+and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket,
+and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of
+the doughty things we have seen them do.  Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz
+and Jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be
+forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the
+goodly game&mdash;"W.G." and Ranji, Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and
+Bonner, Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host.
+We'll not forget one of them.  Not one.  For a whole day we will go it,
+hammer and tongs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there are ever so many more things I shall want to do.  I shall
+want to go and see the chestnuts at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday.  I
+shall want to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the Fifth,
+and make my young friends April fools on the First, and feel what a
+tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on Good Friday and
+pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.  I shall want to go and sit on the sands
+and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the
+Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from
+our hands nearly four years ago.  In short, I shall plunge into all the
+old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no
+heart for, no use for to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of Eden into the snow and
+the slush and the never-ending night.  The magic chariot goes on with
+its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision
+in darkness.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A COMIC GENIUS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+"Like to see Harry Lauder?  Of course I should like to see Harry
+Lauder.  But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord
+Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that
+extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands
+to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have,
+as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan?  Do you
+realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry
+Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls,
+buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans?  Now, on a
+conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed £52,000 to the War Loan.
+In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan.
+You are making him your agent.  You pass the cash on to him and he
+passes the bullets on to the Germans.  It is a patriotic duty to go and
+see Harry Lauder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a
+good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went.  It was a poor setting
+for the great man&mdash;one of those dismal things called revues, that are
+neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger
+contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially
+anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster
+young women.  I confess that I prefer my Harry without these
+accompaniments.  I like him to have the stage to himself.  I like Miss
+Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about.  I do not want
+anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I
+want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time
+with his foot and humming the melody.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And for the same reason.  The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of
+art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed
+by any intrusive and alien note.  And it is this faculty of creating a
+state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the
+characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the
+extraordinary influence he exercises over his public.  If you are
+susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the
+Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike
+anything else on the stage or in life.  Like Bottom, you are
+translated.  Your defences are carried by storm, your severities
+disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the
+world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other
+boys to the piping of the magician.  The burden has fallen off your
+back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of
+light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the
+sunshine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the
+professional sense.  It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is
+not an actor at all.  Contrast him with the other great figure of the
+music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will
+understand what I mean.  Chevalier is never himself, but always
+somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real&mdash;an
+incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man
+celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch."  With his great powers of
+observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type.
+He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to
+you.  If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage.  You do not
+want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself.  It
+doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often
+you have seen him do it.  In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it
+the better you like it.  His jokes may be old, but they are never
+stale.  They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and
+old port that grow better with age.  His songs may be simple and
+threadbare.  You don't care.  You just want him to go on singing them,
+singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the
+heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to
+you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring."  You want to
+see him walk, you want to see him skip&mdash;oh, the incomparable drollery
+of that demure little step!&mdash;you want to hear him talk, you want to
+hear him laugh.  In short, you just want him to be there doing anything
+he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful
+of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He has art, of course&mdash;great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of
+voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate
+sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a
+sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a
+genial satire.  And his figure and his face add to his equipment.  His
+walk is priceless.  His legs&mdash;oh, who shall describe those legs, those
+exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive?  Clothed in his kilt and
+his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical,
+droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery.  Your first impulse
+is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with
+him.  You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for
+his laugh is irresistible.  It is so friendly and companionable, so
+full of intimacies, so open and sunny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his pockets and tells
+you the history of the contents, or gossips of the ways of sailors, and
+you gather round like children at a fair.  The sense of the theatre has
+vanished.  You are not listening to an actor, but to an old friend who
+is getting nearer and nearer to you all the time, until he seems to
+have got you by the button and to be telling his drolleries to you
+personally and chuckling in your own private ear.  There is nothing
+comparable to this intimacy between the man and his audience.  It is
+the triumph of a personality, so expansive, so rich in the humanities,
+so near to the general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort
+of spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all-pervasive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the spell.  If so, be not
+scornful of us who have.  Be sorry for yourself.  Believe me, you have
+missed one of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A VANISHED GARDEN
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road the other evening,
+talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked: "What
+is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome
+of the war?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," I replied.  "Come
+this way and I'll show it to you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I
+turned from the road and led him through the gorse and the trees
+towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of
+allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures,
+men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion
+beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches
+and looking at the fruits of their labour springing from the soil.
+"There," I said, "is the most important result of the war."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He laughed, but not contemptuously.  He knew what I meant, and I think
+he more than half agreed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider what that stretch
+of allotments means.  It is the symptom of the most important revival,
+the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations.
+Wherever you go that symptom meets you.  Here in Hampstead allotments
+are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.  A friend of mine who lives
+in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish.  In the
+neighbourhood of London there must be many thousands.  In the country
+as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands.  If dear old Joseph
+Pels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening,
+see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and
+potato patches, what joy would be his!  He was the forerunner of the
+revival, the passionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel
+fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened
+the sleeper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can
+be measured in terms of food.  That is important, but it is not the
+most important thing.  The allotment movement will add appreciably to
+our food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual resources
+of the nation.  It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is
+blighting our people.  What is wrong with us?  What is the root of our
+social and spiritual ailment?  Is it not the divorce of the people from
+the soil?  For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has
+been sucked into the great towns, and we have seen grow up a vast
+machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of
+the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the
+slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature
+implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the
+streets.  Can you walk through a London working-class district or a
+Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a
+feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous
+perversion of life into the arid channels of death?  Can you take pride
+in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts
+in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now the sun is going to rise.  We have started a revolution that
+will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of
+the people.  The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken.  The
+dead hand is going to be lifted from the land.  Yes, you say, but these
+people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the
+courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and
+so on.  That is true.  But the movement must get hold of the
+<I>intelligenzia</I> first.  The important thing is that the breach in the
+prison is made: the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born&mdash;not
+still-born, but born a living thing.  It is a way of salvation that
+will not be lost, and that all will traverse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is not mere dithyrambic enthusiasm.  Take a man out of the street
+and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him.  I
+have seen the miracle again and again.  I know a bus conductor, for
+example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind.  But one night I
+touched the key of his soul, mentioned allotments, and discovered that
+this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of
+his garden triumphs.  He had got a new purpose in life.  He had got the
+spirit of the earth in his bones.  It is not only the humanising
+influence of the garden, it is its democratising influence too.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+When Adam delved and Eve span,<BR>
+Where was then the gentleman?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss gardens.  I know
+a distinguished public servant and scholar whose allotment is next to
+that of a bricklayer.  They have become fast friends, and the
+bricklayer, being the better man at the job, has unconsciously assumed
+the role of a kindly master encouraging a well-meaning but not very
+competent pupil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And think of the cleansing influence of all this.  Light and air and
+labour&mdash;these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul.
+It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the
+great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets
+and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no
+name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the
+compass of our speech.  In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual
+disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the
+moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that
+ancient fable.  Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of
+soul that is found in gardens.  He must find his way back to Eden if he
+is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though Eden is but a
+twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a hundred other twenty-pole
+allotments, he will find it as full of wonder and refreshment as the
+garden of Epicurus.  He will not find much help from the God that Mr.
+Wells has discovered, or invented, but the God that dwells in gardens
+is sufficient for all our needs&mdash;let the theologians say what they will.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Not God in gardens?  When the eve is cool?<BR>
+Nay, but I have a sign&mdash;<BR>
+'Tis very sure God walks in mine.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt the sign, or lose
+its impress through all his days.  I know, for I was once a child whose
+world was a garden.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It lay a mile away from the little country town, shut out from the road
+by a noble hedge, so high that even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver,
+the wonder and the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so thick
+that no eye could peer through.  It was a garden of plenty, but also a
+garden of the fancy, with neglected corners, rich in tangled growths
+and full of romantic possibilities.  It was in this wilder terrain that
+I had found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow-worm's delicate
+light, and here, with my brain excited by "The Story of the Hundred
+Days," that I knew the Frenchmen lurked in ambush while I at the head
+of my gallant troop of the Black Watch was careering with magnificent
+courage across the open country where the potatoes and the rhubarb and
+the celery grew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was ever the Black Watch.  Something in the name thrilled me.  And
+when one day I packed a little handbag with a nightgown and started out
+to the town where the railway station was, it was to Scotland I was
+bound and the Black Watch in which I meant to enlist.  It occurred to
+me on the road that I needed money and I returned gravely and asked my
+mother for half a crown.  She was a practical woman and brought me back
+to the prose of things with arguments suitable to a very youthful mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The side windows of the house commanded the whole length of the garden
+to where at the end stood the pump whence issued delicious ice-cold
+water brought up from a well so deep that you could imagine Australia
+to be not far from the bottom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If only I could get to Australia!  I knew it lay there under my feet
+with people walking along head downwards and kangaroos hopping about
+with their young in their pockets.  It was merely a question of digging
+to get there.  I chose a sequestered corner and worked all a summer
+morning with a heavy spade in the fury of this high emprise, but I only
+got the length of the spade on the journey and retired from the task
+with a sense of the bitter futility of life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Never was there a garden more rich in fruit.  Around the western wall
+of the house was trained a noble pear tree that flung its arms with
+engaging confidence right up to my bedroom window.  They were hard
+pears that ripened only in keeping, and at Christmas melted rich and
+luscious in the mouth.  They were kept locked up in the tool-shed, but
+love laughs at locksmiths, and my brother found it possible to remove
+the lock without unlocking it by tearing out the whole staple from its
+socket.  My father was greatly puzzled by the tendency of the pears to
+diminish, but he was a kindly, unsuspecting man who made no
+disagreeable inquiries.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Over the tool-shed grew a grape vine.  The roof of the shed was
+accessible by a filbert tree, the first of half a dozen that lined the
+garden on the side remote from the road.  On sunny days there was no
+pleasanter place to lie than the top of the shed, with the grapes,
+small but pleasant to the thirsty palate, ripening thick around you.  A
+point in favour of the spot was that it was visible from no window.
+One could lie there and eat the fruit without annoying interruptions.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Equally retired was the little grass-grown path that branched off from
+the central gravelled path which divided the vegetable from the fruit
+garden.  Here, by stooping down, one was hidden from prying eyes that
+looked from the windows by the thick rows of gooseberry bushes and
+raspberry canes that lined the path.  It was my favourite spot, for
+there grew a delicious gooseberry that I counted above all
+gooseberries, small and hairy and yellow, with a delicate flavour that
+is as vivid to-day as if the forty years that lie between now and then
+were but a day.  By this path, too, grew the greengage trees.  With
+caution, one could safely sample the fruit, and at the worst one was
+sure to find some windfalls among the strawberry beds beyond the
+gooseberry bushes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I loved that little grass-grown path for its seclusion as well as for
+its fruit.  Here, with "Monte Cristo" or "Hereward the Wake," or "The
+Yellow Frigate," or a drawing-board, one could forget the tyrannies of
+school and all the buffets of the world.  Here was the place to take
+one's griefs.  Here it was that I wept hot tears at the news of
+Landseer's death&mdash;Landseer, the god of my young idolatry, whose dogs
+and horses, deer and birds I knew line by line through delighted
+imitation.  It seemed on that day as though the sun had gone out of the
+heavens, as though the pillars of the firmament had suddenly given way.
+Landseer dead!  What then was the worth of living?  But the wave of
+grief passed.  I realised that the path was now clear before me.  While
+Landseer lived I was cribbed, cabined, confined; but now&mdash;&mdash;  My eyes
+cleared as I surveyed the magnificent horizon opening out before me.  I
+must have room to live with this revelation.  The garden was too narrow
+for such limitless thoughts to breathe in.  I stole from the gate that
+led to the road by the pump and sought the wide meadows and the
+riverside to look this vast business squarely in the face.  And for
+days the great secret of my future that I carried with me made the
+burden of a dull, unappreciative world light.  Little did those who
+treated me as an ordinary idle boy know.  Little did my elder brother,
+who ruled me with a rod of iron, realise that one day, when I was
+knighted and my pictures hung thick on the Academy walls, he would
+regret his harsh treatment!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to return to the garden.  The egg-plum tree had no favour in my
+sight.  Its position was too open and palpable.  And indeed I cared not
+for the fruit.  It was too large and fleshy for my taste.  But the
+apple trees!  These were the chief glory of the garden.  Winter apple
+trees with fruit that ripened in secret; paysin trees with fruit that
+ripened on the branches, fruit small with rich crimson splashes on the
+dark green ground; hawthorndean trees with fruit, large, yellow-green,
+into which the teeth crunched with crisp and juicy joy.  There was one
+hawthorndean most thoughtfully situated behind the tool-shed.  And near
+by stood some props providentially placed there for domestic purposes.
+They were the keys with which I unlocked the treasure house.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A large quince tree grew on the other side of the hedge at the end of
+the garden.  It threw its arms in a generous, neighbourly way over the
+hedge, and I knew its austere fruit well.  Some of it came to me from
+its owner, an ancient man, "old Mr. Lake," who on summer days used to
+toss me largess from his abundance.  The odour of a quince always
+brings back to me the memory of a sunny garden and a little old man
+over the hedge crying, "Here, my boy, catch!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I have said nothing of that side of the garden where the vegetables
+grew.  It was dull prose, relieved only by an occasional apple tree.
+The flowers in the fruit garden and by the paths were old-fashioned
+favourites, wallflowers and mignonette, stocks and roses.  And over the
+garden gate grew a spreading lilac whose tassels the bold militiamen,
+who camped not far away, would gaily pluck as they passed on the bright
+May days.  I did not resent it.  I was proud that these brave fellows
+in their red coats should levy tribute on our garden.  It seemed
+somehow to link me up with the romance of war.  By the kitchen door
+grew an elderberry tree, whose heavy and unpleasant odour was borne for
+the sake of the coming winter nights, when around the fire we sat with
+our hot elderberry wine and dipped our toast into the rich, steaming
+product of that odorous tree&mdash;nights when the winter apples came out
+from the chest, no longer hard and sour, but mellow and luscious as a
+King William pear in August, and when out in the garden all was dark
+and mysterious, gaunt trees standing out against the sky, where in the
+far distance a thin luminance told of the vast city beneath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I passed by the old road recently, and sought the garden of my
+childhood.  I sought in vain.  A big factory had come into the little
+town, and workmen's dwellings had sprung up in its train.  Where the
+garden had been there was now a school, surrounded by cottages, and
+children played on the doorsteps or in the little back yards, which
+looked on to other little back yards and cottages beyond.  My garden
+with its noble hedge and its solitude, its companionable trees and
+grass-grown paths, had vanished.  It was the garden of a dream.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ALL ABOUT A DOG
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+It was a bitterly cold night, and even at the far end of the bus the
+east wind that raved along the street cut like a knife.  The bus
+stopped, and two women and a man got in together and filled the vacant
+places.  The younger woman was dressed in sealskin, and carried one of
+those little Pekinese dogs that women in sealskin like to carry in
+their laps.  The conductor came in and took the fares.  Then his eye
+rested with cold malice on the beady-eyed toy dog.  I saw trouble
+brewing.  This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting, and
+he intended to make the most of it.  I had marked him as the type of
+what Mr. Wells has called the Resentful Employee, the man with a
+general vague grievance against everything and a particular grievance
+against passengers who came and sat in his bus while he shivered at the
+door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must take that dog out," he said with sour venom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shall certainly do nothing of the kind.  You can take my name and
+address," said the woman, who had evidently expected the challenge and
+knew the reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must take that dog out&mdash;that's my orders."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I won't go on the top in such weather.  It would kill me," said the
+woman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Certainly not," said her lady companion.  "You've got a cough as it
+is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's nonsense," said her male companion.  The conductor pulled the
+bell and the bus stopped.  "This bus doesn't go on until that dog is
+brought out."  And he stepped on to the pavement and waited.  It was
+his moment of triumph.  He had the law on his side and a whole busful
+of angry people under the harrow.  His embittered soul was having a
+real holiday.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The storm inside rose high.  "Shameful"; "He's no better than a
+German"; "Why isn't he in the Army?"; "Call the police"; "Let's all
+report him"; "Let's make him give us our fares back"; "Yes, that's it,
+let's make him give us our fares back."  For everybody was on the side
+of the lady and the dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That little animal sat blinking at the dim lights in happy
+unconsciousness of the rumpus of which he was the cause.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The conductor came to the door.  "What's your number?" said one, taking
+out a pocketbook with a gesture of terrible things.  "There's my
+number," said the conductor imperturbably.  "Give us our fares
+back&mdash;you've engaged to carry us&mdash;you can't leave us here all night."
+"No fares back," said the conductor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two or three passengers got out and disappeared into the night.  The
+conductor took another turn on the pavement, then went and had a talk
+with the driver.  Another bus, the last on the road, sailed by
+indifferent to the shouts of the passengers to stop.  "They stick by
+each other&mdash;the villains," was the comment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Someone pulled the bell violently.  That brought the driver round to
+the door.  "Who's conductor of this bus?" he said, and paused for a
+reply.  None coming, he returned to his seat and resumed beating his
+arms across his chest.  There was no hope in that quarter.  A policeman
+strolled up and looked in at the door.  An avalanche of indignant
+protests and appeals burst on him.  "Well, he's got his rules, you
+know," he said genially.  "Give your name and address."  "That's what
+he's been offered, and he won't take it."  "Oh," said the policeman,
+and he went away and took his stand a few yards down the street, where
+he was joined by two more constables.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And still the little dog blinked at the lights, and the conductor
+walked to and fro on the pavement like a captain on the quarter-deck in
+the hour of victory.  A young woman, whose voice had risen high above
+the gale inside, descended on him with an air of threatening and
+slaughter.  He was immovable&mdash;as cold as the night and hard as the
+pavement.  She passed on in a fury of impotence to the three policemen,
+who stood like a group of statuary up the street watching the drama.
+Then she came back, imperiously beckoned to her "young man" who had sat
+a silent witness of her rage, and vanished.  Others followed.  The bus
+was emptying.  Even the dashing young fellow who had demanded the
+number, and who had declared he would see this thing through if he sat
+there all night, had taken an opportunity to slip away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile the Pekinese party were passing through every stage of
+resistance to abject surrender.  "I'll go on the top," said the
+sealskin lady at last.  "You mustn't."  "I will."  "You'll have
+pneumonia."  "Let me take it."  (This from the man.)  "Certainly
+not"&mdash;she would die with her dog.  When she had disappeared up the
+stairs, the conductor came back, pulled the bell, and the bus went on.
+He stood sourly triumphant while his conduct was savagely discussed in
+his face by the remnant of the party.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then the engine struck work, and the conductor went to the help of the
+driver.  It was a long job, and presently the lady with the dog stole
+down the stairs and re-entered the bus.  When the engine was put right
+the conductor came back and pulled the bell.  Then his eye fell on the
+dog, and his hand went to the bell-rope again.  The driver looked
+round, the conductor pointed to the dog, the bus stopped, and the
+struggle recommenced with all the original features, the conductor
+walking the pavement, the driver smacking his arm on the box, the
+little dog blinking at the lights, the sealskin lady declaring that she
+would not go on the top&mdash;and finally going....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've got my rules," said the conductor to me when I was the last
+passenger left behind.  He had won his victory, but felt that he would
+like to justify himself to somebody.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rules," I said, "are necessary things, but there are rules and rules.
+Some are hard and fast rules, like the rule of the road, which cannot
+be broken without danger to life and limb.  But some are only rules for
+your guidance, which you can apply or wink at, as common sense
+dictates&mdash;like that rule about the dogs.  They are not a whip put in
+your hand to scourge your passengers with, but an authority for an
+emergency.  They are meant to be observed in the spirit, not in the
+letter&mdash;for the comfort and not the discomfort of the passengers.  You
+have kept the rule and broken its spirit.  You want to mix your rules
+with a little goodwill and good temper."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He took it very well, and when I got off the bus he said "Good night"
+quite amiably.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap16"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I hope the young American soldier, with whom we are becoming so
+familiar in the street, the tube and the omnibus, has found us as
+agreeable as we have found him.  We were not quite sure whether we
+should like him, but the verdict is very decisively in the affirmative.
+It has been my fortune to know many Americans in the past, but they
+were for the most part selected Americans, elderly persons, statesmen,
+writers, diplomatists, journalists, and so on.  Not having been in
+America I had not realised what the plain, average citizen, especially
+the young citizen, was like.  Now he is here, walking our streets and
+rubbing shoulders with us in sufficient numbers for a general
+impression to be taken.  It is a pleasant impression.  I like the air
+of plenty that he carries with him, the well-nourished body, the sense
+of ease with himself and the world, the fund of good nature that he
+seems to have at command, the frankness of bearing, and, what was least
+expected, the touch of self-conscious modesty that is rarely absent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I may say so without offending him, he seems extraordinarily
+English.  Physically he is rather bulkier than the average English
+youth, and his accent distinguishes him; but these differences only
+serve to sharpen the impression that he is one of ourselves who has
+been away somewhere&mdash;in a civilised land, where the larder is full, the
+schools plenty, and the family life homely and cordial.  It is very
+rare that you see what you would call a foreign face in the uniform.
+This is singular in view of the mighty stream of immigration from
+Continental countries that has been flowing for three-quarters of a
+century into the melting pot of the United States; but I do not think
+the fact can be doubted.  The blood is more mixed than ours, but the
+main current is emphatically British.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps the difference that is observable could be expressed by saying
+that the American is not so much reminiscent of ourselves as of our
+forebears.  He suggests a former generation rather than this.  We have
+grown sophisticated, urban, and cynical; he still has the note of the
+country and of the older fashions that persist in the country.  Lowell
+long ago pointed out that many of the phrases which we regarded as
+American slang were good old East Anglian words which had been taken
+out by the early settlers in New England and persisted there after they
+had been forgotten by us.  And in the same way the moral tone of the
+American to-day is like an echo from our past.  He preserves the
+fervour for ideals which we seem to have lost.  There is something of
+the revivalist in him, something elemental and primitive that responds
+to a moral appeal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is this abiding strain of English Puritanism which is responsible
+for the tidal wave of temperance that has swept the United States.
+Already nearly half the States have gone "bone dry," and it is
+calculated that, perhaps in two years, certainly in five, with the
+present temper in being, the whole of the Union will have banished the
+liquor traffic.  A moral phenomenon of this sort might have been
+possible in the England of two or three generations ago; it is
+unthinkable in the moral atmosphere of to-day.  The industrial machine
+has dried up the spring of moral enthusiasm.  It will only return by a
+new way of life.  Perhaps the new way of life is beginning in the
+allotment movement which is restoring to us the primal sanities of
+nature.  We may find salvation in digging.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is sometimes said that the American is crude.  It would be truer to
+say that he is young.  He has not suffered the disenchantment of an old
+and thoroughly exploited society.  We have the qualities of a middle
+aged people who have lost our visions and are rather ashamed to be
+reminded that we ever had any.  But a youthful ardour and buoyancy is
+the note of the American.  He may think too much in the terms of
+dollars, but he has freshness and vitality, faith in himself, a boyish
+belief in his future and a boyish zest in living.  His good temper is
+inexhaustible, and he has the easy-going manner of one who has plenty
+of time and plenty of elbow-room in the world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For contrary to the common conception of him as a hurrying, bustling,
+get-on-or-get-out young man, he is leisurely both in speech and action,
+cool and unworried, equable of mood, little subject to the extremes of
+emotion, bearing himself with a solid deliberateness that suggests
+confidence in himself and inspires confidence in him.  You feel that he
+will neither surprise you, nor let you down.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his accessibility.  The
+common language, of course, is a great help, and the common traditions
+also.  You are rarely quite at home with a man who thinks in another
+language than your own.  The Tower of Babel was a great misfortune for
+humanity.  But it is not these things which give the American his
+quality of immediate and easy intercourse.  There is no ice to break
+before you get at him.  There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and
+hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what
+social footing you are to stand.  You are on him at once&mdash;or rather he
+is on you.  He comes into the open, without reserves of manner, and
+talks "right ahead" with the candour and ease of a man who is at home
+in the world and at home with you.  He is free alike from intellectual
+priggishness and social aloofness.  He is just a plain man talking to a
+plain man on equal terms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the manner of the New World and of a democratic society in which
+the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of
+a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private
+citizen next year.  It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick
+Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln.  "He treated me as a
+man," said Douglass after his visit to the President.  "He did not let
+me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our
+skins."  It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had
+to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners.  He
+treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and an
+equal, and because the difference in the colour of their skins had no
+more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the
+colour of their ties or the shape of their boots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of
+his traits.  It gives the sense of a man who is born free&mdash;free from
+the irritating restraints, embarrassments and artificialities of a
+society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they
+still prevail in most European countries.  Perhaps Germany is the most
+flagrant example.  It used to be said by Goethe that there were
+twenty-seven different social castes in Germany, and that none of them
+would speak to the caste below.  And Mr. Gerard's description of the
+Rat system suggests that the stratification of society has increased
+rather than diminished since the days of Goethe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The disease is not so bad in this country; but we cannot pretend that
+we have the pure milk of democracy.  No people which tolerates titles,
+and so deliberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and
+false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, unobstructed
+intercourse of a real democracy like that of America.  It was said long
+ago by Daniel O'Connell that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a
+poker except its occasional warmth."  It is a caricature, of course,
+but there is truth in it.  We are icy because we are uncertain about
+each other&mdash;not about each other as human beings, but about each
+other's social status.  We have got the spirit of feudalism still in
+our bones, and our public school system, our titles, and our
+established Church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up
+society into social orders which are the negation of democracy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as if we had not enough of the abomination, we are imitating the
+German Rat system with the grotesque O.B.E.  We shall get stiffer than
+ever under this rain of sham jewellery, and shall not be fit to speak
+to our American friends.  But we shall still be able to admire and envy
+the fine freedom and human friendliness which is the conspicuous gift
+of these stalwart young fellows who walk our streets in their
+flat-brimmed hats.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps when the account of the war is made up we shall find that the
+biggest credit entry of all is this fact that they did walk our streets
+as comrades of our own sons.  For over a century we two peoples,
+talking the same language and cherishing the same traditions of
+liberty, have walked on opposites sides of the way, remembering old
+grudges, forgetting our common heritage, forgetting even that we gave
+the world its first and its grandest lead in peace by proclaiming the
+disarmament of the Canadian-United States frontier.  Now the grudges
+are forgotten, and we have found a reconciliation that will never again
+be broken, and that will be the corner-stone of the new world-order
+that is taking shape in the furnace of these days.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap17"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+'APPY 'EINRICH
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The waiter certainly was rather slow, or perhaps it was that we were
+hungry and impatient.  In any case, I apologised to my guest, a young
+fellow home on leave, and explained that the waiter was entitled to be
+a little absent-minded, for he had lost two sons in the war and his
+only remaining son had been invalided out of the Army, a permanent
+wreck.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He tells me," I said, "that the boy never talks about the war or his
+experiences.  He just seems silent and numbed.  All that they know is
+that he killed five Germans, and that he is sorry for one of them.  It
+happened while he was on patrol.  There had been a good deal of
+indignation at that part of the line because there had been cases
+reported in which 'hands up' had been a trick for ensnaring some of our
+men, and the order had been given that the signal was to be ignored and
+those making it shot at sight.  It was twilight and a young German
+soldier was seen running forward with his hands up.  The patrol fired
+and he fell.  He was quite unarmed and alone.  On his body they found
+letters from his sweetheart in England&mdash;old letters that he had
+apparently carried with him all through the war.  They showed that he
+had been at work at some place in London and had been engaged to be
+married when the war broke out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," said my companion, as the waiter came up with the fish.  "Yes,
+when the enemy turns from an abstraction to an individual you generally
+find there's something that makes you hate this killing business.  I
+don't know that I have felt more sorry for any man's death in this war
+than for that of a German.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've been to F&mdash;&mdash;, haven't you?  You know that bit of line north of
+the M&mdash;&mdash; road that you reach by the communication trench that is
+always up to your knees in mud no matter how dry the weather is.  You
+remember how close the lines are to each other at that point&mdash;not forty
+yards apart?  I was there in a dull season."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You were lucky," I said.  "It isn't often dull there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, but it was then.  The Boche would drop over an occasional
+whiz-bang as a reminder, and he'd have his usual afternoon cock-shy
+over our heads at the last pinnacle standing on the ruins of the
+cathedral in the town behind us.  But really there was nothing doing,
+and we got rather chummy with the fellows over the way.  We'd put up a
+target for them, and they'd do the same for us.  They'd got some decent
+singers among them, and we'd shout for the 'Hate' song or 'Wacht am
+Rhein' or 'Tannenbaum' or something of that sort and they always
+obliged, and we gave them the best we had back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, we got quite friendly, and one morning one of their men got up on
+the parapet over the way, bowed very low, and shouted 'Goot morning.'
+Our men answered, 'Morgen, Fritz.  How goes it?' and so on.  He was a
+big fat fellow, with glasses, and a good-humoured face, and to our
+great joy he began to sing a song in broken English.  And after he had
+finished we called for more.  He had a real gift for comedy; seemed one
+of those fellows who are sent into the world with their happiness ready
+made.  He laughed a great gurgling laugh that made you laugh to hear
+it.  Our chaps gave him no end of applause, and called for his name.
+He beamed and bowed, said 'Thank you, genteelmen,' and said that his
+name was Heinrich something or other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So we called him 'Appy 'Einrich,' and whenever our men were bored and
+things had gone to sleep someone would sing out 'We want 'Einrich.
+Send us 'Appy 'Einrich to give us a song.'  And up would come Heinrich
+on to the parapet, red and smiling and bowing like a <I>prima donna</I>.
+And off he would start with his programme.  He always seemed willing
+and evidently greatly enjoyed his popularity with our fellows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This went on for some time, and then one day we got the news that we
+were to be relieved at once.  We were to clear out that night and our
+place was to be taken by a Scotch regiment.  You need not be told that
+we were glad.  Life in the trenches when there is nothing doing is
+about as deadly a weariness as man has invented.  We got our kit
+together and when night fell and our relief had come we marched back
+under the stars through F&mdash;&mdash; towards B&mdash;&mdash;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We had been too much occupied with the prospect of release to give a
+thought to the fellows over the road or to Heinrich.  I remembered him
+afterwards and hoped that someone had told the new men that Heinrich
+was a good sort and would always give them a bit of fun, if he was
+asked, or even if he wasn't asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Some weeks afterwards at B&mdash;&mdash; I ran across a man in the Scotch
+regiment which had followed us in the trenches on the M&mdash;&mdash; road, and
+we talked about things there.  'And how did you get on with Heinrich?'
+I asked.  'Heinrich?' he said, 'Who is he?'  'Why, surely,' said I,
+'you know Heinrich, the fat fellow across the way, who gets up on the
+parapet and says "Goot morning," and sings comic songs?'  'Never heard
+of him,' he said.  'Ah,' I said, 'he would have heard we were relieved
+and didn't find you so responsive a crowd as we were.'  'Never heard of
+him,' he repeated&mdash;then, after a pause, he added, 'There was an
+incident the morning after we took over the line.  Some of our fellows
+saw a bulky Boche climbing on to the parapet just across the way and
+had a little target practice, and he went down in a heap.'  'That was
+him,' I said, 'that was 'Appy 'Einrich.  What a beastly business war
+is, and what ungrateful beggars we were to forget him!'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, a beastly business, killing men," he added.  "I don't wonder the
+waiter's son doesn't want to talk about it.  We shall all be glad to
+forget when we come out of hell."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap18"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON FEAR
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no
+fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who
+fight their battles at the base.  He is invented because these naïve
+people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a
+hero.  But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being
+brave if you had no fear.  The real victory of the hero is not over
+outward circumstance, but over himself.  One of the bravest men of our
+time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of
+apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his
+fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going
+out of his way to meet the things he dreaded.  By sheer will he beat
+down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man
+who knew no fear.  But the very essence of his heroism was that he had
+fought fear and won.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything
+discreditable in knowing fear.  You might as well say that there is
+something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood.  The
+virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to
+lie and yet telling the truth.  And the more you are tempted the more
+splendid is the resistance.  Without temptation you may make a plaster
+saint, but not a human hero.  That is why the familiar story of Nelson
+when a boy&mdash;"Fear! grandmother.  I never saw fear.  What is it?"&mdash;is so
+essentially false.  Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by
+man.  They were brave to the brink of recklessness.  The whole episode
+of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the
+dictates of prudence.  On the facts one would be compelled to admit
+that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one
+incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals
+his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance.  When the issue
+was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster,
+he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore.
+It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call
+camouflage.  When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he
+ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter
+with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used.  "This," said
+he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal."  With such triumphant
+self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in
+view.  But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as
+anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in
+Southey's "Life of Nelson."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle
+of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well.  At the
+age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to
+climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance
+of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed."
+He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing,
+and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory
+to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my
+boy.'  I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I
+tried?  'But you won't do it again?' she said.  I replied, 'Of course
+not&mdash;where would be the fun?'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince
+himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came.
+Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense
+in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind.  I
+was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the
+country the other day.  It had been empty since the beginning of the
+war.  Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade.
+On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried,
+"We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined."  Then he went out and
+shot himself.  Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would
+have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck
+to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any
+other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason
+from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that
+grows by brooding.  There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates
+how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling
+upon fear.  He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who
+had stared insolently at a lady who was with him.  His action led to a
+challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning.
+When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his
+foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold
+assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors
+as a marksman.  As the night advanced he passed through all the stages
+from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn
+he found a corpse.  Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape
+the terrors of his mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear.  Give them only
+a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference
+of disastrous consequences.  It is not a bad thing in this world to be
+born a little dull and unimaginative.  You will have a much more
+comfortable time.  And if you have not taken that precaution, you will
+do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies.
+Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom.  In the romantic theatre of his
+mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always
+Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master
+with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap19"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its
+contents, but by its address.  My name (for the purposes of this
+article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson.
+Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p."  When I see it
+wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance
+altogether disproportioned to the fact.  I know that taken in the lump
+the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons.  There is not a pin to
+choose between us.  In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or
+other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson
+and that man called himself Thompson.  Why he should have spatchcocked
+a "p" into his name I don't know.  I daresay it was pride on his part,
+just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist.
+He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the
+Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding.  When the novelist was asked
+to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs,
+he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell."  That is probably
+the case of the Thompsons.  They don't know how to spell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own
+forms with obstinate pride.  We feel an outrage on our names as if it
+were an outrage on our persons.  It was such an outrage that led to one
+of Stevenson's most angry outbursts.  Some American publisher had
+pirated one of his books.  But it was not the theft that angered him so
+much as the misspelling of his name.  "I saw my book advertised as the
+work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled.  It is so easy
+to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is
+full length on the title-page of your booty.  But no, damn him, not he!
+He calls me Stephenson."  I am grateful to Stevenson for that word.  It
+expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson.
+Thompson, indeed!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir
+Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford.  He was
+addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers
+(whoever they may have been) boiled within him.  "Do I look like a
+person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on.  And
+as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like
+a person of the name of Thompson?  Now do I?"  And yet I suppose one
+may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of
+Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own.  I should like to try the
+experiment on Sir F. E. Smith.  I should like to address him as Sir
+Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys
+us when people play tricks with our names.  We want to be ourselves and
+not somebody else.  We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and
+the fathers that begat us.  We may not know much about our ancestors,
+and may not care much about them.  Most of us, I suppose, are in the
+position of Sydney Smith.  "I found my neighbours," he said, "were
+looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I
+only got as far back as my great-grandfather, <I>who disappeared
+somewhere about the time of the Assizes</I>."  If we go far enough back we
+shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes,
+or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't.  But, such as
+they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those
+fellows, the Thompsons.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there is another reason for the annoyance.  To misspell a man's
+name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do
+not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that
+you need not trouble to find out.  It is to offer him the subtlest of
+all insults&mdash;especially if he is a Scotsman.  The old prides and
+hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and
+I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by
+calling him Mr. M'Donald or <I>vice versa</I>.  Indeed, I recall the case of
+a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a
+political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he
+knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as
+Thompson makes me boil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity.  I like a
+man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or
+steals another.  I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the
+author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was
+Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and
+went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house
+of the Duke of Northumberland.  He even put the Percy arms on his
+monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own
+name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche.
+I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for
+reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and
+so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually
+"something rotten about him," as Johnson would say.  He stamps himself
+as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste."
+When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de
+Sisac)."  On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and
+put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac."  Changing residence again, he
+dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is possible of course to go to the other extreme&mdash;to err, as it
+were, on the side of honesty.  I know a lady who began life with the
+maiden name of Bloomer.  She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs.
+Bloomer-Watlington.  Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd,
+whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd.  She is
+still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health.
+Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into
+a single line on the envelope.  I see the time approaching when I shall
+have to turn over and write, let us say,
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-109"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-109.jpg" ALT="handwritten &quot;Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd&quot;" BORDER="">
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all
+this.  It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may
+have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others.
+After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it
+is the better.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the spirit of the thing is right.  Let us avoid disguises.  Let us
+stick to our names, be they ever so humble.  Let us follow the great
+example of Cicero.  His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick
+or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a
+vetch&mdash;<I>cicer</I>.  When he was standing for public office some anxious
+friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but
+he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious
+than the Scauri or Catuli.  And grandly did he redeem the promise.  The
+Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once
+mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next
+door neighbour.  It is a good precedent for Thomson.  I have a mind to
+make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the
+Pyramids.  And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap20"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes
+think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the
+other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as
+significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day.  He observed
+two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape.  It was quite a
+nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant.
+Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue.  "Why, this is not the
+Leader picture at all," said she.  "It is No. So-and-so."  And
+forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been
+admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures
+before that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now I am not going to make fun of these people.  I am not going to make
+fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their
+infirmity.  If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the
+people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous
+people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain.  We are most of us
+second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all.
+Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own
+thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to
+think.  They had the luck to find themselves out.  Probably it did not
+do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they
+were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to
+be.  They had been taught&mdash;heaven help them!&mdash;to admire those vacant
+prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired
+anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long
+and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at
+last they fought a duel.  And as they lay dying on the ground one of
+them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of
+them."  "Nor I either," said the other.  Then they expired.  I do not
+suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit.  Men are
+always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have
+inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand.
+Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of
+our own on any subject of the mind.  We think in flocks and once in the
+flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of
+mind.  Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he
+thought they were the work of a mediæval monk: when he found they were
+the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he
+behaved to the poet like a cad.  Yet the poems were far more wonderful
+as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would
+have been as the productions of a man of sixty.  The literary world of
+the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but
+when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture
+into the deepest pit of oblivion.  Yet, as poetry, it was as good or
+bad&mdash;I have never read it&mdash;in the one case as in the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this
+subject.  In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the
+candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page.  It was
+printed in the papers as an example of bad French.  "Wherever did these
+military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and
+ridiculous phrases?"  In his own literary circles Anatole France
+himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters.  The
+critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of
+Michelet.  Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at
+his best, from Michelet in his finest period.  How the great sceptic
+must have enjoyed that evening!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not that we cannot think.  It is that we are afraid to think.  It
+is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with
+the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it.  Even
+some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed
+in thinking independently.  We only succeed in getting into other
+flocks.  Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some
+years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and
+other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the
+"advanced" people singing their praises.  They were not real praises
+that expressed genuine feeling.  They were the artificial enthusiasms
+of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion.  They would rave
+over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion&mdash;rather
+than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had
+no meaning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or
+our own judgment.  We want some authority to lean up against, and when
+we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent
+thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table.  I would rather a
+man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo.  I
+once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of
+Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that
+writer."  I smiled at his naïveté, but I respected his courage.  He
+couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend
+that he could.  That is far better than the affectations with which men
+conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of
+being burned.  Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a
+description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical
+established thought can be.  Aristotle was almost as sacred as the
+Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters
+who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five
+shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed
+against the Logic of the Organon."  We have liberated thought from the
+restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in
+liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and
+integrity.  We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease
+to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we
+follow the fashions in hats.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The evil, I suppose, lies in our education.  We standardise our
+children.  We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching
+them to be themselves&mdash;new incarnations of the human spirit, new
+prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world.
+We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than
+in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in
+knowledge but poor in wisdom.  They are not in fear of the stake, but
+they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title
+to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day.
+The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom.  It only
+thrives under suppression.  We need to have our liberties taken away
+from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap21"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON SAWING WOOD
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art
+of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in
+that task.  It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me
+that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn.
+The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the
+shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which
+David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the
+potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard.  I carried some of
+the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice
+and had forgotten the trick.  The saw would go askew, the points would
+dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then I remembered.  You are over-doing it, I said.  You are making a
+mess of the job by too much energy&mdash;misdirected energy.  The trick of
+sawing wood is to work within your strength.  You are starting at it as
+if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke.  It is the
+mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania.  They bit off more
+than they could chew.  You are biting off more than you can chew, and
+you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you
+see.  The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand,
+to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the
+surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the
+wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to
+take your time and to avoid too much energy.  "Gently does it," is the
+motto.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting.  I suppose I am one
+of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit.  We want a
+thing done, but we cannot wait to do it.  We rush at the task with all
+our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't
+surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance
+against the perversity of things.  It reminds me of the remark which a
+professional made to me at the practice nets long ago.  He was watching
+a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a
+whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself.  "He would make a
+good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three
+balls at once."  Recall any really great bowler you have known and you
+will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of
+ease and reserve power.  He was never spending up to the hilt.  There
+was always something left in the bank.  I do not speak of the
+medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless
+grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast
+bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth.  With all their
+physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had
+something in hand.  There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art
+consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically.  The
+temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab
+the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility.
+And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of
+the art reveal itself.  He will mow for three hours on end with never a
+pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his
+hip pocket.  What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful
+leisureliness of his action!  You could go to sleep watching him, and
+you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother
+falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning.  There is the experience
+of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the
+secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its
+patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the
+waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis.  At the bottom, all that John
+Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once.  He is
+always master of his job.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when
+you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it
+were, too high?  You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go
+on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your
+futility.  You are playing over your strength.  You are screaming at
+the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly.  Then
+perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers,
+and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right
+flight and just the right direction and just the right length.  And you
+purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is
+moderation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is so in all things.  The man who wins is the man who keeps cool,
+whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the
+impression that there is more in him than ever comes out.  I have seen
+many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but
+because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting
+it.  What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount
+Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of
+his style?  There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble
+disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same
+authority and finality of speech.  He conveys the sense of a mind
+disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest,
+understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves
+controversy silent.  Take his indictment of Germany as an example.  It
+was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany.
+Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a
+word of extravagance or violence.  It was the naked truthfulness of it
+that was so terrible and unanswerable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of
+war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his
+experiences in the first great battle of the Somme.  Yet the
+characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any
+straining after effect.  He just left the thing he described to speak
+for itself in all its bare horror.  It was a lesson we people who write
+would do well to remember.  Let us have fewer adjectives, good people,
+fewer epithets.  Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun.  It
+is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the
+argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable.  Was it not
+Stendhal who used to read the <I>Code Napoléon</I> once a year to teach him
+its severity of style?
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is still raining.  I will return to the barn and practise the
+philosophy of moderation on those logs.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap22"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+I
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most
+unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got
+caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left
+corrupting in the sun.  "It isn't healthy," he said.  There was no
+affectation of bravado in the remark.  He made it quite simply, as if
+he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating
+of the carriage.  It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected
+him, but its insanitariness.  Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane
+man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile.  "It
+makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war.
+"I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I
+shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though
+recalling the past.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has
+been struck by this attitude of mind towards death.  I remember a
+friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the
+Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling
+me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the
+subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown
+to pieces by his side.  "It is as though war develops another
+integument," he said.  "Your sensibilities are atrophied.  Your nerve
+ends are deadened.  Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part
+of a machine that has no feelings&mdash;only functions."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of
+us.  There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years
+ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the
+last two and a half years.  If the ghostly army of the slain were to
+file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that
+elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years
+without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by.  And if
+behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally
+shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the
+vast procession would not be in sight.  If we had been asked three
+years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of
+death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was
+incredible.  Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the
+shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance
+of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of
+dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers&mdash;such of them as
+trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts.  That is
+certainly done.  You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and
+come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a
+skilfully arranged entertainment&mdash;in which one attractive "turn"
+follows another in swift succession.  Once they actually showed a man
+falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage.
+Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us
+of the reality behind this pictured imposture.  There has never been a
+lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all
+its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the
+Red Harvest.  We are like the dyer's hand.  We are subdued to what we
+work in.  Even those who have been directly stricken find that they
+bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves.  We have got into
+a new habit of thought about death&mdash;in a sense a truer habit of
+thought.  It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in
+hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible
+divinity.  It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent.  We
+accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud
+of tragic fear and strangeness.  The heart seems steeled to the blows
+of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the
+individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of
+years that, at the most, is soon told.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by
+events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings
+will resume their sway.  But it will be long before they recover their
+former tyranny over the mind.  This generation has companioned Death
+too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old.  And
+that, I think, is a gain.  I have always felt that Johnson's morbid
+attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and
+that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of
+mental disease.  Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the
+imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered
+something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he
+should not reach home alive.  But he was quite healthy in his thought.
+It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught
+unawares.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In this, as in most things, Cæsar shone with that grand sanity that
+makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history.  He
+neither sought death nor shunned it.  When Hirtius and Pansa
+remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he
+answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of
+death."  That is the common-sense attitude&mdash;as remote from the spirit
+of the miser as from that of the spendthrift.  And that other comment
+of his on death is equally deserving of recall.  He was dining the
+night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined
+the conspiracy against him.  As he sat dispatching his letters, the
+others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable.
+One of the group asked Cæsar what death he would prefer.  He looked up
+from his papers and said, "That which is least expected."  This was not
+an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland,
+the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I
+envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died
+suddenly."  It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an
+incident of the journey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory.
+As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch
+entered to ask the watchword.  "Æquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and
+with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his
+face to the everlasting shadow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its
+noblest expression.  It faced the shadow without illusions and without
+fear.  It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an
+implacable fact to be faced implacably.  Sir Thomas More met it like a
+bridegroom.  In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable
+with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower.  Who can read that
+moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's
+wife) without catching its pity and its glory?  "In good faythe,
+Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was
+ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my
+harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me
+that should rather have comforted him."  And when Sir Thomas Pope comes
+early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine
+o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings&mdash;"Quiet
+yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for
+I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where
+we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse
+eternally."  And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene
+invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste
+apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it
+off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common
+fellow: the executioner).  What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall
+I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a
+benefitt?  Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would
+accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his
+executyoner thirtye peeces of golde....  And soe was he by Maister
+Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the
+place of execution.  Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake
+that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I
+praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge
+down let me shift for myselfe.  Then desired he all the people there
+aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now
+there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke
+Churche.  Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed,
+turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus
+unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe
+thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou
+strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.'  So passed Sir Thomas
+More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of
+St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may
+be left to share the crown of noble dying.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+II
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+I had rather a shock to-day.  I was sitting down to write an article on
+a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point
+of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor of
+<I>The Star</I>, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more
+attractive hare.  It was a letter announcing my lamented demise.  There
+was no doubt about it.  There was the date and there was the name (a
+nice name, too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black
+and white.  And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no
+obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had
+adorned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous
+remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated."  I am not dead.
+I am not half dead.  I am not even feeling poorly.  I had a tooth out a
+week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for
+ever so long.  I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long
+ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance.  Moreover, as all the
+people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even
+if I had been on board.  And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the
+previous port of call.  It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend
+that I wasn't saved.  I was.  But though I am most flagrantly and
+aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of
+myself as if I were dead.  I find it quite an agreeable diversion.  Not
+that I am morbid.  I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed
+in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for
+Beginners."  You may remember the chapter.  If not, it is short enough
+to repeat:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+What I like about Clive<BR>
+Is that he is no longer alive.<BR>
+There's something to be said<BR>
+For being dead.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+That is overdoing the thing.  What I find agreeable is being alive and
+thinking I am dead.  You have the advantage of both worlds, so to
+speak.  In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears
+over myself.  I have wept at my own grave-side.  I have composed my own
+obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving
+piece of work.  I have met my friends and condoled with them over my
+decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they
+were quite nice.  Some of them made me think that I might write up the
+obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late
+lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the
+few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous,
+kindly, wise, humorous, generous character&mdash;in a word, let myself go a
+bit more.  Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should
+be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I
+was one of the people that he could do without.  But then Old
+Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead.  I
+discounted Grumpington.  I took no notice of Grumpington&mdash;the beast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the
+contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case
+no subject for tears.  After all, said I, the world is not such a gay
+place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it.  I have
+left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate, too,
+in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me.  "What
+dreams may come!"  Well, so be it.  I have no fear of the dreams of
+death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like
+a nightmare.  If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better
+dreams.  If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks.
+If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well.  "I see no
+such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters,
+"and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not
+make tiresome."  And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the
+circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you.  If you prick me I shall
+still bleed.  If you tickle me I shall still laugh.  And with due
+encouragement I shall still write.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+III
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my
+companion pointed to a group&mdash;a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper,
+two women and a child&mdash;sitting on a seat on the platform.  "There they
+are," he said.  "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless,
+you'll find them sitting there."  "What for?" I asked.  "Oh, in case
+there's a raid.  They are taking things in time; they are running no
+risks.  You'll see a few at most stations."  And as the train passed
+from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the
+platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular,
+and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger,
+but these good people carry apprehension to excess.  We need not
+underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves
+ridiculous about them.  So far as the average individual life is
+concerned they are almost negligible.  Assuming that the circumference
+of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop
+two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated
+that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone
+of danger.  But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor
+twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs.  Let us assume, however, that
+they get up to an average of twenty bombs.  It will be over three
+hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril.  I do
+not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the
+streets when a raid is on.  It is true I may not get my turn for three
+hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my
+turn has come.  So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody.  It is
+foolish to take risks that you need not take.  But it is not less
+foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform,
+not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is carrying the fear of death to extremities.  I have referred to
+Cæsar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what
+seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger.  In the end he
+was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is
+one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live.  You may, of
+course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess.  Smalley,
+in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of
+Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the
+late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that
+champagne."  "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington.  "Then why
+do you do it?"  "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather
+be ill now and then than always taking care of myself."  "Oh, you think
+that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?"  "Sir, if
+you will ask me then I will tell you.  I do not anticipate."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the
+example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms.  He was
+not refusing, like Cæsar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the
+sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain
+misery.  It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living,
+which is quite another thing.  But at least he got a present pleasure
+for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers,
+and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at
+all.  They only exist.  They are like Chesterfield in his later years.
+"I am become a vegetable," he said.  "I have been dead twelve years,
+but I don't want any one to know about it."  Those people in the Tube
+are quite dead, although they don't know about it.  What is more, they
+have never been alive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly.  You know that the
+Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps
+quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves
+of the past.  Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your
+heels.  A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or
+a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window.  You can't take a
+ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at
+the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy.  I have
+myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his
+companion at the wicket.  Why, those people so forlornly dodging death
+in the Tube were not out of the danger zone.  They were probably in
+more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality,
+and incubating death than they would have been going about their
+reasonable tasks in the fresh air above.  You may die from the fear of
+death.  I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously."
+There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going
+about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you
+are.  The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously.  Life is a
+dangerous calling, full of pitfalls.  You, getting the coal in the mine
+by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at
+hand.  You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the
+engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the
+ship stoking the fire&mdash;all alike are in an adventure that may terminate
+at any moment.  Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like
+men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in,
+not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand,
+declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our
+steps.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IV
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not
+fixed but fluctuating.  Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high;
+sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low.  There are people, no
+doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any
+appreciable difference to the fund.  It is as inexhaustible as the horn
+of Skrymir.  And there are others whose humility is so established that
+no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them.  But the generality of us go
+up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a
+hundred trifles good or bad.  We are like corks on the wave, sometimes
+borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circumstance, then
+sinking into the trough of the billows.  At this moment I am in the
+trough.  I have been passing through one of those chastening
+experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world.
+When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and
+push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous
+fellows.  However would the world get on without us? we say.  What
+would become of the office?  Who could put those schemes through that I
+have in hand?  What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without
+my judgment to lean on?  What would become of Jones if he no longer met
+me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk?  How
+would <I>The Star</I> survive without...
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that
+we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with
+us there will be a mournful vacuum in society.  Then some day the
+bubble of our vanity is pricked.  We are gently laid aside, deflated
+and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.  Our empire has
+shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild
+dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic
+shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with
+dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back
+defeated and helpless.  And then follow the days&mdash;those peaceful
+days&mdash;of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look
+hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing,
+and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have
+had a bad shaking."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These are the days of illumination.  Outside the buses rumble by, and
+you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from
+the great whirlpool.  And you realise that the mighty world is
+thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you.
+Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your
+absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul;
+Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though
+nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as
+happy with Brown; and <I>The Star</I>&mdash;well, <I>The Star</I> ... yes, the painful
+fact has to be faced....  <I>The Star</I> goes on its radiant path as though
+you had only been a fly on its wheel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a humbling experience.  This, then, was all your high-blown pride
+amounted to.  You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the
+river&mdash;a moment there, then gone for ever.  This is the foretaste of
+death.  When that comes the waters will just close over your head as
+they have closed now&mdash;a comment here and there, perhaps friendly,
+perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and&mdash;oblivion.  It is an old
+story&mdash;old as humanity.  You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the
+news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was
+received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part.
+It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+"The Dean is dead (pray what is trumps?)"<BR>
+Then "Lord have mercy on his soul!<BR>
+(Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.)<BR>
+Six deans, they say, must bear the pall,<BR>
+(I wish I knew what king to call).<BR>
+Madam, your husband will attend<BR>
+The funeral of so good a friend?"<BR>
+"No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight;<BR>
+And he's engaged to-morrow night;<BR>
+My Lady Club will take it ill<BR>
+If he should fail her at quadrille.<BR>
+He loved the Dean (I lead a heart);<BR>
+But dearest friends, they say, must part.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+That is the way of it.  Your friend is dead: you heave a sigh and lead
+a heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Listen to that thrush outside.  How he is going it!  He, too, on this
+bright March morning sings of the world's indifference&mdash;the
+indifference of the joyous, living world to those who have crept to
+their holes.  I hear in his voice the news of the coming of spring, and
+know that down at "the cottage" the crocuses are out in the garden and
+the dark beech woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing up
+into the blue like a flame of song.  How I have loved this pageantry of
+nature, these days of revelation and promise.  I used to think that I
+was a part of them, but now I know that the pageant goes forward in
+sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer in the audience.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble and disillusioned.
+I have discovered that the world goes on very well without me, and I am
+not sure that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed to learn
+that salutary lesson.  When I return to the world I fancy I shall have
+lost some of my ancient swagger.  I shall feel like a modest intruder
+upon a society that has shown it has no need for me.  I may recover my
+feeling of importance in time, but in my secret heart I shall know that
+I am not the hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things.  I can
+skip off and no one is any the wiser.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap23"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON CLOTHES
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure
+of relief.  It is no longer necessary to lie awake o' nights thinking
+about your clothes.  There are some people, of course, who like
+thinking about their clothes.  They seem to regard themselves as
+perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you
+take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt.  When
+I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help
+overhearing snatches of a conversation which was going on between two
+women in the seat behind me.  It was conducted with great volubility
+and seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, I don't
+like that shade....  I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So's at
+Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always
+looks ... No, brocaded..."  And so on without a pause for the space of
+half an hour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I don't offer that conversation as representative.  I imagine that in
+the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely
+ornamental point of view than they ever did.  If you spend twelve hours
+a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a
+Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou'wester, or filling shells
+in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over
+your thoughts.  You will think more about comfort and less about
+finery.  And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a
+higher intelligence.  The more barbaric you are the more you regard
+dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of
+view of utility.  It is a hard saying for the West End of life.
+Spencer, to illustrate his point, mentions that the African attendants
+of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the
+weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up,
+and went about naked and shivering in the rain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible
+among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery.
+It is not good form among them to talk about dress&mdash;that is all.  But
+that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less
+continuously, is certain.  Pepys' Diary is strewn with such
+self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with
+gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God
+to make me able to pay for it."  He ought to have thought of that
+earlier.  No one is entitled to order fine clothes and then throw the
+responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty.  At least he might
+have prayed to God on the subject before approaching the tailor.  The
+case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous.  He was as vain as a
+peacock, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear
+bright clothes.  And his spirit is not dead among men.  Who can look
+upon the large white spats of &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; as he comes down the floor of
+the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not
+mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence).  I would be well-dressed
+myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way.  Like Squire
+Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion.  I find that with
+rare exceptions I dislike new fashions.  They disturb my tranquillity.
+They give me a nasty jolt.  I suspect that the explanation is that
+beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental
+conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old
+grass-grown turnpikes of habit.  It is no uncommon paradox.  Spurgeon
+had it like many others.  He was once rebuked by a friend for his
+political activity on the Liberal side.  Why did he yield to this
+weakness?  "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend.  "I do
+mortify him," said Spurgeon.  "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make
+him vote Liberal.  That mortifies him."  I am conscious of the same
+conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an
+easy winner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was so with Carlyle.  He raged like a bear with a sore head against
+the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes
+he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply
+wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him
+to send another "as before."  And so, by taking no thought about the
+matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who
+worry about clothes do not achieve.  The flavour of the antique world
+hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord
+Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our
+grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous
+generation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past.  I am just an
+ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the
+main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it
+were, a forlorn relic of the year before last.  My taste in ties, I am
+assured, is execrable.  My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots
+have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness.  I put on whatever is
+handiest without a thought of artistic design.  My pockets bulge with
+letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people
+that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned.  I am perfectly
+happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who
+has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial
+poem.  I lunched with such a man a few days ago.  I could not help
+envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his
+eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him
+shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder.  It may have
+been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything
+that it oughtn't to have been.  I shall never know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And it is a great joy to be able not to care.  The war has lightened
+the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no
+matter how much we try.  It is no longer an offence to appear a little
+secondhand.  It is almost a virtue.  You may wear your oldest clothes
+and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments.  You may
+claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of
+patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the
+coffin of the Kaiser.  A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has
+sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a
+suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in
+believing the statement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is the sort of example that makes me happy.  It gives me the
+feeling that I am at last really in the fashion&mdash;the fashion of old and
+unconsidered clothes.  It is a very comfortable fashion.  It saves you
+worry and it saves you money.  I hope it will continue when the war has
+become a memory.  And if we want a literary or historical warrant for
+it we may go to old Montaigne.  When he was a young fellow without
+means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to
+show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to
+his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his
+châteaux to speak for him.  That is the way of us unfashionable folk.
+We leave our estates and our châteaux to speak for us.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap24"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE DUEL THAT FAILED
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know
+they are beaten.  No, that is not quite so banal a prophecy as it
+seems.  Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat.  They only
+end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing.  The
+Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were
+beaten.  All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth
+of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain.  But the man or the
+nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the
+certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat.  I have
+never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall.
+The French are at their best in the hour of defeat.  There was nothing
+so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of
+1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost
+that was the most heroic phase of the war.  But the bully collapses
+when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let me tell you a story.  In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went
+to Heidelberg&mdash;<I>alt Heidelberg du feine</I>.  You know that jolly city,
+and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with
+the scars of old sword cuts.  I was one of a group of young fellows
+from different countries who were studying at the University, and who
+fraternised in a strange land.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in
+England, and one of our group, a young Polish nobleman who had a great
+passion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London.
+If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the
+kind that had appeared in Heidelberg.  You may remember how strange it
+seemed even to the English public when it first came out.  We had got
+accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' looked ridiculous
+and babyish by comparison.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his 'Safety'
+created something like a sensation.  The sports of the 'Englander' were
+held in contempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the last
+straw.  It was the very symbol of the childishness of a nation given
+over to the sport of babes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One day the Pole was riding out on his bicycle when he passed a couple
+of students, who shouted opprobrious epithets at the 'Englander' and
+his preposterous vehicle.  The Pole turned round, flung some verbal
+change back at them, and rode on his way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That evening as he sat in his room he heard steps ascending the
+stairs, and there entered two students clothed in all the formality of
+grave business.  They had brought the Pole a challenge to a duel from
+each of the two young fellows with whom he had exchanged words on the
+road.  The challenges were couched in the most ruthless terms.  This
+was to be no mere nominal satisfaction of honour.  It was to be a duel
+without guards or any of those restrictions that are common in such
+affairs.  The weapon was the sword, and the time-limit eight days.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The seconds having fulfilled their errand went away, leaving the Pole
+in no cheerful frame of mind.  He was only a very indifferent
+swordsman, and had never cultivated the sport of duelling.  Now
+suddenly he was faced with the necessity of fighting a duel in which he
+would certainly be beaten, and might be killed, for he understood the
+intentions of the challengers.  It was clearly not possible for him to
+acquire in a week such expertness with the sword as would give him a
+chance of victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In this emergency he came along to the little group of which I have
+spoken.  We were playing cards when he entered, but stopped when we saw
+that something unusual had happened.  He told us the story of the
+bicycle ride and the sequel.  What was he to do?  He must fight, of
+course, but how was he to get a dog's chance?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now the oldest of our group, and by far the most worldly wise, was an
+American.  He listened to the Pole and agreed that there was no time
+for him to become sufficiently expert with the sword.  'But can you
+shoot?' he asked the Pole.  Yes, he was not a bad shot.  The American
+took up an ace from a pack of cards and held it up.  'Could you,
+standing where you are, hit that ace with a revolver?'  'I am not sure
+that I could hit it,' answered the Pole, 'but I should come very near
+it.'  'That's all right,' said the American.  'Now to business.  These
+fellows have forgotten something.  They're so used to fighting with the
+sword that they've forgotten there's such a thing as the revolver.  And
+they're trying to bluff you into their own terms.  They've forgotten,
+or don't choose to remember, that, as the challenged party, you have
+choice of weapons.  Now we'll draw up an answer to this letter,
+accepting the challenge, claiming the choice of weapons, choosing the
+revolver, and putting the conditions as stiff as we can make 'em.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So we sat around the American and composed the reply.  And I can
+assure you it had a very ugly look.  The Pole signed it with great
+delight, and the American and I as seconds delivered it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then we waited.  One day passed without an answer&mdash;two, three, four,
+five, six.  Still no answer.  We were enjoying ourselves.  On the
+evening of the seventh day the seconds reappeared at the Pole's rooms.
+They brought no acceptance of his challenge, but an impudent demand for
+the original conditions.  The Pole came along to us with the news.
+'That's all right,' said the American.  'We've got them on the run.
+Now to clinch the business.'  And once more we sat round in great glee
+to draft the reply.  It was as hot as we knew how to make it.  It
+breathed death in every syllable, and it gave the Germans eight days to
+prepare for the end at the muzzle of the revolver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Again we waited, and again the days passed without a sign.  Then on
+the eve of the eighth day the seconds once more appeared.  I was
+present with the Pole at the time.  I have never seen a more forlorn
+pair than those seconds made as they entered.  Their principals, driven
+into a corner, faced with the alternative of fighting with weapons
+which did not assure them of victory or of accepting the humiliation of
+running away, had decided to run away.  They would not fight on the
+conditions offered by the Pole, and the seconds were a spectacle of
+humiliation.  Their apologies to us struggled with their indignation at
+their principals and they went away a chastened spectacle.  That night
+we had a gay gathering with the American in the chair, and I think the
+incident must have got wind abroad, for thenceforward the Pole rode his
+Safety in peace and in triumph....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You may think that story is a trifle.  Well, it is.  But I think it
+has some bearing on the end of the war."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap25"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON EARLY RISING
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+There is no period of the year when my spirit is so much at war with
+the flesh as this.  For the winter is over, and the woods are browning
+and the choristers of the fields are calling me to matins&mdash;and I do not
+go.  Spiritually I am an early riser.  I have a passion for the dawn
+and the dew on the grass, and the "early pipe of half-awakened birds."
+On the rare occasions on which I have gone out to meet the sun upon the
+upland lawn or on the mountain tops I have experienced an emotion that
+perhaps no other experience can give.  I remember a morning in the
+Tyrol when I had climbed Kitzbulhorn to see the sun rise.  I saw the
+darkness changing to chill grey, but no beam of sunlight came through
+the massed clouds that barred the east.  Feeling that my night climb
+had been in vain, I turned round to the west, and there, by a sort of
+magical reflection, I saw the sunrise.  A beam of light, invisible to
+the east, had pierced the clouds and struck the mountains in the west.
+It seemed to turn them to molten gold, and as it moved along the black
+mass it was as though a vast torch was setting the world aflame.  And I
+remembered that fine stanza of Clough's:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+And not through eastern windows only,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When morning comes, comes in the light.<BR>
+In front the dawn breaks slow, how slowly.<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But westward, look, the land is bright.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+And there was that other dawn which I saw, from the icy ridge of the
+Petersgrat, turning the snow-clad summits of the Matterhorn, the
+Weisshorn, and Mont Blanc to a magic realm of rose-tinted battlements.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there are others.  But they are few, for though I am spiritually a
+son of the morning, I am physically a sluggard.  There are some people
+who are born with a gift for early rising.  I was born with a genius
+for lying in bed.  I can go to bed as late as anybody, and have no joy
+in a company that begins to yawn and grow drowsy about ten o'clock.
+But in the early rising handicap I am not a starter.  A merciful
+providence has given me a task that keeps me working far into the night
+and makes breakfast and the newspaper in bed a matter of duty.  No
+words can express the sense of secret satisfaction with which I wake
+and realise that I haven't to get up, that stern duty bids me lie a
+little longer, listening to the comfortable household noises down below
+and the cheerful songs outside, studying anew the pattern of the
+wall-paper and taking the problems of life "lying-down" in no craven
+sense.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I know there are many people who have to catch early morning buses and
+trams who would envy me if they knew my luck.  For the ignoble family
+of sluggards is numerous.  It includes many distinguished men.  It
+includes saints as well as sages.  That moral paragon, Dr. Arnold, was
+one of them; Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," was
+another.  Bishop Selwyn even put the duty of lying in bed on a moral
+plane.  "I did once rise early," he said, "but I felt so vain all the
+morning and so sleepy all the afternoon that I determined not to do it
+again."  He stayed in bed to mortify his pride, to make himself humble.
+And is not humility one of the cardinal virtues of a good Christian?  I
+have fancied myself that people who rise early are slightly
+self-righteous.  They can't help feeling a little scornful of us
+sluggards.  And we know it.  Humility is the badge of all our tribe.
+We are not proud of lying in bed.  We are ashamed&mdash;and happy.  The
+noblest sluggard of us all has stated our case for us.  "No man
+practises so well as he writes," said Dr. Johnson.  "I have all my life
+been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with
+great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any
+good."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Of course we pay the penalty.  We do not catch the early worm.  When we
+turn out all the bargains have gone, and we are left only with the odds
+and ends.  From a practical point of view, we have no defence.  We know
+that an early start is the secret of success.  It used to be said of
+the Duke of Newcastle that he always went about as though he had got up
+half an hour late, and was trying all day to catch it up.  And history
+has recorded what a grotesque failure he was in politics.  When someone
+asked Nelson for the secret of his success he replied: "Well, you see,
+I always manage to be a quarter of an hour in front of the other
+fellow."  And the recipe holds good to-day.  When the inner history of
+the battle of the Falkland Islands is told in detail it will be found
+that it was the early start insisted on by the one man of military
+genius and vision we have produced in this war that gave us that
+priceless victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if you have ever been on a walking tour or a cycling tour you know
+that early rising is the key of the business.  Start early and you are
+master of your programme and your fate.  You can linger by the way,
+take a dip in the mountain tarn, lie under the shadow of a great rock
+in the hot afternoon, and arrive at the valley inn in comfortable time
+for the evening meal.  Start late and you are the slave of the hours.
+You chase them with weary feet, pass the tarn with the haste of a
+dispatch bearer though you are dying for a bathe, and arrive when the
+roast and boiled are cleared away and the merry company are doing a
+"traverse" around the skirting board of the billiard room.  Happy
+reader, if you know the inn I mean&mdash;the jolly inn at Wasdale Head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No, whether from the point of view of business or pleasure, worldly
+wisdom or spiritual satisfaction, there is nothing to be said in our
+defence.  All that we can say for lying in bed is what Foote&mdash;I think
+it was Foote&mdash;said about the rum.  "I went into a public-house," he
+said, "and heard one man call for some rum because he was hot, and
+another call for some rum because he was cold.  Then I called for some
+rum because I liked it."  We sluggards had better make the same clean
+breast of the business.  We lie in bed because we like it.  Just that.
+Nothing more.  We like it.  We claim no virtue, ask no indulgence,
+accept with humility the rebukes of the strenuous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As for me, I have a licence&mdash;nay, I have more; I have a duty.  It is my
+duty to lie in bed o' mornings until the day is well aired.  For I burn
+the midnight oil, and the early blackbird&mdash;the first of our choir to
+awake&mdash;has often saluted me on my way home.  Therefore I lie in bed in
+the morning looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the
+busy world without a twinge of conscience.  If you were listening, you
+would hear me laugh softly to myself as I give the pillow another shake
+and thank providence for having given me a job that enables me to enjoy
+the privileges of the sluggard without incurring the odium that he so
+richly deserves.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap26"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON BEING KNOWN
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I went into a tailor's in the West End the other day to order some
+clothes.  My shadow rarely darkens a tailor's door, and this tailor's
+door it had never darkened before.  I was surprised therefore, when,
+after the preliminaries of measurement were finished, the attendant, in
+reply to a question about a deposit, said "No deposit is necessary.
+The name is good enough."  I confess I felt the compliment as an
+agreeable shock.  The request for a deposit always jars on me.  I know
+that "business is business" and that in this wilderness of London it is
+no dishonour to be unknown and no discredit to be formally discredited;
+but yet ... And here was a man I had never seen before and who had
+never seen me, who was prepared to execute my order without any sordid
+assurances of character on my side&mdash;simply on my name.  Such a tribute
+needed some recognition.  "It will save trouble," said I, "if I pay the
+account now."  And I did so.  I fancy the action was a little childish,
+but I couldn't help it.  I really couldn't.  I simply had to do
+something civil, and this was the only civil thing that occurred to me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then I went out of the shop feeling that I had come suddenly into
+an unexpected and pleasing inheritance.  I knew now something of the
+emotion of Mr. Sholes, the eminent author:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Whenever down Fleet Street he strolls<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The policemen look hurriedly up<BR>
+And say "There's the great Mr. Sholes,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Who writes such delectable gup."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+I might not be able to write such delectable gup as Mr. Sholes, but I
+could write gup good enough to make that fellow in the shop trust me
+for a six-guinea suit.  I did not observe that the policeman took any
+particular notice of me as I passed along.  But&mdash;"Give me time," said
+I, addressing the shade of Mr. Sholes.  "Give me time.  I have made a
+start in the handicap of the famous.  I am known to that excellent
+shopman.  I may yet be known (favourably and admiringly) to the police.
+I may yet walk the Strand with a nimbus that will challenge Mr. Horatio
+Bottomley and Mr. Pemberton Billing and the illustrious great.  I may
+yet have the agreeable consciousness that heads are turning in my
+direction, and that the habitual Londoner is saying to his country
+cousin: 'That, my dear Jane, is the eminent Mr. Alpha of the Plough who
+writes those articles in <I>The Star</I>.' ... Give me time, Mr. Sholes.
+Give me time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But as I walked on and as that momentary flash of the limelight faded
+from me I became less confident that I wanted to live in it.  I became
+sensible of the pleasures of obscurity.  I strolled along untroubled by
+the curious, and enjoyed the pageant of the pavement, the display of
+dress, the diversity of faces, the play of light in the eyes, the
+incidents of the streets.  I paused in front of shops and fell into a
+reverie before the window of the incomparable Mr. Bumpus&mdash;the window of
+stately books in noble bindings.  I was submerged in the tide of the
+common life and felt the enfranchisement of the obscure.  I could walk
+which way I pleased and no one would remark me; pause when I liked and
+be unobserved.  But&mdash;why, here is Lord French of Ypres coming along.
+See how heads are turning and fingers are pointing and tongues are
+wagging&mdash;"That, my dear Jane..."  What a nuisance this limelight must
+be!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust yourself out of
+doors&mdash;unless you have the courage of John Burns, who does not care two
+pins who sees him or talks about him.  The King, poor man, could no
+more walk along this pavement as I am doing, rubbing shoulders with the
+people and enjoying the comedy of life, than he could write to the
+newspapers, or address a crowd from the plinth of the Nelson Monument,
+or go to a booking-office and take a ticket for the Tube, or into an
+A.B.C. shop and ask for a cup of tea, or any of the thousand and one
+things that I am at liberty to do and enjoy doing without let or
+hindrance, comment or disturbance.  He is the prisoner of publicity.
+He is pursued by the limelight, as the fleeing soul of the poet was
+pursued by the hound of heaven.  He can't look in Bumpus's.  He can't
+go on to an allotment and dig undisturbed.  You cannot have limelight
+playing about an allotment.  In fact, the more one thinks of it the
+more impoverished his life seems, and so in a lesser degree with all
+the eminent people who are pursued by the photographer, mobbed in the
+streets, fawned on by their friends, slandered by their enemies,
+exalted or defamed in the Press, and dissected in every club
+smoking-room and bar parlour.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, you will say, think of the glory of having your name handed down
+to posterity.  It is a very questionable privilege.  I am not much
+concerned about posterity.  I respect it, as Wordsworth respected it.
+"What has posterity done for me that I should consider it?" some one
+said to him, and he replied, "No, but the past has done much for you."
+It was a just reminder of our obligations.  But it is a lean ambition
+to pose for posterity.  I cannot thrill to the vision of the trumpeter
+Fame blowing my name down the corridors of time while I sleep on
+unheeding in
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+My patrimony of a little mould<BR>
+And entail of four planks.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+I am not warmed by the idea of a marble image standing with
+outstretched arm in the Abbey or sitting on a horse for ever in the
+streets, wet or fine, or perched up on a towering column to be a
+convenience to vagrant birds.  If fame is often a nuisance to the
+living, it is only an empty echo for the dead.  Spare me marble
+trappings, good friends, and give me the peace of forgetfulness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By the time I had reached the end of my walk and my ruminations, I felt
+less cordial towards that man in the shop.  I wished, on the whole,
+that he had asked for the deposit.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap27"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I was rummaging among my books this morning when I came across Frey's
+map of the Bernese Oberland, and forthwith forgot the object of my
+search in the presence of this exhilarating discovery.  Mr. Chesterton,
+I think, once described how he evoked the emotions of a holiday by
+calling a cab, piling it up with luggage, and driving to the station.
+Then, having had his sensation, he drove home again.  It seemed to me
+rather a poor way of taking an imaginative holiday.  One might as well
+heat an empty oven in order to imagine a feast.  The true medium of the
+spiritual holiday is the map.  That is the magic carpet that whisks you
+away from this sodden earth and unhappy present to sunny lands and
+serener days.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are times when books offer no escape from the burden of things,
+when, as Mr. Biglow says
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I'm as unsoshul as a stone,<BR>
+And kind o' suffercate to be alone;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+but there are no circumstances in which a map will not do the trick.  I
+do not care whether it is a map of the known or the unknown, the
+visited or the unvisited, the real or the fanciful.  It was the jolly
+map which Stevenson invented in an idle hour which became the seed of
+"Treasure Island."  That is how a map stimulated his fancy and sent it
+out on a career of immortal adventure.  And though you have not
+Stevenson's genius for describing the adventure, that is what a map
+will do for you if you have a spark of the boy's love of romance left
+in your soul.  It is the "magic casement" of the poet.  I have never
+crossed the Atlantic in the flesh, but, lord, what spiritual adventures
+I have had with maps in the enchanted world on the other side!  I have
+sailed with Drake in Nombre Dios Bay, and navigated the grim straits
+with Magellan, and lived with the Incas of Peru and the bloody Pizarro,
+and gone up the broad bosom of the Amazon into fathomless forests, and
+sailed through the Golden Gates on golden afternoons, and stood with
+Cortes "silent upon a peak in Darien."  I know the Shenandoah Valley
+far better than I know Wimbledon Common, and have fought over every
+inch of it by the side of Stonewall Jackson, just as I have lived in
+the mazes of the Wilderness with Grant and Lee.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Do not tell me I have never been to these places and a thousand others
+like them.  I swear that I have.  I have traversed them all in the
+kingdom of the mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy day
+(like this) I will go on a holiday more entrancing than any that Mr.
+Cook ever planned.  It is not taking tickets that makes the traveller.
+I have known people who have gone round the world without seeing
+anything, while Thoreau could stay in his back garden and entertain the
+universe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic of romance in them,
+maps of the places you have known have a fascination no less rich and
+deep.  They, too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of
+memory and not of the imagination.  You are back with yourself in other
+days and in other places and with other friends.  You may tell me that
+this was a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it looking out
+over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields with their stricken
+crops.  Nothing of the sort.  I spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with
+an incomparable companion.  Three weeks I put in, sir, three weeks on
+the glaciers.  See, there, on this glorious map of Frey's, is Mürren,
+from whence we started.  In front is the mighty snow mass of the
+Jungfrau, the Mönch and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes
+whither we are bound.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg and there is the
+Mütthorn hut, standing on the bit of barren rock that sticks out from
+the great ice-billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier.  Do you remember,
+companion of mine, the mighty bowls of steaming tea we drank when we
+reached that haven of refuge?  And do you remember our start from the
+hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with our guide and with our
+lanterns lit&mdash;and the silence of our march over the snow and ice
+beneath the glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant
+avalanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over the ice-fields,
+and the unforgettable view as we reached the ridge of the Petersgrat
+and saw across the Rhone Valley the great mountain masses beyond&mdash;the
+Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest&mdash;touched to an
+unearthly beauty by the flush of the new-risen sun?  And the scramble
+up the Tschingelhorn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the
+moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal?  And then the days that
+followed in the great ice region behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent
+marches over pathless snows and by yawning crevasses, the struggle up
+peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, sometimes with other
+climbers who blew in across the snows from some remote adventure,
+sometimes alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where we
+paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood to boil our kettle?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of a dizzy precipice.
+Do you remember the sunset we saw from thence, when out of the general
+gloom of the conquering night one beam from the vanished sun caught the
+summit of the Dom and made it gleam like a palace in the heavens or
+like the towers of the radiant city that Christian saw across the dark
+river?  And there at the end of the journey is the great glacier that
+leaps down, seven thousand feet, between the Schreckhorn and the
+Wetterhorn, to the gracious valley of Grindelwald.  How innocent it
+looks on this map, but what a day of gathering menace was that when we
+got caught between the impassable crevasses, and night came on and the
+rain came down and ... But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking Glass leapt up from our
+bed of hay in the Dolfuss hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the
+breakfast.  Outside, the rain fell in torrents and the clouds hung
+thick and low over glacier and peaks.  Our early start for the
+Gleckstein hut was thwarted.  Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and
+still the rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and ice.  Then
+the crest of the Finstraarhorn appeared through a rent in the clouds,
+patches of blue broke up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased.
+Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and plates and swept
+the floor of the hut, and then, shouldering our rucksacks and closing
+the door of the empty hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven hours' journey to
+the Gleckstein.  That seemed to leave ample margin; but do not trust
+guide-books in a season of drought when the crevasses are open.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This wisdom, however, came later.  All through the morning we made
+excellent progress.  The sun shone, the clouds hung lightly about the
+peaks, the ice was in excellent condition.  Heinrich, who brought up
+the rear, occasionally broke into song.  Now, when Heinrich sings you
+know that all is well.  When he whistles you are in a tight place.  For
+the rest he is silent.  Otmar, his brother, is less communicative.  He
+goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting crevasses,
+testing snow-bridges to see if they will bear, occasionally pausing to
+consult his maps.  Once only did he burst into song that day&mdash;but of
+that later.  Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks.  In the hut
+he will make your tea and oil your boots and help Heinrich to wash your
+cups and sweep the floor.  But out in the open he is your master.  If
+you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear.  If you suggest a
+second breakfast before it is due his silence as he pounds forward
+ahead humiliates you.  If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the
+taut insistence of the rope.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and sardines (white wine
+for Otmar and Heinrich).  The pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of
+taking out his pocket looking-glass and touching up his moustache ends
+and giving a flick to his eye-brows.  Heinrich is as big and brawny as
+an ox, but he has the soul of a dandy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It had been easy going on the furrowed face of the ice, but when we
+came to the snow slope that leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace
+slackened.  The snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our
+shins.  Otmar eased the passage up the slope by zigzagging, but it was
+one o'clock when we came face to face with the wall of snow, flanked by
+walls of rock, which form the "saddle."  Otmar led my companion over
+the rocks; but decided that Heinrich should bring me up the snow face.
+Step cutting is slow work, and though Otmar, having reached the top of
+the saddle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed round his
+waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible wall was surmounted, and
+we could look down the great glacier that plunged seven thousand feet
+down into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red roofs and
+pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pass; but we seemed,
+nevertheless, to have the day well in hand.  Four thousand feet down on
+a spur of the Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleckstein
+hut.  It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, but in these vast
+solitudes of ice and snow and rock, vision is deceptive.  The distant
+seems incredibly near, for the familiar measurements of the eye are
+wanting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The weather had changed again.  Clouds had settled on the mighty cliffs
+of the Schreckhorn on our left and the Wetterhorn on our right.  Mist
+was rolling over the pass; rain began to fall.  We cut short our lunch
+(cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our descent, making a
+wide detour of the glacier to the right in the direction of the
+Wetterhorn.  We descended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier,
+crossed an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and came in view
+of Grindelwald, lying like a picture postcard far down below&mdash;so
+immediately below that it seemed that one might fling a stone down into
+its midst.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At half-past three it began to dawn on me that things were not going
+well.  Otmar had, during the past three weeks, been the most skilful of
+guides over most of the great glacier passes of the Oberland and up
+many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like the condition of the
+Grindtlwaldfirn.  The appalling slope of this great sea of ice makes a
+descent in normal times a task of difficulty.  But this year the long
+drought had left open all the yawning crevasses with which it is
+seamed, and its perils were infinitely increased.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the maze, taking us across
+perilous snow bridges and cutting steps on knife-edges of ice where one
+looked down the glittering slope on one side, and into the merciless
+green-blue depths of the crevasse on the other.  But wherever he turned
+he was baulked.  Always the path led to some vast fissure which could
+be neither leapt nor bridged.  Once we seemed to have escaped and
+glissaded swiftly down.  Then the slope got steeper and we
+walked&mdash;steeper and Otmar began cutting steps in the ice&mdash;steeper and
+Otmar paused and looked down the leap of the glacier.  We stood silent
+for his verdict.  "It will not go."  We turned on the rope without a
+word, and began remounting our steps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was half-past four.  The mist was thickening, the rain falling
+steadily.  Below, the red roofs and green pastures of Grindelwald
+gleamed in the sunlight of the valley.  Nearer, the slate roof of the
+Gleckstein on its spur of rock was still visible.  Two hours before it
+had seemed but a step to either.  Now they seemed to have receded to
+another hemisphere.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the first time there flashed through the mind the thought that
+possibly we should not reach the hut after all.  A night on the
+glacier, or rather on the dark ridges of the Wetterhorn!  A wet night,
+too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The same thought was working in Otmar's mind.  No word came from him,
+no hint that he was concerned.  But the whole bearing of the man was
+changed.  In the long hours of the morning he had led us listlessly and
+silently; now he was like a hound on the trail.  The tug of the rope
+became more insistent.  He made us face difficulties that he had
+skirted before; took us on to snow-bridges that made the mind reel;
+slashed steps with his ice axe with a swift haste that spoke in every
+stroke of the coming night.  Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge
+that came to a point between two crevasses, slipped back, and found
+myself in the crevasse, with my feet dancing upon nothing.  The rope
+held; Otmar hauled me out without a word, and we resumed our march.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to prospect from above for a
+possible way out.  We followed at his call, but he led us into new
+mazes, down into a great cavern in the glacier, where we passed over
+the ruined walls and buttresses of an ice cathedral, emerging on the
+surface of the glacier again, only to find ourselves once more checked
+by impassable gulfs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was now half-past five.  We had been three and a half hours in
+vainly attempting to find a way down the ice.  The mist had come thick
+upon us.  The peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; the
+hut was no longer visible.  Only an hour and a half of light remained,
+and the whole problem was still unsolved.  The possibility of a night
+on the ice or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty.  My
+strength was giving out, and I slipped again and again in the ice
+steps.  A kind of dull resignation had taken possession of the mind.
+One went forward in a stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but
+indifferent to all else.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Otmar was now really concerned.  He came from a valley south of the
+Rhone, and was unfamiliar with this pass; but he is of a great strain
+of Alpine guides, is proud of his achievements&mdash;he had led in the first
+ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year&mdash;and to be
+benighted on a glacier would have been a deadly blow to his pride.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direction of the ridge of
+the Wetterhorn that plunged down on our right.  We watched him skimming
+across crevasses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice for
+foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and vanishing into a couloir
+of the mountain&mdash;first depositing his rucksack on the rocks to await
+his return.  Five minutes passed&mdash;ten.  Heinrich startled the silence
+with an halloo&mdash;no answer.  A quarter of an hour&mdash;then, from far below,
+a faint cry came.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on."  We hurried across the
+intervening ice, and met Otmar returning like a cat up the rocks.  Down
+that narrow slit in the mountain we descended with headlong speed.
+There were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to cross with
+negligible foot and hand holds, passages of loose rock where a careless
+move would have sent great stones thundering on the heads of those
+before.  Once Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a
+smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet.  Once he cried: "Quick: it is
+dangerous," and looking up at the crest of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge
+block of ice poised perilously above our downward path.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The night was now upon us.  We were wet to the skin.  A thunderstorm of
+exceptional violence added to the grimness of the setting.  But we were
+down the ridge at last.  We raced across a narrow tongue of the glacier
+and were safe on the spur of rocks where we knew the Gleckstein hut to
+be.  But there was no light to guide us.  We scrambled breathlessly
+over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, each of us
+hardly visible to the other in the thickening mist, save when the blaze
+of lightning flashed the scene into sudden and spectral clearness.  At
+last we struck a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted
+the latch of the hut.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is the time, Heinrich?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Half-past eight."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had been benighted?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Otmar did not hear.  But as he got the wood and made the fire, and
+emptied the rucksacks of our provisions, he began to sing in a pleasant
+tenor voice.  And Heinrich joined in with his full bass.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and wrapped in blankets, we
+sat down to a glorious meal of steaming tea&mdash;in an iron teapot as large
+as a pail&mdash;tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was a narrow escape from a night on the mountains," I said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Otmar said nothing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of hay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is fine," he said.  "The Wetterhorn will go."
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent" ALIGN="center">
+<SPAN STYLE="letter-spacing: 4em">*****</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves still stand in the
+sodden fields.  But I have been a journey.  I have had three weeks in
+the Oberland&mdash;three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, the
+world that seems like a dream we once had, so remote has it become and
+so incredible.  I roll up my magic carpet and bless the man who
+invented maps for the solace of men.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap28"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A TALK IN A BUS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I jumped on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening and took a seat
+against the door.  Opposite me sat a young woman in a conductor's
+dress, who carried on a lively conversation with the woman conductor in
+charge of the bus.  There were the usual criticisms of the habits and
+wickedness of passengers, and then the conductor inside asked the other
+at the door how "Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was
+"sticking it out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," replied the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have you seen her when she has her hat off?  She's pretty then."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can't see what difference that would make."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's got nice eyes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never see anything particular about her eyes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the pretty about
+her&mdash;not a little bit.  Pretty!"  She tossed her head and looked
+indignant, almost hurt, as though she had received some secret personal
+affront.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I do not think she had.  It was more probable that on a subject about
+which she felt deeply she had suffered a painful shock.  She liked
+"Flo," thought her "a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not
+be permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sacred subject like
+"prettiness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The little incident interested me because it illustrated one of the
+great differences between the sexes.  You have only to try to turn that
+conversation into masculine terms to see how wide that difference is.
+Tom and Bill might have a hundred things to say about Jack.  They might
+agree that he was a liar or an honest chap, that he drank too much or
+didn't drink enough, that he was mean or generous; but there is one
+thing it would never occur to them to discuss.  It would never occur to
+them to discuss his looks, to talk about his eyes, to consider whether
+he was more beautiful with or without his hat.  They might say that he
+looked merry or miserable, sulky or pleasant, but that would have
+reference to Jack's character and moral aptitudes and not to any
+æsthetic consideration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But this conversation about "Flo" was entirely æsthetic.  The question
+of her moral traits only came in as a means of dodging the main issue.
+The main issue was whether she was pretty, and it was evidently a very
+important issue indeed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is this interest of women in their own sex as works of art that
+distinguishes them from men.  Men have no interest in their own sex in
+that sense.  Sit on a bus and see what interests the male passenger.
+It is not his fellow males.  He does not sit and study their clothes,
+and make mental notes on their claims to beauty.  If he is interested
+in his fellow passengers at all it is the other sex that appeals to
+him.  His own sex has no pictorial attraction for him.  But a woman is
+interested in women and women only.  It is their clothes that her eye
+wanders over with mild envy or disapproval.  You almost hear her mind
+recording the price of that muff, those furs, the hat and the boots.
+At the end of her survey you feel that she knows what everything cost,
+what are the wearer's ambitions, social status, place of residence&mdash;in
+fact, all about her.  And she is equally concerned about her physical
+qualities.  She will watch a pretty face with open admiration, and pay
+it the same sort of tribute that she would pay to a beautiful picture
+or any other work of art.  "What a pretty woman!"  "What lovely hair
+that girl has!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is not a peculiarity of our own people alone.  Not long ago I went
+with two French officers over a great munitions factory near Paris.  We
+were accompanied by a clever little woman who was secretary to the head
+of one of the departments, and who acted as guide.  We went through
+great shops where thousands of women were working, and as we passed
+along I noticed that every eye fell on the little woman.  I became so
+interested in this human fact that I forgot to give my attention to the
+machinery.  And to be honest I am always ready to turn away from
+machinery, which to me is much less interesting than human nature.  I
+think I can say with truth that not one woman in all those thousands
+failed to scan our guide or bothered to give one glance at the
+officers.  Yet they were fine fellows and obviously important persons,
+while the guide was commonplace in appearance and quite plainly dressed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are of course women who dress and comport themselves with an eye
+to male admiration as well as female envy and appreciation.  They are
+the women of the bold eye, which is not the same thing as the brave
+eye.  But taking women in the lump, it is their own sex they are
+interested in.  They devote enormous attention to dress, but they do so
+for each other's enjoyment.  They have a passion for personal beauty,
+but it is the personal beauty of their own sex that appeals to them.
+No doubt there is a sexual motive underlying this fact.  It is the
+motive expressed in "'My face is my fortune, sir,' she said."  The
+desire to be pretty is ultimately the desire to be matrimonially
+fortunate.  Bill's success in life has no relation to his looks.  He
+may be as ugly as sin, but if he has strong arms, a good digestion, and
+a sound mind he will do as well as another.  Some of the plainest men
+in England have sat on the Woolsack.  Plain women, it is true, have
+come to eminence.  Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., is a
+case in point.  She herself was puzzled to explain her influence over
+that sour fanatic-libertine, for, as she said, "I have no beauty and he
+has not the faculty to appreciate my intelligence."  But the exceptions
+prove the rule.  Prettiness is the woman's commodity.  It is the badge
+of her servitude.  And behind that little conversation in the bus about
+"Flo's" claims to prettiness was a very practical, though unformed,
+consideration of her prospects in life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+What will be the effect of the war upon "Flo" and her kind?  She has
+found that she has an independent, non-sexual importance to society,
+that she has a career which has nothing to do with prettiness, that she
+can win her bread with her mental and physical faculties as easily as a
+man.  She has tasted freedom and discovered herself.  The discovery
+will give her a new independence of outlook, a more self-confident view
+of her place in society, a greater respect for the hard practical
+things of life.  She will still desire to be pretty and to have the
+admiration of her sex, but the desire will have a sounder foundation
+than in the past It will no longer be her career.  It will be her
+ornament.  It will decorate the fact that she can run a bus as well as
+a man.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap29"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we
+shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall
+find against our names in the ledger of our life.  We shall discover
+that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping
+credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our
+failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on
+the credit side.  The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at
+all.  They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Take Smithson Spinks&mdash;everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type.  What a
+reputation for generosity the fellow has!  What a grandeur of giving he
+exhales!  How noble his scorn for mean fellows!  How royal the flash of
+his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man,
+or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself!  No one hesitates
+to ask Smithson Spinks for anything.  He likes to be asked.  He would
+be hurt if he were not asked.  And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's
+generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside
+out.  The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but
+love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and
+envy of others.  You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the
+real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles
+when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle
+perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the
+part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad.  He believes in his own
+fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock.
+He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written
+in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY
+in plain black on the debit side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And I&mdash;let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person.
+But am I?  What will the ledger say?  I have a dreadful suspicion that
+it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve.
+I may&mdash;who knows?&mdash;only be truthful because I haven't courage enough
+for dissimulation.  It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but
+only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit.  It needs great courage
+to tell a lie which you have got to face out.  I could no more do it
+than I could dance on the point of a needle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton&mdash;the sheer
+unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing
+Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing
+judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous
+inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of
+exposure.  A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what
+courage!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a
+chance.  I have no gift of dissimulation.  If I tried it I should
+flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates.  I could not bluff a
+rabbit.  No one would believe me if I told him a lie.  My eye would
+return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would
+refuse its office.  And therein is the worm that eats at my
+self-respect.  May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due
+to my fear of the eleventh commandment&mdash;that cynical rescript which
+runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"?  I hope it is not so, but I must
+prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of
+Jehoshaphat.  For they will be as candid about me and you as about
+Smithson Spinks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have
+shipped him, figuratively,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+... somewhere east of Suez<BR>
+Where the best is like the worst,<BR>
+Where there aren't no ten commandments,<BR>
+And a man can raise a thirst&mdash;<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him
+from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with
+minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled
+governance of himself.  Then it will be found whether the virtues are
+diamonds or paste&mdash;whether they spring out of the ten commandments or
+out of the eleventh.  The lord Angelo in <I>Measure for Measure</I> passed
+for a strict and saintly person&mdash;and I have no doubt believed himself
+to be a strict and saintly person&mdash;so long as he was under control, but
+when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared.  And note that
+subtle touch of Shakespeare's.  Angelo was not an ordinary libertine.
+He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only
+by virtue.  Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+... What is't I dream on?<BR>
+O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,<BR>
+With saints dost bait thy hook!  Most dangerous<BR>
+Is that temptation that doth goad us on<BR>
+To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,<BR>
+With all her double vigour, art and nature<BR>
+Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid<BR>
+Subdues me quite.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the
+floodgates of viciousness.  What a paradox is man!  I think I have
+known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better
+than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of
+sobriety.  Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into
+great trouble for saying so.  He was addressing a temperance meeting at
+a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have
+never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence
+of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who
+have fallen."  It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the
+stern teetotalers present.  "It's a shame," said one, "that he should
+be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord."  They did not
+like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and
+even got drunk.  They expected to have a large credit entry for not
+tippling.  Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale."
+If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from
+them you were virtuous.  It was a beautifully simple moral code, but
+virtue is not so easily catalogued.  It is not a negative thing, but a
+positive thing.  It is not measured by its antipathies but by its
+sympathies.  Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its
+names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before
+"religion and piety."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling
+what virtue is there in not tippling?  The virtue is often with the
+tippler.  I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless,
+had been an heroic struggle with his enemy.  He was always falling, but
+he never ceased fighting.  And it is the fighting, I think, he will
+find recorded in the ledger&mdash;greatly to his surprise, for he had the
+most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral
+infirmity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a
+Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to
+steal half-a-crown.  He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no
+virtue in not stealing what you don't want.  That was what was wrong
+with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were
+the best:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steäls,<BR>
+Them as 'as coäts to their backs an' taäkes their regular meäls.<BR>
+Noä, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meäl's to be 'ad&mdash;<BR>
+Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the
+temptation.  He will have found a much more complex system of
+book-keeping where he has gone.  I imagine him standing painfully
+puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the
+"valley of decision."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap30"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the
+man in the corner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mean those Huns," said the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier.  "He
+can't help hisself.  He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as
+we are, and he does the job same as we do.  But he'd jolly well like to
+chuck the business and go home.  Course he would.  Stands to reason.
+Anybody would."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously
+felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier&mdash;a
+personal hatred of the individual enemy.  This man clearly did not hate
+the enemy.  Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant
+reason.  He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four
+times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice.  It was
+two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to
+see his people in the West of England.  He talked about his experiences
+with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things,
+quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of
+egotism.  He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at
+G&mdash;&mdash;.  "Nobody can hold it," he said.  "We take it when we like, and
+Fritz, he takes it when <I>he</I> likes.  That's all there is about it."  It
+was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always
+without any appearance of personal animus.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I do not record the incident as unusual.  I record it as usual.  No one
+who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank
+or file, will dispute this.  In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse
+a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to
+do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters.  You
+have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate.  I
+have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more
+bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have
+heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of
+utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be
+found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the
+studies of be-spectacled professors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and
+suffering too close, to be consumed with hate.  If he could envy the
+other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him.  But he sees
+that Fritz is in no better plight than himself.  He is living in the
+mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine
+of war as himself.  He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering
+the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No
+Man's Land.  It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow.
+And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion.  The chord
+of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his
+enemy he ceases to hate him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this
+means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in
+consequence.  The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is
+an infantile delusion.  I should have much more confidence in that
+quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I
+should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and
+prove their patriotism by the violence of their language.  I have known
+many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I
+cannot recall one&mdash;not one&mdash;who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the
+soldier's gospel at all.  There have been few greater soldiers in
+history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man.  He fought
+literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the
+doctrine of hate.  When the minister in the course of a sermon had
+expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor,
+there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.'  Do you think
+that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that
+teaching?"  And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I
+wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so?
+Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and
+leaving us to do the same."  And Lee stated his attitude generally when
+he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I
+believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights.  But
+I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never
+seen the day when I did not pray for them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's
+and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day.  In the
+current issue of <I>Punch</I> I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of
+that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which
+he said:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+But where you have met your equals,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Gun for gun and man for man,<BR>
+We have noticed other sequels,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It was always you that ran.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a
+report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquières were obtained by a
+German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a
+field gun single-handed until killed at his gun.  The great bravery of
+this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain
+Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman.  He was
+little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled
+career of victory in the air.  He fought with a terrible skill, but he
+had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for
+the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary.  In one of
+his letters to his father he said:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight.  Yes, I always let
+them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils.  I only
+scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the
+Huns.  He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his
+best.  Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but
+you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case
+of <I>them</I>.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in
+another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual
+laughter:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition.  There was
+nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing.  We
+couldn't help it&mdash;it was so ridiculous.  We flew side by side laughing
+at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other
+and went off.  He was a real sport was that Hun.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited
+boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty,
+failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry
+laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I
+shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day,
+even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there
+are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something
+nobler than hate.  The letter appeared in the <I>Cologne Gazette</I> early
+in the war, and was as follows:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these
+lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly.
+I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal
+packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French,
+English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy.
+Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary,
+everyone expresses his displeasure.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+This is natural when one considers the position.  We know how victories
+are won.  We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained.
+We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield.  We
+rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection
+of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not
+deserved to be derided in such a way.  Had they not fought so bravely
+we should not have had to register such losses.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect
+here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is
+only calculated to cause disgust.  Such postcards are as much out of
+place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral.  Perhaps these
+lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards
+sent to our troops.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I do not suppose they did.  I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home
+went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at
+the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit.  But it is not.
+There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not
+against the victims of war, but against the institution of war.  That
+is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe
+to-day.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap31"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON TAKING THE CALL
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Jane came home from the theatre last night overflowing with an
+indignation that even the beauty of a ride on the top of a bus in the
+air of these divine summer nights had not cooled.  It was not
+dissatisfaction with the play or the performance that made her boil
+with volcanic wrath.  It was the vanity of the insufferable
+actor-manager, who would insist on "taking the call" all the time and
+every time.  There were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed,
+but the more the audience called for them the more the preposterous
+"old-clo'" man of the stage came smirking before the curtain, rubbing
+his fat hands and creasing his fat cheeks.  "It was disgusting," said
+Jane.  "The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all night,
+and the audience were trying to level things up a bit by giving the
+interesting people a show, and this greedy cormorant snatched every
+crumb for himself.  I hate him.  He is a Hun."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard about another
+actor-manager.  At the end of the play he went on the stage and found
+his company bending down in a circle and gazing intently at something
+on the floor.  "What are you looking at?" he asked.  "Oh," they chanted
+in chorus, "we're looking at a spot we've never seen before.  It's the
+centre of the stage."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are, of course, people who carry the centre of the stage with
+them.  It does not matter where they go or what they play: they
+dominate the scene.  "Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table,"
+and where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage.  He needed no
+placard to remind you that he was someone in particular.  You would no
+more have thought of turning the limelight on to him than you would
+have thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or the sun at
+midday.  He just appeared and everyone else became accessory to that
+commanding presence: he spoke and all other voices seemed like the
+chirping of sparrows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so in other spheres.  Take the case of Mr. Asquith, for example, in
+relation to the House of Commons.  It does not matter where he sits.
+He may go to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre of
+the stage will go with him.  When he had sat down after delivering his
+first speech in opposition, one of the ablest observers in Parliament
+turned to me and said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of the
+House."  And that exactly expressed the feeling created by that
+authoritative manner, that masculine voice, that air of high detachment
+from the mere squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game.  He never
+seemed greater to the House than in the moment when he had
+fallen&mdash;never more its intellectual master, its most authentic voice,
+its wisest and most disinterested counsellor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, who come sprinting
+before the curtain after drenching themselves in the limelight on the
+stage.  They hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the
+applause.  The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking the call" are
+quite another breed.  You know the type, both on the stage and off.
+Take that eminent actor, Bluffington Phelps.  He shambles about the
+stage, his words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's
+under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances at the man with
+the limelight he is straining to catch the voice of the prompter at the
+flies.  But when it comes to "taking the call" there is not his
+superior on the stage.  He monopolises the applause as he monopolises
+the limelight; and by these artifices he has persuaded the public that
+he is an actor.  It is a glorious joke&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Hood an ass in reverend purple,<BR>
+So that you hide his too ambitious ears,<BR>
+And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some of the people all
+the time.  Mr. Bluffington Phelps knows that it is true.  He knows that
+there is a large part of the public, possibly the majority of the
+public, which is born to be fooled, which will believe anything because
+it hasn't the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd and
+which will always follow the ass with the longest ears and the loudest
+bray.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is the same off the stage.  The art of politics is the art of
+"taking the call."  Harley knew the trick perfectly.  Where anything
+was to be got, it was said of him, he always knew how to wriggle
+himself in; when any misfortune threatened he knew how to wriggle
+himself out.  He took the cheers and passed the kicks on to his
+colleagues.  His chivalrous spirit is not dead.  It is familiar in
+every country, but most of all in democratic countries.  We all know
+the type of politician who has the true genius for the limelight.  If
+the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is miserable.  "What has
+happened to the publicity department?  Has the fellow in charge of the
+limelight gone to sleep?  Wake him up.  Don't let the public forget me.
+If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em that my hat is two sizes
+larger than it was a year ago.  Tell 'em about my famous smile.  Tell
+'em about my dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable piety.
+Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every morning and never leave
+it until half-past seven the next morning.  Tell 'em anything you
+like&mdash;only tell 'em."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If things go right, and there is applause in the house, he skips in
+front of the curtain to take the call.  "Thank you, gentlemen&mdash;and
+ladies.  Thank you.  Yes, alone I did it.  Nobody else in the company
+had a hand in it&mdash;nor a finger.  No, not a finger."  If anything goes
+wrong and the audience hiss, does he shirk the ordeal?  Not at all.  He
+comes before the curtain with indignant sorrow.  "Yes, ladies and
+gentlemen, I agree with you.  Most scandalous failure.  It was all
+Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's.  I went down on my bended
+knees to them, but they wouldn't listen to me&mdash;wouldn't listen.  And
+now you see what's happened.  Hear the anguish in my voice.  Look at
+the tears in my broken-hearted eyes.  Oh, the pity of it, ladies and
+gentlemen&mdash;the pity of it.  And I tried so hard&mdash;I really did.  But
+they wouldn't listen&mdash;they wouldn't l-l-listen."  (Breaks down in sobs.)
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I recall a legend that seems apposite.  A certain politician of
+antiquity&mdash;let us all call him Eurysthenes&mdash;hit on a happy idea for
+making himself famous.  He bought a lot of parrots and taught them to
+shriek "Great is Eurysthenes!"  Then he turned them all out into the
+woods, and there they sat and squawked "Great is Eurysthenes!"  And the
+Athenians, astonished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried,
+"Great is Eurysthenes."  And Eurysthenes, who was waiting in the flies,
+so to speak, took the call and was famous ever after.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap32"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+Chum, roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking at the universe in
+general and at the cows in the paddock beyond the orchard in
+particular.  Occasionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which
+the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but he soon tires of
+this diversion and resumes his loud-voiced demand to share in the good
+things that are going.  For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting
+over the valley, and the woods are calling him to unknown adventures.
+They shall not call in vain.  Work shall be suspended and this morning
+shall be dedicated to his service.  For this is the day of deliverance.
+The word is spoken and the shadow of the sword is lifted.  The battle
+for his biscuit is won.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He does not know what a narrow shave he has had.  He does not know that
+for weeks past he has been under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a
+luxury that this savage world of men could no longer afford; that
+having taken away his bones we were about to take away his biscuits and
+leave his cheerful companionship a memory of the dream world we lived
+in before the Great Killing began.  All this he does not know.  That is
+one of the numerous advantages of being a dog.  He knows nothing of the
+infamies of men or of the incertitudes of life.  He does not look
+before and after and pine for what is not.  He has no yesterday and no
+to-morrow&mdash;only the happy or the unhappy present.  He does not, as
+Whitman says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or lamenting
+his past or worrying about his future.  His bereavements do not disturb
+him and he doesn't care twopence about his career.  He has no debts and
+hungers for no honours.  He would rather have a bone than a baronetcy.
+He does not turn over old albums, with their pictured records of
+forgotten holidays and happy scenes and yearn for the "tender grace of
+a day that is dead," or wonder whether he will keep his job and what
+will become of his "poor old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he
+doesn't, or speculate whether the war will end this year, next year,
+some time, or never.  He doesn't even know there is a war.  Think of
+it!  He doesn't know there is a war.  O happy dog!  Give him a bone, a
+biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, and his cup of joy is
+full.  Would that my needs were as few and as easily satisfied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now his biscuit is safe and I have the rare privilege of rejoicing
+with Sir Frederick Banbury.  I do not know that I should go as far as
+he seems to go, for in that touching little speech of his at the Cannon
+Street Hotel he indicated that nothing in the heavens above or in the
+earth beneath should stand between him and his dogs.  "In August,
+1914," he said, "my son went to France.  The night before he left he
+said, 'Father, look after my dogs and horses while I am away.'  I said,
+'Don't you worry about them.'  He was killed in December, and I have
+got the horses and dogs now.  As I said to Mr. Bonar Law last year, I
+should like to see the man who would tell me I have not to look after
+my son's dogs and horses."  Well, I suppose that if the choice were
+between a German victory and a dog biscuit, the dog biscuit would have
+to go, Sir Frederick.  But I rejoice with you that we have not to make
+the choice.  I rejoice that the sentence of death has passed from your
+dead son's horses and dogs and from that noble creature under the
+cherry tree.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Look at him, barking now at the cows, now with eloquent appeal at me,
+and then, having caught my eye, turning sportively to worry the hated
+rope.  He knows that my intentions this morning are honourable.  I
+think he feels that, in spite of appearances, I am in that humour in
+which at any radiant moment the magic word "Walk" may leap from my
+lips.  What a word that is!  No sleep so sound that it will not
+penetrate its depths and bring him, passionately awake, to his feet.
+He would sacrifice the whole dictionary for that one electric syllable.
+That and its brother "Bones."  Give him these good, sound, sensible
+words, and all the fancies of the poets and all the rhetoric of the
+statesmen may whistle down the winds.  He has no use for them.  "Walk"
+and "Bones"&mdash;that is the speech a fellow can understand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yes, Chum knows very well that I am thinking about him and thinking
+about him in an uncommonly friendly way.  That is the secret of the
+strange intimacy between us.  We may love other animals, and other
+animals may respond to our affection.  But the dog is the only animal
+who has a reciprocal intelligence.  As Coleridge says, he is the only
+animal that <I>looks upward</I> to man, strains to catch his meanings,
+hungers for his approval.  Stroke a cat or a horse, and it will have a
+physical pleasure; but pat Chum and call him "Good dog!" and he has a
+spiritual pleasure.  He feels good.  He is pleased because you are
+pleased.  His tail, his eyebrows, every part of him, proclaim that
+"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," and that he himself
+is on the side of the angels.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he has the sense of
+sin.  A cat may be taught not to do certain things, but if it is caught
+out and flees, it flees not from shame, but from fear.  But the shame
+of a dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any human emotion.
+He has fallen out of the state of grace, and nothing but the absolution
+and remission of his sin will restore him to happiness.  By his
+association with man he seems to have caught something of his capacity
+for spiritual misery.  I had an Airedale once who had moods of
+despondency as abysmal as my own.  He was as sentimental as any minor
+poet, and at the sound of certain tunes on the piano he would break
+into paroxysms of grief, whining and moaning as if in one moment of
+concentrated anguish he recalled every bereavement he had endured,
+every bone he had lost, every stone heaved at him by his hated enemy,
+the butcher's boy.  Indeed, there are times when the dog approximates
+so close to our intelligence that he seems to be of us, a sort of
+humble relation of ourselves, with our elementary feelings but not our
+gift of expression, our joy but not our laughter, our misery but not
+our tears, our thoughts but not our speech.  To sentence him to death
+would be almost like homicide, and the day of his reprieve should be
+celebrated as a festival....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Come, old friend.  Let us away to the woods.  "Walk" ...
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap33"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I was walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago and had a singular
+impression of a cheerful world.  The Strand is to me always the most
+attractive street I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun
+is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light glints and dances
+in the eyes of the crowd moving westward.  Then it is that I seem to
+see the wayfarers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pursuit of
+some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am almost persuaded to turn
+round and catch with them the flash of vision that gleams in their
+eyes.  But the thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual
+gaiety of the people.  It seemed to me that I had never seen such a
+procession of laughing, happy faces.  Probably it was due to the fact
+that it was about the time when the afternoon theatres were emptying.
+Probably also the impression on my mind was all the sharper because it
+was a day of depressing tidings&mdash;bad news from Russia, from Italy, from
+everywhere.  I did not suppose that these merry people were ignorant of
+the news or indifferent to it.  They were simply obeying the impulse of
+healthy minds and good digestions to be cheerful&mdash;<I>quand même</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as I passed along I wondered whether, in spite of all the tragedy
+in which our life is cast, our fund of personal happiness is
+undiminished.  Do we come into the world with a certain capacity for
+pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our external
+circumstances may be?  Johnson took that view and expressed it in the
+familiar lines incorporated in Goldsmith's "Traveller"&mdash;the only lines
+of Johnson's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort of
+immortality:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+How small, of all that human hearts endure,<BR>
+That part which kings or laws can cause or cure.<BR>
+Still to ourselves in every place consigned<BR>
+Our own felicity we make or find.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse.
+Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but
+distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform.
+And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation
+to the conditions in which we live.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the
+slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by
+exploiting others.  And like most falsities there is a sense in which
+it is true.  The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and
+probably experiences as much animal happiness&mdash;assuming it is
+sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm&mdash;as the boy in the Eton
+playing-fields.  It is a mercy it is so.  It is a mercy that we have
+this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and
+bitter blows of outward circumstance.  But he who advances this fact as
+a political argument is not a wise man.  Is the quality of happiness
+nothing?  Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a
+pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the
+infinite fields of the mind's adventures?  Is it nothing to society?
+We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects,
+there is much truth in Johnson's lines.  Happiness is an entirely
+personal affair.  We have it in large measure or in small, but in so
+far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of
+fortune.  I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not
+lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of
+happiness.  If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will
+afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may
+be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction.  I hope
+it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on
+the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer
+physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less
+to-day than in normal times.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed
+satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most
+"interesting" period of the world's history.  There was an indignant
+protest against the word from another member of the company; but the
+author insisted.  Yes, interesting.  Could not tragedy be interesting
+as well as comedy?  Could not one feel all the horror and misery and
+insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's
+part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the
+mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and
+pronounce it&mdash;yes, interesting?  His own record of unselfish service
+during the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and ordered world
+were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough.  There has never
+been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the
+energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we
+are living.  It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours
+everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks
+up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe,
+and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships.  I can fancy
+that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of
+their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the
+tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has
+overtaken us.  In a sense they will be right.  In another sense they
+will be wrong.  We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our
+dreams.  The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to
+plunge us individually in despair.  But it doesn't.  Individually we
+seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, snatch our pleasures with a
+sharpened appetite, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the
+lightnings that stab the tortured earth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As I look up I see the buses passing and read the announcements on the
+knife-boards.  You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in
+the most light-hearted of worlds.  There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at
+one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing
+Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to
+"Zig-Zag."  These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with
+which England amused itself in the time of the tempest.  And do not
+forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept
+the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy.  Perhaps
+without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled
+renown.  For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties&mdash;a
+violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of
+things even.  The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little
+wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into
+the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its
+equilibrium throughout.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We are seen both at our best and our worst&mdash;stripped naked as it were
+to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves
+and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both.  Our nerve-ends
+are bare, and our reactions to circumstance are violent and irrational.
+We are at once more generous and more bitter.  We are the sport even of
+the weather.  If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more
+brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a
+more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush
+of our winter nights.  I could not help associating with the procession
+of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I
+witnessed in a bus the other night.  It seemed the reverse side of the
+same shield.  A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of
+the darkness and the sleet.  They were both rather large, and there was
+not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with
+an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no
+nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to
+waste on anybody.  You know the sort of people.  If you don't get out
+of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you.  They do
+not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?"  That would be a sign
+of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness,
+except in other people.  They expect it in other people.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Victoria," said the man with a snap.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've told you six times," snapped the man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What a bully you are," retorted the woman.  Then they subsided into
+silence.  Husband and wife, I thought&mdash;bursting with bad temper to such
+an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people.  Probably
+they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will
+go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust.
+They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the
+gloom of the London night in their souls.  Most of us get it in our
+souls more or less.  It makes us ill-humoured and depressed.  In the
+early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and
+some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so
+beautiful before.  They even wrote poems about it.  When you blundered
+into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled
+against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but
+substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across
+Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure
+of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating.  But three
+winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made
+London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make
+it a debauch of another kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is
+no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves
+and our tempers.  We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since
+we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on
+each other.  The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and
+there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust
+rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore.  We
+have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are
+subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed.
+Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is
+worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards.  I heard the other
+day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who
+mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining
+with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case
+gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the
+million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their
+excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers.  When Mars is
+abroad Venus must be abroad, too.  Murder is the sole business of the
+world and lust is its proper pastime.  Take a glance at any bookstall
+and note the garbage which lines its shelves.  Dip into the morass of
+the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and
+see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly
+intellectual bath.  The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has
+overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable
+tragedy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is no new phenomenon.  In time of peril humanity always reveals
+these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of
+the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the
+background of a city perishing of plague.  We live at once more
+intensely and more frivolously.  The pendulum of our emotions swings
+violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers
+the mood of depression and anxiety.  I can conceive that that couple in
+the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and
+read that Vimy Ridge had been won.  There is, in Pepys' Diary, a
+delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in
+times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise.  It is the 10th of
+September (Lord's Day), 1665.  The plague is at its worst and the whole
+city seems doomed.  The war with the Dutch is going badly.  Mrs.
+Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black.  But there comes
+news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord
+Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+&mdash;where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the
+receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it
+inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that
+in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this
+night.  Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made
+up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it
+so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did
+make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir
+J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so
+out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself
+out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Isn't that a wonderful picture?  And think of the grave John Evelyn
+having this gaiety in him!  You will read the whole of his Diary and
+not get one smile from his severe countenance.  I had the curiosity to
+turn to his own record of the same time.  He has no entry for the 10th,
+but two days before, he says:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however,
+I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's,
+a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the
+streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful
+silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is
+seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest
+evening of his life.  And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that
+the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of
+circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the
+surface.  There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage
+in that great and moving book "Under Fire"&mdash;the most tremendous picture
+of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man.  One of the squad
+of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near
+Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.  It is before the English had taken over
+that part of the line.  There is a quiet time and some of the men get
+on companionable terms with the enemy.  This man's wife and child are
+in Lens, just behind the German lines.  He has not seen them for
+eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend
+him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into
+Lens.  He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own
+house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a
+comrade sitting at their work.  In the room with them are two German
+non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife
+is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.&mdash;"Not a forced smile, not a
+debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave."
+He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness
+had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the
+adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words
+of extraordinary beauty:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six.  She can't hold her
+youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in
+the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst
+out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat.
+It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of
+herself.  It's life.  She lives.  Ah, yes, she lives and that's all.
+It isn't her fault if she lives.  You wouldn't have her die?  Very
+well, what do you want her to do?  Cry all day on account of me and the
+Boches?  Grouse?  One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen
+months.  Can't be done.  It's too long, I tell you.  That's all there
+is to it."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter.  We live.  And,
+living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of
+ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the
+unspeakable tragedy of things.  We may wonder that we can be happy and
+may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our
+natures.  We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out
+the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become
+mad.  We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges
+that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things.  There was a
+good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that
+"Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood."  The wild
+current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our
+separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private
+distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of
+events.  Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic
+wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event.
+She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little
+callously.  And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had
+the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz
+and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the
+battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits
+of the Infant Roscius.  It is well that we have this faculty of
+detachment and independent life.  If there were no private relief for
+this public tragedy the world would have gone mad.  But perhaps you
+will say it has gone mad....
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Let me recall by way of <I>envoi</I> that fine story in Montaigne.  When the
+town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was
+stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner.  And as he was led
+away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest
+that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich
+and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap34"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON WORD-MAGIC
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I see that a discussion has arisen in the <I>Spectator</I> on the "Canadian
+Boat Song."  It appeared in <I>Blackwood's</I> nearly a century ago, and
+ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent
+controversy.  The author may have been "Christopher North," or his
+brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of
+Eglinton, or none of these.  We shall never know.  It is one of those
+pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius
+Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be
+exhausted because they can never be solved.  I am not going to offer an
+opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate
+the magic of a word.  The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+From the lone shieling of the misty island<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas&mdash;<BR>
+Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this
+strong music.  The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never
+been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the
+same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and
+ending:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hills of home, and to hear again the call.<BR>
+Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying&mdash;<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And hear no more at all.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm.
+The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother
+shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the
+note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of
+that word "Hebrides."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its
+perfect setting.  It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord
+of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons.
+It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with
+extraordinary effect.  Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many
+beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the
+couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland
+girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the
+cuckoo's call
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Breaking the silence of the seas<BR>
+Among the farthest Hebrides.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in
+poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and
+significant beauty.  The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the
+closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+But on old age serene and bright,<BR>
+And lovely as a Lapland night,<BR>
+Shall lead thee to thy grave.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in
+this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the
+heavens of poetry.  And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically
+beautiful.  Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the
+greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Silent&mdash;upon a peak&mdash;in Dar&mdash;ien.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words
+themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use.
+Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+I am dying, Egypt, dying.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of
+Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the
+usage in Plutarch.  It is a stroke of sheer word-magic.  It summons up
+with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in
+the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly
+glories that are fading into the darkness of death.  The whole tragedy
+seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the
+action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just
+as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the
+craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself
+at the touch of the master.  "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and
+few are more frequently on our lips.  Yet what wonderful effects
+Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;<BR>
+The holy time is quiet as a nun,<BR>
+Breathless with adoration.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary
+word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence,
+filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace.  And so with
+Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme<BR>
+To take into the air my quiet breath.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+And again:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star<BR>
+Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer
+instinct for the precious word than he had.  Byron had none of this
+magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his
+spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the
+energy of his thought.  Tennyson was much more of the artificer in
+words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of
+Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats.  Compare the use of adjectives in
+two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the
+Nightingale," and the difference is startling.  Both are incomparable,
+but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture
+that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its
+jewelled word.  "<I>Embalmèd</I> darkness," "<I>Verdurous</I> glooms," "Now more
+than ever seems it <I>rich</I> to die."  "Cooled a long age in the
+<I>deep-delvèd</I> earth." "<I>Darkling</I> I listen."  "She stood in tears amid
+the <I>alien</I> corn."  "Oh, for a beaker full of the <I>warm south</I>."  "With
+beaded bubbles <I>winking</I> at the brim."  "No <I>hungry</I> generations tread
+thee down."  And so on.  Such a casket of jewels can be found in no
+other poet that has used our tongue.  If Keats's vocabulary had a
+defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like
+the touch of his hand, spoke of death.  It lacked the fresh, happy,
+sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Word-magic belongs to poetry.  In prose it is an intrusion.  That was
+the view of Coleridge.  It was because, among its other qualities,
+Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that
+Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose.  The
+modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear
+and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a
+brilliant writer this fellow is."  And that is the true triumph of the
+art.  It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the
+emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap35"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ODIN GROWN OLD
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I had a strange dream last night.  Like most dreams, it was a sort of
+wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours.
+We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from
+day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of
+impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could
+overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found
+out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless
+as the guesses of the foolish.  Ah, if we could only get behind this
+grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten
+years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give?  What a
+strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging,
+blood-stained Europe.  With what a shock we should discover the meaning
+of the terror.  But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable
+secrecy.  We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot
+tell a syllable that it will write....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of
+myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless
+centuries.  It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and
+now stood far beyond the confines of Time.  I was alone in the world.
+I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I
+came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once
+to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained
+great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay
+rotting in garments of seaweed and slime.  I seemed, with the magic of
+dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map.  I
+traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they
+were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to
+continent, from desolation to desolation.  Again and again I cried out
+in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a
+solitude that was infinite.  Time seemed to have no meaning in this
+appalling vacancy.  I did not live hours or days, but centuries, æons,
+eternities.  Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see
+anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable
+backward of time.  Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I
+saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern
+Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man.  He seemed stricken with
+unthinkable years.  His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his
+figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity.  He sat at the foot of the
+Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in
+an infantile treble.  As I approached he peered at me through his dim
+eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy
+voice:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am Odin&mdash;hee! hee!  I possess the earth, the whole earth ... I and
+my sword ... we own it all ... we and the Sphinx ... we own it all....
+All ... hee! hee!..."  And he turned and began to fondle his sword
+again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But where are the others?  What happened to them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gone ... hee! hee! .... All gone....  It took thousands of years to do
+it, but they've all gone.  It never would have been done if man hadn't
+become civilised.  For centuries and centuries men tried to kill
+themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they
+couldn't do it.  Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better.
+The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered
+modern science.  He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water,
+and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills
+into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms
+of heat and power.  And all the time he went on saying what a good
+world he was making ... hee! hee!  Such a wonderful Machine....  Such a
+peaceful Machine ... hee! hee! ... Age of Reason, he said....  Age of
+universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said.... hee! hee! ...
+We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we
+have found Him.  We have made Him ourselves&mdash;out of our own heads.  We
+got tired of looking for Him in the soul.  Now we have found Him in the
+laboratory.  We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth.
+Great is our God of the Machine.  Honour, blessing, glory, power&mdash;power
+of things.  Power!  Power!  Power!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His voice rose to a senile shriek.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And all the time ... hee, hee! ... all the time he was making the
+Machine for me&mdash;me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings,
+the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men.  I laughed ... hee,
+hee! ... I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for
+the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him
+more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel.  What
+a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said.  What a friend
+of Man.  How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of
+Benevolence...
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And it was mine ... hee, hee! ... Mine.  And when it was completed I
+handed it over to my servants.  And the Machine of Benevolence became
+the Monster of Destruction.  First one tyrant seized it and fell; then
+another and he fell.  This white race got the Machine for a season,
+then another white race got it; then the yellow race.  And they all
+perished ... hee, hee!  ... They all perished....  And with every
+victory the Machine grew more deadly.  All the gifts of the earth and
+all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger.  It devoured its
+creators by thousands, by millions, by nations.  It slew, it poisoned,
+it burned, it starved.  The whole earth became a desolation....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And now I own it all ... hee, hee! ... I and my sword.  We own it
+all....  We and the Sphinx."  His voice, which had grown strong with
+excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked.  "And what will you do
+with your victory?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The meaning ... the meaning ... I don't know....  I've come to ask the
+Sphinx.  I've sat here for years, centuries ... oh, so long.  But she
+says nothing&mdash;only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm,
+as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it....  Look ...
+look now....  Aren't her lips..."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry.  The sword shook in his palsied
+hands.  His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I looked up, too....  Yes, surely the lips were moving.  They were
+about to open.  I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the
+strange beings who made a God that slew them....  The lips were open
+now ... there was a rattling in throat....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there
+came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the
+desert.  It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things.  The
+Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the
+Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of
+nothingness....
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap36"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this
+morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face.
+I was surprised.  Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the
+contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness&mdash;a little
+patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution.  But
+I have not been hilarious for a week past.  There is not much to be
+hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping
+back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes
+burdened with dark tidings.  I find the light-hearted person a trial,
+and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad
+agony of Lear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Why, then, this smiling face in the glass?  Only last night, coming up
+on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat
+man who came and sat in front of me.  He looked up at the brilliant
+moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to
+himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness.  When he
+was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more
+intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier.  Hang the fellow,
+thought I, what is he humming and whistling about?  This moon that is
+touching the London streets with beauty&mdash;what scenes of horror and
+carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away!  What nameless
+heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in
+security and ease!  What mighty issues are in the balance! ... And this
+fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day.
+Perhaps he is a profiteer.  Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down
+the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air....  Yet this
+face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as
+readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible.  The
+beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge
+my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of
+resentment.  They are like a satire on our tragedy&mdash;like marriage
+garments robing the skeleton of death.  Moreover, they are a practical
+as well as a spiritual grievance.  They are the ally of the enemy.
+They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last
+autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men
+floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud.  No, most
+Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you.  I would you would hide your face
+from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even
+justice between the disputants in this great argument....  No, this
+smile cannot be for you.  And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter
+that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the
+honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of
+his first leave and plunged into this hell of death.  Dated Saturday.
+All well up to Saturday.  The first two terrible days survived.  Those
+who love him can breathe more freely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the
+smile.  Ah, I had got it!  It was that paragraph I had read in the
+newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of
+his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar
+blasphemy, "God is with us."  I find that when I am cheerless a message
+from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the
+Almighty gives me confidence.  This crude, humourless vanity cannot be
+destined to win the world.  It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so
+grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and
+of the system of which he is the symbol.  I know that other warriors
+have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in
+virtue of the claim.  Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it
+to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the
+Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to
+the warriors of Israel.  Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible
+for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his
+conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the
+sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the
+name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive
+beauty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf
+between their piety and this vulgar impiety.  And the reason is simple.
+They believed in the spiritual governance of human life.  Cromwell may
+have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the
+spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving
+the spiritual redemption of men.  The material victory was nothing to
+him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of
+man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression.
+But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is
+spiritual and humane.  He talks of his God as if he were a brigand
+chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a
+family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern,
+to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness
+to adorn a triumph.  It is the negation of the God of the spirit.  It
+is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the
+garden of the soul in man.  It is the God of materialism at war with
+all that is spiritual.  In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God
+is not God at all.  It is the Devil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our
+human quarrels, the best attitude is silence.  Lincoln, with his
+unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady
+asked him for the assurance that God was on their side.  "The important
+thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are
+on the side of God."  This attitude will save us from blasphemous
+arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity.  For when we claim that
+God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into
+difficulties.  We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite
+purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of
+the Almighty will be sustained.  And what will you do then?  Will you,
+when things go wrong, ask with the poet,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+Is he deaf and blind, our God? ... Is he indeed at all?<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the
+most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides.
+They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were
+neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side.  Vulcan
+could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn
+him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom,
+but neither could save him.  This guess at the spiritual world supplied
+a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the
+human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the
+mind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our
+life.  We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast
+rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are
+engulfed.  No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky.
+The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither
+comfort nor revelation.  But within us we feel the impulse of the human
+spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and
+reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun.  And in
+that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we
+move.  We cannot doubt its validity.  It is the authentic,
+indestructible note of humanity.  We may falter in the measure, stumble
+in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and
+unintelligible things.  But the spiritual movement goes on, like the
+Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world.  It
+may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it
+wins&mdash;in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle.
+The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for
+righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of
+violence.  It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser
+appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine
+prerogative of freedom.  Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his
+altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries,
+"Oh, Baal, hear us."  And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and
+stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in
+the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught in the shaving
+glass this morning.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap37"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+That was a jolly story which Mr. Arthur Ransome told the other day in
+one of his messages from Petrograd.  A stout old lady was walking with
+her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great
+confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself.  It was
+pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for foot-passengers,
+but she replied: "I'm going to walk where I like.  We've got liberty
+now."  It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled
+the foot-passenger to walk down the middle of the road it also entitled
+the cab-driver to drive on the pavement, and that the end of such
+liberty would be universal chaos.  Everybody would be getting in
+everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere.  Individual liberty
+would have become social anarchy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like
+the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind
+ourselves of what the rule of the road means.  It means that in order
+that the liberties of all may be preserved the liberties of everybody
+must be curtailed.  When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus steps
+into the middle of the road and puts up his hand, he is the symbol not
+of tyranny, but of liberty.  You may not think so.  You may, being in a
+hurry and seeing your motor-car pulled up by this insolence of office,
+feel that your liberty has been outraged.  How dare this fellow
+interfere with your free use of the public highway?  Then, if you are a
+reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not, incidentally,
+interfere with you he would interfere with no one, and the result would
+be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never
+cross at all.  You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty
+in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a
+reality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract.  It is an
+accommodation of interests.  In matters which do not touch anybody
+else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like.  If I choose to
+go down the Strand in a dressing-gown, with long hair and bare feet,
+who shall say me nay?  You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have
+liberty to be indifferent to you.  And if I have a fancy for dyeing my
+hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing a tall
+hat, a frock-coat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up
+early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission.  I shall
+not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton.  I may
+like mustard with my mutton.  And you will not ask me whether you may
+be a Protestant or a Catholic, whether you may marry the dark lady or
+the fair lady, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to
+Wordsworth, or champagne to shandygaff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In all these and a thousand other details you and I please ourselves
+and ask no one's leave.  We have a whole kingdom in which we rule
+alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy,
+conventional or odd.  But directly we step out of that kingdom our
+personal liberty of action becomes qualified by other people's liberty.
+I might like to practise on the trombone from midnight till three in
+the morning.  If I went on to the top of Helvellyn to do it I could
+please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and
+if I do it out in the streets the neighbours will remind me that my
+liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to
+sleep in quiet.  There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to
+accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately we are much more
+conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our
+own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I got into a railway carriage at a country station the other morning
+and settled down for what the schoolboys would call an hour's "swot" at
+a Blue-book.  I was not reading it for pleasure.  The truth is that I
+never do read Blue-books for pleasure.  I read them as a barrister
+reads a brief, for the very humble purpose of turning an honest penny
+out of them.  Now, if you are reading a book for pleasure it doesn't
+matter what is going on around you.  I think I could enjoy "Tristram
+Shandy" or "Treasure Island" in the midst of an earthquake.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But when you are reading a thing as a task you need reasonable quiet,
+and that is what I didn't get, for at the next station in came a couple
+of men, one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the journey in
+a loud and pompous voice.  He was one of those people who remind one of
+that story of Home Tooke who, meeting a person of immense swagger in
+the street, stopped him and said, "Excuse me, sir, but are you someone
+in particular?"  This gentleman was someone in particular.  As I
+wrestled with clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale, and his
+family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, and his criticisms of
+the generals and the politicians submerged my poor attempts to hang on
+to my job.  I shut up the Blue-book, looked out of the window, and
+listened wearily while the voice thundered on with themes like these:
+"Now what French ought to have done..."  "The mistake the Germans
+made..."  "If only Asquith had..."  You know the sort of stuff.  I had
+heard it all before, oh, so often.  It was like a barrel-organ groaning
+out some banal song of long ago.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in a lower tone I daresay
+he would have thought I was a very rude fellow.  It did not occur to
+him that anybody could have anything better to do than to listen to
+him, and I have no doubt he left the carriage convinced that everybody
+in it had, thanks to him, had a very illuminating journey, and would
+carry away a pleasing impression of his encyclopædic range.  He was
+obviously a well-intentioned person.  The thing that was wrong with him
+was that he had not the social sense.  He was not "a clubbable man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the
+foundation of social conduct.  It is commonly alleged against women
+that in this respect they are less civilised than men, and I am bound
+to confess that in my experience it is the woman&mdash;the well-dressed
+woman&mdash;who thrusts herself in front of you at the ticket office.  The
+man would not attempt it, partly because he knows the thing would not
+be tolerated from him, but also because he has been better drilled in
+the small give-and-take of social relationships.  He has lived more in
+the broad current of the world, where you have to learn to accommodate
+yourself to the general standard of conduct, and his school life, his
+club life, and his games have in this respect given him a training that
+women are only now beginning to enjoy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I believe that the rights of small people and quiet people are as
+important to preserve as the rights of small nationalities.  When I
+hear the aggressive, bullying horn which some motorists deliberately
+use, I confess that I feel something boiling up in me which is very
+like what I felt when Germany came trampling like a bully over Belgium.
+By what right, my dear sir, do you go along our highways uttering that
+hideous curse on all who impede your path?  Cannot you announce your
+coming like a gentleman?  Cannot you take your turn?  Are you someone
+in particular or are you simply a hot gospeller of the prophet
+Nietzsche?  I find myself wondering what sort of a person it is who can
+sit behind that hog-like outrage without realising that he is the
+spirit of Prussia incarnate, and a very ugly spectacle in a civilised
+world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there is the more harmless person who has bought a very blatant
+gramophone, and on Sunday afternoon sets the thing going, opens the
+windows and fills the street with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" or some
+similar banality.  What are the right limits of social behaviour in a
+matter of this sort?  Let us take the trombone as an illustration
+again.  Hazlitt said that a man who wanted to learn that fearsome
+instrument was entitled to learn it in his own house, even though he
+was a nuisance to his neighbours, but it was his business to make the
+nuisance as slight as possible.  He must practise in the attic, and
+shut the window.  He had no right to sit in his front room, open the
+window, and blow his noise into his neighbours' ears with the maximum
+of violence.  And so with the gramophone.  If you like the gramophone
+you are entitled to have it, but you are interfering with the liberties
+of your neighbours if you don't do what you can to limit the noise to
+your own household.  Your neighbours may not like "Keep the Home Fires
+Burning."  They may prefer to have their Sunday afternoon undisturbed,
+and it is as great an impertinence for you to wilfully trespass on
+their peace as it would be to go, unasked, into their gardens and
+trample on their flower beds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are cases, of course, where the clash of liberties seems to defy
+compromise.  My dear old friend X., who lives in a West End square and
+who is an amazing mixture of good nature and irascibility, flies into a
+passion when he hears a street piano, and rushes out to order it away.
+But near by lives a distinguished lady of romantic picaresque tastes,
+who dotes on street pianos, and attracts them as wasps are attracted to
+a jar of jam.  Whose liberty in this case should surrender to the
+other?  For the life of me I cannot say.  It is as reasonable to like
+street pianos as to dislike them&mdash;and vice versa.  I would give much to
+hear Sancho Panza's solution of such a nice riddle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+I suppose the fact is that we can be neither complete anarchists nor
+complete Socialists in this complex world&mdash;or rather we must be a
+judicious mixture of both.  We have both liberties to preserve&mdash;our
+individual liberty and our social liberty.  We must watch the
+bureaucrat on the one side and warn off the anarchist on the other.  I
+am neither a Marxist, nor a Tolstoyan, but a compromise.  I shall not
+permit any authority to say that my child must go to this school or
+that, shall specialise in science or arts, shall play rugger or soccer.
+These things are personal.  But if I proceed to say that my child shall
+have no education at all, that he shall be brought up as a primeval
+savage, or at Mr. Fagin's academy for pickpockets, then Society will
+politely but firmly tell me that it has no use for primeval savages and
+a very stern objection to pickpockets, and that my child must have a
+certain minimum of education whether I like it or not.  I cannot have
+the liberty to be a nuisance to my neighbours or make my child a burden
+and a danger to the commonwealth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of
+the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are
+civilised or uncivilised.  The great moments of heroism and sacrifice
+are rare.  It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make
+up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey.  I
+hope my friend in the railway carriage will reflect on this.  Then he
+will not cease, I am sure, to explain to his neighbour where French
+went wrong and where the Germans went ditto; but he will do it in a way
+that will permit me to read my Blue-book undisturbed.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap38"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON THE INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+There has never, I suppose, been a time when the moon had such a vogue
+as during the past ten days.  For centuries, for thousands of years,
+for I know not what uncounted ages, she has been sailing the sky,
+"clustered around with all her starry fays."  She has seen this
+tragi-comedy of man since the beginning, and I daresay will outlive its
+end.  What she thinks of it all we shall never know.  Perhaps she
+laughs at it, perhaps she weeps over it, perhaps she does both in
+turns, as you and I do.  Perhaps she is only indifferent.  Yes, I
+suppose she is indifferent, for she holds up her lamp for the just and
+the unjust and lights the assassin's way as readily as the lover's and
+the shepherd's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying ball to which we
+cling with our feet she has never been a subject of such painful
+concern as now.  Love-sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have
+studied her countenance and made maps of her hills and her valleys, and
+children have been lulled to sleep with legends of the old man in the
+moon and the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks.  But for
+most of us she had no more serious import than a Chinese lantern hung
+on a Christmas tree to please the children.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And suddenly she has become the most sensational fact of our lives.
+From the King in his palace to the pauper in his workhouse we have all
+been talking of the moon, and watching the moon and studying the phases
+of the moon.  There are seven millions of Londoners who know more about
+the moon to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, or than
+they ever dreamed that they would want to know.  John Bright once said
+that the only virtue of war was that it taught people geography, but
+even he did not think of the geography of the moon and of the
+firmament.  But in the intense school of these days we are learning
+about everything in heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the
+waters under the earth.  Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and
+now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon.  We are not so
+grateful as we might be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, is that Nature does
+not take sides in our affairs.  We all like to think that she does take
+sides&mdash;that is, our side&mdash;that a special providence watches over us,
+and that invisible powers will see us through.  It is a common
+weakness.  The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it in its most grotesque
+assumption.  He does really believe&mdash;or did, for dreadful doubts must
+be invading the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Cæsar&mdash;that
+God and Nature are his Imperial agents.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, pin our faith to
+some special providence.  We are so important to ourselves that we
+cannot conceive that we are unimportant to whatever powers there be.
+Others may fall, but we have charmed lives.  Our cause must prevail
+because, being ours, it is beyond mortal challenge.  A distinguished
+General was telling me not long ago of an incident in the second battle
+of Ypres.  He stood with another General, since killed, watching the
+battle at its most critical phase.  They saw the British line yield,
+and the Germans advance, and all seemed over.  My friend put up his
+glasses with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come.  His
+companion turned to him and said, "God will never allow those &mdash;&mdash; to
+win."  It was an odd expression of faith, but it represents the
+conviction latent in most of us that we can count on invisible allies
+who, like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in straits,
+and fling a cloud between us and the foe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources of power in men
+of primitive and intense faith.  Cromwell was a practical mystic and
+never forgot to keep his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord
+visibly at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest, and that
+conviction added a fervour to his terrible sword.  In his letter to
+Speaker Lenthall on the battle of Dunbar he tells how in marching from
+Musselburgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear-forlorn of our
+horse" and "had like to have engaged our rear brigade of horse with
+their whole army&mdash;<I>had not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over
+the moon</I>, hereby giving us opportunity to draw off those horse to the
+rest of our army."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed God Himself in the
+tempest that scattered the Armada, and a hundred years later the people
+saw the same Divine sanction in the winds that brought William Prince
+of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers away.  "The weather had
+indeed served the Protestant cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some
+men of more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary laws of
+nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty and
+religion of England.  Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the
+Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God.
+Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the
+obedient elements had fought for the good cause.  The wind had blown
+strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel,
+had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a
+calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was
+completed, had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the face."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our cause, we should, in
+spite of Macaulay, allow our piety to have the better of our judgment.
+Indeed, there have been those who in the absence of more solid evidence
+have accepted the Angels of Mons with as touching and unquestioning a
+faith as they accepted the legend of the Army of Russians from
+Archangel.  Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that accounts
+for this credulity.  In its more degraded form it is responsible for
+such phenomena as the revival of fortune-telling and the emergence of
+the Prophet Bottomley.  In its more reputable expression it springs
+from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the dominion of the
+spiritual over the material and of the witness of that dominion in the
+operations of Nature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then comes this wonderful harvest moon with its clear sky and its still
+air to light our enemies to their villainous work and to remind us
+that, however virtuous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us.
+She is indifferent whether we win or lose.  She is not against us, but
+she is not for us.  Sometimes she helps the enemy, and sometimes she
+helps us.  She blew a snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most
+critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great adventure.  In
+August last she came out on the side of the enemy.  She rained and blew
+ceaselessly, and disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack
+on which so much depended was driven perilously late into the year.
+And even the brilliant moon and the cloudless nights that have been so
+disturbing to us in London speak the same language of Nature's
+impartiality.  They serve the enemy here, but they are serving us far
+more just across the sea, where every bright day and moonlit night
+snatched from the mud and rain of the coming winter is of priceless
+value to our Army.  That consideration should enable us to bear our
+affliction with fortitude as we crowd the "tubes" or listen to the roar
+of the guns from under the domestic table.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature does not care twopence
+who wins, and is as unconcerned about our affairs as we are about the
+affairs of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing that we have
+trodden on it.  She is beyond good and evil.  She has no morals and is
+indifferent about justice and what men call right and wrong.  She
+blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nature, with equal mind<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sees all her sons at play;<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sees man control the wind,<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The wind sweep man away;<BR>
+Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+It is a chill, but a chastening thought.  It leaves us with a sense of
+loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of
+the unconquerable human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant,
+reaching out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of
+attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, but still
+stumbling forward by its half-lights in search of some Land of Promise
+that always skips just beyond the horizon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon too.  Frankly, we have
+seen enough of her face to last us for a long time.  When she comes out
+again let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and bring the winds in
+her train.  We do not like to think of her as a mere flunkey of the
+Kaiser and the torch-bearer of his assassins.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap39"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IF JEREMY CAME BACK
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is a rounded
+tale.  We pay our money at the box, go in, see the story begin,
+progress and end, sadly or cheerfully, and come away with the discords
+resolved, virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled skein of
+things neatly unravelled.  And so home, content.  But on the stage of
+life there is none of this satisfying completeness and finish.  We
+enter in the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years in trying
+to pick up the threads and purport of the action, and go as
+inopportunely as we came.  The curtain does not descend punctually upon
+an exhausted plot and an accomplished purpose.  It descends upon a
+thrilling but unfinished tale.  You have got, perhaps, into the most
+breathless part of the action, seized at last the clue that will
+assuredly explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally the light
+fails, and for you the theatre is dark for ever.  Your emotions have
+been stirred, your curiosity awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain.
+Even the episode you have been permitted to witness is left with ragged
+ends and unfinished judgments.  How did it proceed and how did it end,
+and what was the sequel?  Was virtue or villainy triumphant?  Who was
+the real hero?  Were your sympathies on the right side or the wrong?
+And, more personally, what of those shoots of life you have thrown out
+to the challenge of the future?  Did they wilt or flourish, and what
+was their fortune?  These are among the thousand questions to which we
+should like an answer, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking
+that we may have an answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of us to have the
+privilege which Jeremy Bentham confessed that he would like to enjoy.
+That amiable and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless life
+in the development of his comfortable gospel of the "greatest good of
+the greatest number," entertained the pleasant fancy of returning to
+the scene of his labours once in every hundred years to see humanity
+marching triumphantly to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism, along the
+straight and smooth turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease
+and direction.  He had the touching confidence of the idealist that
+humanity only had to be shown the way out of the wilderness to plunge
+into it with joyous shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm.
+And since he had shown the way all would henceforth be well.  It is
+this confidence which makes the idealist an object of pity to the
+cynic.  For the cynic is often only the idealist turned sour.  He is
+the idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, but in
+humanity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This is about the time when Jeremy might be expected back on his first
+centennial visit to see how we have got along the road to human
+perfectibility.  I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking
+with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which a century of time
+has given to his anticipations.  This, the New Jerusalem of his
+confident vision?  This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of
+progress?  And the cynic beside him, tapping his ghostly snuff-box,
+observes dryly, "They don't seem to have got very far on the way,
+friend Jeremy; not very far on the way."  I can conceive the
+philosopher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering whether,
+after all, these visits are worth while.  If this is the achievement of
+a hundred years' enjoyment of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what
+unthinkable revelation may await him on his next visit!  Perhaps ...
+yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting.  It is
+probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit
+immensely.  He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous
+mind.  I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child
+and as fondly as a parent.  For among his multitudinous activities he
+experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish.  Why,
+asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?
+What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons?  And Benjamin
+made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?"  If he
+is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost
+as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby"
+has grown to.  He will be astonished at other things.  He will recall
+the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the
+delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the
+great&mdash;was it not in Downing Street?&mdash;and was spat upon by the noble
+lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the
+Atlantic was undecipherable.  He will recall how he put his outraged
+garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the
+Declaration of Independence.  And now, what miracle is this?  England
+and America reconciled at last.  England, no less than France,
+straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening
+to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by
+whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....
+Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide
+of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin,
+who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody.  But the noble
+lords who spat on him!...
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the
+spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How
+now, gentlemen?  What do you say to the steamboat now?"  Poor wretches,
+how humiliated they will be.  For when Napoleon asked the Academie des
+Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented
+steamboat, their verdict was, "Idée folle, erreur grossière,
+absurdité."  They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby
+destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas
+of the world to-day.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before
+the revelations that await them.  They will look on with the
+complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.
+Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky
+man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the
+intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of
+his wit at their foolish experiments.  They will have lost the very
+human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those
+shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so
+well-directed and piercing.  Perhaps they will read this to him:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="block">
+Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone
+and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day.  Some
+register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
+is changeable.  There are men yet more profound, who have heard that
+two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold
+bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce
+the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Admirable old boy!  What wit you had!  We can still enjoy it even
+though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your
+own breast.  All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out.  All
+your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see
+of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your
+Olympian mind with scorn.  But you will have your compensations.  Even
+you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long
+after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street.
+You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the
+Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the
+faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past.
+Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well
+content with your visit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And it may be that the victory of the scientists will assuage the
+disappointment of Jeremy himself.  It is possible that when, back once
+more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he
+begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits.
+This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to
+his astonishing intellectual victory.  I forgot that stage in the
+journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism.  This century that has
+passed has witnessed that stage.  It has been a period of inconceivable
+triumph over matter.  Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth
+and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things.  His moral and
+social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless
+material development.  He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst
+of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned.  He has become
+the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his
+invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind
+effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the
+machine has imposed on him.  The great parturition is upon him and he
+is shedding gouts of blood in his agony.  But he will emerge from his
+pains.  The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the
+machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will
+revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past.  The march is longer
+than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense
+overthrow.  The road I built was only premature.  Man was not ready to
+take it.  But it is still there&mdash;a little grass-grown and neglected,
+but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise.  When he rises from
+his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take
+it....  Yes, I think I shall go back after all....
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap40"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly and quite acutely
+awake.  It is an unusual experience for me.  I knew the disturbance had
+not come from without myself, but from within&mdash;from some low but
+persistent knocking at the remote door of consciousness.  Who was the
+knocker?  I ran over the possible visitors before opening the door just
+as one sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address before opening
+a letter.  Ah, yes, the disquieting discovery I had made
+yesterday&mdash;that was the intruder.  And, saying this, I opened the door
+and let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it over me in the
+darkness.  I had succeeded in suppressing him before I went to
+bed&mdash;burying him beneath talk about this and that, some variations of
+Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from Korbay's collection, so
+incomparable in their fierce energy and passion, and so on; the mound
+nicely rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and the headstone
+of sleep duly erected.  Now, I thought, I shall hear nothing more of
+him until I face him squarely to-morrow.  And here, up from the depths
+he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is with sleep as with affairs.  One cracked bell will shatter a
+whole ring; one scheming, predatory power will set the whole world in
+flames.  And one disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole comity
+of sleep.  He will neither slumber forgetfully nor play with the others
+in dreams, turning the realities and solemnities of the day into a wild
+travesty of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible seems
+as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your head on the cross of St.
+Paul's or walk up the Strand carrying your head under your arm without
+any sense of surprise or impropriety.  Nor is he one of those obliging
+subjects of the mind who obey their orders like a sensible house-dog,
+sleeping with one eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything
+goes wrong.  You know that sort of decent fellow.  You say to him
+overnight, "Now, remember, I have that train to catch in the morning,
+and I must be awake without fail at seven."  Or it may be six, or four.
+And whatever the hour you name, sure enough the good dog barks in time.
+If he has a failing, it is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss
+the nice question whether you dare go to sleep again or whether you had
+better remain awake.  In the midst of which you probably go to sleep
+again and miss your train.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This control of the kingdom of sleep by the apparently dormant
+consciousness can be carried far.  A friend of mine tells me that he
+has even learned to put his dreams under the check of conscious or
+sub-conscious thought.  He had one persistent dream which took the form
+of missing the train.  Sometimes his wife was on board, and he rushed
+on to the platform just in time to see the train in motion and her head
+out of the window with agony written on her face.  Sometimes he was in
+the train and his wife just missed it.  Sometimes they were both
+inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too late.  Sometimes the
+luggage got in and they didn't.  Always something went wrong.  He
+determined to have that dream regularised.  And so before going to bed
+he thought hard of catching the train.  He saturated himself with the
+idea of catching the train.  And the thing worked like a charm.  He
+never misses a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage.  They all
+steam away on their dream journeys together without a hitch.  So he
+tells me, and I believe him, for he is a truthful man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had evidences of this
+sub-conscious operation in sleep.  That it is common enough is shown by
+the familiar saying, "I will sleep on it."  I have gone to bed more
+than once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have fallen to
+sleep, and have wakened in the morning with the course so clear that I
+have wondered how I could have been in doubt.  And Sir Edward Clarke in
+his reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over his briefs
+he would go to bed with his way through the tangle obscure and
+perplexing, and would wake from sleep with the path plain as a
+pikestaff.  The phenomenon is doubtless due in some measure to rest.
+The mind clears in sleeping as muddy waters clear in standing.  But
+this is not the whole explanation.  Some process has taken place in the
+interval far down in the hinterlands of thought.  You may observe this
+even in your waking hours.  Lord Leverhulme, who I suppose has one of
+the biggest letter-bags in the country, once told me that his habit in
+dealing with his correspondence is to answer at once those letters he
+can reply to off-hand, and to put aside those that need consideration.
+When he turns to the latter he finds the answers have fashioned
+themselves without any conscious act of thought.  This experience is
+not uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the maximum of
+activity it disposes of the idea that rest is the complete explanation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+More goes on in us than we know.  At this moment I am conscious of at
+least six strata of thought.  I am attending to this writing, the
+shaping of the letters, the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I
+shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing outside, and that
+the sun is shining; this pervades my mind with the glow of the thought
+that in a few days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this happy
+glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last night forces himself on my
+attention; down below there is the boom of the great misery of the
+world that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the double bass
+in the orchestra.  And out of sight and consciousness there are, I
+suspect, deeper and more obscure functions shaping all sorts of things
+in the unfathomed caves of the mind.  The results will come to the
+surface in due course, and I shall wonder where they came from.  It is
+a mistake to suppose that we can only think of one thing at a time.
+The mind can keep as many balls circulating as Cinquevalli.  It can
+keep some of them circulating even without knowing that they exist.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But these profound functions of the mind that know no sleep, and yet do
+not disturb our sleep, are not to be confused with that imp of the
+pillow.  He is a brawler of the day.  He brings the noisy world of fact
+into the cloistered calm or the playground of sleep.  He is known to
+all of us, but most of all to the criminal who has still got a
+conscience.  Macbeth knew him&mdash;"Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the
+innocent sleep."  Eugene Aram knew him:
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+And a mighty wind had swept the leaves<BR>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And still the corpse was bare.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+I know him ... And that reminds me.  It is time I went and had it out
+with my imp of the pillow in the daylight.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap41"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ON MOWING
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its
+praises.  And if you doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme,
+come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes
+where they lie and note the workmanship.  Yes, I admit that over there
+by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt,
+dishevelled appearance about the grass as though it had been stabbed
+and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe.  It is true.  It
+has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal.  It was there that I
+began.  It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered.
+It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should
+disapprove.  It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the
+scythe.  But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause
+here where the orchard slopes to the paddock.  I do not care who looks
+at this bit.  I am prepared to stand or fall by it.  It speaks for
+itself.  The signature of the master hand is here.  It is my signature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier
+spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the <I>Nation</I>.  He was returning to
+England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish
+landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as
+though I should like to cut grass all the rest of my life."  I do not
+know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke.  Perhaps it was
+only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the
+squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him.
+But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo.  I
+echo them.  I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of
+sunny days and illimitable fields of waving grass and just go on mowing
+and mowing and mowing for ever.  I am chilled by the thought that you
+can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year.  I
+look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted
+opportunities.  What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy
+of it!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear.  When
+once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is
+intoxicating.  The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a
+tool, gradually changes its character.  It becomes an instrument of
+infinite flexibility and delicacy.  The lines that seemed so uncouth
+and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time.  What
+centuries of accumulated experience under the suns of what diverse
+lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the
+fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at
+so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to
+the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses
+the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth,
+almost instinctive motion.  It is like an extension of yourself, with a
+touch as fine as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold
+and resistless as the sweep of a cataract.  It is no longer a clumsy,
+blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious
+as your touch.  You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching,
+with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a
+forest of stalwart grasses.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself.
+The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as
+serene as a pastoral symphony.  You feel the rhythm taking shape, and
+as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task.  You are no
+longer manipulating a tool.  You and the tool have become magically
+one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether
+you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong,
+swimming stroke.  The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of
+delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have
+a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the
+stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently
+flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as
+the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is
+true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it
+clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the
+moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next
+stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel.  A frog hops out
+in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep grasses.
+You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are
+drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its
+imperious current.  You are no longer a man, but a motion.  The frog
+must take his chance.  Swish&mdash;swish&mdash;swish&mdash;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Not that the rhythm is unrelieved.  It has its "accidentals."  You
+repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of
+pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the
+theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray
+flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the
+pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so
+deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone.  But all the time
+the song of the scythe goes on.  It fills your mind and courses through
+your blood.  Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish&mdash;swish&mdash;swish, and
+to that measure you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees
+and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through
+which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally
+overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain.  You mark the
+shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees.  A thrush
+sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other
+side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and
+begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the
+west.  Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their
+evening meal.  Presently they descend and chase each other over the
+orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to
+the symphony of late summer evenings.  You are pleasantly conscious of
+these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe,
+and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches of old
+song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on
+his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving
+grasses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more
+august harvest....  The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall
+on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the
+valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in
+the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one
+final note of the white-throat....  There is still light for this last
+slope to the paddock.  Swish&mdash;swish&mdash;swish....
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<P CLASS="t4">
+The Temple Press, Letchworth
+<BR>
+ENGLAND
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Leaves in the Wind
+
+Author: A. G. Gardiner
+
+Release Date: October 26, 2011 [EBook #37858]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEAVES IN THE WIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "There under some spreading oak or beech."]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WAYFARERS LIBRARY
+
+
+
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+
+
+Alpha of the Plough
+
+(A. G. Gardiner)
+
+
+
+LONDON & TORONTO: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
+
+NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+MY CHILDREN
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+This collection of essays, now republished in the "Wayfarers' Library,"
+were written during the war, and first appeared in book form during the
+war.  Like the preceding volume, _Pebbles on the Shore_, they were the
+literary diversions of a time of great public anxiety and heavy
+personal tasks.  The writing of them was a happy distraction from
+unhappy things, and now that the great wind has passed it is a pleasure
+to find the leaves it blew down gathered between the companionable
+covers of the "Wayfarer."  I leave them as they fell.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  A Fellow Traveller
+  On a Famous Sermon
+  On Pockets and Things
+  On a Country Platform
+  On a Distant View of a Pig
+  In Defence of Ignorance
+  On a Shiny Night
+  On Giving up Tobacco
+  The Great God Gun
+  On a Legend of the War
+  On Talk and Talkers
+  On a Vision of Eden
+  On a Comic Genius
+  On a Vanished Garden
+  All About a Dog
+  On the American Soldier
+  'Appy 'Einrich
+  On Fear
+  On Being Called Thompson
+  On Thinking for One's Self
+  On Sawing Wood
+  Variations on an Old Theme
+  On Clothes
+  The Duel that Failed
+  On Early Rising
+  On Being Known
+  On a Map of the Oberland
+  On a Talk in a Bus
+  On Virtues that don't Count
+  On Hate and the Soldier
+  On Taking the Call
+  A Dithyramb on a Dog
+  On Happy Faces in the Strand
+  On Word-Magic
+  Odin Grown Old
+  On a Smile in a Shaving Glass
+  On the Rule of the Road
+  On the Indifference of Nature
+  If Jeremy Came Back
+  On Sleep and Thought
+  On Mowing
+
+
+
+
+LEAVES IN THE WIND
+
+
+
+
+A FELLOW TRAVELLER
+
+I do not know which of us got into the carriage first.  Indeed I did
+not know he was in the carriage at all for some time.  It was the last
+train from London to a Midland town--a stopping train, an infinitely
+leisurely train, one of those trains which give you an understanding of
+eternity.  It was tolerably full when it started, but as we stopped at
+the suburban stations the travellers alighted in ones and twos, and by
+the time we had left the outer ring of London behind I was alone--or,
+rather, I thought I was alone.
+
+There is a pleasant sense of freedom about being alone in a carriage
+that is jolting noisily through the night.  It is liberty and
+unrestraint in a very agreeable form.  You can do anything you like.
+You can talk to yourself as loud as you please and no one will hear
+you.  You can have that argument out with Jones and roll him
+triumphantly in the dust without fear of a counter-stroke.  You can
+stand on your head and no one will see you.  You can sing, or dance a
+two-step, or practise a golf stroke, or play marbles on the floor
+without let or hindrance.  You can open the window or shut it without
+provoking a protest.  You can open both windows or shut both.  Indeed,
+you can go on opening them and shutting them as a sort of festival of
+freedom.  You can have any corner you choose and try all of them in
+turn.  You can lie at full length on the cushions and enjoy the luxury
+of breaking the regulations and possibly the heart of D.O.R.A. herself.
+Only D.O.R.A. will not know that her heart is broken.  You have escaped
+even D.O.R.A.
+
+On this night I did not do any of these things.  They did not happen to
+occur to me.  What I did was much more ordinary.  When the last of my
+fellow-passengers had gone I put down my paper, stretched my arms and
+my legs, stood up and looked out of the window on the calm summer night
+through which I was journeying, noting the pale reminiscence of day
+that still lingered in the northern sky; crossed the carriage and
+looked out of the other window; lit a cigarette, sat down and began to
+read again.  It was then that I became aware of my fellow traveller.
+He came and sat on my nose....  He was one of those wingy, nippy,
+intrepid insects that we call, vaguely, mosquitoes.  I flicked him off
+my nose, and he made a tour of the compartment, investigated its three
+dimensions, visited each window, fluttered round the light, decided
+that there was nothing so interesting as that large animal in the
+corner, came and had a look at my neck.
+
+I flicked him off again.  He skipped away, took another jaunt round the
+compartment, returned, and seated himself impudently on the back of my
+hand.  It is enough, I said; magnanimity has its limits.  Twice you
+have been warned that I am someone in particular, that my august person
+resents the tickling impertinences of strangers.  I assume the black
+cap.  I condemn you to death.  Justice demands it, and the court awards
+it.  The counts against you are many.  You are a vagrant; you are a
+public nuisance; you are travelling without a ticket; you have no meat
+coupon.  For these and many other misdemeanours you are about to die.
+I struck a swift, lethal blow with my right hand.  He dodged the attack
+with an insolent ease that humiliated me.  My personal vanity was
+aroused.  I lunged at him with my hand, with my paper; I jumped on the
+seat and pursued him round the lamp; I adopted tactics of feline
+cunning, waiting till he had alighted, approaching with a horrible
+stealthiness, striking with a sudden and terrible swiftness.
+
+It was all in vain.  He played with me, openly and ostentatiously, like
+a skilful matador finessing round an infuriated bull.  It was obvious
+that he was enjoying himself, that it was for this that he had
+disturbed my repose.  He wanted a little sport, and what sport like
+being chased by this huge, lumbering windmill of a creature, who tasted
+so good and seemed so helpless and so stupid?  I began to enter into
+the spirit of the fellow.  He was no longer a mere insect.  He was
+developing into a personality, an intelligence that challenged the
+possession of this compartment with me on equal terms.  I felt my heart
+warming towards him and the sense of superiority fading.  How could I
+feel superior to a creature who was so manifestly my master in the only
+competition in which we had ever engaged?  Why not be magnanimous
+again?  Magnanimity and mercy were the noblest attributes of man.  In
+the exercise of these high qualities I could recover my prestige.  At
+present I was a ridiculous figure, a thing for laughter and derision.
+By being merciful I could reassert the moral dignity of man and go back
+to my corner with honour.  I withdraw the sentence of death, I said,
+returning to my seat.  I cannot kill you, but I can reprieve you.  I do
+it.
+
+I took up my paper and he came and sat on it.  Foolish fellow, I said,
+you have delivered yourself into my hands.  I have but to give this
+respectable weekly organ of opinion a smack on both covers and you are
+a corpse, neatly sandwiched between an article on "Peace Traps" and
+another on "The Modesty of Mr. Hughes."  But I shall not do it.  I have
+reprieved you, and I will satisfy you that when this large animal says
+a thing he means it.  Moreover, I no longer desire to kill you.
+Through knowing you better I have come to feel--shall I say?--a sort of
+affection for you.  I fancy that St. Francis would have called you
+"little brother."  I cannot go so far as that in Christian charity and
+civility.  But I recognise a more distant relationship.  Fortune has
+made us fellow travellers on this summer night.  I have interested you
+and you have entertained me.  The obligation is mutual and it is
+founded on the fundamental fact that we are fellow mortals.  The
+miracle of life is ours in common and its mystery too.  I suppose you
+don't know anything about your journey.  I'm not sure that I know much
+about mine.  We are really, when you come to think of it, a good deal
+alike--just apparitions that are and then are not, coming out of the
+night into the lighted carriage, fluttering about the lamp for a while
+and going out into the night again.  Perhaps...
+
+"Going on to-night, sir?" said a voice at the window.  It was a
+friendly porter giving me a hint that this was my station.  I thanked
+him and said I must have been dozing.  And seizing my hat and stick I
+went out into the cool summer night.  As I closed the door of the
+compartment I saw my fellow traveller fluttering round the lamp....
+
+
+
+
+ON A FAMOUS SERMON
+
+I see that Queen Alexandra has made a further distribution among
+charities of the profits from the sale of the late Canon Fleming's
+sermon, "On Recognition in Eternity."  The sermon was preached on the
+occasion of the death of the Duke of Clarence, and judging from its
+popularity I have no doubt it is a good sermon.  But I am tempted to
+write on the subject by a mischievous thought suggested by the
+authorship of this famous sermon.  There is no idea which makes so
+universal an appeal to the deepest instincts of humanity as the idea
+that when we awake from the dream of life we shall pass into the
+companionship of those who have shared and lightened our pilgrimage
+here.  The intellect may dismiss the idea as unscientific, but, as
+Newman says, the finite can tell us nothing about the infinite Creator,
+and the Quaker poet's serene assurance--
+
+  Yet love will hope and faith will trust
+  (Since He Who knows our needs is just)
+  That somehow, somewhere, meet we must--
+
+defies all the buffetings of reason.
+
+Even Shelley, for all his aggressive Atheism, could not, as Francis
+Thompson points out, escape the instinct of personal immortality.  In
+his glorious elegy on Keats he implicitly assumes the personal
+immortality which the poem explicitly denies, as when, to greet the
+dead youth,
+
+  The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
+  Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought
+  Far in the unapparent.
+
+And it is on the same note that the poem reaches its sublime and
+prophetic close:--
+
+  I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
+  Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
+  The soul of Adonais like a star
+  Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
+
+The ink of that immortal strain was hardly dry upon the page when the
+vision was fulfilled, for only a few months elapsed between the death
+of Keats and the drowning of Shelley, and in the interval the great
+monody had been written.
+
+I refuse, for the sake of the feelings of Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr.
+Foote and the other stern old dogmatists of Rationalism, to deny myself
+the pleasure of imagining the meeting of Shelley and Keats in the
+Elysian Fields.  If Shelley, "borne darkly, fearfully afar" beyond the
+confines of reason, could feel that grand assurance, why should I, who
+dislike the dogmatists of Rationalism as much as the dogmatists of
+Orthodoxy, deny myself that beautiful solace?  I like to think of those
+passionate spirits in eternal comradeship, pausing in their eager talk
+to salute deep-browed Homer as, perchance, he passes in grave discourse
+with the "mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies."  I like to think of
+Dante meeting Beatrice by some crystal stream, of Lincoln wandering
+side by side with Lee, of poor Mary Lamb reunited to the mother she
+loved and whom she slew in one of her fits of insanity, and of an
+innumerable host of humbler recognitions no less sweet.
+
+But Canon Fleming's name reminds me that all the recognitions will not
+be agreeable.  I cannot imagine that eminent Court preacher showing any
+eagerness to recognise or be recognised by that other eminent preacher,
+Dr. Talmage.  For it was Talmage's sermon on the wickedness of great
+cities that Fleming so unblushingly preached _and published_ as his
+own, simply altering the names of American cities to those of European
+cities.  Some cruel editor printed the two sermons side by side, I
+think in the old _St. James's Gazette_, and the poor Canon's excuse
+only made matters rather worse.  The incident did not prevent him
+securing preferment, and his sermon on "Recognition in Eternity" still
+goes on selling.  But he will not be comfortable when he sees Talmage
+coming his way across the Elysian Fields.  I do not think he will offer
+him the very unconvincing explanation he offered to the British public.
+He will make a frank confession and Talmage will no doubt give him
+absolution.  There will be many such awkward meetings.  With what
+emotions of shame, for example, will Charles I. see Strafford
+approaching.  "Not a hair of your head shall be touched by Parliament"
+was his promise to that instrument of his despotic rule, but when
+Parliament demanded the head itself he endorsed the verdict that sent
+Strafford to the scaffold.  And I can imagine there will be a little
+coldness between Cromwell and Charles when they pass, though in the
+larger understanding of that world Charles, I fancy, will see that he
+was quite impossible, and that he left the grim old Puritan no other
+way.
+
+It is this thought of the larger understanding that will come when we
+have put off the coarse vesture of things that makes this speculation
+reasonable.  That admirable woman, Mrs. Berry, in "Richard Feverel,"
+had the recognitions of eternity in her mind when she declared that
+widows ought not to remarry.  "And to think," she said, "o' two
+(husbands) claimin' o' me then, it makes me hot all over."  Mrs.
+Berry's mistake was in thinking of Elysium in the terms of earth.  It
+is precisely because we shall have escaped from the encumbering flesh
+and all the bewilderments of this clumsy world that we cannot merely
+tolerate the idea, but can find in it a promised explanation of the
+inexplicable.
+
+It is the same mistake that I find in Mr. Belloc, who, I see from
+yesterday's paper, has been denouncing the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism, and describing the miracles of Lourdes as "a special
+providential act designed to convert, change, upset, and disintegrate
+the materialism of the nineteenth century."  I want to see the
+materialism of the nineteenth century converted, changed, upset and
+disintegrated, as much as Mr. Belloc does, but I have as little regard
+for the instrument he trusts in as for the "tomfoolery" of
+spiritualism.  And when he goes on to denounce a Miss Posthlethwaite, a
+Catholic spiritualist, for having declared that in the next world she
+found people of all religions and did not find that Mohammedans
+suffered more than others, I feel that he is as materialistic as Mrs.
+Berry.  He sees heaven in the terms of the troublesome little
+sectarianisms of the earth, with an ascendancy party in possession, and
+no non-alcoholic Puritans, Jews, or Mohammedans visible to his august
+eye.  They will all be in another place, and very uncomfortable indeed.
+He really has not advanced beyond that infantile partisanship
+satirised, I think, by Swift:--
+
+  We are God's chosen few,
+  All others will be damned.
+  There is no place in heaven for you,
+  We can't have heaven crammed.
+
+
+No, no, Mr. Belloc.  The judgments of eternity will not be so vulgar as
+this, nor the companionship so painfully exclusive.  You will not walk
+the infinite meadows of heaven alone with the sect you adorned on
+earth.  You will find all sorts of people there regardless of the
+quaint little creeds they professed in the elementary school of life.
+I am sure you will find Mrs. Berry there, for that simple woman had the
+root of the true gospel in her.  "I think it's al'ays the plan in a
+dielemma," she said, "to pray God and walk forward."  I think it is
+possible that in the larger atmosphere you will discover that she was a
+wiser pupil in the elementary school than you were.
+
+
+
+
+ON POCKETS AND THINGS
+
+I suppose most men felt, as I felt, the reasonableness of Mr. Justice
+Bray's remarks the other day on the preference of women for bags
+instead of pockets.  A case was before him in which a woman had gone
+into a shop, had put down her satchel containing her money and
+valuables, turned to pick it up a little later, found it had been
+stolen, and thereupon brought an action against the owners of the shop
+for the recovery of her losses.  The jury were unsympathetic, found
+that in the circumstances the woman was responsible, and gave a verdict
+against her.
+
+Of course the jury were men, all of them prejudiced on this subject of
+pockets.  At a guess I should say that there were not fewer than 150
+pockets in that jury-box, _and not one satchel_.  You, madam, may
+retort that this is only another instance of the scandal of this
+man-ridden world.  Why were there no women in that jury-box?  Why are
+all the decisions of the courts, from the High Court to the coroner's
+court, left to the judgment of men?  Madam, I share your indignation.
+I would "comb-out" the jury-box.  I would send half the jurymen, if not
+into the trenches, at least to hoe turnips, and fill their places with
+a row of women.  Women are just as capable as men of forming an opinion
+about facts, they have at least as much time to spare, and their point
+of view is as essential to justice.  What can there be more ridiculous,
+for example, than a jury of men sitting for a whole day to decide the
+question of the cut of a gown without a single woman's expert opinion
+to guide them, or more unjust than to leave an issue between a man and
+a woman entirely in the hands of men?  Yes, certainly madam, I am with
+you on the general question.
+
+But when we come to the subject of pockets, I am bound to confess that
+I am with the jury.  If I had been on that jury I should have voted
+with fervour for making the woman responsible for her own loss.  If it
+were possible for women to put their satchels down on counters, or the
+seats of buses, or any odd place they thought of, and then to make some
+innocent person responsible because they were stolen, there would be no
+security for anybody.  It would be a travesty of justice--a premium
+upon recklessness and even fraud.  Moreover, people who won't wear
+pockets deserve to be punished.  They ask for trouble and ought not to
+complain when they get it.
+
+I have never been able to fathom the obduracy of women in this matter
+of pockets.  It is not the only reflection upon their common-sense
+which is implicit in their dress.  If we were to pass judgment on the
+relative intelligence of the sexes by their codes of costume, sanity
+would pronounce overwhelmingly in favour of men.  Imagine a man who
+buttoned his coat and waistcoat down the back, so that he was dependent
+on someone else to help dress him in the morning and unfasten him at
+night, or who relied on such abominations as hooks-and-eyes scattered
+over unattainable places, in order to keep his garments in position.
+You cannot imagine such a man.  Yet women submit to these incredible
+tyrannies of fashion without a murmur, and talk about them as though it
+was the hand of fate upon them.  I have a good deal of sympathy with
+the view of a friend of mine who says that no woman ought to have a
+vote until she has won the enfranchisement of her own buttons.
+
+Or take high-heeled boots.  Is there any sight more ludicrous than the
+spectacle of a woman stumbling along on a pair of high heels, flung out
+of the perpendicular and painfully struggling to preserve her
+equilibrium, condemned to take finicking little steps lest she should
+topple over, all the grace and freedom of movement lost in an ugly
+acrobatic feat?  And when the feet turn in, and the high heels turn
+over--heavens!  I confess I never see high heels without looking for a
+mindless face, and I rarely look in vain.
+
+But the puzzle about the pockets is that quite sensible women go about
+in a pocketless condition.  I turned to Jane just now--she was sitting
+by the fire knitting--and asked how many pockets she had when she was
+fully dressed.  "None," she said.  "Pockets haven't been worn for years
+and years, but now they are coming in--in an ornamental way."  "In an
+ornamental way?" said I.  "Won't they carry anything?"  "Well, you can
+trust a handkerchief to them."  "Not a purse?"  "Good gracious, no.  It
+would simply ask to be stolen, and if it wasn't stolen in five minutes
+it would fall out in ten."  The case was stranger than I had thought.
+Not to have pockets was bad enough; but to have sham pockets!  Think of
+it!  We have been at war for three and a half years, and women are now
+beginning to wear pockets "in an ornamental way," not for use but as a
+pretty fal-lal, much as they might put on another row of useless
+buttons to button nothing.  And what is the result?  Jane (I have full
+permission to mention her in order to give actuality to this moral
+discourse) spends hours looking for her glasses, for her keys, for the
+letter that came this morning, for her purse, for her bag, for all that
+is hers.  And we, the devoted members of the family, spend hours in
+looking for them too, exploring dark corners, probing the interstices
+of sofas and chairs, rummaging the dishevelled drawers anew,
+discovering the thing that disappeared so mysteriously last week or
+last month and that we no longer want, but rarely the article that is
+the very hub of the immediate wheel of things.
+
+Now, I am different.  I am pockets all over.  I am simply agape with
+pockets.  I am like a pillar-box walking about, waiting for the postman
+to come and collect things.  All told, I carry sixteen pockets--none of
+them ornamental, every one as practical as a time-table--pockets for
+letters, for watch, for keys, for handkerchiefs, for tickets, for
+spectacles (two pairs, long and short distance), for loose money, for
+note-wallet, for diary and pocket-book--why, bless me, you can hardly
+mention a thing I haven't a pocket for.  And I would not do without one
+of them, madam--not one.  Do I ever lose things?  Of course I lose
+things.  I lose them in my pockets.  You can't possibly have as many
+pockets as I have got without losing things in them.  But then you have
+them all the time.
+
+That is the splendid thing about losing your property in your own
+pockets.  It always turns up in the end, and that lady's satchel left
+on the counter will never turn up.  And think of the surprises you get
+when rummaging in your pockets--the letters you haven't answered, the
+bills you haven't paid, the odd money that has somehow got into the
+wrong pocket.  When I have nothing else to do I just search my
+pockets--all my pockets, those in the brown suit, and the grey suit,
+and the serge suit, and my "Sunday best"--there must be fifty pockets
+in all, and every one of them full of something, of ghosts of
+engagements I haven't kept, and duties I haven't performed, and friends
+I have neglected, of pipes that I have mourned as lost, and half
+packets of cigarettes that by some miracle I have not smoked, and all
+the litter of a casual and disorderly life.  I would not part with
+these secrecies for all the satchels in Oxford Street.  I am my own
+book of mysteries.  I bulge with mysteries.  I can surprise myself at
+any moment I like by simply exploring my pockets.  If I avoid exploring
+them I know I am not very well.  I know I am not in a condition to face
+the things that I might find there.  I just leave them there till I am
+stronger--not lost, madam, as they would be in your satchel, but just
+forgotten, comfortably forgotten.  Why should one always be disturbing
+the sleeping dogs in the kennels of one's pockets?  Why not let them
+sleep?  Are there not enough troubles in life that one must go seeking
+them in one's own pockets?  And I have a precedent, look you.  Did not
+Napoleon say that if you did not look at your letters for a fortnight
+you generally found that they had answered themselves?
+
+And may I not in this connection recall the practice of Sir Andrew
+Clarke, the physician of Mr. Gladstone, as recorded in the
+reminiscences of Mr. Henry Holiday?  At dinner one night Sir Andrew was
+observed to be drinking champagne, and was asked why he allowed himself
+an indulgence which he so rigorously denied to his patients.  "Yes," he
+said, "but you do not understand my case.  When I go from here I shall
+find a pile of fifty or sixty letters awaiting answers."  "But will
+champagne help you to answer them?" asked the other.  "Not at all,"
+said Sir Andrew, "not at all; but it puts you in the frame of mind in
+which you don't care a damn whether they are answered or not."  I do
+not offer this story for the imitation of youth, but for the solace of
+the people like myself who have long reached the years of discretion
+without becoming discreet, and who like to feel that their weaknesses
+have been shared by the eminent and the wise.
+
+And, to conclude, the wisdom of the pocket habit is not to be judged by
+its abuse, but by its obvious convenience and safety.  I trust that
+some energetic woman will be moved to inaugurate a crusade for the
+redemption of her sex from its pocketless condition.  A Society for the
+Propagation of Pockets Among Women (S.P.P.A.W.) is a real need of the
+time.  It should be a part of the great work of after-the-war
+reconstruction.  It should organise opinion, distribute leaflets and
+hold meetings, with the Mayor in the chair and experts, rich in pockets
+and the lore of the subject, to light the fire of rebellion throughout
+the land.  Women have won the vote from the tyrant man.  Let them win
+their pockets from the tyrant dressmaker.
+
+
+
+
+ON A COUNTRY PLATFORM
+
+The fields lie cheek-by-jowl with the station, and a group of high
+elms, in which dwells a colony of rooks, throws its ample shade over
+the "down" platform.
+
+From the cornfield that marches side by side with the station there
+comes the cheerful music of the reaper and the sound of the voices of
+the harvesters, old men, some women and more children--for half of the
+field has been reaped and is being gathered and gleaned.  They are so
+near that the engine-driver of the "local" train exchanges gossip with
+them in the intervals of oiling his engine.  They talk of the crops and
+the bad weather there has been and the change that has come with
+September, and the news of boys who are fighting or have fallen....
+
+A dozen youths march, two by two, on to the "up" platform.  They are in
+civilian dress, but behind them walks a sergeant who ejaculates
+"left--left--left" like the flick of a whip.  They are the latest
+trickle from this countryside to the great whirlpool, most of them mere
+boys.  They have the self-consciousness of obscure country youths who
+have suddenly been thrust into the public eye and are aware that all
+glances are turned critically upon their awkward movements.  They
+shamble along with a grotesque caricature of a dare-devil swagger, and
+laugh loud and vacantly to show how much they are at ease with
+themselves and the world.  It is hollow gaiety and suggests the
+animation of a trout with a hook in its throat.
+
+The booking-clerk, lounging at the door of the booking-office, passes a
+half-contemptuous remark upon them to a companion.
+
+"Wait till they come for you, Jimmy," says the other.  "You won't find
+it so funny then."
+
+Jimmy's face falls at the reminder, for he is nearly ripe for the great
+harvest, and the reaper will soon come his way....
+
+A few people drift in from outside as the time for the departure of the
+London train approaches.  Among them, a young woman, hot and flushed
+and carrying a country basket, is greeted by an acquaintance with
+surprise.
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I'm going to London--just as I am---a telegram from Tom--he's got
+leave from the front--isn't it glorious--and all so
+unexpected--couldn't change, or even drop my basket--the messenger met
+me in the street--hadn't a moment to lose to catch the train." ...
+
+A little group brushes by her with far other emotions.  A stalwart
+soldier, a bronzed, good-looking fellow, with three stripes, who has
+evidently seen much service, is returning from leave.  His wife, neatly
+dressed and with head down, wheels a perambulator beside him.  Inside
+the perambulator is a child of three years or so.  Two other children,
+of perhaps five and six, walk with the soldier, each clasping a hand.
+The little procession passes in silence to the end of the platform,
+full of that misery which seeks to be alone with itself....
+
+Over the wooden bridge that connects the two platforms comes a solitary
+soldier, laden with his belongings.  He has come in from some other
+village by the local train.  He flings himself down on the form and
+stares gloomily at the elms and the cornfield and the sunshine.  A
+comfortable-looking, elderly man, who has a copy of the _London Corn
+Circular_ in his hand, turns to him with that amiable desire to be
+friendly which elderly people have in the presence of soldiers.
+
+"And how long have you been out at the war, sonny?" he asks, much as he
+might ask how long holiday he had had.
+
+"I'm sick of the bloody war," says the soldier, without even turning
+his head.
+
+The comfortable, elderly man collapses into silence and the _Corn
+Circular_....
+
+A young officer who has been driven up in a dog-cart comes on to the
+platform accompanied by a dog with tongue lolling from its mouth and
+with the large, brown, affectionate eyes of the Airedale.
+
+The train thunders in, and the officer opens a carriage door.  The dog
+tries to enter with his master.
+
+"No, no, old chap," says the latter, gently patting him and pulling him
+back.  "Go home.  They don't want you where I'm going."
+
+The dog stands for a moment on the platform, panting and gazing at his
+master as if hoping that he will relent.  Then he turns and trots away,
+throwing occasional glances back on the off-chance of a whistle of
+recall....
+
+The moment has come for the separation of the little family at the end
+of the platform.  The soldier leans from the carriage window and his
+wife clings about his neck.  The two children stand by the
+perambulator.  They are brave little girls and remember that they have
+not to cry.  The train begins to move and the woman unclasps herself,
+leaving her husband at the window, smiling his hardest and throwing
+kisses to the children.  The train gathers speed and takes a curve and
+the soldier has vanished.  The mother turns to the perambulator and
+seeks to hide her face as she hurries with her little charges along the
+platform and through the gate.  The two little girls stifle their sobs
+in their aprons, but the child in the carriage knows nothing of public
+behaviour.  He knows in that dim way that is the affliction of
+childhood that something terrible is happening, and as the forlorn
+little group hurries by to escape into the lane hard by where grief can
+have its fill he rends the air with his sobs and cries of "Poor dada,
+poor dada!"
+
+Poor little mite, he is beginning his apprenticeship to this rough,
+insane world betimes....
+
+And now the platform is empty, and the only sound of life is the whirr
+of the reaping machine and the voices from the harvest field.  Through
+the meadow that leads to the village the dog is slowly trotting home,
+still casting occasional glances backwards on the chance....
+
+
+
+
+ON A DISTANT VIEW OF A PIG
+
+Yes, I would certainly keep a pig.  The idea came to me while I was
+digging.  I find that there is no occupation that stimulates thought
+more than digging if you choose your soil well.  Digging in the London
+clay does not stimulate thought; it deadens thought.  It is good
+exercise for the body, but it is no exercise for the mind.  You can't
+play with your fancies as you plunge your spade into this stiff and
+stubborn medium.  But in the light, porous soil of my garden on the
+chalk hills digging goes with a swing and a rhythm that set the
+thoughts singing like the birds.  I feel I could win battles when I'm
+digging, or write plays or lyrics that would stun the world, or make
+speeches that would stir a post to action.  Ideas seem as plentiful as
+blackberries in the autumn, and if only I could put down the spade and
+capture them red-hot I feel that I could make _The Star_ simply blaze
+with glory.
+
+It was in one of these prolific moments that I thought of the pig.
+Like all great ideas there was something inevitable about it.  The
+calculations of Le Verrier and Adams proved the existence of Neptune
+before that orb was discovered.  They knew it was there before they
+found it.  My pig was born without my knowledge.  In the furnace of my
+mind he took shape merely by the friction of facts.  He was a sort of
+pig by divine right.  It happened thus.  In the midst of my digging Jim
+Squire, passing up the lane, had paused on the other side of the hedge
+to discuss last night's frost.  I straightened my back for a talk, and
+naturally we talked about potatoes.  If you want to get the best out of
+Jim Squire you must touch him on potatoes.  There are some people who
+find Jim an unresponsive and suspicious yokel.  That is because they do
+not know how to draw him out.  Mention potatoes, or carrots, or the
+best way of dealing with slugs, or the right manure for a hot-bed, or
+any sensible subject like these, and he simply flows with wisdom and
+urbanity.
+
+He observed that I should have a tidy few potatoes, what with the
+garden I was digging, and the piece I'd turned over in the orchard, and
+that there bit o' waste land on the hillside which he _had_ heard as I
+was getting Mestur Wistock to plough up for me.  Yes, there'd be a
+niceish lot.  And he _did_ hear I was going to set King Edwards and
+Arran Chiefs.  Rare and fine potatoes they were too.  He had some King
+Edwards last year--turned out wonderful, they did.  One root he pulled
+up weighed 12 lb.  Yes, Miss Mary weighed 'em for him in the scale at
+the farm--just for a hobby like as you might say.  It was like this.
+He'd seen a bit in the paper about a man as had 8 lb. on a root, and he
+(Jim) said to himself, "This root beats that by a long chalk _I_ know."
+And Miss Mary come by and she said she'd weigh 'em.  And she did.  And
+it was 12 lb. full, she said.  If anything, she said, 'twas a shade
+over.  _She_ said as they'd have took a prize anywhere--that's what she
+said....  Well, you couldn't have too many potatoes these days.
+Wonderful good food they were, for man _and_ pig....
+
+As he went on up the lane my spade took up that word like a refrain.
+At every rhythmic stroke it seemed to cry "pig" with increasing
+vehemence.
+
+  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
+  When a new planet swims into his ken.
+
+A pig?  Why not?--and I straightened my back again.  I felt that
+something prodigious was taking shape.  My eye wandered across the
+orchard.  There were the hives standing in a row--three of them, to be
+increased to twelve as fast as the expert, who has set up her
+carpenter's shop in the barn, can get the parts to put together.  And
+beyond the hives three sheds--one for poultry, one for the hot-bed for
+mushrooms, the third--why, the very thing....  Concrete the floor and
+it would be a very palace for a pig.
+
+I took a turn up the garden to look this thing squarely in the face,
+and at the gate I saw the farmer's wife coming down the lane.  We
+stopped, and she talked about her cows and about an order she had got
+from the Government to plough up more pasture, and then--as if echoing
+the very thought that was drumming in my head--about the litter of pigs
+she was expecting and of her wish to get the cottagers to keep pigs.
+Why, this was a very conspiracy of circumstance, thought I.  It seemed
+as though man and events alike were engaged in a plot to make me keep a
+pig.
+
+With an air of idle curiosity I encouraged the farmer's wife to talk on
+the thrilling theme, and she responded with enthusiasm.  The pig, I
+found, was a grossly maligned animal.  It had lain uncomplainingly
+under imputations that were foul slanders on its innocent and lovable
+character.  Yes, lovable.  She had had pigs who were as affectionate as
+any dog--pigs that followed her about in sheer friendliness.  And as
+for the charge of filthiness, who was to blame?  We gave them dirty
+styes and then called them dirty pigs.  But the pig was a clean animal,
+loved cleanliness, thrived on cleanliness.  It was man the dirty who
+kept the pig foul and then called him unclean.  And what a profitable
+animal.  She had had a sow which had produced 108 pigs and 102 of them
+came to maturity.  What an example to Shoreditch, I said.  Perhaps they
+don't give them clean styes in Shoreditch, she said.  No, I replied,
+they give them dirty styes....
+
+I went indoors, suffused with the vision of the transfigured pig, the
+affectionate, cleanly, intelligent pig, and took up a paper, and the
+first thing my eye encountered was an article on "The Cottager's Pig."
+I read it with the frenzy of a new religion and rose filled to the brim
+with lore about the animal to whose existence (except in the shape of
+bacon) I had been indifferent so long.  And now, fully seized with the
+idea, it seemed that the world talked of nothing but pig.  It was only
+that my ears were unstopped and my eyes unsealed by an awakened
+curiosity; but it seemed to me that the pig had suddenly been born into
+the universe, and that the air was filled with the rumour of his
+coming.  I encountered the subject at every turn.  In the _Times_ I
+read a touching lament over the disappearance of the little black pig.
+Elsewhere I saw a facsimile letter from Lord Rhondda, in which he
+declared his loyalty to the pig and denied that he had ever spoken evil
+of him.
+
+It was a patriotic duty to keep a pig.  He was an ally in the war.  I
+saw the whole German General Staff turning pale at his name, as Mazarin
+was said to turn pale at the name of Cromwell.  Arriving in town I met
+the eminent politician Mr. R---- and he began to tell me how he had
+started all his cottagers in the North growing pig.  By nightfall I
+could have held my own without shame or discredit in any company of pig
+dealers, and in my dreams I saw the great globe itself resting on the
+back, not of an elephant, but of a pig with a beautiful curly tail.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Later: I have ordered the pig.
+
+
+
+
+IN DEFENCE OF IGNORANCE
+
+A young man wrote to me the other day lamenting his ignorance and
+requesting me to tell him what books to read and what to do in order to
+become learned and wise.  I sent him a civil answer and such advice as
+occurred to me.  But I confess that the more I thought of the matter
+the less assured I felt of my competence for the task.  I ceased to be
+flattered by the implied tribute to my omniscience, and felt rather
+like a person who gives up a third-class ticket after he has ridden in
+a first-class carriage might feel.  I surveyed my title to this
+reputation for learning, and was shocked at the poverty of my estate.
+As I contrasted the mountain of things I didn't know with the molehill
+of things I did know, my self-esteem sank to zero.  Why, my dear young
+sir, thought I, I cannot pay twopence in the pound.  I am nothing but
+the possessor of a wide-spread ignorance.  Why should you come to me
+for a loan?
+
+I begin with myself--this body of me that is carried about on a pair of
+cunningly-devised stilts and waves a couple of branches with five
+flexible twigs at the end of each, and is surmounted by a large round
+knob with wonderful little orifices, and glittering jewels, and a sort
+of mat for a covering, and which utters strange noises and speaks and
+sings and laughs and cries.  Bless me, said I, what do I know about it?
+I am a mere bundle of mysteries in coat and breeches.  I couldn't tell
+you where my epiglottis is or what it does without looking in a
+dictionary.  I have been told, but I always forget.  I am little better
+than the boy in the class.  "Where is the diaphragm?" asked the
+teacher.  "Please sir, in North Staffordshire."  said the boy.  I may
+laugh at the boy, but any young medical student would laugh just as
+much at me if I told him honestly what I do not know about the
+diaphragm.  And when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of this
+aggregation of atoms which we call the human body the medical student
+and, indeed, the whole Medical Faculty would be found to be nearly as
+ignorant as the boy was about the diaphragm.
+
+From myself I pass to all the phenomena of life, and wherever I turn I
+find myself exploring what Carlyle calls the "great, deep sea of
+Nescience on which we float like exhalations that are and then are
+not."  I see Orion striding across the southern heavens, and feel the
+wonder and the majesty of that stupendous spectacle, but if I ask
+myself what I know about it I have no answer.  And even the knowledge
+of the most learned astronomer only touches the fringe of the
+immensity.  What is beyond--beyond---beyond?  His mind is balked, as
+mine is, almost at the threshold of the mighty paradox of a universe
+which we can conceive neither as finite nor as infinite, which is
+unthinkable as having limits and unthinkable as having no limits.  As
+the flowers come on in summer I always learn their names, but I know
+that I shall have to learn them again next year.  And as to the mystery
+of their being, by what miracle they grow and transmute the secretions
+of the earth and air into life and beauty--why, my dear young sir, I am
+no more communicative than the needy knife-grinder.  "Story?  God bless
+you, I have none to tell, sir."
+
+I cannot put my hand to anything outside my little routine without
+finding myself meddling with things I don't understand.  I was digging
+in the garden just now and came upon a patch of ground with roots deep
+down.  Some villainous pest, said I, some enemy of my carrots and
+potatoes.  Have at them!  I felt like a knight charging to the rescue
+of innocence.  I plunged the fork deeper and deeper and tore at the
+roots, and grew breathless and perspiring.  Even now I ache with the
+agonies of that titanic combat.  And the more I fought the more
+infinite became the ramifications of those roots.  And so I called for
+the expert advice of the young person who was giving some candy to her
+bees in the orchard.  She came, took a glance into the depths, and
+said: "Yes, you are pulling up that tree."  And she pointed to an
+ivy-grown tree in the hedge a dozen yards away.  Did I feel foolish,
+young sir?  Of course I felt foolish, but not more foolish than I have
+felt on a thousand other occasions.  And you ask me for advice.
+
+I recall one among many of these occasions for my chastening.  When I
+was young I was being driven one day through a woodland country by an
+old fellow who kept an inn and let out a pony and chaise for hire.  As
+we went along I made some remark about a tree by the wayside and he
+spoke of it as a poplar.  "Not a poplar," said I with the easy
+assurance of youth, and I described to him for his information the
+characters of what I conceived to be the poplar.  "Ah," he said "you
+are thinking of the Lombardy poplar.  That tree is the Egyptian
+poplar."  And then he went on to tell me of a score of other
+poplars--their appearance, their habits, and their origins--quite
+kindly and without any knowledge of the withering blight that had
+fallen upon my cocksure ignorance.  I found that he had spent his life
+in tree culture and had been forester to a Scotch duke.  And I had
+explained to him what a poplar was like!  But I think he did me good,
+and I often recall him to mind when I feel disposed to give other
+people information that they possibly do not need.
+
+And the books I haven't read, and the sciences I don't know, and the
+languages I don't speak, and the things I can't do--young man, if you
+knew all this you would be amazed.  But it does not make me unhappy.
+On the contrary I find myself growing cheerful in the contemplation of
+these vast undeveloped estates.  I feel like a fellow who has inherited
+a continent and, so far, has only had time to cultivate a tiny corner
+of the inheritance.  The rest I just wander through like a boy in
+wonderland.  Some day I will know about all these things.  I will
+develop all these immensities.  I will search out all these mysteries.
+In my heart I know I shall do nothing of the sort.  I know that when
+the curtain rings down I shall be digging the same tiny plot.  But it
+is pleasant to dream of future conquests that you won't make.
+
+And, after all, aren't we all allotment holders of the mind,
+cultivating our own little patch and surrounded by the wonderland of
+the unknown?  Even the most learned of us is ignorant when his
+knowledge is measured by the infinite sum of things.  And the riches of
+knowledge themselves are much more widely diffused than we are apt to
+think.  There are few people who are not better informed about
+something than we are, who have not gathered their own peculiar sheaf
+of wisdom or knowledge in this vast harvest field of experience.  That
+is at once a comfortable and a humbling thought.  It checks a too
+soaring vanity on the one hand and a too tragic abasement on the other.
+The fund of knowledge is a collective sum.  No one has all the items,
+nor a fraction of the items, and there are few of us so poor as not to
+have some.  If I were to walk out into the street now I fancy I should
+not meet a soul, man or woman, who could not fill in some blank of my
+mind.  And I think--for I must not let humility go too far--I think I
+could fill some blank in theirs.  Our carrying capacity varies
+infinitely, but we all carry something, and it differs from the store
+of any one else on earth.  And, moreover, the mere knowledge of things
+is not necessary to their enjoyment, nor necessary even to wisdom.
+There are things that every ploughboy knows to-day which were hidden
+from Plato and Caesar and Dante, but the ploughboy is not wiser than
+they.  Sir Thomas Browne, in his book on "Vulgar Errors," declared that
+the idea that the earth went round the sun was too foolish to be
+controverted.  I know better, but that doesn't make me a wiser man than
+Browne.  Wisdom does not depend on these things.  I suppose that, on
+the whole, Lincoln was the wisest and most fundamentally sane man who
+ever took a great part in the affairs of this planet.  Yet compared
+with the average undergraduate he was utterly unlearned.
+
+Do not, my young friend, suppose I am decrying your eagerness to know.
+Learn all you can, my boy, about this wonderful caravan on which we
+make our annual tour round the sun, and on which we quarrel and fight
+with such crazy ferocity as we go.  But at the end of all your learning
+you will be astonished at how little you know, and will rejoice that
+the pleasure of living is in healthy feeling rather than in the
+accumulation of facts.  There was a good deal of truth in that saying
+of Savonarola that "a little old woman who kept the faith knew more
+than Plato or Aristotle."
+
+
+
+
+ON A SHINY NIGHT
+
+The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about midnight.  It is then
+that I leave the throbbing heart of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to
+the last bus bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer the back corner
+seat.  If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near as I can and watch
+the enemy who possesses it with a vigilant eye.  When he rises I pounce
+on the quarry like a kestrel on its prey.  I love the back seat, not
+only because it is the most comfortable, but also because it gives you
+the sense of solitude in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the most
+enjoyable sensations I know.  To see, and not be seen, to watch the
+human comedy unobserved, save by the friendly stars who look down very
+searchingly but never blab, to have the advantages of both solitude and
+society in one breath, as it were--this is my idea of enjoyment.
+
+But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night,
+when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making
+all the earth a wonder of romance.  The garish day is of the earth,
+"the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is seen and the
+constellations blaze in unimaginable space is of the eternal; but here
+in this magic glamour of the moon where night and day are wedded is the
+realm of romance.  You may wander all day in the beech woods and never
+catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult coming down the glades or hear an
+echo of Robin Hood's horn; but walk in the beech woods by moonlight and
+every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends
+of long ago.
+
+That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion for "Cumnor Hall."
+"After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked
+in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never
+weary of repeating the first stanza:
+
+  The dews of summer night did fall--
+    The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
+  Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
+    And many an oak that stood thereby."
+
+There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter.  He was the King
+of the Moonlighters.  He was a man who would have been my most dreaded
+rival on the midnight bus.  He would have wanted the back seat, I know,
+and there he would have sat and chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and
+watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and
+turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.
+
+There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a
+shiny night."  There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous
+Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:
+
+  Oh, 'tis my delight
+  On a shiny night,
+  In the season of the year.
+
+I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure
+that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night
+because he was a poacher.  I never could affect any indignation about
+poachers.  I suspect that I rather like them.  Anyhow, there is no
+stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:
+
+  Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire,
+  Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.
+  Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.
+        Oh, 'tis my delight, etc.
+
+And there was Dick Turpin.  He, too, loved the moonlight for very
+practical reasons.  He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but
+because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with
+Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.
+
+And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of
+moonlight.  The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy.  The
+sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied.
+Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast
+between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the
+invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast
+between degrees of brightness.  Everything is bright, but some things
+are more bright than others.  But in the moonlight the world is etched
+in black and white.  The shadows are flat and unrevealing.  They have
+none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the
+shadows of the day.  They are as secret as the grave; distinct
+personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere
+passages of colour tuned to a lower key.  And the quality of the
+encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast.  The moon does not
+bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:
+
+        .... Strange she is, and secret.
+  Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.
+
+See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful
+effect of black and white that it creates.  Under the play of the
+moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries.  The lights seem lighter
+than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker.
+That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may
+lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is
+the soul of romance.
+
+Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that
+you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks
+which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar
+scenes.  Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott,
+knew those impenetrable shadows well:
+
+        .... tender is the night,
+  And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,
+  Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
+    But here there is no light,
+  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
+  Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
+
+In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the
+unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the
+other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to
+escape the prying eyes of Shylock.  Hence through all time it has been
+the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent
+horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,
+
+  To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
+  Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.
+
+Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to
+the magic of the moonlight.
+
+
+
+
+ON GIVING UP TOBACCO
+
+This evening I am morally a little unapproachable.  I feel too good to
+be true.  Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of
+Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world
+that is not quite up to my moral handicap.  For I have given up
+tobacco.  For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my
+lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over
+me....  For a whole day!  I had not realised how long a day could be.
+It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into
+eternity.  I once heard a man say: "Dear me!  How time flies!"  It
+struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have
+often repeated it since.  But now I know it to be false.  I know that
+that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that
+gives the illusion of the flight of time.  If he had the moral courage
+to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!"  He would say,
+as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the
+mantel-piece), "How time stands still!"  He would find that a day can
+seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is
+terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.
+
+I have been contemplating this thing for years.  Some day, I have said
+to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant
+Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service.  Long have I borne his
+yoke--ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket
+pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger.  (How
+well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the
+sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable
+feeling of physical nausea.)  I have kicked against the tyranny of a
+habit that I knew had become my master.  It was not the tobacco I
+disliked.  Far from it.  I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of
+tobacco.  The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit
+and to lose our freedom--to cease to be masters of our own actions.
+"Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a
+character in some play, and the saying has a wide application.  I did
+not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me.  I did not say
+with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good
+dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco."  It was the
+pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions."  And though as the
+result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and
+resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was
+the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise.  The old dog in a new coat,
+as Johnson used to say.
+
+There are some people who approach the question frivolously.  The young
+man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example.  When the lady
+in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the
+young man John agreed.  Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said,
+and he was going to burn them all.  The lady in bombazine rejoiced.
+Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said.  "That ain't
+my way," replied the young man called John.  "I burn 'em one at a
+time--little end in my mouth, big end outside."  Similarly wanting in
+seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared
+that it prolonged life.  "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said.
+"None of them smoked, _and they are all dead_."  Others again discover
+virtues to conceal the tyranny.  Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign
+Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with tobacco
+smoke on the ground that it was necessary to his work.  "The art of
+diplomacy," he said, "is the judicious administration of tobacco."  No
+one knew better how to handle a cigar case than Bismarck, and it is no
+very extravagant fancy to see in the events of to-day the enormous
+fruit of an interlude of tobacco between him and Disraeli in the
+council chamber at Berlin.
+
+There are some who say they smoke because it soothes their nerves, and
+others who say they smoke because it is an aid to social intercourse.
+It is true that you can sit and smoke and say nothing without feeling
+that the spirit of communion is broken.  That was the case of Carlyle
+and his mother and of Carlyle and Tennyson, brave smokers all and
+silent to boot.  They let their pipes carry on a conversation too deep
+for words.  And lesser people, as Cowper knew, conceal their bankruptcy
+of words in wreaths of smoke:
+
+  The pipe, with solemn, interposing puff,
+  Makes half a sentence at a time enough;
+  The dozing sages drop the drowsy strain,
+  Then pause, and puff, and speak, and puff again.
+
+
+And, while some say they smoke for company, others claim to smoke for
+thought and inspiration.  "Tobacco is the sister of Literature," says
+Sir Walter Raleigh, loyal in this to his great namesake who brought the
+good gift to our shores.  Heaven forbid that I should deny the debt we
+who write owe to tobacco, but I am bound to confess that brother
+Literature did some handsome things before he found his sister.  Homer
+and Euripides, Virgil and Horace wrote quite tolerably without the help
+of tobacco, though no one can read Horace without feeling that he had
+the true spirit of the tobacco cult.  Had he been born a couple of
+thousand years later, what praises of the weed of Havana he would have
+mingled with his praises of Falernian!
+
+But if we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that we smoke not
+for this or that respectable reason--not always even because we enjoy
+it--but because we have got into the habit and can't get out of it.
+And in this, as in other cases, it is the surrender of the will more
+than the thing yielded to that is the mischief.  All the great systems
+of religion have provided against the enslavement of the individual to
+his habits.  The ordinances of abstinence are designed, in part at all
+events, to keep the will master of the appetites.  They are
+intended--altogether apart from the question of salvation by works--to
+serve as a breach with habits which, if allowed uninterrupted sway,
+reduce the soul to a sort of bondage to the body.
+
+It is against that bondage of habit that I have warred to-day.  I shall
+not describe the incidents of the struggle: the allurements of the
+tobacconists' shops--and what a lot of tobacconists' shops there
+are!--the insidious temptation of a company of men smoking contentedly
+after lunch, the heroism of waving away the offered cigarette or cigar
+as though it were a matter of no importance, the constant act of
+refusal.  For this is no case of one splendid deed of heroism.  You do
+not slay Apollyon with a thrust of your sword and march triumphantly on
+your way.  You have to go on fighting every inch of the journey, deaf
+to the appeals of Gold Flake and Capstan and Navy Cut and the other
+syrens that beckon you from the shop windows.  And now evening has come
+and the victory is mine.  I have singed the beard of the giant.  I am
+no longer his thrall.  To-morrow I shall be able to smoke with a clear
+conscience--with the feeling that it is an act of my own free choice,
+and not an act of slavish obedience to an old habit....
+
+How I shall enjoy to-morrow!
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT GOD GUN
+
+A few days ago I saw the Advent of the Great God Gun.  The goddess
+Aphrodite, according to ancient mythology, rose out of the foam of the
+sea, and the Great God Gun, too, emerged from a bath, but it was a bath
+of fire--fire so white and intense that the eyes were blinded by it as
+they are blinded by the light of the unclouded sun at midday.
+
+Our presence had been timed for the moment of his coming.  We stood in
+a great chamber higher than a cathedral nave, and with something even
+less than the dim religious light of a cathedral nave.  The exterior of
+the temple was plain even to ugliness, a tower of high, windowless
+walls faced with corrugated iron.  Within was a maze of immense
+mysteries, mighty cylinders towering into the gloom above, great pits
+descending into the gloom below, gigantic cranes showing against the
+dim skylight, with here and there a Cyclopean figure clad in oily
+overalls and with a face grimy and perspiring.
+
+The signal was given.  Two shadowy figures that appeared in the
+darkness above one of the cylinders began their incantations.  A giant
+crane towered above them and one saw its mighty claw descend into the
+orifice of the cylinder as if to drag some Eurydice out of the hell
+within.  Then the word was spoken and somewhere a lever, or perhaps
+only an electric button, was touched.  But at that touch the whole
+front of the mighty cylinder from top to bottom opened and swung back
+slowly and majestically, and one stood before a pillar of flame forty
+feet high, pure and white, an infinity of intolerable light, from
+whence a wave of heat came forth like a living thing.  And as the door
+opened the Cyclops above--strange Dantesque figures now swallowed up in
+the gloom, now caught in the light of the furnace--set the crane in
+motion, and through the open door of the cylinder came the god,
+suspended from the claw of the crane that gripped it like the fingers
+of a hand.
+
+It emerged slowly like a column of solid light--mystic, wonderful.  All
+night it had stood imprisoned in the cylinder enveloped by that bath of
+incalculable hotness, and as it came out from the ordeal, it was as
+white as the furnace within.  The great hand of the crane bore it
+forward with a solemn slowness until it paused over the mouth of one of
+the pits.  I had looked into this pit and seen that it was filled
+nearly to the brim with a slimy liquid.  It was a pit of oil--tens of
+thousands of gallons of high-flash rape oil.  It was the second bath of
+the god.
+
+The monster, the whiteness of his heat now flushing to pink, paused
+above the pit.  Then gravely, under the direction of the iron hand that
+held him suspended in mid-air, he began to descend into the oil.  The
+breech end of the incandescent column touched the surface of the
+liquid, and at that touch there leapt out of the mouth of the pit great
+tongues of flame.  As the red pillar sank deeper and deeper in the pit
+the flames burst up through the muzzle and licked with fury about the
+ruthless claw as if to tear it to pieces.  But it would not let go.
+Lower and lower sank the god until even his head was submerged and he
+stood invisible beneath us, robed in his cloak of oil.
+
+And there we will leave him to toughen and harden as he drinks in the
+oil hungrily through his burning pores.  Soon he will be caught up in
+the claw of the crane again, lifted out of his bath and lowered into an
+empty pit near by.  And upon him will descend another tube, that has
+passed through the same trials, and that will fit him as the skin fits
+the body.  And then in due course he will be provided with yet another
+coat.  Round and round him will be wound miles of flattened wire, put
+on at a tension of unthinkable resistance.  And even then there remains
+his outer garment, his jacket, to swell still further his mighty bulk.
+After that he will be equipped with his brain--all the wonderful
+mechanism of breech and cradle--and then one day he will be carried to
+the huge structure near by, where the Great God Gun, in all his
+manifestations, from the little mountain ten-pounder to the leviathan
+fifteen-inch, rests shining and wonderful, to be sent forth with his
+message of death and destruction.
+
+The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and
+stone."  Poor savage!  If we could only take him, with his childlike
+intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and
+industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men
+could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts
+are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the
+hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue
+thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles--how ashamed
+the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone!  How he would
+abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!
+
+And what a voracious deity he is!  Here in the great arsenal of
+Woolwich one passes through miles and miles of bewildering activities,
+foundries where the forty-ton hammer falls with the softness of a
+caress upon the great column of molten metal, and gives it the first
+crude likeness of the god, where vast converters are sending out flames
+of an unearthly hue and brightness, or where men clothed in grime and
+perspiration are swinging about billets of steel that scorch you as
+they pass from the furnace to the steam-press in which they are stamped
+like putty into the rough shape of great shells; shops where the roar
+of thousands of lathes drowns the voice, and where the food of the god
+is passing through a multitude of preparations more delicate than any
+known to the kitchens of Lucullus; pools of silence where grave
+scientific men are at their calculations and their tests, and where
+mechanics who are the princes of their trade show you delicate
+instruments gauged to the hundred-thousandth of an inch that are so
+precious that they will scarcely let you handle them; mysterious
+chambers where the high explosives are handled and where the shells are
+filled, where you walk in felt slippers upon padded floors and dare not
+drop a pin lest you wake an earthquake, and where you see men working
+(for what pay I know not) with materials more terrible than lightnings,
+themselves partitioned off from eternity only by the scrupulous
+observance of the stern laws of this realm of the sleeping Furies.
+
+A great town--a town whose activities alone are equal to all the labour
+of a city like Leeds--all devoted to the service of the god who lies
+there, mystic, wonderful, waiting to speak his oracles to men.  I see
+the poor savage growing more and more ashamed of his wood and stone.
+And this, good savage, is only a trifling part of our devotions.  All
+over the land wherever you go you shall find furnaces blazing to his
+glory, mountains shattered to make his ribs, factories throbbing day
+and night to feed his gigantic maw and to clothe his servants.
+
+You shall go down to the great rivers and hear a thousand hammers
+beating their music out of the hulls of mighty ships that are to be the
+chariots of the god, in which he will go forth to preach his gospel.
+You shall go down into the bowels of the earth and see half-naked men
+toiling in the blackness by the dim light of the safety lamp to win
+that wonderful food which is the ultimate food of the god, power to
+forge his frame, power to drive his chariots, power to wing his bolts.
+You shall go to our temples of learning and the laboratories of our
+universities and see the miracles of destruction that science, the
+proudest achievement of man, can wring out of that astonishing mystery
+coal-tar.  You shall go to our ports and watch the ships riding in
+proudly from the seas with their tributes from afar to the god.  And
+behind all this activity you shall see a nation working day and night
+to pay for the food of the god, throwing all its accumulated wealth
+into the furnace to keep the engines going, pawning its future to the
+uttermost farthing and to the remotest generation.
+
+And wherever the white man dwells, good savage, the same vision awaits
+you--
+
+        ... where Rhine unto the sea,
+  And Thames and Tiber, Seine and Danube run,
+  And where great armies glitter in the sun,
+  And great kings rule and men are boasted free.
+
+Everywhere the hammers are ringing, the forests are falling, the
+harvests are being gathered, and men and women toil like galley slaves
+chained to the oar to build more and more of the image and feed him
+more lavishly with the food of death.  You cannot escape the great
+traffic of the god though you go to the outposts of the earth.  The
+horses of the pampas are being rounded up to drag his wagons, the sheep
+of Australia are being sheared to clothe his slaves, the pine trees of
+Lapland are being split for his service, the silence of the Arctic seas
+is broken by the throbbing of his chariots.  As a neutral, good savage,
+you shall be free to go to Essen and see marvels no less wonderful than
+these you have seen at Woolwich, and all through Europe from Bremen to
+the Golden Horn the same infinite toil in the service of the Great God
+Gun will greet your astonished eyes.
+
+Then, it may be, you will pass to where the god delivers his message;
+on sea where one word from his mouth sends a thousand men and twenty
+thousand tons of metal in one huge dust storm to the skies; on land
+where over hundreds of miles of battle front the towns and villages are
+mounds of rubbish, where the desolate earth is riven and shattered by
+that treacly stuff you saw being ladled into the shells in the danger
+rooms at Woolwich or Essen, where the dead lie thick as leaves in
+autumn, and where in every wood you will come upon the secret shrines
+of the god.  At one light touch of the lever he lifts his head, coughs
+his mighty guttural speech and sinks back as if convulsed.  He has
+spoken, the earth trembles, the trees about him shudder at the shock.
+And standing in the observatory you will see far off a great black,
+billowy mass rise in the clear sky and you will know that the god has
+blown another god like unto him into fragments, and that in that mass
+that rises and falls is the wreckage of many a man who has looked his
+last upon the sun and will never till the home fields again or gladden
+the eyes of those he has left in some distant land.
+
+And then, to complete your experience, you shall hear from the prophets
+of the Great God Gun the praises of his gospel, how that gospel is an
+abiding part of the white man's faith, how it acts as a moral medicine
+to humanity, purging it of its vices and teaching it the higher virtues
+(a visit to the music halls and the Strand at midnight will help your
+simple mind to realise this), and how the words of the poet, uttered in
+satire--
+
+  That civilisation doos git forrad
+  Sometimes upon a powder cart--
+
+were in truth the words of eternal wisdom.
+
+I see the poor savage returning sadly to his home and gazing with
+mingled scorn and humiliation at his futile image of wood and stone.
+Perhaps another feeling will mingle with his sadness.  Perhaps he will
+be perplexed and puzzled.  For he may have heard of another religion
+that the white man serves, and it may be difficult for his simple mind
+to reconcile that religion with the gospel of the Great God Gun.
+
+
+
+
+ON A LEGEND OF THE WAR
+
+I was going down to the country the other night when I fell into
+conversation with a soldier who was going home on leave.  He was a
+reservist, who, after leaving the Army, had taken to gardening, and who
+had been called up at the beginning of the war.  He had many
+interesting things to tell, which he told in that unromantic,
+matter-of-fact fashion peculiar to the British soldier.  But something
+he said about his cousin led him to make a reference to Lord Kitchener,
+and I noticed that he spoke of the great soldier as if he were living.
+
+"But," said I, "do you think Kitchener wasn't drowned?"
+
+"Yes," he replied, "I can't never believe he was drowned."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Well, he hadn't no escort.  You're not going to make me believe he
+didn't know what he was doing when he went off and didn't have no
+escort.  It stands to reason.  He wasn't no stick of rhubub, as you
+might say.  He was a hard man on the soldier, but he had foresight, he
+had.  He could look ahead.  That's what he could do.  He could look
+ahead.  What did he say about the war?  Three years, he said, or the
+duration, and he was about right.  He wasn't the man to get drowned by
+an oversight--not him.  Stands to reason.
+
+"Same with Hector Macdonald," he said, warming to his theme.  "He's
+alive right enough.  He's fighting for the Germans.  Why, I know a man
+who see him in a German uniform before the war began.  I should know
+him if I see him.  He inspected me often.  He made a fool of himself at
+Monte Carlo and that sort o' thing, and just went off to get a new
+start, as you might say.
+
+"And look at Hamel.  He ain't dead--course not.  He went to
+Germany--that's what he did.  Stands to reason."
+
+"And what has become of Kitchener?" I asked.  "Is he fighting for the
+Germans too?"
+
+Well no.  That was too tall an order even for his credulity.  He
+boggled a bit at the hedge and then proceeded:
+
+"He's laying by--that's what he's doing.  He's laying by.  You see,
+he'd done his job.  He raised his army and made the whole job, as you
+may say, safe, and he wasn't going to take a back seat and be put in a
+corner.  Not him.  Stands to reason.  Why should he?  And him done all
+what he had done.  So he just goes off and lays by until he's wanted
+again.  Then he'll turn up all right.  You'll see."
+
+"But the ship was blown up," I said, "and only one boatload of
+survivors came to shore.  There were 800 men who perished with Lord
+Kitchener.  Not one has been heard of.  Are they all 'laying by'?  And
+where are they hiding?  And why?  And were they all in Lord Kitchener's
+secret?"
+
+He seemed a little gravelled by these considerations, but unmoved.
+
+"I can't never believe that he's dead," he said with the air of a man
+who didn't want to be awkward and would oblige if he possibly could.
+"I can't do it....  With his foresight and all....  And no escort, mind
+you....  No, I can't believe it....  Stands to reason."
+
+And as he sank back in his seat and lit a cigarette I realised that the
+legend of Kitchener had passed beyond the challenge of death.  I had
+heard much of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in
+Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted
+that that man's name was--well, whose would you think?  Why, of
+course....  But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity
+and absoluteness.  It did not rest upon fact.  It defied all facts and
+all evidence.  It was an act of tyrannic faith.  He was not dead,
+because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead.  And so he
+was alive.  And there you are.
+
+No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end
+that helped the growth of the myth.  He filled so vast a place in the
+public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed
+unthinkable.  No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his
+body in death.  He had just walked out into the night, and from the
+night he would return.
+
+But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to
+the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the
+popular mind.  It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural.
+In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who
+could daunt death itself.  And when death stabbed him suddenly in the
+dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the
+wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of
+blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy.  "Stands to
+reason."  That's all.  It just "stands to reason."
+
+It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief
+to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent
+foolishness.  It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps,"
+expresses over his fallen comrade--
+
+  O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
+  Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!
+
+There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple
+mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into
+material terms.  Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he
+lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."
+
+  Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
+  Call him when your powder's running low--
+      "If the Dons sight Devon
+      I'll leave the port of Heaven,
+  And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."
+
+And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after,
+in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear
+that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death.  The torch of
+a great spirit never goes out.  It is handed on from generation to
+generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest.  And that I
+think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate
+credulity.  Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that
+cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material
+immortality to give his faith an anchorage.  And so, out in the vague
+shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his
+post--"laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening
+for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.
+
+As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out
+into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't
+never believe that he's dead....  Stands to reason."  And as he bade me
+"Good-night," I said, "I think you are right.  I think he is living,
+too."  And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."
+
+
+
+
+ON TALK AND TALKERS
+
+The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the
+conversation.  I confess that I found the experience a little trying.
+In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person.  The talk I
+like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that
+"that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the
+laughter abundant."  I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to
+be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics.  I like to talk in my slippers, as
+it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all
+the evening before me.  Above all, I like the company of people who
+talk for enjoyment and not for admiration.  "I am none of those who
+sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the
+secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song.  But at this dinner
+table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning.  It was
+so staccato and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand.  It
+was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of
+touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and
+shuttlecock, or demon patience, or anything you like that is
+intellectually and physically breathless and baffling.  I thought of a
+bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting
+away from the mark that I never got it out.  It had grown stale and out
+of date before I could invest it with the artistic merit that would
+enable it to appear in such brilliant company.  And so, mentally out of
+breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch
+the drift of the sparkling dialogue.  But I looked as wise as possible,
+just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the
+things I did not say were quite worth saying.  That was Henry Irving's
+way when the conversation got beyond him.  He just looked wise and said
+nothing.
+
+There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but
+this was not good talk.  It was clever talk, which is quite a different
+thing.  There was no "stuff" in it.  It was like trying to make a meal
+off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack
+of geniality.  It reminded me of the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice
+Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court
+from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate quotations.
+The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of
+fellowship.  Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of
+wit, but wit alone never made good conversation.  It is like mint sauce
+without the lamb.
+
+Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists.  Macaulay
+talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as
+though he were engaged in an argument with space and eternity.  "If any
+of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at
+breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a
+chance.  Macaulay is coming."  And you remember that whimsical story of
+Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the
+garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning
+in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and
+seeing the poet with the button between forefinger and thumb still
+talking into space.  His life was an unending monologue.  "I think,
+Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking
+of his pulpit days.  "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you
+do anything else."
+
+Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a
+clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of
+the encounter.  He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of
+Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he
+had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of hearty conversation.
+He quarrelled heartily and forgave heartily--as in that heated scene at
+Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing
+and had come under his sledge hammer.  Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a
+short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy;--Johnson: Give me
+your hand, Sir.  You were too tedious and I was too short.--Mr. ----:
+Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way.--Johnson: Come, Sir,
+let's have no more of it.  We offend one another by our contention; let
+us not offend the company by our compliments."  He always had the
+company in mind.  He no more thought of talking alone than a boxer
+would think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think of
+rushing up to the net for a rally alone.  He wanted something to hit
+and something to parry, and the harder he hit and the quicker he
+parried the more he loved the other fellow.  That is the way with all
+the good talkers of our own time.  Perhaps Mr. Belloc is too cyclonic
+and scornful for perfect conversation, but his energy and wit are
+irresistible.  I find Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less
+aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the platform.  But the
+princes of the art, in my experience, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and
+Mr. Richard Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, the
+second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his thought, the third for
+the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk.
+I would add Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist.  He is too
+interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested in others.  When
+he is well under way you simply sit round and listen.  It is capital
+amusement, but it is not conversation.
+
+It is not the man who talks abundantly who alone keeps the pot of
+conversation boiling.  Some of the best talkers talk little.  They save
+their shots for critical moments and come in with sudden and
+devastating effect.  Lamb had that art, and his stammer was the perfect
+vehicle of his brilliant sallies.  Mr. Arnold Bennett in our time uses
+the same hesitation with delightful effect--sometimes with a shattering
+truthfulness that seems to gain immensely from the preliminary
+obstruction that has to be overcome.  And I like in my company of
+talkers the good listener, the man who contributes an eloquent silence
+which envelops conversation in an atmosphere of vigilant but friendly
+criticism.  Addison had this quality of eloquent silence.  Goldsmith,
+on the other hand, would have liked to shine, but had not the gift of
+talk.  Among the eloquent listeners of our day I place that fine writer
+and critic, Mr. Robert Lynd, whose quiet has a certain benignant
+graciousness, a tolerant yet vigilant watchfulness, that adds its
+flavour to the more eager talk of others.
+
+It was a favourite fancy of Samuel Rogers that "perhaps in the next
+world the use of words may be dispensed with--that our thoughts may
+stream into each other's minds without any verbal communication."  It
+is an idea which has its attractions.  It would save time and effort,
+and would preserve us from the misunderstandings which the clumsy
+instrument of speech involves.  I think, as I sit here in the orchard
+by the beehive and watch the bees carrying out their myriad functions
+with such disciplined certainty, that there must be the possibility of
+mutual understanding without speech--an understanding such as that
+which Coleridge believed humanity would have discovered and exploited
+if it had been created mute.
+
+And yet I do not share Rogers's hope.  I fancy the next world will be
+like this, only better.  I think it will resound with the familiar
+speech of our earthly pilgrimage, and that in any shady walk or among
+any of the fields of asphodel over which we wander we may light upon
+the great talkers of history, and share in their eternal disputation.
+There, under some spreading oak or beech, I shall hope to see Carlyle
+and Tennyson, or Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, or Johnson laying down
+the law to Langton and Burke and Beauclerk, with Bozzy taking notes, or
+Ben Jonson and Shakespeare continuing those combats of the Mermaid
+Tavern described by Fuller--the one mighty and lumbering like a Spanish
+galleon, the other swift and supple of movement like an English
+frigate--or Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims still telling tales on
+an eternal May morning.  It is a comfortable thought, but I cannot
+conceive it without the odd, cheerful din of contending tongues.  I
+fancy edging myself into those enchanted circles, and having a modest
+share in the glorious pow-wows of the masters.  I hope they won't vote
+me a bore and scatter at my approach.
+
+
+
+
+ON A VISION OF EDEN
+
+I had a glimpse of Eden last night.  It came, as visions should come,
+out of the misery of things.  In all these tragic years no night spent
+in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its
+sense of impending peril, its disquieting _communique_, Wytschaate
+lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever
+retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a
+sick and foreboding heart--and then out into the night with the burden
+of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul.  And as I stood in the
+dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering
+towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast
+furnaces on a dark hillside.  It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding
+through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the
+darkness with its jovial lamps.  Heavens, thought I, what strangers we
+are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant,
+for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear.  The bus stopped and I
+got inside, and inside it was radiant too--so brilliant that you could
+not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and
+blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read
+the paper with luxurious ease.
+
+But I did not read the paper.  I didn't want to read the paper.  I only
+wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit
+bus.  It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and
+bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into
+the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told.  One day,
+I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this.  All the
+buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight
+through streets as bright as day.  The gloom will have vanished from
+Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter
+once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and
+Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills.  We shall
+look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be
+afraid.  The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor
+slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.
+
+And as I sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this
+intoxicating vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is
+past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that
+was lost and that we yearn to regain.  Yes, I think I should fall on my
+knees.  I think we shall all want to fall on our knees.  What other
+attitude will there be for us?  Even my barber will fall on his knees.
+"If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other
+day, "I'd fall on my knees _this very night_."  He spoke as though
+nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of
+thing.  I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond
+me.  It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who
+when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts
+if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and
+blew their temple down.  But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of
+the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.
+
+But then--what then?  Well I should want to get on to some high and
+solitary place--alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be
+silent and when to talk--there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of
+horror.  I would take the midnight train and ho! for Keswick.  And in
+the dawn of a golden day--it must be a golden day--I would see the sun
+
+  Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye
+
+and set out by the lapping waves of Derwentwater for glorious Sty Head
+and hear the murmurs from Glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up
+Great Gable and over by Eskhause and Scafell and down into the green
+pastures of Langdale.  And there in that sanctuary with its starry dome
+and its encompassing hills I should find the thing I sought.
+
+Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do something desperate.  I
+shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if I know my
+companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his
+craft of the mountains and together we will
+
+  Leave our rags on Pavey Ark,
+  Our cards on Pillar grim.
+
+And then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world
+that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its Paradise
+Regained....  Why, here is St. John's Wood already.  And Lord's!  Of
+course, I _must_ have a day at Lord's.  It will be a part of the ritual
+of reconciliation.  The old players will not be there, for the gulf
+with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on
+distant fields.  But we must recapture their music and pay homage to
+their memory.  Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's--or perchance the
+Oval--and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball,
+and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket,
+and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of
+the doughty things we have seen them do.  Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz
+and Jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be
+forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the
+goodly game--"W.G." and Ranji, Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and
+Bonner, Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host.
+We'll not forget one of them.  Not one.  For a whole day we will go it,
+hammer and tongs.
+
+And there are ever so many more things I shall want to do.  I shall
+want to go and see the chestnuts at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday.  I
+shall want to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the Fifth,
+and make my young friends April fools on the First, and feel what a
+tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on Good Friday and
+pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.  I shall want to go and sit on the sands
+and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the
+Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from
+our hands nearly four years ago.  In short, I shall plunge into all the
+old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no
+heart for, no use for to-day.
+
+But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of Eden into the snow and
+the slush and the never-ending night.  The magic chariot goes on with
+its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision
+in darkness.
+
+
+
+
+ON A COMIC GENIUS
+
+"Like to see Harry Lauder?  Of course I should like to see Harry
+Lauder.  But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord
+Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that
+extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands
+to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have,
+as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan?  Do you
+realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry
+Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls,
+buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans?  Now, on a
+conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to----"
+
+"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed L52,000 to the War Loan.
+In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan.
+You are making him your agent.  You pass the cash on to him and he
+passes the bullets on to the Germans.  It is a patriotic duty to go and
+see Harry Lauder."
+
+I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a
+good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went.  It was a poor setting
+for the great man--one of those dismal things called revues, that are
+neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger
+contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially
+anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster
+young women.  I confess that I prefer my Harry without these
+accompaniments.  I like him to have the stage to himself.  I like Miss
+Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about.  I do not want
+anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I
+want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time
+with his foot and humming the melody.
+
+And for the same reason.  The Fifth Symphony or any other great work of
+art creates a state of mind, a spiritual atmosphere, that is destroyed
+by any intrusive and alien note.  And it is this faculty of creating a
+state of feeling, an authentic atmosphere of his own, that is the
+characteristic of the art of Harry Lauder, and the secret of the
+extraordinary influence he exercises over his public.  If you are
+susceptible to that influence the entrance of the quaint figure in the
+Scotch cap, the kilt and the tartan gives you a sensation unlike
+anything else on the stage or in life.  Like Bottom, you are
+translated.  Your defences are carried by storm, your severities
+disperse like the mist before the sun, you are no longer the man the
+world knows; you are a boy, trooping out from Hamelin town with other
+boys to the piping of the magician.  The burden has fallen off your
+back, the dark mountain has opened like a gateway into the realms of
+light and laughter, and you go through, dancing happy, to meet the
+sunshine.
+
+This atmosphere is not the result of conscious art or of acting in the
+professional sense.  It would even be true to say that Harry Lauder is
+not an actor at all.  Contrast him with the other great figure of the
+music-hall stage in this generation, Albert Chevalier, and you will
+understand what I mean.  Chevalier is never himself, but always
+somebody else, and that somebody else is astonishingly real--an
+incomparable coster, a serio-comic decayed actor, a simple old man
+celebrating the virtues of his "Old Dutch."  With his great powers of
+observation and imitativeness he gives you a subtle study of a type.
+He is so much of an artist that his own personality never occurs to
+you.  If Chevalier came on as Chevalier you would not know him.
+
+But Harry Lauder is the most personal thing on the stage.  You do not
+want him to imitate someone else: you want him to be just himself.  It
+doesn't much matter what he does, and it doesn't much matter how often
+you have seen him do it.  In fact, the oftener you have seen him do it
+the better you like it.  His jokes may be old, but they are never
+stale.  They ripen and mellow with time; they are like old friends and
+old port that grow better with age.  His songs may be simple and
+threadbare.  You don't care.  You just want him to go on singing them,
+singing about the bluebells in the dells and the bonnie lassie, and the
+heather-r, the bonnie pur-r-ple heather-r, and pausing to explain to
+you the thrifty terms on which he has bought "the ring."  You want to
+see him walk, you want to see him skip--oh, the incomparable drollery
+of that demure little step!--you want to hear him talk, you want to
+hear him laugh.  In short, you just want him to be there doing anything
+he likes and making you happy and idyllic and childlike and forgetful
+of all the burden and the mystery of this inexplicable world.
+
+He has art, of course--great art; a tuneful voice; a rare gift of
+voice-production, every word coming full and true, and with a delicate
+sense of value; a shrewd understanding of the limits of his medium; a
+sly, dry humour which makes his simple rusticity the vehicle of a
+genial satire.  And his figure and his face add to his equipment.  His
+walk is priceless.  His legs--oh, who shall describe those legs, those
+exiguous legs, so brief and yet so expressive?  Clothed in his kilt and
+his tartan, he is grotesque and yet not grotesque, but whimsical,
+droll, a strange mixture of dignity and buffoonery.  Your first impulse
+is to laugh at him, your next and enduring impulse is to laugh with
+him.  You cannot help laughing with him if you have a laugh in you, for
+his laugh is irresistible.  It is so friendly and companionable, so
+full of intimacies, so open and sunny.
+
+He comes to the footlights and talks, turns out his pockets and tells
+you the history of the contents, or gossips of the ways of sailors, and
+you gather round like children at a fair.  The sense of the theatre has
+vanished.  You are not listening to an actor, but to an old friend who
+is getting nearer and nearer to you all the time, until he seems to
+have got you by the button and to be telling his drolleries to you
+personally and chuckling in your own private ear.  There is nothing
+comparable to this intimacy between the man and his audience.  It is
+the triumph of a personality, so expansive, so rich in the humanities,
+so near to the general heart, that it seems a natural element, a sort
+of spirit of happiness, embodied and yet all-pervasive.
+
+But perhaps you, sir, have not fallen under the spell.  If so, be not
+scornful of us who have.  Be sorry for yourself.  Believe me, you have
+missed one of the cheerful experiences of a rather drab world.
+
+
+
+
+ON A VANISHED GARDEN
+
+I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards Road the other evening,
+talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked: "What
+is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome
+of the war?"
+
+"It is within two or three hundred yards from here," I replied.  "Come
+this way and I'll show it to you."
+
+He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I
+turned from the road and led him through the gorse and the trees
+towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of
+allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures,
+men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion
+beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches
+and looking at the fruits of their labour springing from the soil.
+"There," I said, "is the most important result of the war."
+
+He laughed, but not contemptuously.  He knew what I meant, and I think
+he more than half agreed.
+
+And I think you will agree, too, if you will consider what that stretch
+of allotments means.  It is the symptom of the most important revival,
+the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations.
+Wherever you go that symptom meets you.  Here in Hampstead allotments
+are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.  A friend of mine who lives
+in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish.  In the
+neighbourhood of London there must be many thousands.  In the country
+as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands.  If dear old Joseph
+Pels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening,
+see the vacant lots and waste spaces bursting into onion beds and
+potato patches, what joy would be his!  He was the forerunner of the
+revival, the passionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot; but his hot gospel
+fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened
+the sleeper.
+
+Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can
+be measured in terms of food.  That is important, but it is not the
+most important thing.  The allotment movement will add appreciably to
+our food supplies, but it will add far more to the spiritual resources
+of the nation.  It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is
+blighting our people.  What is wrong with us?  What is the root of our
+social and spiritual ailment?  Is it not the divorce of the people from
+the soil?  For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has
+been sucked into the great towns, and we have seen grow up a vast
+machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of
+the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the
+slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature
+implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the
+streets.  Can you walk through a London working-class district or a
+Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a
+feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous
+perversion of life into the arid channels of death?  Can you take pride
+in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts
+in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?
+
+And now the sun is going to rise.  We have started a revolution that
+will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of
+the people.  The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken.  The
+dead hand is going to be lifted from the land.  Yes, you say, but these
+people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the
+courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and
+so on.  That is true.  But the movement must get hold of the
+_intelligenzia_ first.  The important thing is that the breach in the
+prison is made: the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born--not
+still-born, but born a living thing.  It is a way of salvation that
+will not be lost, and that all will traverse.
+
+This is not mere dithyrambic enthusiasm.  Take a man out of the street
+and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him.  I
+have seen the miracle again and again.  I know a bus conductor, for
+example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind.  But one night I
+touched the key of his soul, mentioned allotments, and discovered that
+this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of
+his garden triumphs.  He had got a new purpose in life.  He had got the
+spirit of the earth in his bones.  It is not only the humanising
+influence of the garden, it is its democratising influence too.
+
+  When Adam delved and Eve span,
+  Where was then the gentleman?
+
+You can get on terms with anybody if you will discuss gardens.  I know
+a distinguished public servant and scholar whose allotment is next to
+that of a bricklayer.  They have become fast friends, and the
+bricklayer, being the better man at the job, has unconsciously assumed
+the role of a kindly master encouraging a well-meaning but not very
+competent pupil.
+
+And think of the cleansing influence of all this.  Light and air and
+labour--these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul.
+It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the
+great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets
+and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no
+name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the
+compass of our speech.  In the great legend of the Fall the spiritual
+disaster of Man is symbolised by his exclusion from a garden, and the
+moral tragedy of modern industrialism is only the repetition of that
+ancient fable.  Man lost his garden, and with it that tranquillity of
+soul that is found in gardens.  He must find his way back to Eden if he
+is to recover his spiritual heritage, and though Eden is but a
+twenty-pole allotment in the midst of a hundred other twenty-pole
+allotments, he will find it as full of wonder and refreshment as the
+garden of Epicurus.  He will not find much help from the God that Mr.
+Wells has discovered, or invented, but the God that dwells in gardens
+is sufficient for all our needs--let the theologians say what they will.
+
+  Not God in gardens?  When the eve is cool?
+  Nay, but I have a sign--
+  'Tis very sure God walks in mine.
+
+
+No one who has been a child in a garden will doubt the sign, or lose
+its impress through all his days.  I know, for I was once a child whose
+world was a garden.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It lay a mile away from the little country town, shut out from the road
+by a noble hedge, so high that even Jim Berry, the giant coal-heaver,
+the wonder and the terror of my childhood, could not see over, so thick
+that no eye could peer through.  It was a garden of plenty, but also a
+garden of the fancy, with neglected corners, rich in tangled growths
+and full of romantic possibilities.  It was in this wilder terrain that
+I had found the hedgehog, here, too, had seen the glow-worm's delicate
+light, and here, with my brain excited by "The Story of the Hundred
+Days," that I knew the Frenchmen lurked in ambush while I at the head
+of my gallant troop of the Black Watch was careering with magnificent
+courage across the open country where the potatoes and the rhubarb and
+the celery grew.
+
+It was ever the Black Watch.  Something in the name thrilled me.  And
+when one day I packed a little handbag with a nightgown and started out
+to the town where the railway station was, it was to Scotland I was
+bound and the Black Watch in which I meant to enlist.  It occurred to
+me on the road that I needed money and I returned gravely and asked my
+mother for half a crown.  She was a practical woman and brought me back
+to the prose of things with arguments suitable to a very youthful mind.
+
+The side windows of the house commanded the whole length of the garden
+to where at the end stood the pump whence issued delicious ice-cold
+water brought up from a well so deep that you could imagine Australia
+to be not far from the bottom.
+
+If only I could get to Australia!  I knew it lay there under my feet
+with people walking along head downwards and kangaroos hopping about
+with their young in their pockets.  It was merely a question of digging
+to get there.  I chose a sequestered corner and worked all a summer
+morning with a heavy spade in the fury of this high emprise, but I only
+got the length of the spade on the journey and retired from the task
+with a sense of the bitter futility of life.
+
+Never was there a garden more rich in fruit.  Around the western wall
+of the house was trained a noble pear tree that flung its arms with
+engaging confidence right up to my bedroom window.  They were hard
+pears that ripened only in keeping, and at Christmas melted rich and
+luscious in the mouth.  They were kept locked up in the tool-shed, but
+love laughs at locksmiths, and my brother found it possible to remove
+the lock without unlocking it by tearing out the whole staple from its
+socket.  My father was greatly puzzled by the tendency of the pears to
+diminish, but he was a kindly, unsuspecting man who made no
+disagreeable inquiries.
+
+Over the tool-shed grew a grape vine.  The roof of the shed was
+accessible by a filbert tree, the first of half a dozen that lined the
+garden on the side remote from the road.  On sunny days there was no
+pleasanter place to lie than the top of the shed, with the grapes,
+small but pleasant to the thirsty palate, ripening thick around you.  A
+point in favour of the spot was that it was visible from no window.
+One could lie there and eat the fruit without annoying interruptions.
+
+Equally retired was the little grass-grown path that branched off from
+the central gravelled path which divided the vegetable from the fruit
+garden.  Here, by stooping down, one was hidden from prying eyes that
+looked from the windows by the thick rows of gooseberry bushes and
+raspberry canes that lined the path.  It was my favourite spot, for
+there grew a delicious gooseberry that I counted above all
+gooseberries, small and hairy and yellow, with a delicate flavour that
+is as vivid to-day as if the forty years that lie between now and then
+were but a day.  By this path, too, grew the greengage trees.  With
+caution, one could safely sample the fruit, and at the worst one was
+sure to find some windfalls among the strawberry beds beyond the
+gooseberry bushes.
+
+I loved that little grass-grown path for its seclusion as well as for
+its fruit.  Here, with "Monte Cristo" or "Hereward the Wake," or "The
+Yellow Frigate," or a drawing-board, one could forget the tyrannies of
+school and all the buffets of the world.  Here was the place to take
+one's griefs.  Here it was that I wept hot tears at the news of
+Landseer's death--Landseer, the god of my young idolatry, whose dogs
+and horses, deer and birds I knew line by line through delighted
+imitation.  It seemed on that day as though the sun had gone out of the
+heavens, as though the pillars of the firmament had suddenly given way.
+Landseer dead!  What then was the worth of living?  But the wave of
+grief passed.  I realised that the path was now clear before me.  While
+Landseer lived I was cribbed, cabined, confined; but now----  My eyes
+cleared as I surveyed the magnificent horizon opening out before me.  I
+must have room to live with this revelation.  The garden was too narrow
+for such limitless thoughts to breathe in.  I stole from the gate that
+led to the road by the pump and sought the wide meadows and the
+riverside to look this vast business squarely in the face.  And for
+days the great secret of my future that I carried with me made the
+burden of a dull, unappreciative world light.  Little did those who
+treated me as an ordinary idle boy know.  Little did my elder brother,
+who ruled me with a rod of iron, realise that one day, when I was
+knighted and my pictures hung thick on the Academy walls, he would
+regret his harsh treatment!
+
+But to return to the garden.  The egg-plum tree had no favour in my
+sight.  Its position was too open and palpable.  And indeed I cared not
+for the fruit.  It was too large and fleshy for my taste.  But the
+apple trees!  These were the chief glory of the garden.  Winter apple
+trees with fruit that ripened in secret; paysin trees with fruit that
+ripened on the branches, fruit small with rich crimson splashes on the
+dark green ground; hawthorndean trees with fruit, large, yellow-green,
+into which the teeth crunched with crisp and juicy joy.  There was one
+hawthorndean most thoughtfully situated behind the tool-shed.  And near
+by stood some props providentially placed there for domestic purposes.
+They were the keys with which I unlocked the treasure house.
+
+A large quince tree grew on the other side of the hedge at the end of
+the garden.  It threw its arms in a generous, neighbourly way over the
+hedge, and I knew its austere fruit well.  Some of it came to me from
+its owner, an ancient man, "old Mr. Lake," who on summer days used to
+toss me largess from his abundance.  The odour of a quince always
+brings back to me the memory of a sunny garden and a little old man
+over the hedge crying, "Here, my boy, catch!"
+
+I have said nothing of that side of the garden where the vegetables
+grew.  It was dull prose, relieved only by an occasional apple tree.
+The flowers in the fruit garden and by the paths were old-fashioned
+favourites, wallflowers and mignonette, stocks and roses.  And over the
+garden gate grew a spreading lilac whose tassels the bold militiamen,
+who camped not far away, would gaily pluck as they passed on the bright
+May days.  I did not resent it.  I was proud that these brave fellows
+in their red coats should levy tribute on our garden.  It seemed
+somehow to link me up with the romance of war.  By the kitchen door
+grew an elderberry tree, whose heavy and unpleasant odour was borne for
+the sake of the coming winter nights, when around the fire we sat with
+our hot elderberry wine and dipped our toast into the rich, steaming
+product of that odorous tree--nights when the winter apples came out
+from the chest, no longer hard and sour, but mellow and luscious as a
+King William pear in August, and when out in the garden all was dark
+and mysterious, gaunt trees standing out against the sky, where in the
+far distance a thin luminance told of the vast city beneath.
+
+I passed by the old road recently, and sought the garden of my
+childhood.  I sought in vain.  A big factory had come into the little
+town, and workmen's dwellings had sprung up in its train.  Where the
+garden had been there was now a school, surrounded by cottages, and
+children played on the doorsteps or in the little back yards, which
+looked on to other little back yards and cottages beyond.  My garden
+with its noble hedge and its solitude, its companionable trees and
+grass-grown paths, had vanished.  It was the garden of a dream.
+
+
+
+
+ALL ABOUT A DOG
+
+It was a bitterly cold night, and even at the far end of the bus the
+east wind that raved along the street cut like a knife.  The bus
+stopped, and two women and a man got in together and filled the vacant
+places.  The younger woman was dressed in sealskin, and carried one of
+those little Pekinese dogs that women in sealskin like to carry in
+their laps.  The conductor came in and took the fares.  Then his eye
+rested with cold malice on the beady-eyed toy dog.  I saw trouble
+brewing.  This was the opportunity for which he had been waiting, and
+he intended to make the most of it.  I had marked him as the type of
+what Mr. Wells has called the Resentful Employee, the man with a
+general vague grievance against everything and a particular grievance
+against passengers who came and sat in his bus while he shivered at the
+door.
+
+"You must take that dog out," he said with sour venom.
+
+"I shall certainly do nothing of the kind.  You can take my name and
+address," said the woman, who had evidently expected the challenge and
+knew the reply.
+
+"You must take that dog out--that's my orders."
+
+"I won't go on the top in such weather.  It would kill me," said the
+woman.
+
+"Certainly not," said her lady companion.  "You've got a cough as it
+is."
+
+"It's nonsense," said her male companion.  The conductor pulled the
+bell and the bus stopped.  "This bus doesn't go on until that dog is
+brought out."  And he stepped on to the pavement and waited.  It was
+his moment of triumph.  He had the law on his side and a whole busful
+of angry people under the harrow.  His embittered soul was having a
+real holiday.
+
+The storm inside rose high.  "Shameful"; "He's no better than a
+German"; "Why isn't he in the Army?"; "Call the police"; "Let's all
+report him"; "Let's make him give us our fares back"; "Yes, that's it,
+let's make him give us our fares back."  For everybody was on the side
+of the lady and the dog.
+
+That little animal sat blinking at the dim lights in happy
+unconsciousness of the rumpus of which he was the cause.
+
+The conductor came to the door.  "What's your number?" said one, taking
+out a pocketbook with a gesture of terrible things.  "There's my
+number," said the conductor imperturbably.  "Give us our fares
+back--you've engaged to carry us--you can't leave us here all night."
+"No fares back," said the conductor.
+
+Two or three passengers got out and disappeared into the night.  The
+conductor took another turn on the pavement, then went and had a talk
+with the driver.  Another bus, the last on the road, sailed by
+indifferent to the shouts of the passengers to stop.  "They stick by
+each other--the villains," was the comment.
+
+Someone pulled the bell violently.  That brought the driver round to
+the door.  "Who's conductor of this bus?" he said, and paused for a
+reply.  None coming, he returned to his seat and resumed beating his
+arms across his chest.  There was no hope in that quarter.  A policeman
+strolled up and looked in at the door.  An avalanche of indignant
+protests and appeals burst on him.  "Well, he's got his rules, you
+know," he said genially.  "Give your name and address."  "That's what
+he's been offered, and he won't take it."  "Oh," said the policeman,
+and he went away and took his stand a few yards down the street, where
+he was joined by two more constables.
+
+And still the little dog blinked at the lights, and the conductor
+walked to and fro on the pavement like a captain on the quarter-deck in
+the hour of victory.  A young woman, whose voice had risen high above
+the gale inside, descended on him with an air of threatening and
+slaughter.  He was immovable--as cold as the night and hard as the
+pavement.  She passed on in a fury of impotence to the three policemen,
+who stood like a group of statuary up the street watching the drama.
+Then she came back, imperiously beckoned to her "young man" who had sat
+a silent witness of her rage, and vanished.  Others followed.  The bus
+was emptying.  Even the dashing young fellow who had demanded the
+number, and who had declared he would see this thing through if he sat
+there all night, had taken an opportunity to slip away.
+
+Meanwhile the Pekinese party were passing through every stage of
+resistance to abject surrender.  "I'll go on the top," said the
+sealskin lady at last.  "You mustn't."  "I will."  "You'll have
+pneumonia."  "Let me take it."  (This from the man.)  "Certainly
+not"--she would die with her dog.  When she had disappeared up the
+stairs, the conductor came back, pulled the bell, and the bus went on.
+He stood sourly triumphant while his conduct was savagely discussed in
+his face by the remnant of the party.
+
+Then the engine struck work, and the conductor went to the help of the
+driver.  It was a long job, and presently the lady with the dog stole
+down the stairs and re-entered the bus.  When the engine was put right
+the conductor came back and pulled the bell.  Then his eye fell on the
+dog, and his hand went to the bell-rope again.  The driver looked
+round, the conductor pointed to the dog, the bus stopped, and the
+struggle recommenced with all the original features, the conductor
+walking the pavement, the driver smacking his arm on the box, the
+little dog blinking at the lights, the sealskin lady declaring that she
+would not go on the top--and finally going....
+
+"I've got my rules," said the conductor to me when I was the last
+passenger left behind.  He had won his victory, but felt that he would
+like to justify himself to somebody.
+
+"Rules," I said, "are necessary things, but there are rules and rules.
+Some are hard and fast rules, like the rule of the road, which cannot
+be broken without danger to life and limb.  But some are only rules for
+your guidance, which you can apply or wink at, as common sense
+dictates--like that rule about the dogs.  They are not a whip put in
+your hand to scourge your passengers with, but an authority for an
+emergency.  They are meant to be observed in the spirit, not in the
+letter--for the comfort and not the discomfort of the passengers.  You
+have kept the rule and broken its spirit.  You want to mix your rules
+with a little goodwill and good temper."
+
+He took it very well, and when I got off the bus he said "Good night"
+quite amiably.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
+
+I hope the young American soldier, with whom we are becoming so
+familiar in the street, the tube and the omnibus, has found us as
+agreeable as we have found him.  We were not quite sure whether we
+should like him, but the verdict is very decisively in the affirmative.
+It has been my fortune to know many Americans in the past, but they
+were for the most part selected Americans, elderly persons, statesmen,
+writers, diplomatists, journalists, and so on.  Not having been in
+America I had not realised what the plain, average citizen, especially
+the young citizen, was like.  Now he is here, walking our streets and
+rubbing shoulders with us in sufficient numbers for a general
+impression to be taken.  It is a pleasant impression.  I like the air
+of plenty that he carries with him, the well-nourished body, the sense
+of ease with himself and the world, the fund of good nature that he
+seems to have at command, the frankness of bearing, and, what was least
+expected, the touch of self-conscious modesty that is rarely absent.
+
+If I may say so without offending him, he seems extraordinarily
+English.  Physically he is rather bulkier than the average English
+youth, and his accent distinguishes him; but these differences only
+serve to sharpen the impression that he is one of ourselves who has
+been away somewhere--in a civilised land, where the larder is full, the
+schools plenty, and the family life homely and cordial.  It is very
+rare that you see what you would call a foreign face in the uniform.
+This is singular in view of the mighty stream of immigration from
+Continental countries that has been flowing for three-quarters of a
+century into the melting pot of the United States; but I do not think
+the fact can be doubted.  The blood is more mixed than ours, but the
+main current is emphatically British.
+
+Perhaps the difference that is observable could be expressed by saying
+that the American is not so much reminiscent of ourselves as of our
+forebears.  He suggests a former generation rather than this.  We have
+grown sophisticated, urban, and cynical; he still has the note of the
+country and of the older fashions that persist in the country.  Lowell
+long ago pointed out that many of the phrases which we regarded as
+American slang were good old East Anglian words which had been taken
+out by the early settlers in New England and persisted there after they
+had been forgotten by us.  And in the same way the moral tone of the
+American to-day is like an echo from our past.  He preserves the
+fervour for ideals which we seem to have lost.  There is something of
+the revivalist in him, something elemental and primitive that responds
+to a moral appeal.
+
+It is this abiding strain of English Puritanism which is responsible
+for the tidal wave of temperance that has swept the United States.
+Already nearly half the States have gone "bone dry," and it is
+calculated that, perhaps in two years, certainly in five, with the
+present temper in being, the whole of the Union will have banished the
+liquor traffic.  A moral phenomenon of this sort might have been
+possible in the England of two or three generations ago; it is
+unthinkable in the moral atmosphere of to-day.  The industrial machine
+has dried up the spring of moral enthusiasm.  It will only return by a
+new way of life.  Perhaps the new way of life is beginning in the
+allotment movement which is restoring to us the primal sanities of
+nature.  We may find salvation in digging.
+
+It is sometimes said that the American is crude.  It would be truer to
+say that he is young.  He has not suffered the disenchantment of an old
+and thoroughly exploited society.  We have the qualities of a middle
+aged people who have lost our visions and are rather ashamed to be
+reminded that we ever had any.  But a youthful ardour and buoyancy is
+the note of the American.  He may think too much in the terms of
+dollars, but he has freshness and vitality, faith in himself, a boyish
+belief in his future and a boyish zest in living.  His good temper is
+inexhaustible, and he has the easy-going manner of one who has plenty
+of time and plenty of elbow-room in the world.
+
+For contrary to the common conception of him as a hurrying, bustling,
+get-on-or-get-out young man, he is leisurely both in speech and action,
+cool and unworried, equable of mood, little subject to the extremes of
+emotion, bearing himself with a solid deliberateness that suggests
+confidence in himself and inspires confidence in him.  You feel that he
+will neither surprise you, nor let you down.
+
+Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his accessibility.  The
+common language, of course, is a great help, and the common traditions
+also.  You are rarely quite at home with a man who thinks in another
+language than your own.  The Tower of Babel was a great misfortune for
+humanity.  But it is not these things which give the American his
+quality of immediate and easy intercourse.  There is no ice to break
+before you get at him.  There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and
+hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what
+social footing you are to stand.  You are on him at once--or rather he
+is on you.  He comes into the open, without reserves of manner, and
+talks "right ahead" with the candour and ease of a man who is at home
+in the world and at home with you.  He is free alike from intellectual
+priggishness and social aloofness.  He is just a plain man talking to a
+plain man on equal terms.
+
+It is the manner of the New World and of a democratic society in which
+the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of
+a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private
+citizen next year.  It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick
+Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln.  "He treated me as a
+man," said Douglass after his visit to the President.  "He did not let
+me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our
+skins."  It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had
+to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners.  He
+treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and an
+equal, and because the difference in the colour of their skins had no
+more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the
+colour of their ties or the shape of their boots.
+
+The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of
+his traits.  It gives the sense of a man who is born free--free from
+the irritating restraints, embarrassments and artificialities of a
+society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they
+still prevail in most European countries.  Perhaps Germany is the most
+flagrant example.  It used to be said by Goethe that there were
+twenty-seven different social castes in Germany, and that none of them
+would speak to the caste below.  And Mr. Gerard's description of the
+Rat system suggests that the stratification of society has increased
+rather than diminished since the days of Goethe.
+
+The disease is not so bad in this country; but we cannot pretend that
+we have the pure milk of democracy.  No people which tolerates titles,
+and so deliberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and
+false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, unobstructed
+intercourse of a real democracy like that of America.  It was said long
+ago by Daniel O'Connell that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a
+poker except its occasional warmth."  It is a caricature, of course,
+but there is truth in it.  We are icy because we are uncertain about
+each other--not about each other as human beings, but about each
+other's social status.  We have got the spirit of feudalism still in
+our bones, and our public school system, our titles, and our
+established Church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up
+society into social orders which are the negation of democracy.
+
+And as if we had not enough of the abomination, we are imitating the
+German Rat system with the grotesque O.B.E.  We shall get stiffer than
+ever under this rain of sham jewellery, and shall not be fit to speak
+to our American friends.  But we shall still be able to admire and envy
+the fine freedom and human friendliness which is the conspicuous gift
+of these stalwart young fellows who walk our streets in their
+flat-brimmed hats.
+
+Perhaps when the account of the war is made up we shall find that the
+biggest credit entry of all is this fact that they did walk our streets
+as comrades of our own sons.  For over a century we two peoples,
+talking the same language and cherishing the same traditions of
+liberty, have walked on opposites sides of the way, remembering old
+grudges, forgetting our common heritage, forgetting even that we gave
+the world its first and its grandest lead in peace by proclaiming the
+disarmament of the Canadian-United States frontier.  Now the grudges
+are forgotten, and we have found a reconciliation that will never again
+be broken, and that will be the corner-stone of the new world-order
+that is taking shape in the furnace of these days.
+
+
+
+
+'APPY 'EINRICH
+
+The waiter certainly was rather slow, or perhaps it was that we were
+hungry and impatient.  In any case, I apologised to my guest, a young
+fellow home on leave, and explained that the waiter was entitled to be
+a little absent-minded, for he had lost two sons in the war and his
+only remaining son had been invalided out of the Army, a permanent
+wreck.
+
+"He tells me," I said, "that the boy never talks about the war or his
+experiences.  He just seems silent and numbed.  All that they know is
+that he killed five Germans, and that he is sorry for one of them.  It
+happened while he was on patrol.  There had been a good deal of
+indignation at that part of the line because there had been cases
+reported in which 'hands up' had been a trick for ensnaring some of our
+men, and the order had been given that the signal was to be ignored and
+those making it shot at sight.  It was twilight and a young German
+soldier was seen running forward with his hands up.  The patrol fired
+and he fell.  He was quite unarmed and alone.  On his body they found
+letters from his sweetheart in England--old letters that he had
+apparently carried with him all through the war.  They showed that he
+had been at work at some place in London and had been engaged to be
+married when the war broke out."
+
+"Yes," said my companion, as the waiter came up with the fish.  "Yes,
+when the enemy turns from an abstraction to an individual you generally
+find there's something that makes you hate this killing business.  I
+don't know that I have felt more sorry for any man's death in this war
+than for that of a German.
+
+"You've been to F----, haven't you?  You know that bit of line north of
+the M---- road that you reach by the communication trench that is
+always up to your knees in mud no matter how dry the weather is.  You
+remember how close the lines are to each other at that point--not forty
+yards apart?  I was there in a dull season."
+
+"You were lucky," I said.  "It isn't often dull there."
+
+"No, but it was then.  The Boche would drop over an occasional
+whiz-bang as a reminder, and he'd have his usual afternoon cock-shy
+over our heads at the last pinnacle standing on the ruins of the
+cathedral in the town behind us.  But really there was nothing doing,
+and we got rather chummy with the fellows over the way.  We'd put up a
+target for them, and they'd do the same for us.  They'd got some decent
+singers among them, and we'd shout for the 'Hate' song or 'Wacht am
+Rhein' or 'Tannenbaum' or something of that sort and they always
+obliged, and we gave them the best we had back.
+
+"Yes, we got quite friendly, and one morning one of their men got up on
+the parapet over the way, bowed very low, and shouted 'Goot morning.'
+Our men answered, 'Morgen, Fritz.  How goes it?' and so on.  He was a
+big fat fellow, with glasses, and a good-humoured face, and to our
+great joy he began to sing a song in broken English.  And after he had
+finished we called for more.  He had a real gift for comedy; seemed one
+of those fellows who are sent into the world with their happiness ready
+made.  He laughed a great gurgling laugh that made you laugh to hear
+it.  Our chaps gave him no end of applause, and called for his name.
+He beamed and bowed, said 'Thank you, genteelmen,' and said that his
+name was Heinrich something or other.
+
+"So we called him 'Appy 'Einrich,' and whenever our men were bored and
+things had gone to sleep someone would sing out 'We want 'Einrich.
+Send us 'Appy 'Einrich to give us a song.'  And up would come Heinrich
+on to the parapet, red and smiling and bowing like a _prima donna_.
+And off he would start with his programme.  He always seemed willing
+and evidently greatly enjoyed his popularity with our fellows.
+
+"This went on for some time, and then one day we got the news that we
+were to be relieved at once.  We were to clear out that night and our
+place was to be taken by a Scotch regiment.  You need not be told that
+we were glad.  Life in the trenches when there is nothing doing is
+about as deadly a weariness as man has invented.  We got our kit
+together and when night fell and our relief had come we marched back
+under the stars through F---- towards B----.
+
+"We had been too much occupied with the prospect of release to give a
+thought to the fellows over the road or to Heinrich.  I remembered him
+afterwards and hoped that someone had told the new men that Heinrich
+was a good sort and would always give them a bit of fun, if he was
+asked, or even if he wasn't asked.
+
+"Some weeks afterwards at B---- I ran across a man in the Scotch
+regiment which had followed us in the trenches on the M---- road, and
+we talked about things there.  'And how did you get on with Heinrich?'
+I asked.  'Heinrich?' he said, 'Who is he?'  'Why, surely,' said I,
+'you know Heinrich, the fat fellow across the way, who gets up on the
+parapet and says "Goot morning," and sings comic songs?'  'Never heard
+of him,' he said.  'Ah,' I said, 'he would have heard we were relieved
+and didn't find you so responsive a crowd as we were.'  'Never heard of
+him,' he repeated--then, after a pause, he added, 'There was an
+incident the morning after we took over the line.  Some of our fellows
+saw a bulky Boche climbing on to the parapet just across the way and
+had a little target practice, and he went down in a heap.'  'That was
+him,' I said, 'that was 'Appy 'Einrich.  What a beastly business war
+is, and what ungrateful beggars we were to forget him!'
+
+"Yes, a beastly business, killing men," he added.  "I don't wonder the
+waiter's son doesn't want to talk about it.  We shall all be glad to
+forget when we come out of hell."
+
+
+
+
+ON FEAR
+
+I am disposed to agree with Captain Dolbey that the man who knows no
+fear exists only in the imagination of the lady novelist or those who
+fight their battles at the base.  He is invented because these naive
+people suppose that a hero who is conscious of fear ceases to be a
+hero.  But the truth surely is that there would be no merit in being
+brave if you had no fear.  The real victory of the hero is not over
+outward circumstance, but over himself.  One of the bravest men of our
+time is a man who was born timid and nervous and suffered tortures of
+apprehension, and who set himself to the deliberate conquest of his
+fears by challenging every danger that crossed his path and even going
+out of his way to meet the things he dreaded.  By sheer will he beat
+down the enemy within, and to the external world he seemed like a man
+who knew no fear.  But the very essence of his heroism was that he had
+fought fear and won.
+
+It is time we got rid of the notion that there is anything
+discreditable in knowing fear.  You might as well say that there is
+something discreditable in being tempted to tell a falsehood.  The
+virtue is not in having no temptation to lie, but in being tempted to
+lie and yet telling the truth.  And the more you are tempted the more
+splendid is the resistance.  Without temptation you may make a plaster
+saint, but not a human hero.  That is why the familiar story of Nelson
+when a boy--"Fear! grandmother.  I never saw fear.  What is it?"--is so
+essentially false.  Nelson did some of the bravest things ever done by
+man.  They were brave to the brink of recklessness.  The whole episode
+of the battle of Copenhagen was a breathless challenge to all the
+dictates of prudence.  On the facts one would be compelled to admit
+that it was an act of uncalculating recklessness, except for one
+incident which flashes a sudden light on the mind of Nelson and reveals
+his astonishing command of himself and of circumstance.  When the issue
+was trembling in the balance and every moment lost might mean disaster,
+he prepared his audacious message of terms to the Crown Prince ashore.
+It was a magnificent piece of what, in these days, we should call
+camouflage.  When he had written it, a wafer was given him, but he
+ordered a candle to be brought from the cockpit and sealed the letter
+with wax, affixing a larger seal than he ordinarily used.  "This," said
+he, "is no time to appear hurried and informal."  With such triumphant
+self-possession could he trample on fear when he had a great end in
+view.  But when there was nothing at stake he could be as fearful as
+anybody, as in the accident to his carriage, recorded, I think, in
+Southey's "Life of Nelson."
+
+That incident of young Swinburne's climb of Culver Cliff, in the Isle
+of Wight, expresses the common-sense of the matter very well.  At the
+age of seventeen he wanted to be a cavalry officer, and he decided to
+climb Culver Cliff, which was believed to be impregnable, "as a chance
+of testing my nerve in the face of death which could not be surpassed."
+He performed the feat, and then confessed his hardihood to his mother.
+
+"Of course," he said, "she wanted to know why I had done such a thing,
+and when I told her she laughed a short sweet laugh, most satisfactory
+to the young ear, and said, 'Nobody ever thought you were a coward, my
+boy.'  I said that was all very well, but how could I tell till I
+tried?  'But you won't do it again?' she said.  I replied, 'Of course
+not--where would be the fun?'"
+
+It was not that he had no fear: it was that he wanted to convince
+himself that he was able to master his fear when the emergency came.
+Having discovered that he had fear under his control there was no sense
+in taking risks for the mere sake of taking them.
+
+Most fears are purely subjective, the phantoms of a too vivid mind.  I
+was looking over a deserted house situated in large grounds in the
+country the other day.  It had been empty since the beginning of the
+war.  Up to then it had been occupied by a man in the shipping trade.
+On the day that war was declared he rushed into the house and cried,
+"We have declared war on Germany; I am ruined."  Then he went out and
+shot himself.  Had his mind been disciplined against panic he would
+have mastered his fears, and would have discovered that he had the luck
+to be in a trade which has benefited by the war more, perhaps, than any
+other.
+
+In this case it was the sudden impact of fear that overthrew reason
+from its balance, but in other cases fear is a maggot in the brain that
+grows by brooding.  There is a story of Maupassant's, which illustrates
+how a man who is not a coward may literally die of fright, by dwelling
+upon fear.  He had resented the conduct of a man in a restaurant, who
+had stared insolently at a lady who was with him.  His action led to a
+challenge from the offender, and an arrangement to meet next morning.
+When he got home, instead of going to bed, he began to wonder who his
+foe was, to hunt for his name in directories, to recall the cold
+assurance of his challenge, and to invest him with all sorts of terrors
+as a marksman.  As the night advanced he passed through all the stages
+from anxious curiosity to panic, and when his valet called him at dawn
+he found a corpse.  Like the shipowner, he had shot himself to escape
+the terrors of his mind.
+
+It is the imaginative people who suffer most from fear.  Give them only
+a hint of peril, and their minds will explore the whole circumference
+of disastrous consequences.  It is not a bad thing in this world to be
+born a little dull and unimaginative.  You will have a much more
+comfortable time.  And if you have not taken that precaution, you will
+do well to have a prosaic person handy to correct your fantasies.
+Therein Don Quixote showed his wisdom.  In the romantic theatre of his
+mind perils rose like giants on every horizon; but there was always
+Sancho Panza on his donkey, ready to prick the bubbles of his master
+with the broadsword of his incomparable stupidity.
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING CALLED THOMPSON
+
+Among my letters this morning was one which annoyed me, not by its
+contents, but by its address.  My name (for the purposes of this
+article) is Thomson, but my correspondent addressed me as Thompson.
+Now I confess I am a little sensitive about that "p."  When I see it
+wedged in the middle of my name I am conscious of an annoyance
+altogether disproportioned to the fact.  I know that taken in the lump
+the Thompsons are as good as the Thomsons.  There is not a pin to
+choose between us.  In the beginning we were all sons of some Thomas or
+other, and as surnames began to develop this man called himself Thomson
+and that man called himself Thompson.  Why he should have spatchcocked
+a "p" into his name I don't know.  I daresay it was pride on his part,
+just as it is my pride not to have a "p."
+
+Or perhaps the explanation is that offered by Fielding, the novelist.
+He belonged to a branch of the Earl of Denbigh's family, but the
+Denbighs spelt their family name Feilding.  When the novelist was asked
+to explain the difference between the rendering of his name and theirs,
+he replied: "I suppose they don't know how to spell."  That is probably
+the case of the Thompsons.  They don't know how to spell.
+
+But whatever the origin of these variations we are attached to our own
+forms with obstinate pride.  We feel an outrage on our names as if it
+were an outrage on our persons.  It was such an outrage that led to one
+of Stevenson's most angry outbursts.  Some American publisher had
+pirated one of his books.  But it was not the theft that angered him so
+much as the misspelling of his name.  "I saw my book advertised as the
+work of R. L. Stephenson," he says, "and I own I boiled.  It is so easy
+to know the name of a man whose book you have stolen, for there it is
+full length on the title-page of your booty.  But no, damn him, not he!
+He calls me Stephenson."  I am grateful to Stevenson for that word.  It
+expresses my feelings about the fellow who calls me Thompson.
+Thompson, indeed!
+
+I felt at this moment almost a touch of sympathy with that snob, Sir
+Frederic Thesiger, the uncle of the first Lord Chelmsford.  He was
+addressed one day as "Mr. Smith," and the blood of all the Thesigers
+(whoever they may have been) boiled within him.  "Do I look like a
+person of the name of Smith?" he asked scornfully, and passed on.  And
+as the blood of all the Thomsons boils within me I ask, "Do I look like
+a person of the name of Thompson?  Now do I?"  And yet I suppose one
+may fall as much in love with the name of Smith as with the name of
+Thesiger, if it happens to be one's own.  I should like to try the
+experiment on Sir F. E. Smith.  I should like to address him as Sir
+Frederic Thesiger and see how the blood of all the Smiths would take it.
+
+It is, I suppose, the feeling of the loss of our identity that annoys
+us when people play tricks with our names.  We want to be ourselves and
+not somebody else.  We don't want to be cut off from our ancestry and
+the fathers that begat us.  We may not know much about our ancestors,
+and may not care much about them.  Most of us, I suppose, are in the
+position of Sydney Smith.  "I found my neighbours," he said, "were
+looking up their family tree, and I thought I would do the same, but I
+only got as far back as my great-grandfather, _who disappeared
+somewhere about the time of the Assizes_."  If we go far enough back we
+shall all find ancestors who disappeared about the time of the Assizes,
+or, still worse, ought to have disappeared and didn't.  But, such as
+they are, we belong to them, and don't want to be confounded with those
+fellows, the Thompsons.
+
+And there is another reason for the annoyance.  To misspell a man's
+name is to imply that he is so obscure and so negligible that you do
+not know how to address him and that you think so meanly of him that
+you need not trouble to find out.  It is to offer him the subtlest of
+all insults--especially if he is a Scotsman.  The old prides and
+hatreds of the clans still linger in the forms of the Scotch names, and
+I believe you may make a mortal enemy of, let us say, Mr. Macdonald by
+calling him Mr. M'Donald or _vice versa_.  Indeed, I recall the case of
+a malignant Scotch journalist who used systematically to spell a
+political opponent's name M'Intosh instead of Mackintosh because he
+knew it made him "boil," as Stephenson made R. L. S. boil or as
+Thompson makes me boil.
+
+Nor is this reverence for our names a contemptible vanity.  I like a
+man who stands by his name and distrust the man who buys, borrows, or
+steals another.  I have never thought so well of Bishop Percy, the
+author of "Percy's Reliques," since I discovered that his real name was
+Piercy, and that, being the son of a grocer, he knocked his "i" out and
+went into the Church, in order to set up a claim to belong to the house
+of the Duke of Northumberland.  He even put the Percy arms on his
+monument in Dromore Cathedral, and, not content with changing his own
+name, altered the maiden name of his wife from Gutteridge to Godriche.
+I am afraid Bishop Percy was a snob.
+
+There are, of course, cases in which men change their names for
+reputable reasons, to continue a distinguished family association and
+so on; but the man who does it to cover up his tracks has usually
+"something rotten about him," as Johnson would say.  He stamps himself
+as a counterfeit coin, like M. Fellaire in Anatole France's "Jocaste."
+When he first started business his brass plate ran "Fellaire (de
+Sisac)."  On removing to new premises he dropped the parentheses and
+put up a plate with "Fellaire, de Sisac."  Changing residence again, he
+dropped the comma and became "Fellaire de Sisac."
+
+It is possible of course to go to the other extreme--to err, as it
+were, on the side of honesty.  I know a lady who began life with the
+maiden name of Bloomer.  She married a Mr. Watlington and became Mrs.
+Bloomer-Watlington.  Her husband died and she married a Mr. Dodd,
+whereupon she styled herself Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd.  She is
+still fairly young and Mr. Dodd, I regret to say, is in failing health.
+Already I have to write her name in smallish characters to get it into
+a single line on the envelope.  I see the time approaching when I shall
+have to turn over and write, let us say,
+
+[Illustration: handwritten "Mrs. Bloomer-Watlington-Dodd"]
+
+There is no need to be so aggressively faithful to one's names as all
+this.  It is hard on your children and trying to your friends, who may
+have difficulty in remembering which husband came before the others.
+After all, a name is only a label, and if it is honest the shorter it
+is the better.
+
+But the spirit of the thing is right.  Let us avoid disguises.  Let us
+stick to our names, be they ever so humble.  Let us follow the great
+example of Cicero.  His name originated with an ancestor who had a nick
+or dent at the tip of his nose which resembled the opening in a
+vetch--_cicer_.  When he was standing for public office some anxious
+friends suggested that the young man should assume a nobler name, but
+he declined, saying that he would make the name of Cicero more glorious
+than the Scauri or Catuli.  And grandly did he redeem the promise.  The
+Scauri and the Catuli live to-day only by the fact that Cicero once
+mentioned them, while we know Cicero far better than we know our next
+door neighbour.  It is a good precedent for Thomson.  I have a mind to
+make that name outlast the Cecils and Marlboroughs, if not the
+Pyramids.  And cursed be he who desecrates it with a "p."
+
+
+
+
+ON THINKING FOR ONE'S SELF
+
+A friend of mine, to whom I owe so much of my gossip that I sometimes
+think that he does the work and I only take the collection, told me the
+other day of an incident at a picture exhibition which struck me as
+significant of a good deal that is wrong with us to-day.  He observed
+two people in ecstasies before a certain landscape.  It was quite a
+nice picture, but my friend thought their praises were extravagant.
+Suddenly one of the two turned to the catalogue.  "Why, this is not the
+Leader picture at all," said she.  "It is No. So-and-so."  And
+forthwith the two promptly turned away from the picture they had been
+admiring so strenuously, found No. So-and-So, and fell into raptures
+before that.
+
+Now I am not going to make fun of these people.  I am not going to make
+fun of them because I am not sure that I don't suffer from their
+infirmity.  If I don't I am certainly an exceptional person, for the
+people who really think for themselves are almost as scarce as virtuous
+people were found to be in the Cities of the Plain.  We are most of us
+second-hand thinkers, and second-hand thinkers are not thinkers at all.
+Those good people before the picture were not thinking their own
+thoughts: they were thinking what they thought was the right thing to
+think.  They had the luck to find themselves out.  Probably it did not
+do them any good, but at least they knew privately what humbugs they
+were, what empty echoes of an echo they had discovered themselves to
+be.  They had been taught--heaven help them!--to admire those vacant
+prettinesses of Leader and they were so docile that they admired
+anything they believed to be his even when it wasn't his.
+
+It reminds me of the story of the two Italians who quarrelled so long
+and so bitterly over the relative merits of Tasso and Ariosto that at
+last they fought a duel.  And as they lay dying on the ground one of
+them said to the other, "And to think that I have never read a line of
+them."  "Nor I either," said the other.  Then they expired.  I do not
+suppose that story is true in fact, but it is true in spirit.  Men are
+always dying for other people's opinions, prejudices they have
+inherited from somebody else, ideas they have borrowed second-hand.
+Many of us go through life without ever having had a genuine thought of
+our own on any subject of the mind.  We think in flocks and once in the
+flock we go wherever the bellwether leads us.
+
+It is not only the ignorant who are afflicted with this servility of
+mind.  Horace Walpole was enraptured with the Rowley Poems when he
+thought they were the work of a mediaeval monk: when he found they were
+the work of Chatterton himself his interest in them ceased and he
+behaved to the poet like a cad.  Yet the poems were far more wonderful
+as the productions of the "marvellous boy" of sixteen than they would
+have been as the productions of a man of sixty.  The literary world of
+the eighteenth century thought Ossian hardly inferior to Homer; but
+when Macpherson's forgery was indisputable it dropped the imposture
+into the deepest pit of oblivion.  Yet, as poetry, it was as good or
+bad--I have never read it--in the one case as in the other.
+
+There is a delicious story told by Anatole France which bears on this
+subject.  In some examination in Paris the Military Board gave the
+candidates a piece of dictation consisting of an unsigned page.  It was
+printed in the papers as an example of bad French.  "Wherever did these
+military fellows," it was asked, "find such a farrago of uncouth and
+ridiculous phrases?"  In his own literary circles Anatole France
+himself heard the passage held up to laughter and torn to tatters.  The
+critic who laughed loudest, he says, was an enthusiastic admirer of
+Michelet.  Yet the passage was from Michelet himself, from Michelet at
+his best, from Michelet in his finest period.  How the great sceptic
+must have enjoyed that evening!
+
+It is not that we cannot think.  It is that we are afraid to think.  It
+is so much easier to go with the tide than against it, to shout with
+the crowd than to stand lonely and suspect in the midst of it.  Even
+some of us who try to escape this hypnotism of the flock do not succeed
+in thinking independently.  We only succeed in getting into other
+flocks.  Think of that avalanche of crazy art that descended on us some
+years ago, the Cubists and Dottists and Spottists and Futurists and
+other cranks, who filled London with their shows, and set all the
+"advanced" people singing their praises.  They were not real praises
+that expressed genuine feeling.  They were the artificial enthusiasms
+of people who wanted to join in the latest fashion.  They would rave
+over any imbecility rather than not be in the latest fashion--rather
+than not be thought clever enough to find a meaning in things that had
+no meaning.
+
+We are too timid to think alone, too humble to trust our own feeling or
+our own judgment.  We want some authority to lean up against, and when
+we have got it we mouth its shibboleths with as little independent
+thought as children reciting the "twice-times" table.  I would rather a
+man should think ignorantly than that he should be merely an echo.  I
+once heard an Evangelical clergyman in the pulpit, speaking of
+Shakespeare, gravely remark that he "could never see anything in that
+writer."  I smiled at his naivete, but I respected his courage.  He
+couldn't see anything in Shakespeare and he was too honest to pretend
+that he could.  That is far better than the affectations with which men
+conceal the poverty of their minds and their intellectual servility.
+
+In other days the man that dared to think for himself ran the risk of
+being burned.  Giordano Bruno, who was himself burned, has left us a
+description of the Oxford of his day which shows how tyrannical
+established thought can be.  Aristotle was almost as sacred as the
+Bible, and the University statutes enacted that "Bachelors and Masters
+who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five
+shillings for every point of divergence and for every fault committed
+against the Logic of the Organon."  We have liberated thought from the
+restraints of the policeman and the executioner since then, but in
+liberating it we have lost our reverence for its independence and
+integrity.  We are free to think as we please, and so most of us cease
+to think at all, and follow the fashions of thought as servilely as we
+follow the fashions in hats.
+
+The evil, I suppose, lies in our education.  We standardise our
+children.  We aim at making them like ourselves instead of teaching
+them to be themselves--new incarnations of the human spirit, new
+prophets and teachers, new adventurers in the wilderness of the world.
+We are more concerned about putting our thoughts into their heads than
+in drawing their thoughts out, and we succeed in making them rich in
+knowledge but poor in wisdom.  They are not in fear of the stake, but
+they are in fear of the judgment of the world, which has no more title
+to respect than those old statutes of Oxford which we laugh at to-day.
+The truth, I fear, is that thought does not thrive on freedom.  It only
+thrives under suppression.  We need to have our liberties taken away
+from us in order to discover that they are worth dying for.
+
+
+
+
+ON SAWING WOOD
+
+I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art
+of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in
+that task.  It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me
+that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn.
+The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the
+shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which
+David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the
+potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard.  I carried some of
+the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice
+and had forgotten the trick.  The saw would go askew, the points would
+dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
+
+Then I remembered.  You are over-doing it, I said.  You are making a
+mess of the job by too much energy--misdirected energy.  The trick of
+sawing wood is to work within your strength.  You are starting at it as
+if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke.  It is the
+mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania.  They bit off more
+than they could chew.  You are biting off more than you can chew, and
+you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you
+see.  The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand,
+to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the
+surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the
+wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to
+take your time and to avoid too much energy.  "Gently does it," is the
+motto.
+
+It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting.  I suppose I am one
+of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit.  We want a
+thing done, but we cannot wait to do it.  We rush at the task with all
+our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't
+surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance
+against the perversity of things.  It reminds me of the remark which a
+professional made to me at the practice nets long ago.  He was watching
+a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a
+whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself.  "He would make a
+good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three
+balls at once."  Recall any really great bowler you have known and you
+will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of
+ease and reserve power.  He was never spending up to the hilt.  There
+was always something left in the bank.  I do not speak of the
+medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless
+grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast
+bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth.  With all their
+physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had
+something in hand.  There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
+
+And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art
+consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically.  The
+temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab
+the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility.
+And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of
+the art reveal itself.  He will mow for three hours on end with never a
+pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his
+hip pocket.  What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful
+leisureliness of his action!  You could go to sleep watching him, and
+you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother
+falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning.  There is the experience
+of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the
+secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its
+patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the
+waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis.  At the bottom, all that John
+Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once.  He is
+always master of his job.
+
+And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when
+you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it
+were, too high?  You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go
+on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your
+futility.  You are playing over your strength.  You are screaming at
+the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly.  Then
+perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers,
+and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right
+flight and just the right direction and just the right length.  And you
+purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is
+moderation.
+
+It is so in all things.  The man who wins is the man who keeps cool,
+whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the
+impression that there is more in him than ever comes out.  I have seen
+many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but
+because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting
+it.  What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount
+Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of
+his style?  There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble
+disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same
+authority and finality of speech.  He conveys the sense of a mind
+disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest,
+understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves
+controversy silent.  Take his indictment of Germany as an example.  It
+was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany.
+Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a
+word of extravagance or violence.  It was the naked truthfulness of it
+that was so terrible and unanswerable.
+
+And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of
+war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his
+experiences in the first great battle of the Somme.  Yet the
+characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any
+straining after effect.  He just left the thing he described to speak
+for itself in all its bare horror.  It was a lesson we people who write
+would do well to remember.  Let us have fewer adjectives, good people,
+fewer epithets.  Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun.  It
+is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the
+argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable.  Was it not
+Stendhal who used to read the _Code Napoleon_ once a year to teach him
+its severity of style?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It is still raining.  I will return to the barn and practise the
+philosophy of moderation on those logs.
+
+
+
+
+VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME
+
+I
+
+A soldier, whom I met in the train the other day, said that the most
+unpleasant thing in his experience of the war was the bodies which got
+caught in the barbed wire in No Man's Land, and had to be left
+corrupting in the sun.  "It isn't healthy," he said.  There was no
+affectation of bravado in the remark.  He made it quite simply, as if
+he were commenting on the inclemency of the weather or the overheating
+of the carriage.  It was not the tragedy of the thing that affected
+him, but its insanitariness.  Yet he was obviously a kindly and humane
+man, and he talked of his home with the yearning of an exile.  "It
+makes you think something of your home," he said, speaking of the war.
+"I shan't never want to leave my home when I get out of this, and I
+shan't never grumble at the missus again," he added, as though
+recalling the past.
+
+I suppose everyone who has talked to soldiers back from the war has
+been struck by this attitude of mind towards death.  I remember a
+friend of mine, who was afterwards killed in the first battle of the
+Somme while trying to save one of his men who had been wounded, telling
+me of the horror of the first days of his experience of war, and of the
+subsequent calm with which he saw a man who had been his friend blown
+to pieces by his side.  "It is as though war develops another
+integument," he said.  "Your sensibilities are atrophied.  Your nerve
+ends are deadened.  Your normal feelings perish, and you become a part
+of a machine that has no feelings--only functions."
+
+In some measure the same phenomenon is apparent in the minds of most of
+us.  There has not been since the Great Plague swept Europe 250 years
+ago such a harvesting of untimely death as we have witnessed during the
+last two and a half years.  If the ghostly army of the slain were to
+file before you, passing in a rank of four for every minute that
+elapsed, you could sit and watch it day and night for five years
+without pause before the last of the phantom host had gone by.  And if
+behind the dead there followed the maimed, blind, and mentally
+shattered, you could sit on for twenty years and still the end of the
+vast procession would not be in sight.  If we had been asked three
+years ago whether the human mind could endure such a deliberate orgy of
+death in its most terrible form, we should have said the thing was
+incredible.  Yet we live through it without revolt, clamour about the
+shortage of potatoes, crowd the cinemas to see the latest extravagance
+of Charlie Chaplin, and have forgotten to glance at the daily tale of
+dead that fills the obscure columns of the newspapers--such of them as
+trouble any longer to give that tale at all.
+
+It is not merely that we avert our eyes from the facts.  That is
+certainly done.  You may go to see the "war pictures" at the cinema and
+come away without supposing that they represent anything more than a
+skilfully arranged entertainment--in which one attractive "turn"
+follows another in swift succession.  Once they actually showed a man
+falling dead, and there was a cry of indignation at such an outrage.
+Ten millions have fallen dead, but we must not look on one to remind us
+of the reality behind this pictured imposture.  There has never been a
+lie on the scale of these "war pictures" that leave out the war and all
+its sprawling ugliness, monotony, mutilation, and death.
+
+But it is not this fact that explains our apparent indifference to the
+Red Harvest.  We are like the dyer's hand.  We are subdued to what we
+work in.  Even those who have been directly stricken find that they
+bear the blow with a calm that astonishes themselves.  We have got into
+a new habit of thought about death--in a sense a truer habit of
+thought.  It used to be screened from the light of day, talked of in
+hushed voices, surrounded with the mystery and aloofness of a terrible
+divinity.  It has come into the open, brutal, naked, violent.  We
+accept it as the commonplace it is, instead of enveloping it in a cloud
+of tragic fear and strangeness.  The heart seems steeled to the blows
+of fate, looks death steadily in the face, understands that the
+individual life is merged in issues more vast than this little tale of
+years that, at the most, is soon told.
+
+It may be that, like the soldiers, our senses are only numbed by
+events, and that when we come out of the nightmare the old feelings
+will resume their sway.  But it will be long before they recover their
+former tyranny over the mind.  This generation has companioned Death
+too closely to see him again quite as the hooded terror of old.  And
+that, I think, is a gain.  I have always felt that Johnson's morbid
+attitude towards death was the weakest trait in a fine character, and
+that George Selwyn's perpetual absorption in the subject was a form of
+mental disease.  Montaigne, too, lived with the constant thought of the
+imminence of death, so much so that if, when out walking, he remembered
+something he wanted done, he wrote down the request at once, lest he
+should not reach home alive.  But he was quite healthy in his thought.
+It was not that he feared death, but that he did not want to be caught
+unawares.
+
+In this, as in most things, Caesar shone with that grand sanity that
+makes him one of the most illuminated secular minds in history.  He
+neither sought death nor shunned it.  When Hirtius and Pansa
+remonstrated with him for going unprotected by a bodyguard, he
+answered, "It is better to die once than always to go in fear of
+death."  That is the common-sense attitude--as remote from the spirit
+of the miser as from that of the spendthrift.  And that other comment
+of his on death is equally deserving of recall.  He was dining the
+night before his murder at the house of Decimus Brutus, who had joined
+the conspiracy against him.  As he sat dispatching his letters, the
+others talked of death and of that form of death which was preferable.
+One of the group asked Caesar what death he would prefer.  He looked up
+from his papers and said, "That which is least expected."  This was not
+an old man's weariness of life such as that which made Lord Holland,
+the father of Charles James Fox, write to Selwyn: "And yet the man I
+envy most is the late Lord Chamberlain, for he is dead and he died
+suddenly."  It was just the Roman courage that accepted death as an
+incident of the journey.
+
+Of that high courage the end of Antoninus Pius is an immortal memory.
+As the Emperor lay dying in his tent the tribune of the night-watch
+entered to ask the watchword.  "AEquanimitas," said Antoninus Pius, and
+with that last word he, in the language of the historian, "turned his
+face to the everlasting shadow."
+
+With that grave calm the philosophy of the ancient world touched its
+noblest expression.  It faced the shadow without illusions and without
+fear.  It met death neither as an enemy, nor as a friend, but as an
+implacable fact to be faced implacably.  Sir Thomas More met it like a
+bridegroom.  In all the literature of death there is nothing comparable
+with Roper's story of those last days in the Tower.  Who can read that
+moving description of the farewell with his daughter Margaret (Roper's
+wife) without catching its pity and its glory?  "In good faythe,
+Maister Roper," said stout Sir William Kingstone, the gaoler, "I was
+ashamed of myself that at my departing from your father I found my
+harte soe feeble and his soe stronge, that he was fayne to comfort me
+that should rather have comforted him."  And when Sir Thomas Pope comes
+early on St. Thomas' Even with the news that he is to die at nine
+o'clock that morning and falls weeping at his own tidings--"Quiet
+yourselfe, Good Maister Pope," says More, "and be not discomforted; for
+I trust that we shall once in heaven see eche other full merily, where
+we shalbe sure to live and love togeather, in joy full blisse
+eternally."  And then, Pope being gone, More "as one that had beene
+invited to some solempne feaste, chaunged himself into his beste
+apparrell; which Maister Leiftenante espyinge, advised him to put it
+off, sayinge that he that should have it was but a javill (a common
+fellow: the executioner).  What, Maister Leiftenante, quothe he, shall
+I accompte him a javill that shall doe me this day so singular a
+benefitt?  Nay, I assure you, were it clothe of goulde, I would
+accompte it well bestowed upon him, as St. Ciprian did, who gave his
+executyoner thirtye peeces of golde....  And soe was he by Maister
+Leiftenante brought out of the Tower and from thence led towardes the
+place of execution.  Wher, goinge up the scaffold, which was so weake
+that it was readye to fall, he said merilye to Maister Leiftenante, I
+praye you, Maister Leiftenante, see me safe uppe and for my cominge
+down let me shift for myselfe.  Then desired he all the people there
+aboute to pray for him, and to bare witnes with him that he should now
+there suffer deathe, in and for the faith of the Holy Catholicke
+Churche.  Which donne, he kneeled downe; and after his prayers sayed,
+turned to the executioner, and with a cheerfull countenance spake thus
+unto him: 'Plucke uppe thy spiritts, manne, and be not affrayde to doe
+thine office; my necke is very shorte, take heede, therfore, thou
+strike not awrye for savinge of thine honesty.'  So passed Sir Thomas
+More out of this worlde to God, upon the very same daye (the Ntas. of
+St. Peter) in which himself had most desired."
+
+The saint of the pagan world and the saint of the Christian world may
+be left to share the crown of noble dying.
+
+
+II
+
+I had rather a shock to-day.  I was sitting down to write an article on
+a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point
+of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor of
+_The Star_, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more
+attractive hare.  It was a letter announcing my lamented demise.  There
+was no doubt about it.  There was the date and there was the name (a
+nice name, too), and there were the circumstances all set out in black
+and white.  And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no
+obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had
+adorned.
+
+Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain's famous
+remark in similar circumstances, "greatly exaggerated."  I am not dead.
+I am not half dead.  I am not even feeling poorly.  I had a tooth out a
+week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for
+ever so long.  I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long
+ago that I had almost forgotten the circumstance.  Moreover, as all the
+people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even
+if I had been on board.  And I wasn't on board, for I had left at the
+previous port of call.  It was a narrow escape, but I can't pretend
+that I wasn't saved.  I was.  But though I am most flagrantly and
+aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of
+myself as if I were dead.  I find it quite an agreeable diversion.  Not
+that I am morbid.  I do not share my friend Clerihew's view, expressed
+in his chapter on Lord Clive in that noble work "Biography for
+Beginners."  You may remember the chapter.  If not, it is short enough
+to repeat:
+
+  What I like about Clive
+  Is that he is no longer alive.
+  There's something to be said
+  For being dead.
+
+That is overdoing the thing.  What I find agreeable is being alive and
+thinking I am dead.  You have the advantage of both worlds, so to
+speak.  In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears
+over myself.  I have wept at my own grave-side.  I have composed my own
+obituary notice, and I don't think I have ever turned out a more moving
+piece of work.  I have met my friends and condoled with them over my
+decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they
+were quite nice.  Some of them made me think that I might write up the
+obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late
+lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the
+few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous,
+kindly, wise, humorous, generous character--in a word, let myself go a
+bit more.  Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should
+be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I
+was one of the people that he could do without.  But then Old
+Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead.  I
+discounted Grumpington.  I took no notice of Grumpington--the beast.
+
+And then I passed from the living world I had left behind to the
+contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case
+no subject for tears.  After all, said I, the world is not such a gay
+place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it.  I have
+left some dear friends behind, but they will pass the toll-gate, too,
+in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me.  "What
+dreams may come!"  Well, so be it.  I have no fear of the dreams of
+death, having passed through the dream of life, which was so often like
+a nightmare.  If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better
+dreams.  If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks.
+If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well.  "I see no
+such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters,
+"and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not
+make tiresome."  And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the
+circumstances of the departed Alpha to lament....
+
+Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you.  If you prick me I shall
+still bleed.  If you tickle me I shall still laugh.  And with due
+encouragement I shall still write.
+
+
+III
+
+I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my
+companion pointed to a group--a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper,
+two women and a child--sitting on a seat on the platform.  "There they
+are," he said.  "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless,
+you'll find them sitting there."  "What for?" I asked.  "Oh, in case
+there's a raid.  They are taking things in time; they are running no
+risks.  You'll see a few at most stations."  And as the train passed
+from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the
+platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular,
+and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.
+
+There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger,
+but these good people carry apprehension to excess.  We need not
+underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves
+ridiculous about them.  So far as the average individual life is
+concerned they are almost negligible.  Assuming that the circumference
+of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop
+two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated
+that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone
+of danger.  But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor
+twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs.  Let us assume, however, that
+they get up to an average of twenty bombs.  It will be over three
+hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril.  I do
+not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the
+streets when a raid is on.  It is true I may not get my turn for three
+hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my
+turn has come.  So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody.  It is
+foolish to take risks that you need not take.  But it is not less
+foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform,
+not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.
+
+This is carrying the fear of death to extremities.  I have referred to
+Caesar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what
+seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger.  In the end he
+was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is
+one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live.  You may, of
+course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess.  Smalley,
+in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of
+Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the
+late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that
+champagne."  "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington.  "Then why
+do you do it?"  "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather
+be ill now and then than always taking care of myself."  "Oh, you think
+that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?"  "Sir, if
+you will ask me then I will tell you.  I do not anticipate."
+
+I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the
+example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms.  He was
+not refusing, like Caesar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the
+sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain
+misery.  It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living,
+which is quite another thing.  But at least he got a present pleasure
+for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers,
+and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at
+all.  They only exist.  They are like Chesterfield in his later years.
+"I am become a vegetable," he said.  "I have been dead twelve years,
+but I don't want any one to know about it."  Those people in the Tube
+are quite dead, although they don't know about it.  What is more, they
+have never been alive.
+
+You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly.  You know that the
+Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps
+quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves
+of the past.  Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your
+heels.  A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or
+a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window.  You can't take a
+ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at
+the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy.  I have
+myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his
+companion at the wicket.  Why, those people so forlornly dodging death
+in the Tube were not out of the danger zone.  They were probably in
+more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality,
+and incubating death than they would have been going about their
+reasonable tasks in the fresh air above.  You may die from the fear of
+death.  I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously."
+There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going
+about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you
+are.  The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously.  Life is a
+dangerous calling, full of pitfalls.  You, getting the coal in the mine
+by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at
+hand.  You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the
+engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the
+ship stoking the fire--all alike are in an adventure that may terminate
+at any moment.  Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like
+men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in,
+not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand,
+declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our
+steps.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not
+fixed but fluctuating.  Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high;
+sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low.  There are people, no
+doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any
+appreciable difference to the fund.  It is as inexhaustible as the horn
+of Skrymir.  And there are others whose humility is so established that
+no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them.  But the generality of us go
+up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a
+hundred trifles good or bad.  We are like corks on the wave, sometimes
+borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circumstance, then
+sinking into the trough of the billows.  At this moment I am in the
+trough.  I have been passing through one of those chastening
+experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world.
+When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and
+push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous
+fellows.  However would the world get on without us? we say.  What
+would become of the office?  Who could put those schemes through that I
+have in hand?  What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without
+my judgment to lean on?  What would become of Jones if he no longer met
+me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk?  How
+would _The Star_ survive without...
+
+And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that
+we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with
+us there will be a mournful vacuum in society.  Then some day the
+bubble of our vanity is pricked.  We are gently laid aside, deflated
+and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.  Our empire has
+shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild
+dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic
+shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with
+dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back
+defeated and helpless.  And then follow the days--those peaceful
+days--of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look
+hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing,
+and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have
+had a bad shaking."
+
+These are the days of illumination.  Outside the buses rumble by, and
+you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from
+the great whirlpool.  And you realise that the mighty world is
+thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you.
+Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your
+absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul;
+Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though
+nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as
+happy with Brown; and _The Star_--well, _The Star_ ... yes, the painful
+fact has to be faced....  _The Star_ goes on its radiant path as though
+you had only been a fly on its wheel.
+
+It is a humbling experience.  This, then, was all your high-blown pride
+amounted to.  You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the
+river--a moment there, then gone for ever.  This is the foretaste of
+death.  When that comes the waters will just close over your head as
+they have closed now--a comment here and there, perhaps friendly,
+perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and--oblivion.  It is an old
+story--old as humanity.  You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the
+news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was
+received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part.
+It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."
+
+  "The Dean is dead (pray what is trumps?)"
+  Then "Lord have mercy on his soul!
+  (Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.)
+  Six deans, they say, must bear the pall,
+  (I wish I knew what king to call).
+  Madam, your husband will attend
+  The funeral of so good a friend?"
+  "No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight;
+  And he's engaged to-morrow night;
+  My Lady Club will take it ill
+  If he should fail her at quadrille.
+  He loved the Dean (I lead a heart);
+  But dearest friends, they say, must part.
+
+That is the way of it.  Your friend is dead: you heave a sigh and lead
+a heart.
+
+Listen to that thrush outside.  How he is going it!  He, too, on this
+bright March morning sings of the world's indifference--the
+indifference of the joyous, living world to those who have crept to
+their holes.  I hear in his voice the news of the coming of spring, and
+know that down at "the cottage" the crocuses are out in the garden and
+the dark beech woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing up
+into the blue like a flame of song.  How I have loved this pageantry of
+nature, these days of revelation and promise.  I used to think that I
+was a part of them, but now I know that the pageant goes forward in
+sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer in the audience.
+
+And so I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble and disillusioned.
+I have discovered that the world goes on very well without me, and I am
+not sure that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed to learn
+that salutary lesson.  When I return to the world I fancy I shall have
+lost some of my ancient swagger.  I shall feel like a modest intruder
+upon a society that has shown it has no need for me.  I may recover my
+feeling of importance in time, but in my secret heart I shall know that
+I am not the hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things.  I can
+skip off and no one is any the wiser.
+
+
+
+
+ON CLOTHES
+
+There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure
+of relief.  It is no longer necessary to lie awake o' nights thinking
+about your clothes.  There are some people, of course, who like
+thinking about their clothes.  They seem to regard themselves as
+perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you
+take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt.  When
+I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help
+overhearing snatches of a conversation which was going on between two
+women in the seat behind me.  It was conducted with great volubility
+and seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, I don't
+like that shade....  I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So's at
+Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always
+looks ... No, brocaded..."  And so on without a pause for the space of
+half an hour.
+
+I don't offer that conversation as representative.  I imagine that in
+the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely
+ornamental point of view than they ever did.  If you spend twelve hours
+a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a
+Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou'wester, or filling shells
+in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over
+your thoughts.  You will think more about comfort and less about
+finery.  And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a
+higher intelligence.  The more barbaric you are the more you regard
+dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of
+view of utility.  It is a hard saying for the West End of life.
+Spencer, to illustrate his point, mentions that the African attendants
+of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the
+weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up,
+and went about naked and shivering in the rain.
+
+A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible
+among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery.
+It is not good form among them to talk about dress--that is all.  But
+that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less
+continuously, is certain.  Pepys' Diary is strewn with such
+self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with
+gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God
+to make me able to pay for it."  He ought to have thought of that
+earlier.  No one is entitled to order fine clothes and then throw the
+responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty.  At least he might
+have prayed to God on the subject before approaching the tailor.  The
+case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous.  He was as vain as a
+peacock, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear
+bright clothes.  And his spirit is not dead among men.  Who can look
+upon the large white spats of ---- ---- as he comes down the floor of
+the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.
+
+I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not
+mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence).  I would be well-dressed
+myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way.  Like Squire
+Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion.  I find that with
+rare exceptions I dislike new fashions.  They disturb my tranquillity.
+They give me a nasty jolt.  I suspect that the explanation is that
+beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental
+conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old
+grass-grown turnpikes of habit.  It is no uncommon paradox.  Spurgeon
+had it like many others.  He was once rebuked by a friend for his
+political activity on the Liberal side.  Why did he yield to this
+weakness?  "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend.  "I do
+mortify him," said Spurgeon.  "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make
+him vote Liberal.  That mortifies him."  I am conscious of the same
+conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an
+easy winner.
+
+It was so with Carlyle.  He raged like a bear with a sore head against
+the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes
+he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply
+wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him
+to send another "as before."  And so, by taking no thought about the
+matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who
+worry about clothes do not achieve.  The flavour of the antique world
+hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord
+Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our
+grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous
+generation.
+
+I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past.  I am just an
+ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the
+main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it
+were, a forlorn relic of the year before last.  My taste in ties, I am
+assured, is execrable.  My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots
+have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness.  I put on whatever is
+handiest without a thought of artistic design.  My pockets bulge with
+letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people
+that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned.  I am perfectly
+happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who
+has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial
+poem.  I lunched with such a man a few days ago.  I could not help
+envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his
+eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him
+shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder.  It may have
+been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything
+that it oughtn't to have been.  I shall never know.
+
+And it is a great joy to be able not to care.  The war has lightened
+the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no
+matter how much we try.  It is no longer an offence to appear a little
+secondhand.  It is almost a virtue.  You may wear your oldest clothes
+and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments.  You may
+claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of
+patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the
+coffin of the Kaiser.  A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has
+sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a
+suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in
+believing the statement.
+
+That is the sort of example that makes me happy.  It gives me the
+feeling that I am at last really in the fashion--the fashion of old and
+unconsidered clothes.  It is a very comfortable fashion.  It saves you
+worry and it saves you money.  I hope it will continue when the war has
+become a memory.  And if we want a literary or historical warrant for
+it we may go to old Montaigne.  When he was a young fellow without
+means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to
+show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to
+his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his
+chateaux to speak for him.  That is the way of us unfashionable folk.
+We leave our estates and our chateaux to speak for us.
+
+
+
+
+THE DUEL THAT FAILED
+
+"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know
+they are beaten.  No, that is not quite so banal a prophecy as it
+seems.  Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat.  They only
+end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing.  The
+Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were
+beaten.  All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth
+of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain.  But the man or the
+nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the
+certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat.  I have
+never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall.
+The French are at their best in the hour of defeat.  There was nothing
+so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of
+1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost
+that was the most heroic phase of the war.  But the bully collapses
+when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.
+
+"Let me tell you a story.  In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went
+to Heidelberg--_alt Heidelberg du feine_.  You know that jolly city,
+and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with
+the scars of old sword cuts.  I was one of a group of young fellows
+from different countries who were studying at the University, and who
+fraternised in a strange land.
+
+"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in
+England, and one of our group, a young Polish nobleman who had a great
+passion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London.
+If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the
+kind that had appeared in Heidelberg.  You may remember how strange it
+seemed even to the English public when it first came out.  We had got
+accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' looked ridiculous
+and babyish by comparison.
+
+"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his 'Safety'
+created something like a sensation.  The sports of the 'Englander' were
+held in contempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the last
+straw.  It was the very symbol of the childishness of a nation given
+over to the sport of babes.
+
+"One day the Pole was riding out on his bicycle when he passed a couple
+of students, who shouted opprobrious epithets at the 'Englander' and
+his preposterous vehicle.  The Pole turned round, flung some verbal
+change back at them, and rode on his way.
+
+"That evening as he sat in his room he heard steps ascending the
+stairs, and there entered two students clothed in all the formality of
+grave business.  They had brought the Pole a challenge to a duel from
+each of the two young fellows with whom he had exchanged words on the
+road.  The challenges were couched in the most ruthless terms.  This
+was to be no mere nominal satisfaction of honour.  It was to be a duel
+without guards or any of those restrictions that are common in such
+affairs.  The weapon was the sword, and the time-limit eight days.
+
+"The seconds having fulfilled their errand went away, leaving the Pole
+in no cheerful frame of mind.  He was only a very indifferent
+swordsman, and had never cultivated the sport of duelling.  Now
+suddenly he was faced with the necessity of fighting a duel in which he
+would certainly be beaten, and might be killed, for he understood the
+intentions of the challengers.  It was clearly not possible for him to
+acquire in a week such expertness with the sword as would give him a
+chance of victory.
+
+"In this emergency he came along to the little group of which I have
+spoken.  We were playing cards when he entered, but stopped when we saw
+that something unusual had happened.  He told us the story of the
+bicycle ride and the sequel.  What was he to do?  He must fight, of
+course, but how was he to get a dog's chance?
+
+"Now the oldest of our group, and by far the most worldly wise, was an
+American.  He listened to the Pole and agreed that there was no time
+for him to become sufficiently expert with the sword.  'But can you
+shoot?' he asked the Pole.  Yes, he was not a bad shot.  The American
+took up an ace from a pack of cards and held it up.  'Could you,
+standing where you are, hit that ace with a revolver?'  'I am not sure
+that I could hit it,' answered the Pole, 'but I should come very near
+it.'  'That's all right,' said the American.  'Now to business.  These
+fellows have forgotten something.  They're so used to fighting with the
+sword that they've forgotten there's such a thing as the revolver.  And
+they're trying to bluff you into their own terms.  They've forgotten,
+or don't choose to remember, that, as the challenged party, you have
+choice of weapons.  Now we'll draw up an answer to this letter,
+accepting the challenge, claiming the choice of weapons, choosing the
+revolver, and putting the conditions as stiff as we can make 'em.'
+
+"So we sat around the American and composed the reply.  And I can
+assure you it had a very ugly look.  The Pole signed it with great
+delight, and the American and I as seconds delivered it.
+
+"Then we waited.  One day passed without an answer--two, three, four,
+five, six.  Still no answer.  We were enjoying ourselves.  On the
+evening of the seventh day the seconds reappeared at the Pole's rooms.
+They brought no acceptance of his challenge, but an impudent demand for
+the original conditions.  The Pole came along to us with the news.
+'That's all right,' said the American.  'We've got them on the run.
+Now to clinch the business.'  And once more we sat round in great glee
+to draft the reply.  It was as hot as we knew how to make it.  It
+breathed death in every syllable, and it gave the Germans eight days to
+prepare for the end at the muzzle of the revolver.
+
+"Again we waited, and again the days passed without a sign.  Then on
+the eve of the eighth day the seconds once more appeared.  I was
+present with the Pole at the time.  I have never seen a more forlorn
+pair than those seconds made as they entered.  Their principals, driven
+into a corner, faced with the alternative of fighting with weapons
+which did not assure them of victory or of accepting the humiliation of
+running away, had decided to run away.  They would not fight on the
+conditions offered by the Pole, and the seconds were a spectacle of
+humiliation.  Their apologies to us struggled with their indignation at
+their principals and they went away a chastened spectacle.  That night
+we had a gay gathering with the American in the chair, and I think the
+incident must have got wind abroad, for thenceforward the Pole rode his
+Safety in peace and in triumph....
+
+"You may think that story is a trifle.  Well, it is.  But I think it
+has some bearing on the end of the war."
+
+
+
+
+ON EARLY RISING
+
+There is no period of the year when my spirit is so much at war with
+the flesh as this.  For the winter is over, and the woods are browning
+and the choristers of the fields are calling me to matins--and I do not
+go.  Spiritually I am an early riser.  I have a passion for the dawn
+and the dew on the grass, and the "early pipe of half-awakened birds."
+On the rare occasions on which I have gone out to meet the sun upon the
+upland lawn or on the mountain tops I have experienced an emotion that
+perhaps no other experience can give.  I remember a morning in the
+Tyrol when I had climbed Kitzbulhorn to see the sun rise.  I saw the
+darkness changing to chill grey, but no beam of sunlight came through
+the massed clouds that barred the east.  Feeling that my night climb
+had been in vain, I turned round to the west, and there, by a sort of
+magical reflection, I saw the sunrise.  A beam of light, invisible to
+the east, had pierced the clouds and struck the mountains in the west.
+It seemed to turn them to molten gold, and as it moved along the black
+mass it was as though a vast torch was setting the world aflame.  And I
+remembered that fine stanza of Clough's:
+
+  And not through eastern windows only,
+    When morning comes, comes in the light.
+  In front the dawn breaks slow, how slowly.
+    But westward, look, the land is bright.
+
+And there was that other dawn which I saw, from the icy ridge of the
+Petersgrat, turning the snow-clad summits of the Matterhorn, the
+Weisshorn, and Mont Blanc to a magic realm of rose-tinted battlements.
+
+And there are others.  But they are few, for though I am spiritually a
+son of the morning, I am physically a sluggard.  There are some people
+who are born with a gift for early rising.  I was born with a genius
+for lying in bed.  I can go to bed as late as anybody, and have no joy
+in a company that begins to yawn and grow drowsy about ten o'clock.
+But in the early rising handicap I am not a starter.  A merciful
+providence has given me a task that keeps me working far into the night
+and makes breakfast and the newspaper in bed a matter of duty.  No
+words can express the sense of secret satisfaction with which I wake
+and realise that I haven't to get up, that stern duty bids me lie a
+little longer, listening to the comfortable household noises down below
+and the cheerful songs outside, studying anew the pattern of the
+wall-paper and taking the problems of life "lying-down" in no craven
+sense.
+
+I know there are many people who have to catch early morning buses and
+trams who would envy me if they knew my luck.  For the ignoble family
+of sluggards is numerous.  It includes many distinguished men.  It
+includes saints as well as sages.  That moral paragon, Dr. Arnold, was
+one of them; Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," was
+another.  Bishop Selwyn even put the duty of lying in bed on a moral
+plane.  "I did once rise early," he said, "but I felt so vain all the
+morning and so sleepy all the afternoon that I determined not to do it
+again."  He stayed in bed to mortify his pride, to make himself humble.
+And is not humility one of the cardinal virtues of a good Christian?  I
+have fancied myself that people who rise early are slightly
+self-righteous.  They can't help feeling a little scornful of us
+sluggards.  And we know it.  Humility is the badge of all our tribe.
+We are not proud of lying in bed.  We are ashamed--and happy.  The
+noblest sluggard of us all has stated our case for us.  "No man
+practises so well as he writes," said Dr. Johnson.  "I have all my life
+been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with
+great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any
+good."
+
+Of course we pay the penalty.  We do not catch the early worm.  When we
+turn out all the bargains have gone, and we are left only with the odds
+and ends.  From a practical point of view, we have no defence.  We know
+that an early start is the secret of success.  It used to be said of
+the Duke of Newcastle that he always went about as though he had got up
+half an hour late, and was trying all day to catch it up.  And history
+has recorded what a grotesque failure he was in politics.  When someone
+asked Nelson for the secret of his success he replied: "Well, you see,
+I always manage to be a quarter of an hour in front of the other
+fellow."  And the recipe holds good to-day.  When the inner history of
+the battle of the Falkland Islands is told in detail it will be found
+that it was the early start insisted on by the one man of military
+genius and vision we have produced in this war that gave us that
+priceless victory.
+
+And if you have ever been on a walking tour or a cycling tour you know
+that early rising is the key of the business.  Start early and you are
+master of your programme and your fate.  You can linger by the way,
+take a dip in the mountain tarn, lie under the shadow of a great rock
+in the hot afternoon, and arrive at the valley inn in comfortable time
+for the evening meal.  Start late and you are the slave of the hours.
+You chase them with weary feet, pass the tarn with the haste of a
+dispatch bearer though you are dying for a bathe, and arrive when the
+roast and boiled are cleared away and the merry company are doing a
+"traverse" around the skirting board of the billiard room.  Happy
+reader, if you know the inn I mean--the jolly inn at Wasdale Head.
+
+No, whether from the point of view of business or pleasure, worldly
+wisdom or spiritual satisfaction, there is nothing to be said in our
+defence.  All that we can say for lying in bed is what Foote--I think
+it was Foote--said about the rum.  "I went into a public-house," he
+said, "and heard one man call for some rum because he was hot, and
+another call for some rum because he was cold.  Then I called for some
+rum because I liked it."  We sluggards had better make the same clean
+breast of the business.  We lie in bed because we like it.  Just that.
+Nothing more.  We like it.  We claim no virtue, ask no indulgence,
+accept with humility the rebukes of the strenuous.
+
+As for me, I have a licence--nay, I have more; I have a duty.  It is my
+duty to lie in bed o' mornings until the day is well aired.  For I burn
+the midnight oil, and the early blackbird--the first of our choir to
+awake--has often saluted me on my way home.  Therefore I lie in bed in
+the morning looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the
+busy world without a twinge of conscience.  If you were listening, you
+would hear me laugh softly to myself as I give the pillow another shake
+and thank providence for having given me a job that enables me to enjoy
+the privileges of the sluggard without incurring the odium that he so
+richly deserves.
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING KNOWN
+
+I went into a tailor's in the West End the other day to order some
+clothes.  My shadow rarely darkens a tailor's door, and this tailor's
+door it had never darkened before.  I was surprised therefore, when,
+after the preliminaries of measurement were finished, the attendant, in
+reply to a question about a deposit, said "No deposit is necessary.
+The name is good enough."  I confess I felt the compliment as an
+agreeable shock.  The request for a deposit always jars on me.  I know
+that "business is business" and that in this wilderness of London it is
+no dishonour to be unknown and no discredit to be formally discredited;
+but yet ... And here was a man I had never seen before and who had
+never seen me, who was prepared to execute my order without any sordid
+assurances of character on my side--simply on my name.  Such a tribute
+needed some recognition.  "It will save trouble," said I, "if I pay the
+account now."  And I did so.  I fancy the action was a little childish,
+but I couldn't help it.  I really couldn't.  I simply had to do
+something civil, and this was the only civil thing that occurred to me.
+
+And then I went out of the shop feeling that I had come suddenly into
+an unexpected and pleasing inheritance.  I knew now something of the
+emotion of Mr. Sholes, the eminent author:
+
+  Whenever down Fleet Street he strolls
+    The policemen look hurriedly up
+  And say "There's the great Mr. Sholes,
+    Who writes such delectable gup."
+
+I might not be able to write such delectable gup as Mr. Sholes, but I
+could write gup good enough to make that fellow in the shop trust me
+for a six-guinea suit.  I did not observe that the policeman took any
+particular notice of me as I passed along.  But--"Give me time," said
+I, addressing the shade of Mr. Sholes.  "Give me time.  I have made a
+start in the handicap of the famous.  I am known to that excellent
+shopman.  I may yet be known (favourably and admiringly) to the police.
+I may yet walk the Strand with a nimbus that will challenge Mr. Horatio
+Bottomley and Mr. Pemberton Billing and the illustrious great.  I may
+yet have the agreeable consciousness that heads are turning in my
+direction, and that the habitual Londoner is saying to his country
+cousin: 'That, my dear Jane, is the eminent Mr. Alpha of the Plough who
+writes those articles in _The Star_.' ... Give me time, Mr. Sholes.
+Give me time."
+
+But as I walked on and as that momentary flash of the limelight faded
+from me I became less confident that I wanted to live in it.  I became
+sensible of the pleasures of obscurity.  I strolled along untroubled by
+the curious, and enjoyed the pageant of the pavement, the display of
+dress, the diversity of faces, the play of light in the eyes, the
+incidents of the streets.  I paused in front of shops and fell into a
+reverie before the window of the incomparable Mr. Bumpus--the window of
+stately books in noble bindings.  I was submerged in the tide of the
+common life and felt the enfranchisement of the obscure.  I could walk
+which way I pleased and no one would remark me; pause when I liked and
+be unobserved.  But--why, here is Lord French of Ypres coming along.
+See how heads are turning and fingers are pointing and tongues are
+wagging--"That, my dear Jane..."  What a nuisance this limelight must
+be!
+
+And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust yourself out of
+doors--unless you have the courage of John Burns, who does not care two
+pins who sees him or talks about him.  The King, poor man, could no
+more walk along this pavement as I am doing, rubbing shoulders with the
+people and enjoying the comedy of life, than he could write to the
+newspapers, or address a crowd from the plinth of the Nelson Monument,
+or go to a booking-office and take a ticket for the Tube, or into an
+A.B.C. shop and ask for a cup of tea, or any of the thousand and one
+things that I am at liberty to do and enjoy doing without let or
+hindrance, comment or disturbance.  He is the prisoner of publicity.
+He is pursued by the limelight, as the fleeing soul of the poet was
+pursued by the hound of heaven.  He can't look in Bumpus's.  He can't
+go on to an allotment and dig undisturbed.  You cannot have limelight
+playing about an allotment.  In fact, the more one thinks of it the
+more impoverished his life seems, and so in a lesser degree with all
+the eminent people who are pursued by the photographer, mobbed in the
+streets, fawned on by their friends, slandered by their enemies,
+exalted or defamed in the Press, and dissected in every club
+smoking-room and bar parlour.
+
+But, you will say, think of the glory of having your name handed down
+to posterity.  It is a very questionable privilege.  I am not much
+concerned about posterity.  I respect it, as Wordsworth respected it.
+"What has posterity done for me that I should consider it?" some one
+said to him, and he replied, "No, but the past has done much for you."
+It was a just reminder of our obligations.  But it is a lean ambition
+to pose for posterity.  I cannot thrill to the vision of the trumpeter
+Fame blowing my name down the corridors of time while I sleep on
+unheeding in
+
+  My patrimony of a little mould
+  And entail of four planks.
+
+I am not warmed by the idea of a marble image standing with
+outstretched arm in the Abbey or sitting on a horse for ever in the
+streets, wet or fine, or perched up on a towering column to be a
+convenience to vagrant birds.  If fame is often a nuisance to the
+living, it is only an empty echo for the dead.  Spare me marble
+trappings, good friends, and give me the peace of forgetfulness.
+
+By the time I had reached the end of my walk and my ruminations, I felt
+less cordial towards that man in the shop.  I wished, on the whole,
+that he had asked for the deposit.
+
+
+
+
+ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND
+
+I was rummaging among my books this morning when I came across Frey's
+map of the Bernese Oberland, and forthwith forgot the object of my
+search in the presence of this exhilarating discovery.  Mr. Chesterton,
+I think, once described how he evoked the emotions of a holiday by
+calling a cab, piling it up with luggage, and driving to the station.
+Then, having had his sensation, he drove home again.  It seemed to me
+rather a poor way of taking an imaginative holiday.  One might as well
+heat an empty oven in order to imagine a feast.  The true medium of the
+spiritual holiday is the map.  That is the magic carpet that whisks you
+away from this sodden earth and unhappy present to sunny lands and
+serener days.
+
+There are times when books offer no escape from the burden of things,
+when, as Mr. Biglow says
+
+  I'm as unsoshul as a stone,
+  And kind o' suffercate to be alone;
+
+but there are no circumstances in which a map will not do the trick.  I
+do not care whether it is a map of the known or the unknown, the
+visited or the unvisited, the real or the fanciful.  It was the jolly
+map which Stevenson invented in an idle hour which became the seed of
+"Treasure Island."  That is how a map stimulated his fancy and sent it
+out on a career of immortal adventure.  And though you have not
+Stevenson's genius for describing the adventure, that is what a map
+will do for you if you have a spark of the boy's love of romance left
+in your soul.  It is the "magic casement" of the poet.  I have never
+crossed the Atlantic in the flesh, but, lord, what spiritual adventures
+I have had with maps in the enchanted world on the other side!  I have
+sailed with Drake in Nombre Dios Bay, and navigated the grim straits
+with Magellan, and lived with the Incas of Peru and the bloody Pizarro,
+and gone up the broad bosom of the Amazon into fathomless forests, and
+sailed through the Golden Gates on golden afternoons, and stood with
+Cortes "silent upon a peak in Darien."  I know the Shenandoah Valley
+far better than I know Wimbledon Common, and have fought over every
+inch of it by the side of Stonewall Jackson, just as I have lived in
+the mazes of the Wilderness with Grant and Lee.
+
+Do not tell me I have never been to these places and a thousand others
+like them.  I swear that I have.  I have traversed them all in the
+kingdom of the mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy day
+(like this) I will go on a holiday more entrancing than any that Mr.
+Cook ever planned.  It is not taking tickets that makes the traveller.
+I have known people who have gone round the world without seeing
+anything, while Thoreau could stay in his back garden and entertain the
+universe.
+
+But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic of romance in them,
+maps of the places you have known have a fascination no less rich and
+deep.  They, too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of
+memory and not of the imagination.  You are back with yourself in other
+days and in other places and with other friends.  You may tell me that
+this was a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it looking out
+over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields with their stricken
+crops.  Nothing of the sort.  I spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with
+an incomparable companion.  Three weeks I put in, sir, three weeks on
+the glaciers.  See, there, on this glorious map of Frey's, is Muerren,
+from whence we started.  In front is the mighty snow mass of the
+Jungfrau, the Moench and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes
+whither we are bound.
+
+There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg and there is the
+Muetthorn hut, standing on the bit of barren rock that sticks out from
+the great ice-billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier.  Do you remember,
+companion of mine, the mighty bowls of steaming tea we drank when we
+reached that haven of refuge?  And do you remember our start from the
+hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with our guide and with our
+lanterns lit--and the silence of our march over the snow and ice
+beneath the glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant
+avalanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over the ice-fields,
+and the unforgettable view as we reached the ridge of the Petersgrat
+and saw across the Rhone Valley the great mountain masses beyond--the
+Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest--touched to an
+unearthly beauty by the flush of the new-risen sun?  And the scramble
+up the Tschingelhorn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the
+moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal?  And then the days that
+followed in the great ice region behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent
+marches over pathless snows and by yawning crevasses, the struggle up
+peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, sometimes with other
+climbers who blew in across the snows from some remote adventure,
+sometimes alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where we
+paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood to boil our kettle?
+
+There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of a dizzy precipice.
+Do you remember the sunset we saw from thence, when out of the general
+gloom of the conquering night one beam from the vanished sun caught the
+summit of the Dom and made it gleam like a palace in the heavens or
+like the towers of the radiant city that Christian saw across the dark
+river?  And there at the end of the journey is the great glacier that
+leaps down, seven thousand feet, between the Schreckhorn and the
+Wetterhorn, to the gracious valley of Grindelwald.  How innocent it
+looks on this map, but what a day of gathering menace was that when we
+got caught between the impassable crevasses, and night came on and the
+rain came down and ... But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here....
+
+It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking Glass leapt up from our
+bed of hay in the Dolfuss hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the
+breakfast.  Outside, the rain fell in torrents and the clouds hung
+thick and low over glacier and peaks.  Our early start for the
+Gleckstein hut was thwarted.  Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and
+still the rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and ice.  Then
+the crest of the Finstraarhorn appeared through a rent in the clouds,
+patches of blue broke up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased.
+Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and plates and swept
+the floor of the hut, and then, shouldering our rucksacks and closing
+the door of the empty hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier.
+
+It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven hours' journey to
+the Gleckstein.  That seemed to leave ample margin; but do not trust
+guide-books in a season of drought when the crevasses are open.
+
+This wisdom, however, came later.  All through the morning we made
+excellent progress.  The sun shone, the clouds hung lightly about the
+peaks, the ice was in excellent condition.  Heinrich, who brought up
+the rear, occasionally broke into song.  Now, when Heinrich sings you
+know that all is well.  When he whistles you are in a tight place.  For
+the rest he is silent.  Otmar, his brother, is less communicative.  He
+goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting crevasses,
+testing snow-bridges to see if they will bear, occasionally pausing to
+consult his maps.  Once only did he burst into song that day--but of
+that later.  Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks.  In the hut
+he will make your tea and oil your boots and help Heinrich to wash your
+cups and sweep the floor.  But out in the open he is your master.  If
+you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear.  If you suggest a
+second breakfast before it is due his silence as he pounds forward
+ahead humiliates you.  If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the
+taut insistence of the rope.
+
+It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and sardines (white wine
+for Otmar and Heinrich).  The pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of
+taking out his pocket looking-glass and touching up his moustache ends
+and giving a flick to his eye-brows.  Heinrich is as big and brawny as
+an ox, but he has the soul of a dandy.
+
+It had been easy going on the furrowed face of the ice, but when we
+came to the snow slope that leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace
+slackened.  The snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our
+shins.  Otmar eased the passage up the slope by zigzagging, but it was
+one o'clock when we came face to face with the wall of snow, flanked by
+walls of rock, which form the "saddle."  Otmar led my companion over
+the rocks; but decided that Heinrich should bring me up the snow face.
+Step cutting is slow work, and though Otmar, having reached the top of
+the saddle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed round his
+waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible wall was surmounted, and
+we could look down the great glacier that plunged seven thousand feet
+down into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red roofs and
+pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists.
+
+We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pass; but we seemed,
+nevertheless, to have the day well in hand.  Four thousand feet down on
+a spur of the Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleckstein
+hut.  It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, but in these vast
+solitudes of ice and snow and rock, vision is deceptive.  The distant
+seems incredibly near, for the familiar measurements of the eye are
+wanting.
+
+The weather had changed again.  Clouds had settled on the mighty cliffs
+of the Schreckhorn on our left and the Wetterhorn on our right.  Mist
+was rolling over the pass; rain began to fall.  We cut short our lunch
+(cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our descent, making a
+wide detour of the glacier to the right in the direction of the
+Wetterhorn.  We descended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier,
+crossed an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and came in view
+of Grindelwald, lying like a picture postcard far down below--so
+immediately below that it seemed that one might fling a stone down into
+its midst.
+
+At half-past three it began to dawn on me that things were not going
+well.  Otmar had, during the past three weeks, been the most skilful of
+guides over most of the great glacier passes of the Oberland and up
+many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like the condition of the
+Grindtlwaldfirn.  The appalling slope of this great sea of ice makes a
+descent in normal times a task of difficulty.  But this year the long
+drought had left open all the yawning crevasses with which it is
+seamed, and its perils were infinitely increased.
+
+Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the maze, taking us across
+perilous snow bridges and cutting steps on knife-edges of ice where one
+looked down the glittering slope on one side, and into the merciless
+green-blue depths of the crevasse on the other.  But wherever he turned
+he was baulked.  Always the path led to some vast fissure which could
+be neither leapt nor bridged.  Once we seemed to have escaped and
+glissaded swiftly down.  Then the slope got steeper and we
+walked--steeper and Otmar began cutting steps in the ice--steeper and
+Otmar paused and looked down the leap of the glacier.  We stood silent
+for his verdict.  "It will not go."  We turned on the rope without a
+word, and began remounting our steps.
+
+It was half-past four.  The mist was thickening, the rain falling
+steadily.  Below, the red roofs and green pastures of Grindelwald
+gleamed in the sunlight of the valley.  Nearer, the slate roof of the
+Gleckstein on its spur of rock was still visible.  Two hours before it
+had seemed but a step to either.  Now they seemed to have receded to
+another hemisphere.
+
+For the first time there flashed through the mind the thought that
+possibly we should not reach the hut after all.  A night on the
+glacier, or rather on the dark ridges of the Wetterhorn!  A wet night,
+too.
+
+The same thought was working in Otmar's mind.  No word came from him,
+no hint that he was concerned.  But the whole bearing of the man was
+changed.  In the long hours of the morning he had led us listlessly and
+silently; now he was like a hound on the trail.  The tug of the rope
+became more insistent.  He made us face difficulties that he had
+skirted before; took us on to snow-bridges that made the mind reel;
+slashed steps with his ice axe with a swift haste that spoke in every
+stroke of the coming night.  Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge
+that came to a point between two crevasses, slipped back, and found
+myself in the crevasse, with my feet dancing upon nothing.  The rope
+held; Otmar hauled me out without a word, and we resumed our march.
+
+Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to prospect from above for a
+possible way out.  We followed at his call, but he led us into new
+mazes, down into a great cavern in the glacier, where we passed over
+the ruined walls and buttresses of an ice cathedral, emerging on the
+surface of the glacier again, only to find ourselves once more checked
+by impassable gulfs.
+
+It was now half-past five.  We had been three and a half hours in
+vainly attempting to find a way down the ice.  The mist had come thick
+upon us.  The peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; the
+hut was no longer visible.  Only an hour and a half of light remained,
+and the whole problem was still unsolved.  The possibility of a night
+on the ice or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty.  My
+strength was giving out, and I slipped again and again in the ice
+steps.  A kind of dull resignation had taken possession of the mind.
+One went forward in a stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but
+indifferent to all else.
+
+Otmar was now really concerned.  He came from a valley south of the
+Rhone, and was unfamiliar with this pass; but he is of a great strain
+of Alpine guides, is proud of his achievements--he had led in the first
+ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year--and to be
+benighted on a glacier would have been a deadly blow to his pride.
+
+He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direction of the ridge of
+the Wetterhorn that plunged down on our right.  We watched him skimming
+across crevasses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice for
+foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and vanishing into a couloir
+of the mountain--first depositing his rucksack on the rocks to await
+his return.  Five minutes passed--ten.  Heinrich startled the silence
+with an halloo--no answer.  A quarter of an hour--then, from far below,
+a faint cry came.
+
+"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on."  We hurried across the
+intervening ice, and met Otmar returning like a cat up the rocks.  Down
+that narrow slit in the mountain we descended with headlong speed.
+There were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to cross with
+negligible foot and hand holds, passages of loose rock where a careless
+move would have sent great stones thundering on the heads of those
+before.  Once Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a
+smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet.  Once he cried: "Quick: it is
+dangerous," and looking up at the crest of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge
+block of ice poised perilously above our downward path.
+
+The night was now upon us.  We were wet to the skin.  A thunderstorm of
+exceptional violence added to the grimness of the setting.  But we were
+down the ridge at last.  We raced across a narrow tongue of the glacier
+and were safe on the spur of rocks where we knew the Gleckstein hut to
+be.  But there was no light to guide us.  We scrambled breathlessly
+over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, each of us
+hardly visible to the other in the thickening mist, save when the blaze
+of lightning flashed the scene into sudden and spectral clearness.  At
+last we struck a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted
+the latch of the hut.
+
+"What is the time, Heinrich?"
+
+"Half-past eight."
+
+"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had been benighted?"
+
+Otmar did not hear.  But as he got the wood and made the fire, and
+emptied the rucksacks of our provisions, he began to sing in a pleasant
+tenor voice.  And Heinrich joined in with his full bass.
+
+And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and wrapped in blankets, we
+sat down to a glorious meal of steaming tea--in an iron teapot as large
+as a pail--tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam.
+
+"That was a narrow escape from a night on the mountains," I said.
+
+"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich.
+
+Otmar said nothing.
+
+Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of hay.
+
+"It is fine," he said.  "The Wetterhorn will go."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves still stand in the
+sodden fields.  But I have been a journey.  I have had three weeks in
+the Oberland--three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, the
+world that seems like a dream we once had, so remote has it become and
+so incredible.  I roll up my magic carpet and bless the man who
+invented maps for the solace of men.
+
+
+
+
+ON A TALK IN A BUS
+
+I jumped on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening and took a seat
+against the door.  Opposite me sat a young woman in a conductor's
+dress, who carried on a lively conversation with the woman conductor in
+charge of the bus.  There were the usual criticisms of the habits and
+wickedness of passengers, and then the conductor inside asked the other
+at the door how "Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was
+"sticking it out."
+
+"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said.
+
+"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," replied the other.
+
+"Have you seen her when she has her hat off?  She's pretty then."
+
+"Can't see what difference that would make."
+
+"She's got nice eyes."
+
+"Never see anything particular about her eyes."
+
+"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway."
+
+"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the pretty about
+her--not a little bit.  Pretty!"  She tossed her head and looked
+indignant, almost hurt, as though she had received some secret personal
+affront.
+
+I do not think she had.  It was more probable that on a subject about
+which she felt deeply she had suffered a painful shock.  She liked
+"Flo," thought her "a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not
+be permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sacred subject like
+"prettiness."
+
+The little incident interested me because it illustrated one of the
+great differences between the sexes.  You have only to try to turn that
+conversation into masculine terms to see how wide that difference is.
+Tom and Bill might have a hundred things to say about Jack.  They might
+agree that he was a liar or an honest chap, that he drank too much or
+didn't drink enough, that he was mean or generous; but there is one
+thing it would never occur to them to discuss.  It would never occur to
+them to discuss his looks, to talk about his eyes, to consider whether
+he was more beautiful with or without his hat.  They might say that he
+looked merry or miserable, sulky or pleasant, but that would have
+reference to Jack's character and moral aptitudes and not to any
+aesthetic consideration.
+
+But this conversation about "Flo" was entirely aesthetic.  The question
+of her moral traits only came in as a means of dodging the main issue.
+The main issue was whether she was pretty, and it was evidently a very
+important issue indeed.
+
+It is this interest of women in their own sex as works of art that
+distinguishes them from men.  Men have no interest in their own sex in
+that sense.  Sit on a bus and see what interests the male passenger.
+It is not his fellow males.  He does not sit and study their clothes,
+and make mental notes on their claims to beauty.  If he is interested
+in his fellow passengers at all it is the other sex that appeals to
+him.  His own sex has no pictorial attraction for him.  But a woman is
+interested in women and women only.  It is their clothes that her eye
+wanders over with mild envy or disapproval.  You almost hear her mind
+recording the price of that muff, those furs, the hat and the boots.
+At the end of her survey you feel that she knows what everything cost,
+what are the wearer's ambitions, social status, place of residence--in
+fact, all about her.  And she is equally concerned about her physical
+qualities.  She will watch a pretty face with open admiration, and pay
+it the same sort of tribute that she would pay to a beautiful picture
+or any other work of art.  "What a pretty woman!"  "What lovely hair
+that girl has!"
+
+This is not a peculiarity of our own people alone.  Not long ago I went
+with two French officers over a great munitions factory near Paris.  We
+were accompanied by a clever little woman who was secretary to the head
+of one of the departments, and who acted as guide.  We went through
+great shops where thousands of women were working, and as we passed
+along I noticed that every eye fell on the little woman.  I became so
+interested in this human fact that I forgot to give my attention to the
+machinery.  And to be honest I am always ready to turn away from
+machinery, which to me is much less interesting than human nature.  I
+think I can say with truth that not one woman in all those thousands
+failed to scan our guide or bothered to give one glance at the
+officers.  Yet they were fine fellows and obviously important persons,
+while the guide was commonplace in appearance and quite plainly dressed.
+
+There are of course women who dress and comport themselves with an eye
+to male admiration as well as female envy and appreciation.  They are
+the women of the bold eye, which is not the same thing as the brave
+eye.  But taking women in the lump, it is their own sex they are
+interested in.  They devote enormous attention to dress, but they do so
+for each other's enjoyment.  They have a passion for personal beauty,
+but it is the personal beauty of their own sex that appeals to them.
+No doubt there is a sexual motive underlying this fact.  It is the
+motive expressed in "'My face is my fortune, sir,' she said."  The
+desire to be pretty is ultimately the desire to be matrimonially
+fortunate.  Bill's success in life has no relation to his looks.  He
+may be as ugly as sin, but if he has strong arms, a good digestion, and
+a sound mind he will do as well as another.  Some of the plainest men
+in England have sat on the Woolsack.  Plain women, it is true, have
+come to eminence.  Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., is a
+case in point.  She herself was puzzled to explain her influence over
+that sour fanatic-libertine, for, as she said, "I have no beauty and he
+has not the faculty to appreciate my intelligence."  But the exceptions
+prove the rule.  Prettiness is the woman's commodity.  It is the badge
+of her servitude.  And behind that little conversation in the bus about
+"Flo's" claims to prettiness was a very practical, though unformed,
+consideration of her prospects in life.
+
+What will be the effect of the war upon "Flo" and her kind?  She has
+found that she has an independent, non-sexual importance to society,
+that she has a career which has nothing to do with prettiness, that she
+can win her bread with her mental and physical faculties as easily as a
+man.  She has tasted freedom and discovered herself.  The discovery
+will give her a new independence of outlook, a more self-confident view
+of her place in society, a greater respect for the hard practical
+things of life.  She will still desire to be pretty and to have the
+admiration of her sex, but the desire will have a sounder foundation
+than in the past It will no longer be her career.  It will be her
+ornament.  It will decorate the fact that she can run a bus as well as
+a man.
+
+
+
+
+ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT
+
+I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we
+shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall
+find against our names in the ledger of our life.  We shall discover
+that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping
+credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our
+failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on
+the credit side.  The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at
+all.  They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.
+
+
+Take Smithson Spinks--everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type.  What a
+reputation for generosity the fellow has!  What a grandeur of giving he
+exhales!  How noble his scorn for mean fellows!  How royal the flash of
+his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man,
+or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself!  No one hesitates
+to ask Smithson Spinks for anything.  He likes to be asked.  He would
+be hurt if he were not asked.  And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's
+generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside
+out.  The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but
+love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and
+envy of others.  You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the
+real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles
+when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle
+perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the
+part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad.  He believes in his own
+fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock.
+He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written
+in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY
+in plain black on the debit side.
+
+And I--let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person.
+But am I?  What will the ledger say?  I have a dreadful suspicion that
+it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve.
+I may--who knows?--only be truthful because I haven't courage enough
+for dissimulation.  It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but
+only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit.  It needs great courage
+to tell a lie which you have got to face out.  I could no more do it
+than I could dance on the point of a needle.
+
+Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton--the sheer
+unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing
+Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing
+judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous
+inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of
+exposure.  A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what
+courage!
+
+Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a
+chance.  I have no gift of dissimulation.  If I tried it I should
+flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates.  I could not bluff a
+rabbit.  No one would believe me if I told him a lie.  My eye would
+return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would
+refuse its office.  And therein is the worm that eats at my
+self-respect.  May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due
+to my fear of the eleventh commandment--that cynical rescript which
+runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"?  I hope it is not so, but I must
+prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of
+Jehoshaphat.  For they will be as candid about me and you as about
+Smithson Spinks.
+
+You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have
+shipped him, figuratively,
+
+  ... somewhere east of Suez
+  Where the best is like the worst,
+  Where there aren't no ten commandments,
+  And a man can raise a thirst--
+
+until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him
+from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with
+minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled
+governance of himself.  Then it will be found whether the virtues are
+diamonds or paste--whether they spring out of the ten commandments or
+out of the eleventh.  The lord Angelo in _Measure for Measure_ passed
+for a strict and saintly person--and I have no doubt believed himself
+to be a strict and saintly person--so long as he was under control, but
+when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared.  And note that
+subtle touch of Shakespeare's.  Angelo was not an ordinary libertine.
+He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only
+by virtue.  Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:
+
+  ... What is't I dream on?
+  O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
+  With saints dost bait thy hook!  Most dangerous
+  Is that temptation that doth goad us on
+  To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
+  With all her double vigour, art and nature
+  Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
+  Subdues me quite.
+
+His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the
+floodgates of viciousness.  What a paradox is man!  I think I have
+known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better
+than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.
+
+That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of
+sobriety.  Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into
+great trouble for saying so.  He was addressing a temperance meeting at
+a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have
+never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence
+of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who
+have fallen."  It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the
+stern teetotalers present.  "It's a shame," said one, "that he should
+be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord."  They did not
+like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and
+even got drunk.  They expected to have a large credit entry for not
+tippling.  Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale."
+If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from
+them you were virtuous.  It was a beautifully simple moral code, but
+virtue is not so easily catalogued.  It is not a negative thing, but a
+positive thing.  It is not measured by its antipathies but by its
+sympathies.  Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its
+names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before
+"religion and piety."
+
+And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling
+what virtue is there in not tippling?  The virtue is often with the
+tippler.  I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless,
+had been an heroic struggle with his enemy.  He was always falling, but
+he never ceased fighting.  And it is the fighting, I think, he will
+find recorded in the ledger--greatly to his surprise, for he had the
+most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral
+infirmity.
+
+It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a
+Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to
+steal half-a-crown.  He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no
+virtue in not stealing what you don't want.  That was what was wrong
+with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were
+the best:
+
+  Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steaels,
+  Them as 'as coaets to their backs an' taaekes their regular meaels.
+  Noae, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meael's to be 'ad--
+  Taaeke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.
+
+It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the
+temptation.  He will have found a much more complex system of
+book-keeping where he has gone.  I imagine him standing painfully
+puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the
+"valley of decision."
+
+
+
+
+ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER
+
+"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the
+man in the corner.
+
+"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.
+
+"I mean those Huns," said the other.
+
+"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier.  "He
+can't help hisself.  He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as
+we are, and he does the job same as we do.  But he'd jolly well like to
+chuck the business and go home.  Course he would.  Stands to reason.
+Anybody would."
+
+It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously
+felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier--a
+personal hatred of the individual enemy.  This man clearly did not hate
+the enemy.  Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant
+reason.  He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four
+times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice.  It was
+two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to
+see his people in the West of England.  He talked about his experiences
+with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things,
+quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of
+egotism.  He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at
+G----.  "Nobody can hold it," he said.  "We take it when we like, and
+Fritz, he takes it when _he_ likes.  That's all there is about it."  It
+was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always
+without any appearance of personal animus.
+
+I do not record the incident as unusual.  I record it as usual.  No one
+who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank
+or file, will dispute this.  In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse
+a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to
+do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters.  You
+have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate.  I
+have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more
+bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have
+heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of
+utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be
+found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the
+studies of be-spectacled professors.
+
+The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and
+suffering too close, to be consumed with hate.  If he could envy the
+other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him.  But he sees
+that Fritz is in no better plight than himself.  He is living in the
+mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine
+of war as himself.  He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering
+the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No
+Man's Land.  It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow.
+And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion.  The chord
+of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his
+enemy he ceases to hate him.
+
+But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this
+means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in
+consequence.  The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is
+an infantile delusion.  I should have much more confidence in that
+quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I
+should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and
+prove their patriotism by the violence of their language.  I have known
+many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I
+cannot recall one--not one--who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.
+
+The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the
+soldier's gospel at all.  There have been few greater soldiers in
+history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man.  He fought
+literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the
+doctrine of hate.  When the minister in the course of a sermon had
+expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor,
+there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.'  Do you think
+that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that
+teaching?"  And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I
+wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so?
+Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and
+leaving us to do the same."  And Lee stated his attitude generally when
+he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I
+believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights.  But
+I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never
+seen the day when I did not pray for them."
+
+There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's
+and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day.  In the
+current issue of _Punch_ I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of
+that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which
+he said:
+
+  But where you have met your equals,
+    Gun for gun and man for man,
+  We have noticed other sequels,
+    It was always you that ran.
+
+
+In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a
+report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:
+
+
+Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquieres were obtained by a
+German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a
+field gun single-handed until killed at his gun.  The great bravery of
+this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.
+
+
+The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain
+Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman.  He was
+little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled
+career of victory in the air.  He fought with a terrible skill, but he
+had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for
+the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary.  In one of
+his letters to his father he said:
+
+
+You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight.  Yes, I always let
+them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils.  I only
+scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the
+Huns.  He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his
+best.  Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but
+you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case
+of _them_.
+
+
+And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in
+another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual
+laughter:
+
+
+We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition.  There was
+nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing.  We
+couldn't help it--it was so ridiculous.  We flew side by side laughing
+at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other
+and went off.  He was a real sport was that Hun.
+
+
+That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited
+boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty,
+failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry
+laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.
+
+And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I
+shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day,
+even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there
+are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something
+nobler than hate.  The letter appeared in the _Cologne Gazette_ early
+in the war, and was as follows:
+
+
+Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these
+lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly.
+I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal
+packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French,
+English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.
+
+The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy.
+Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary,
+everyone expresses his displeasure.
+
+This is natural when one considers the position.  We know how victories
+are won.  We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained.
+We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield.  We
+rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection
+of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.
+
+And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not
+deserved to be derided in such a way.  Had they not fought so bravely
+we should not have had to register such losses.
+
+Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect
+here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is
+only calculated to cause disgust.  Such postcards are as much out of
+place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral.  Perhaps these
+lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards
+sent to our troops.
+
+
+I do not suppose they did.  I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home
+went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at
+the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit.  But it is not.
+There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not
+against the victims of war, but against the institution of war.  That
+is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+ON TAKING THE CALL
+
+Jane came home from the theatre last night overflowing with an
+indignation that even the beauty of a ride on the top of a bus in the
+air of these divine summer nights had not cooled.  It was not
+dissatisfaction with the play or the performance that made her boil
+with volcanic wrath.  It was the vanity of the insufferable
+actor-manager, who would insist on "taking the call" all the time and
+every time.  There were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed,
+but the more the audience called for them the more the preposterous
+"old-clo'" man of the stage came smirking before the curtain, rubbing
+his fat hands and creasing his fat cheeks.  "It was disgusting," said
+Jane.  "The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all night,
+and the audience were trying to level things up a bit by giving the
+interesting people a show, and this greedy cormorant snatched every
+crumb for himself.  I hate him.  He is a Hun."
+
+The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard about another
+actor-manager.  At the end of the play he went on the stage and found
+his company bending down in a circle and gazing intently at something
+on the floor.  "What are you looking at?" he asked.  "Oh," they chanted
+in chorus, "we're looking at a spot we've never seen before.  It's the
+centre of the stage."
+
+There are, of course, people who carry the centre of the stage with
+them.  It does not matter where they go or what they play: they
+dominate the scene.  "Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table,"
+and where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage.  He needed no
+placard to remind you that he was someone in particular.  You would no
+more have thought of turning the limelight on to him than you would
+have thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or the sun at
+midday.  He just appeared and everyone else became accessory to that
+commanding presence: he spoke and all other voices seemed like the
+chirping of sparrows.
+
+And so in other spheres.  Take the case of Mr. Asquith, for example, in
+relation to the House of Commons.  It does not matter where he sits.
+He may go to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre of
+the stage will go with him.  When he had sat down after delivering his
+first speech in opposition, one of the ablest observers in Parliament
+turned to me and said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of the
+House."  And that exactly expressed the feeling created by that
+authoritative manner, that masculine voice, that air of high detachment
+from the mere squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game.  He never
+seemed greater to the House than in the moment when he had
+fallen--never more its intellectual master, its most authentic voice,
+its wisest and most disinterested counsellor.
+
+It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, who come sprinting
+before the curtain after drenching themselves in the limelight on the
+stage.  They hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the
+applause.  The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking the call" are
+quite another breed.  You know the type, both on the stage and off.
+Take that eminent actor, Bluffington Phelps.  He shambles about the
+stage, his words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's
+under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances at the man with
+the limelight he is straining to catch the voice of the prompter at the
+flies.  But when it comes to "taking the call" there is not his
+superior on the stage.  He monopolises the applause as he monopolises
+the limelight; and by these artifices he has persuaded the public that
+he is an actor.  It is a glorious joke--
+
+  Hood an ass in reverend purple,
+  So that you hide his too ambitious ears,
+  And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
+
+
+It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some of the people all
+the time.  Mr. Bluffington Phelps knows that it is true.  He knows that
+there is a large part of the public, possibly the majority of the
+public, which is born to be fooled, which will believe anything because
+it hasn't the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd and
+which will always follow the ass with the longest ears and the loudest
+bray.
+
+It is the same off the stage.  The art of politics is the art of
+"taking the call."  Harley knew the trick perfectly.  Where anything
+was to be got, it was said of him, he always knew how to wriggle
+himself in; when any misfortune threatened he knew how to wriggle
+himself out.  He took the cheers and passed the kicks on to his
+colleagues.  His chivalrous spirit is not dead.  It is familiar in
+every country, but most of all in democratic countries.  We all know
+the type of politician who has the true genius for the limelight.  If
+the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is miserable.  "What has
+happened to the publicity department?  Has the fellow in charge of the
+limelight gone to sleep?  Wake him up.  Don't let the public forget me.
+If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em that my hat is two sizes
+larger than it was a year ago.  Tell 'em about my famous smile.  Tell
+'em about my dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable piety.
+Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every morning and never leave
+it until half-past seven the next morning.  Tell 'em anything you
+like--only tell 'em."
+
+If things go right, and there is applause in the house, he skips in
+front of the curtain to take the call.  "Thank you, gentlemen--and
+ladies.  Thank you.  Yes, alone I did it.  Nobody else in the company
+had a hand in it--nor a finger.  No, not a finger."  If anything goes
+wrong and the audience hiss, does he shirk the ordeal?  Not at all.  He
+comes before the curtain with indignant sorrow.  "Yes, ladies and
+gentlemen, I agree with you.  Most scandalous failure.  It was all
+Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's.  I went down on my bended
+knees to them, but they wouldn't listen to me--wouldn't listen.  And
+now you see what's happened.  Hear the anguish in my voice.  Look at
+the tears in my broken-hearted eyes.  Oh, the pity of it, ladies and
+gentlemen--the pity of it.  And I tried so hard--I really did.  But
+they wouldn't listen--they wouldn't l-l-listen."  (Breaks down in sobs.)
+
+I recall a legend that seems apposite.  A certain politician of
+antiquity--let us all call him Eurysthenes--hit on a happy idea for
+making himself famous.  He bought a lot of parrots and taught them to
+shriek "Great is Eurysthenes!"  Then he turned them all out into the
+woods, and there they sat and squawked "Great is Eurysthenes!"  And the
+Athenians, astonished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried,
+"Great is Eurysthenes."  And Eurysthenes, who was waiting in the flies,
+so to speak, took the call and was famous ever after.
+
+
+
+
+A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG
+
+Chum, roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking at the universe in
+general and at the cows in the paddock beyond the orchard in
+particular.  Occasionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which
+the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but he soon tires of
+this diversion and resumes his loud-voiced demand to share in the good
+things that are going.  For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting
+over the valley, and the woods are calling him to unknown adventures.
+They shall not call in vain.  Work shall be suspended and this morning
+shall be dedicated to his service.  For this is the day of deliverance.
+The word is spoken and the shadow of the sword is lifted.  The battle
+for his biscuit is won.
+
+He does not know what a narrow shave he has had.  He does not know that
+for weeks past he has been under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a
+luxury that this savage world of men could no longer afford; that
+having taken away his bones we were about to take away his biscuits and
+leave his cheerful companionship a memory of the dream world we lived
+in before the Great Killing began.  All this he does not know.  That is
+one of the numerous advantages of being a dog.  He knows nothing of the
+infamies of men or of the incertitudes of life.  He does not look
+before and after and pine for what is not.  He has no yesterday and no
+to-morrow--only the happy or the unhappy present.  He does not, as
+Whitman says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or lamenting
+his past or worrying about his future.  His bereavements do not disturb
+him and he doesn't care twopence about his career.  He has no debts and
+hungers for no honours.  He would rather have a bone than a baronetcy.
+He does not turn over old albums, with their pictured records of
+forgotten holidays and happy scenes and yearn for the "tender grace of
+a day that is dead," or wonder whether he will keep his job and what
+will become of his "poor old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he
+doesn't, or speculate whether the war will end this year, next year,
+some time, or never.  He doesn't even know there is a war.  Think of
+it!  He doesn't know there is a war.  O happy dog!  Give him a bone, a
+biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, and his cup of joy is
+full.  Would that my needs were as few and as easily satisfied.
+
+And now his biscuit is safe and I have the rare privilege of rejoicing
+with Sir Frederick Banbury.  I do not know that I should go as far as
+he seems to go, for in that touching little speech of his at the Cannon
+Street Hotel he indicated that nothing in the heavens above or in the
+earth beneath should stand between him and his dogs.  "In August,
+1914," he said, "my son went to France.  The night before he left he
+said, 'Father, look after my dogs and horses while I am away.'  I said,
+'Don't you worry about them.'  He was killed in December, and I have
+got the horses and dogs now.  As I said to Mr. Bonar Law last year, I
+should like to see the man who would tell me I have not to look after
+my son's dogs and horses."  Well, I suppose that if the choice were
+between a German victory and a dog biscuit, the dog biscuit would have
+to go, Sir Frederick.  But I rejoice with you that we have not to make
+the choice.  I rejoice that the sentence of death has passed from your
+dead son's horses and dogs and from that noble creature under the
+cherry tree.
+
+Look at him, barking now at the cows, now with eloquent appeal at me,
+and then, having caught my eye, turning sportively to worry the hated
+rope.  He knows that my intentions this morning are honourable.  I
+think he feels that, in spite of appearances, I am in that humour in
+which at any radiant moment the magic word "Walk" may leap from my
+lips.  What a word that is!  No sleep so sound that it will not
+penetrate its depths and bring him, passionately awake, to his feet.
+He would sacrifice the whole dictionary for that one electric syllable.
+That and its brother "Bones."  Give him these good, sound, sensible
+words, and all the fancies of the poets and all the rhetoric of the
+statesmen may whistle down the winds.  He has no use for them.  "Walk"
+and "Bones"--that is the speech a fellow can understand.
+
+Yes, Chum knows very well that I am thinking about him and thinking
+about him in an uncommonly friendly way.  That is the secret of the
+strange intimacy between us.  We may love other animals, and other
+animals may respond to our affection.  But the dog is the only animal
+who has a reciprocal intelligence.  As Coleridge says, he is the only
+animal that _looks upward_ to man, strains to catch his meanings,
+hungers for his approval.  Stroke a cat or a horse, and it will have a
+physical pleasure; but pat Chum and call him "Good dog!" and he has a
+spiritual pleasure.  He feels good.  He is pleased because you are
+pleased.  His tail, his eyebrows, every part of him, proclaim that
+"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," and that he himself
+is on the side of the angels.
+
+And just as he has the sense of virtue, so also he has the sense of
+sin.  A cat may be taught not to do certain things, but if it is caught
+out and flees, it flees not from shame, but from fear.  But the shame
+of a dog touches an abyss of misery as bottomless as any human emotion.
+He has fallen out of the state of grace, and nothing but the absolution
+and remission of his sin will restore him to happiness.  By his
+association with man he seems to have caught something of his capacity
+for spiritual misery.  I had an Airedale once who had moods of
+despondency as abysmal as my own.  He was as sentimental as any minor
+poet, and at the sound of certain tunes on the piano he would break
+into paroxysms of grief, whining and moaning as if in one moment of
+concentrated anguish he recalled every bereavement he had endured,
+every bone he had lost, every stone heaved at him by his hated enemy,
+the butcher's boy.  Indeed, there are times when the dog approximates
+so close to our intelligence that he seems to be of us, a sort of
+humble relation of ourselves, with our elementary feelings but not our
+gift of expression, our joy but not our laughter, our misery but not
+our tears, our thoughts but not our speech.  To sentence him to death
+would be almost like homicide, and the day of his reprieve should be
+celebrated as a festival....
+
+Come, old friend.  Let us away to the woods.  "Walk" ...
+
+
+
+
+ON HAPPY FACES IN THE STRAND
+
+I was walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago and had a singular
+impression of a cheerful world.  The Strand is to me always the most
+attractive street I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun
+is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light glints and dances
+in the eyes of the crowd moving westward.  Then it is that I seem to
+see the wayfarers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pursuit of
+some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am almost persuaded to turn
+round and catch with them the flash of vision that gleams in their
+eyes.  But the thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual
+gaiety of the people.  It seemed to me that I had never seen such a
+procession of laughing, happy faces.  Probably it was due to the fact
+that it was about the time when the afternoon theatres were emptying.
+Probably also the impression on my mind was all the sharper because it
+was a day of depressing tidings--bad news from Russia, from Italy, from
+everywhere.  I did not suppose that these merry people were ignorant of
+the news or indifferent to it.  They were simply obeying the impulse of
+healthy minds and good digestions to be cheerful--_quand meme_.
+
+And as I passed along I wondered whether, in spite of all the tragedy
+in which our life is cast, our fund of personal happiness is
+undiminished.  Do we come into the world with a certain capacity for
+pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our external
+circumstances may be?  Johnson took that view and expressed it in the
+familiar lines incorporated in Goldsmith's "Traveller"--the only lines
+of Johnson's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort of
+immortality:
+
+  How small, of all that human hearts endure,
+  That part which kings or laws can cause or cure.
+  Still to ourselves in every place consigned
+  Our own felicity we make or find.
+
+In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse.
+Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but
+distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform.
+And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation
+to the conditions in which we live.
+
+It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the
+slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by
+exploiting others.  And like most falsities there is a sense in which
+it is true.  The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and
+probably experiences as much animal happiness--assuming it is
+sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm--as the boy in the Eton
+playing-fields.  It is a mercy it is so.  It is a mercy that we have
+this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and
+bitter blows of outward circumstance.  But he who advances this fact as
+a political argument is not a wise man.  Is the quality of happiness
+nothing?  Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a
+pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the
+infinite fields of the mind's adventures?  Is it nothing to society?
+We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.
+
+But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects,
+there is much truth in Johnson's lines.  Happiness is an entirely
+personal affair.  We have it in large measure or in small, but in so
+far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of
+fortune.  I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not
+lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of
+happiness.  If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will
+afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may
+be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction.  I hope
+it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on
+the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer
+physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less
+to-day than in normal times.
+
+I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed
+satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most
+"interesting" period of the world's history.  There was an indignant
+protest against the word from another member of the company; but the
+author insisted.  Yes, interesting.  Could not tragedy be interesting
+as well as comedy?  Could not one feel all the horror and misery and
+insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's
+part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the
+mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and
+pronounce it--yes, interesting?  His own record of unselfish service
+during the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and ordered world
+were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.
+
+And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough.  There has never
+been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the
+energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we
+are living.  It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours
+everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks
+up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe,
+and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships.  I can fancy
+that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of
+their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the
+tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has
+overtaken us.  In a sense they will be right.  In another sense they
+will be wrong.  We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our
+dreams.  The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to
+plunge us individually in despair.  But it doesn't.  Individually we
+seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, snatch our pleasures with a
+sharpened appetite, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the
+lightnings that stab the tortured earth.
+
+As I look up I see the buses passing and read the announcements on the
+knife-boards.  You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in
+the most light-hearted of worlds.  There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at
+one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing
+Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to
+"Zig-Zag."  These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with
+which England amused itself in the time of the tempest.  And do not
+forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept
+the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy.  Perhaps
+without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled
+renown.  For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties--a
+violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of
+things even.  The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little
+wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into
+the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its
+equilibrium throughout.
+
+We are seen both at our best and our worst--stripped naked as it were
+to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves
+and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both.  Our nerve-ends
+are bare, and our reactions to circumstance are violent and irrational.
+We are at once more generous and more bitter.  We are the sport even of
+the weather.  If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more
+brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a
+more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush
+of our winter nights.  I could not help associating with the procession
+of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I
+witnessed in a bus the other night.  It seemed the reverse side of the
+same shield.  A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of
+the darkness and the sleet.  They were both rather large, and there was
+not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with
+an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no
+nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to
+waste on anybody.  You know the sort of people.  If you don't get out
+of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you.  They do
+not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?"  That would be a sign
+of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness,
+except in other people.  They expect it in other people.
+
+"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.
+
+"Victoria," said the man with a snap.
+
+"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.
+
+"I've told you six times," snapped the man.
+
+"What a bully you are," retorted the woman.  Then they subsided into
+silence.  Husband and wife, I thought--bursting with bad temper to such
+an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people.  Probably
+they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will
+go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.
+
+But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust.
+They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the
+gloom of the London night in their souls.  Most of us get it in our
+souls more or less.  It makes us ill-humoured and depressed.  In the
+early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and
+some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so
+beautiful before.  They even wrote poems about it.  When you blundered
+into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled
+against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but
+substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across
+Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure
+of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating.  But three
+winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made
+London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make
+it a debauch of another kind.
+
+But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is
+no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves
+and our tempers.  We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since
+we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on
+each other.  The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and
+there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust
+rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore.  We
+have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are
+subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed.
+Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is
+worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards.  I heard the other
+day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who
+mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining
+with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
+
+In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case
+gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the
+million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their
+excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers.  When Mars is
+abroad Venus must be abroad, too.  Murder is the sole business of the
+world and lust is its proper pastime.  Take a glance at any bookstall
+and note the garbage which lines its shelves.  Dip into the morass of
+the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and
+see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly
+intellectual bath.  The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has
+overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable
+tragedy.
+
+It is no new phenomenon.  In time of peril humanity always reveals
+these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of
+the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the
+background of a city perishing of plague.  We live at once more
+intensely and more frivolously.  The pendulum of our emotions swings
+violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers
+the mood of depression and anxiety.  I can conceive that that couple in
+the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and
+read that Vimy Ridge had been won.  There is, in Pepys' Diary, a
+delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in
+times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise.  It is the 10th of
+September (Lord's Day), 1665.  The plague is at its worst and the whole
+city seems doomed.  The war with the Dutch is going badly.  Mrs.
+Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black.  But there comes
+news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord
+Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich--
+
+
+--where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the
+receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it
+inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that
+in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this
+night.  Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made
+up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it
+so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did
+make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir
+J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so
+out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself
+out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
+
+
+Isn't that a wonderful picture?  And think of the grave John Evelyn
+having this gaiety in him!  You will read the whole of his Diary and
+not get one smile from his severe countenance.  I had the curiosity to
+turn to his own record of the same time.  He has no entry for the 10th,
+but two days before, he says:
+
+
+Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however,
+I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's,
+a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the
+streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful
+silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
+
+
+And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is
+seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest
+evening of his life.  And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
+
+The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that
+the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of
+circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the
+surface.  There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage
+in that great and moving book "Under Fire"--the most tremendous picture
+of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man.  One of the squad
+of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near
+Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.  It is before the English had taken over
+that part of the line.  There is a quiet time and some of the men get
+on companionable terms with the enemy.  This man's wife and child are
+in Lens, just behind the German lines.  He has not seen them for
+eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend
+him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into
+Lens.  He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own
+house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a
+comrade sitting at their work.  In the room with them are two German
+non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
+
+But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife
+is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.--"Not a forced smile, not a
+debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave."
+He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness
+had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the
+adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words
+of extraordinary beauty:
+
+
+"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six.  She can't hold her
+youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in
+the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst
+out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat.
+It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of
+herself.  It's life.  She lives.  Ah, yes, she lives and that's all.
+It isn't her fault if she lives.  You wouldn't have her die?  Very
+well, what do you want her to do?  Cry all day on account of me and the
+Boches?  Grouse?  One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen
+months.  Can't be done.  It's too long, I tell you.  That's all there
+is to it."
+
+
+In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter.  We live.  And,
+living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of
+ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the
+unspeakable tragedy of things.  We may wonder that we can be happy and
+may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our
+natures.  We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out
+the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become
+mad.  We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges
+that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things.  There was a
+good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that
+"Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood."  The wild
+current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our
+separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private
+distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of
+events.  Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic
+wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event.
+She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little
+callously.  And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had
+the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz
+and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the
+battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits
+of the Infant Roscius.  It is well that we have this faculty of
+detachment and independent life.  If there were no private relief for
+this public tragedy the world would have gone mad.  But perhaps you
+will say it has gone mad....
+
+
+Let me recall by way of _envoi_ that fine story in Montaigne.  When the
+town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was
+stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner.  And as he was led
+away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest
+that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich
+and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."
+
+
+
+
+ON WORD-MAGIC
+
+I see that a discussion has arisen in the _Spectator_ on the "Canadian
+Boat Song."  It appeared in _Blackwood's_ nearly a century ago, and
+ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent
+controversy.  The author may have been "Christopher North," or his
+brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of
+Eglinton, or none of these.  We shall never know.  It is one of those
+pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius
+Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be
+exhausted because they can never be solved.  I am not going to offer an
+opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate
+the magic of a word.  The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
+
+  From the lone shieling of the misty island
+    Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas--
+  Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.
+    And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
+
+It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this
+strong music.  The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never
+been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the
+same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and
+ending:
+
+  Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.
+    Hills of home, and to hear again the call.
+  Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying--
+    And hear no more at all.
+
+But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm.
+The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother
+shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the
+note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of
+that word "Hebrides."
+
+It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its
+perfect setting.  It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord
+of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons.
+It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with
+extraordinary effect.  Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many
+beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the
+couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland
+girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the
+cuckoo's call
+
+  Breaking the silence of the seas
+  Among the farthest Hebrides.
+
+
+Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in
+poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and
+significant beauty.  The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the
+closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
+
+  But on old age serene and bright,
+  And lovely as a Lapland night,
+  Shall lead thee to thy grave.
+
+"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in
+this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the
+heavens of poetry.  And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically
+beautiful.  Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the
+greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
+
+  Silent--upon a peak--in Dar--ien.
+
+
+And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words
+themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use.
+Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony--
+
+  I am dying, Egypt, dying.
+
+It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of
+Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the
+usage in Plutarch.  It is a stroke of sheer word-magic.  It summons up
+with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in
+the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly
+glories that are fading into the darkness of death.  The whole tragedy
+seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the
+action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
+
+Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just
+as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the
+craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself
+at the touch of the master.  "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and
+few are more frequently on our lips.  Yet what wonderful effects
+Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
+
+  It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
+  The holy time is quiet as a nun,
+  Breathless with adoration.
+
+The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary
+word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence,
+filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace.  And so with
+Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
+
+  Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.
+
+Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
+
+  Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme
+  To take into the air my quiet breath.
+
+
+And again:
+
+  Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
+  Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.
+
+
+There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer
+instinct for the precious word than he had.  Byron had none of this
+magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his
+spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the
+energy of his thought.  Tennyson was much more of the artificer in
+words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of
+Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats.  Compare the use of adjectives in
+two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the
+Nightingale," and the difference is startling.  Both are incomparable,
+but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture
+that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its
+jewelled word.  "_Embalmed_ darkness," "_Verdurous_ glooms," "Now more
+than ever seems it _rich_ to die."  "Cooled a long age in the
+_deep-delved_ earth." "_Darkling_ I listen."  "She stood in tears amid
+the _alien_ corn."  "Oh, for a beaker full of the _warm south_."  "With
+beaded bubbles _winking_ at the brim."  "No _hungry_ generations tread
+thee down."  And so on.  Such a casket of jewels can be found in no
+other poet that has used our tongue.  If Keats's vocabulary had a
+defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like
+the touch of his hand, spoke of death.  It lacked the fresh, happy,
+sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
+
+Word-magic belongs to poetry.  In prose it is an intrusion.  That was
+the view of Coleridge.  It was because, among its other qualities,
+Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that
+Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose.  The
+modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear
+and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a
+brilliant writer this fellow is."  And that is the true triumph of the
+art.  It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the
+emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.
+
+
+
+
+ODIN GROWN OLD
+
+I had a strange dream last night.  Like most dreams, it was a sort of
+wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours.
+We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from
+day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of
+impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could
+overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found
+out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless
+as the guesses of the foolish.  Ah, if we could only get behind this
+grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten
+years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give?  What a
+strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging,
+blood-stained Europe.  With what a shock we should discover the meaning
+of the terror.  But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable
+secrecy.  We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot
+tell a syllable that it will write....
+
+You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this....
+
+When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of
+myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless
+centuries.  It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and
+now stood far beyond the confines of Time.  I was alone in the world.
+I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I
+came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once
+to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained
+great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay
+rotting in garments of seaweed and slime.  I seemed, with the magic of
+dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map.  I
+traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they
+were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to
+continent, from desolation to desolation.  Again and again I cried out
+in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a
+solitude that was infinite.  Time seemed to have no meaning in this
+appalling vacancy.  I did not live hours or days, but centuries, aeons,
+eternities.  Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see
+anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable
+backward of time.  Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I
+saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern
+Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
+
+And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man.  He seemed stricken with
+unthinkable years.  His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his
+figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity.  He sat at the foot of the
+Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in
+an infantile treble.  As I approached he peered at me through his dim
+eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy
+voice:
+
+"I am Odin--hee! hee!  I possess the earth, the whole earth ... I and
+my sword ... we own it all ... we and the Sphinx ... we own it all....
+All ... hee! hee!..."  And he turned and began to fondle his sword
+again.
+
+"But where are the others?  What happened to them?"
+
+"Gone ... hee! hee! .... All gone....  It took thousands of years to do
+it, but they've all gone.  It never would have been done if man hadn't
+become civilised.  For centuries and centuries men tried to kill
+themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they
+couldn't do it.  Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better.
+The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered
+modern science.  He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water,
+and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills
+into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms
+of heat and power.  And all the time he went on saying what a good
+world he was making ... hee! hee!  Such a wonderful Machine....  Such a
+peaceful Machine ... hee! hee! ... Age of Reason, he said....  Age of
+universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said.... hee! hee! ...
+We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we
+have found Him.  We have made Him ourselves--out of our own heads.  We
+got tired of looking for Him in the soul.  Now we have found Him in the
+laboratory.  We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth.
+Great is our God of the Machine.  Honour, blessing, glory, power--power
+of things.  Power!  Power!  Power!"
+
+His voice rose to a senile shriek.
+
+"And all the time ... hee, hee! ... all the time he was making the
+Machine for me--me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings,
+the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men.  I laughed ... hee,
+hee! ... I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for
+the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him
+more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel.  What
+a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said.  What a friend
+of Man.  How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of
+Benevolence...
+
+"And it was mine ... hee, hee! ... Mine.  And when it was completed I
+handed it over to my servants.  And the Machine of Benevolence became
+the Monster of Destruction.  First one tyrant seized it and fell; then
+another and he fell.  This white race got the Machine for a season,
+then another white race got it; then the yellow race.  And they all
+perished ... hee, hee!  ... They all perished....  And with every
+victory the Machine grew more deadly.  All the gifts of the earth and
+all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger.  It devoured its
+creators by thousands, by millions, by nations.  It slew, it poisoned,
+it burned, it starved.  The whole earth became a desolation....
+
+"And now I own it all ... hee, hee! ... I and my sword.  We own it
+all....  We and the Sphinx."  His voice, which had grown strong with
+excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
+
+"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked.  "And what will you do
+with your victory?"
+
+"The meaning ... the meaning ... I don't know....  I've come to ask the
+Sphinx.  I've sat here for years, centuries ... oh, so long.  But she
+says nothing--only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm,
+as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it....  Look ...
+look now....  Aren't her lips..."
+
+His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry.  The sword shook in his palsied
+hands.  His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
+
+I looked up, too....  Yes, surely the lips were moving.  They were
+about to open.  I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the
+strange beings who made a God that slew them....  The lips were open
+now ... there was a rattling in throat....
+
+But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there
+came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the
+desert.  It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things.  The
+Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the
+Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of
+nothingness....
+
+
+
+
+ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS
+
+As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this
+morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face.
+I was surprised.  Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the
+contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness--a little
+patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution.  But
+I have not been hilarious for a week past.  There is not much to be
+hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping
+back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes
+burdened with dark tidings.  I find the light-hearted person a trial,
+and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad
+agony of Lear.
+
+Why, then, this smiling face in the glass?  Only last night, coming up
+on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat
+man who came and sat in front of me.  He looked up at the brilliant
+moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to
+himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness.  When he
+was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more
+intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier.  Hang the fellow,
+thought I, what is he humming and whistling about?  This moon that is
+touching the London streets with beauty--what scenes of horror and
+carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away!  What nameless
+heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in
+security and ease!  What mighty issues are in the balance! ... And this
+fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day.
+Perhaps he is a profiteer.  Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down
+the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air....  Yet this
+face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as
+readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
+
+It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible.  The
+beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge
+my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of
+resentment.  They are like a satire on our tragedy--like marriage
+garments robing the skeleton of death.  Moreover, they are a practical
+as well as a spiritual grievance.  They are the ally of the enemy.
+They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last
+autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men
+floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud.  No, most
+Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you.  I would you would hide your face
+from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even
+justice between the disputants in this great argument....  No, this
+smile cannot be for you.  And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter
+that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the
+honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of
+his first leave and plunged into this hell of death.  Dated Saturday.
+All well up to Saturday.  The first two terrible days survived.  Those
+who love him can breathe more freely.
+
+But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the
+smile.  Ah, I had got it!  It was that paragraph I had read in the
+newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of
+his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar
+blasphemy, "God is with us."  I find that when I am cheerless a message
+from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the
+Almighty gives me confidence.  This crude, humourless vanity cannot be
+destined to win the world.  It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so
+grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and
+of the system of which he is the symbol.  I know that other warriors
+have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in
+virtue of the claim.  Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it
+to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the
+Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to
+the warriors of Israel.  Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible
+for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his
+conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the
+sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the
+name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive
+beauty.
+
+You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf
+between their piety and this vulgar impiety.  And the reason is simple.
+They believed in the spiritual governance of human life.  Cromwell may
+have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the
+spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving
+the spiritual redemption of men.  The material victory was nothing to
+him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of
+man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression.
+But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is
+spiritual and humane.  He talks of his God as if he were a brigand
+chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a
+family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern,
+to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness
+to adorn a triumph.  It is the negation of the God of the spirit.  It
+is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the
+garden of the soul in man.  It is the God of materialism at war with
+all that is spiritual.  In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God
+is not God at all.  It is the Devil.
+
+On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our
+human quarrels, the best attitude is silence.  Lincoln, with his
+unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady
+asked him for the assurance that God was on their side.  "The important
+thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are
+on the side of God."  This attitude will save us from blasphemous
+arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity.  For when we claim that
+God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into
+difficulties.  We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite
+purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of
+the Almighty will be sustained.  And what will you do then?  Will you,
+when things go wrong, ask with the poet,
+
+  Is he deaf and blind, our God? ... Is he indeed at all?
+
+
+The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the
+most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides.
+They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were
+neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side.  Vulcan
+could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn
+him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom,
+but neither could save him.  This guess at the spiritual world supplied
+a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the
+human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the
+mind.
+
+We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our
+life.  We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast
+rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are
+engulfed.  No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky.
+The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither
+comfort nor revelation.  But within us we feel the impulse of the human
+spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and
+reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun.  And in
+that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we
+move.  We cannot doubt its validity.  It is the authentic,
+indestructible note of humanity.  We may falter in the measure, stumble
+in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and
+unintelligible things.  But the spiritual movement goes on, like the
+Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world.  It
+may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it
+wins--in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle.
+The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for
+righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of
+violence.  It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser
+appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine
+prerogative of freedom.  Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his
+altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries,
+"Oh, Baal, hear us."  And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and
+stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in
+the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.
+
+That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught in the shaving
+glass this morning.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE RULE OF THE ROAD
+
+That was a jolly story which Mr. Arthur Ransome told the other day in
+one of his messages from Petrograd.  A stout old lady was walking with
+her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great
+confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself.  It was
+pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for foot-passengers,
+but she replied: "I'm going to walk where I like.  We've got liberty
+now."  It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled
+the foot-passenger to walk down the middle of the road it also entitled
+the cab-driver to drive on the pavement, and that the end of such
+liberty would be universal chaos.  Everybody would be getting in
+everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere.  Individual liberty
+would have become social anarchy.
+
+There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like
+the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind
+ourselves of what the rule of the road means.  It means that in order
+that the liberties of all may be preserved the liberties of everybody
+must be curtailed.  When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus steps
+into the middle of the road and puts up his hand, he is the symbol not
+of tyranny, but of liberty.  You may not think so.  You may, being in a
+hurry and seeing your motor-car pulled up by this insolence of office,
+feel that your liberty has been outraged.  How dare this fellow
+interfere with your free use of the public highway?  Then, if you are a
+reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not, incidentally,
+interfere with you he would interfere with no one, and the result would
+be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never
+cross at all.  You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty
+in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a
+reality.
+
+Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract.  It is an
+accommodation of interests.  In matters which do not touch anybody
+else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like.  If I choose to
+go down the Strand in a dressing-gown, with long hair and bare feet,
+who shall say me nay?  You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have
+liberty to be indifferent to you.  And if I have a fancy for dyeing my
+hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing a tall
+hat, a frock-coat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up
+early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission.  I shall
+not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton.  I may
+like mustard with my mutton.  And you will not ask me whether you may
+be a Protestant or a Catholic, whether you may marry the dark lady or
+the fair lady, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to
+Wordsworth, or champagne to shandygaff.
+
+In all these and a thousand other details you and I please ourselves
+and ask no one's leave.  We have a whole kingdom in which we rule
+alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy,
+conventional or odd.  But directly we step out of that kingdom our
+personal liberty of action becomes qualified by other people's liberty.
+I might like to practise on the trombone from midnight till three in
+the morning.  If I went on to the top of Helvellyn to do it I could
+please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and
+if I do it out in the streets the neighbours will remind me that my
+liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to
+sleep in quiet.  There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to
+accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
+
+We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately we are much more
+conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our
+own.
+
+I got into a railway carriage at a country station the other morning
+and settled down for what the schoolboys would call an hour's "swot" at
+a Blue-book.  I was not reading it for pleasure.  The truth is that I
+never do read Blue-books for pleasure.  I read them as a barrister
+reads a brief, for the very humble purpose of turning an honest penny
+out of them.  Now, if you are reading a book for pleasure it doesn't
+matter what is going on around you.  I think I could enjoy "Tristram
+Shandy" or "Treasure Island" in the midst of an earthquake.
+
+But when you are reading a thing as a task you need reasonable quiet,
+and that is what I didn't get, for at the next station in came a couple
+of men, one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the journey in
+a loud and pompous voice.  He was one of those people who remind one of
+that story of Home Tooke who, meeting a person of immense swagger in
+the street, stopped him and said, "Excuse me, sir, but are you someone
+in particular?"  This gentleman was someone in particular.  As I
+wrestled with clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale, and his
+family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, and his criticisms of
+the generals and the politicians submerged my poor attempts to hang on
+to my job.  I shut up the Blue-book, looked out of the window, and
+listened wearily while the voice thundered on with themes like these:
+"Now what French ought to have done..."  "The mistake the Germans
+made..."  "If only Asquith had..."  You know the sort of stuff.  I had
+heard it all before, oh, so often.  It was like a barrel-organ groaning
+out some banal song of long ago.
+
+If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in a lower tone I daresay
+he would have thought I was a very rude fellow.  It did not occur to
+him that anybody could have anything better to do than to listen to
+him, and I have no doubt he left the carriage convinced that everybody
+in it had, thanks to him, had a very illuminating journey, and would
+carry away a pleasing impression of his encyclopaedic range.  He was
+obviously a well-intentioned person.  The thing that was wrong with him
+was that he had not the social sense.  He was not "a clubbable man."
+
+A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the
+foundation of social conduct.  It is commonly alleged against women
+that in this respect they are less civilised than men, and I am bound
+to confess that in my experience it is the woman--the well-dressed
+woman--who thrusts herself in front of you at the ticket office.  The
+man would not attempt it, partly because he knows the thing would not
+be tolerated from him, but also because he has been better drilled in
+the small give-and-take of social relationships.  He has lived more in
+the broad current of the world, where you have to learn to accommodate
+yourself to the general standard of conduct, and his school life, his
+club life, and his games have in this respect given him a training that
+women are only now beginning to enjoy.
+
+I believe that the rights of small people and quiet people are as
+important to preserve as the rights of small nationalities.  When I
+hear the aggressive, bullying horn which some motorists deliberately
+use, I confess that I feel something boiling up in me which is very
+like what I felt when Germany came trampling like a bully over Belgium.
+By what right, my dear sir, do you go along our highways uttering that
+hideous curse on all who impede your path?  Cannot you announce your
+coming like a gentleman?  Cannot you take your turn?  Are you someone
+in particular or are you simply a hot gospeller of the prophet
+Nietzsche?  I find myself wondering what sort of a person it is who can
+sit behind that hog-like outrage without realising that he is the
+spirit of Prussia incarnate, and a very ugly spectacle in a civilised
+world.
+
+And there is the more harmless person who has bought a very blatant
+gramophone, and on Sunday afternoon sets the thing going, opens the
+windows and fills the street with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" or some
+similar banality.  What are the right limits of social behaviour in a
+matter of this sort?  Let us take the trombone as an illustration
+again.  Hazlitt said that a man who wanted to learn that fearsome
+instrument was entitled to learn it in his own house, even though he
+was a nuisance to his neighbours, but it was his business to make the
+nuisance as slight as possible.  He must practise in the attic, and
+shut the window.  He had no right to sit in his front room, open the
+window, and blow his noise into his neighbours' ears with the maximum
+of violence.  And so with the gramophone.  If you like the gramophone
+you are entitled to have it, but you are interfering with the liberties
+of your neighbours if you don't do what you can to limit the noise to
+your own household.  Your neighbours may not like "Keep the Home Fires
+Burning."  They may prefer to have their Sunday afternoon undisturbed,
+and it is as great an impertinence for you to wilfully trespass on
+their peace as it would be to go, unasked, into their gardens and
+trample on their flower beds.
+
+There are cases, of course, where the clash of liberties seems to defy
+compromise.  My dear old friend X., who lives in a West End square and
+who is an amazing mixture of good nature and irascibility, flies into a
+passion when he hears a street piano, and rushes out to order it away.
+But near by lives a distinguished lady of romantic picaresque tastes,
+who dotes on street pianos, and attracts them as wasps are attracted to
+a jar of jam.  Whose liberty in this case should surrender to the
+other?  For the life of me I cannot say.  It is as reasonable to like
+street pianos as to dislike them--and vice versa.  I would give much to
+hear Sancho Panza's solution of such a nice riddle.
+
+I suppose the fact is that we can be neither complete anarchists nor
+complete Socialists in this complex world--or rather we must be a
+judicious mixture of both.  We have both liberties to preserve--our
+individual liberty and our social liberty.  We must watch the
+bureaucrat on the one side and warn off the anarchist on the other.  I
+am neither a Marxist, nor a Tolstoyan, but a compromise.  I shall not
+permit any authority to say that my child must go to this school or
+that, shall specialise in science or arts, shall play rugger or soccer.
+These things are personal.  But if I proceed to say that my child shall
+have no education at all, that he shall be brought up as a primeval
+savage, or at Mr. Fagin's academy for pickpockets, then Society will
+politely but firmly tell me that it has no use for primeval savages and
+a very stern objection to pickpockets, and that my child must have a
+certain minimum of education whether I like it or not.  I cannot have
+the liberty to be a nuisance to my neighbours or make my child a burden
+and a danger to the commonwealth.
+
+It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of
+the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are
+civilised or uncivilised.  The great moments of heroism and sacrifice
+are rare.  It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make
+up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey.  I
+hope my friend in the railway carriage will reflect on this.  Then he
+will not cease, I am sure, to explain to his neighbour where French
+went wrong and where the Germans went ditto; but he will do it in a way
+that will permit me to read my Blue-book undisturbed.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE
+
+There has never, I suppose, been a time when the moon had such a vogue
+as during the past ten days.  For centuries, for thousands of years,
+for I know not what uncounted ages, she has been sailing the sky,
+"clustered around with all her starry fays."  She has seen this
+tragi-comedy of man since the beginning, and I daresay will outlive its
+end.  What she thinks of it all we shall never know.  Perhaps she
+laughs at it, perhaps she weeps over it, perhaps she does both in
+turns, as you and I do.  Perhaps she is only indifferent.  Yes, I
+suppose she is indifferent, for she holds up her lamp for the just and
+the unjust and lights the assassin's way as readily as the lover's and
+the shepherd's.
+
+But in all her timeless journeyings around this flying ball to which we
+cling with our feet she has never been a subject of such painful
+concern as now.  Love-sick poets have sung of her, and learned men have
+studied her countenance and made maps of her hills and her valleys, and
+children have been lulled to sleep with legends of the old man in the
+moon and the old woman eternally gathering her eternal sticks.  But for
+most of us she had no more serious import than a Chinese lantern hung
+on a Christmas tree to please the children.
+
+And suddenly she has become the most sensational fact of our lives.
+From the King in his palace to the pauper in his workhouse we have all
+been talking of the moon, and watching the moon and studying the phases
+of the moon.  There are seven millions of Londoners who know more about
+the moon to-day than they ever dreamed there was to be known, or than
+they ever dreamed that they would want to know.  John Bright once said
+that the only virtue of war was that it taught people geography, but
+even he did not think of the geography of the moon and of the
+firmament.  But in the intense school of these days we are learning
+about everything in heaven above and in the earth beneath and in the
+waters under the earth.  Count Zeppelin taught us about the stars, and
+now Herr von Gotha is giving us a lesson on the moon.  We are not so
+grateful as we might be.
+
+But the main lesson we are all learning, I think, is that Nature does
+not take sides in our affairs.  We all like to think that she does take
+sides--that is, our side--that a special providence watches over us,
+and that invisible powers will see us through.  It is a common
+weakness.  The preposterous Kaiser exhibits it in its most grotesque
+assumption.  He does really believe--or did, for dreadful doubts must
+be invading the armour-plated vanity of this jerry-built Caesar--that
+God and Nature are his Imperial agents.
+
+And in a less degree most of us, in times of stress, pin our faith to
+some special providence.  We are so important to ourselves that we
+cannot conceive that we are unimportant to whatever powers there be.
+Others may fall, but we have charmed lives.  Our cause must prevail
+because, being ours, it is beyond mortal challenge.  A distinguished
+General was telling me not long ago of an incident in the second battle
+of Ypres.  He stood with another General, since killed, watching the
+battle at its most critical phase.  They saw the British line yield,
+and the Germans advance, and all seemed over.  My friend put up his
+glasses with the gesture of one who knew the worst had come.  His
+companion turned to him and said, "God will never allow those ---- to
+win."  It was an odd expression of faith, but it represents the
+conviction latent in most of us that we can count on invisible allies
+who, like the goddess in Homer, will intervene if we are in straits,
+and fling a cloud between us and the foe.
+
+This reliance on the supernatural is one of the sources of power in men
+of primitive and intense faith.  Cromwell was a practical mystic and
+never forgot to keep his powder dry, but he saw the hand of the Lord
+visibly at work for his cause on the winds and the tempest, and that
+conviction added a fervour to his terrible sword.  In his letter to
+Speaker Lenthall on the battle of Dunbar he tells how in marching from
+Musselburgh to Haddington the enemy fell upon "the rear-forlorn of our
+horse" and "had like to have engaged our rear brigade of horse with
+their whole army--_had not the Lord by His Providence put a cloud over
+the moon_, hereby giving us opportunity to draw off those horse to the
+rest of our army."
+
+In the same way Elizabethan England witnessed God Himself in the
+tempest that scattered the Armada, and a hundred years later the people
+saw the same Divine sanction in the winds that brought William Prince
+of Orange to our shores and drove his pursuers away.  "The weather had
+indeed served the Protestant cause so well," says Macaulay, "that some
+men of more piety than judgment fully believed the ordinary laws of
+nature to have been suspended for the preservation of the liberty and
+religion of England.  Exactly a hundred years before, they said, the
+Armada, invincible by man, had been scattered by the wrath of God.
+Civil freedom and divine truth were again in jeopardy; and again the
+obedient elements had fought for the good cause.  The wind had blown
+strong from the east while the Prince wished to sail down the Channel,
+had turned to the south when he wished to enter Torbay, had sunk to a
+calm during the disembarkation, and, as soon as the disembarkation was
+completed, had risen to a storm and had met the pursuers in the face."
+
+If we saw such a sequence of winds blowing for our cause, we should, in
+spite of Macaulay, allow our piety to have the better of our judgment.
+Indeed, there have been those who in the absence of more solid evidence
+have accepted the Angels of Mons with as touching and unquestioning a
+faith as they accepted the legend of the Army of Russians from
+Archangel.  Perhaps it is not "piety" so much as anxiety that accounts
+for this credulity.  In its more degraded form it is responsible for
+such phenomena as the revival of fortune-telling and the emergence of
+the Prophet Bottomley.  In its more reputable expression it springs
+from the conviction of the justice of our cause, of the dominion of the
+spiritual over the material and of the witness of that dominion in the
+operations of Nature.
+
+Then comes this wonderful harvest moon with its clear sky and its still
+air to light our enemies to their villainous work and to remind us
+that, however virtuous our cause, Nature is not concerned about us.
+She is indifferent whether we win or lose.  She is not against us, but
+she is not for us.  Sometimes she helps the enemy, and sometimes she
+helps us.  She blew a snowstorm in the face of the Germans on the most
+critical day of Verdun, and helped to defeat that great adventure.  In
+August last she came out on the side of the enemy.  She rained and blew
+ceaselessly, and disarranged our plans in Flanders, so that the attack
+on which so much depended was driven perilously late into the year.
+And even the brilliant moon and the cloudless nights that have been so
+disturbing to us in London speak the same language of Nature's
+impartiality.  They serve the enemy here, but they are serving us far
+more just across the sea, where every bright day and moonlit night
+snatched from the mud and rain of the coming winter is of priceless
+value to our Army.  That consideration should enable us to bear our
+affliction with fortitude as we crowd the "tubes" or listen to the roar
+of the guns from under the domestic table.
+
+But we must admit, on the evidence, that Nature does not care twopence
+who wins, and is as unconcerned about our affairs as we are about the
+affairs of a nest of ants that we tread on without knowing that we have
+trodden on it.  She is beyond good and evil.  She has no morals and is
+indifferent about justice and what men call right and wrong.  She
+blasts the wise and leaves the foolish to flourish.
+
+      Nature, with equal mind
+      Sees all her sons at play;
+      Sees man control the wind,
+      The wind sweep man away;
+  Allows the proudly riding and the found'ring barque.
+
+It is a chill, but a chastening thought.  It leaves us with a sense of
+loneliness, but it brings with it, also, a sense of power, the power of
+the unconquerable human spirit, self-dependent and self-reliant,
+reaching out to ideals beyond itself, beyond its highest hope of
+attainment, broken on the wheel of intractable things, but still
+stumbling forward by its half-lights in search of some Land of Promise
+that always skips just beyond the horizon.
+
+Happily the moon is skipping beyond the horizon too.  Frankly, we have
+seen enough of her face to last us for a long time.  When she comes out
+again let her clothe herself in good fat clouds and bring the winds in
+her train.  We do not like to think of her as a mere flunkey of the
+Kaiser and the torch-bearer of his assassins.
+
+
+
+
+IF JEREMY CAME BACK
+
+It is the agreeable illusion of the theatre that life is a rounded
+tale.  We pay our money at the box, go in, see the story begin,
+progress and end, sadly or cheerfully, and come away with the discords
+resolved, virtue exalted and villainy abased, and the tangled skein of
+things neatly unravelled.  And so home, content.  But on the stage of
+life there is none of this satisfying completeness and finish.  We
+enter in the midst of a very ancient drama, spend our years in trying
+to pick up the threads and purport of the action, and go as
+inopportunely as we came.  The curtain does not descend punctually upon
+an exhausted plot and an accomplished purpose.  It descends upon a
+thrilling but unfinished tale.  You have got, perhaps, into the most
+breathless part of the action, seized at last the clue that will
+assuredly explain the mystery, when suddenly and irrationally the light
+fails, and for you the theatre is dark for ever.  Your emotions have
+been stirred, your curiosity awakened, your sympathies aroused in vain.
+Even the episode you have been permitted to witness is left with ragged
+ends and unfinished judgments.  How did it proceed and how did it end,
+and what was the sequel?  Was virtue or villainy triumphant?  Who was
+the real hero?  Were your sympathies on the right side or the wrong?
+And, more personally, what of those shoots of life you have thrown out
+to the challenge of the future?  Did they wilt or flourish, and what
+was their fortune?  These are among the thousand questions to which we
+should like an answer, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking
+that we may have an answer.
+
+It would be enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of us to have the
+privilege which Jeremy Bentham confessed that he would like to enjoy.
+That amiable and industrious philosopher, having spent a blameless life
+in the development of his comfortable gospel of the "greatest good of
+the greatest number," entertained the pleasant fancy of returning to
+the scene of his labours once in every hundred years to see humanity
+marching triumphantly to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism, along the
+straight and smooth turnpike road that he had fashioned for its ease
+and direction.  He had the touching confidence of the idealist that
+humanity only had to be shown the way out of the wilderness to plunge
+into it with joyous shouts, and hurry along it with eager enthusiasm.
+And since he had shown the way all would henceforth be well.  It is
+this confidence which makes the idealist an object of pity to the
+cynic.  For the cynic is often only the idealist turned sour.  He is
+the idealist disillusioned by loss of faith, not in his ideals, but in
+humanity.
+
+This is about the time when Jeremy might be expected back on his first
+centennial visit to see how we have got along the road to human
+perfectibility.  I can imagine him, poised in the unapparent, looking
+with round-eyed astonishment upon the answer which a century of time
+has given to his anticipations.  This, the New Jerusalem of his
+confident vision?  This shambles the harvest of a hundred years of
+progress?  And the cynic beside him, tapping his ghostly snuff-box,
+observes dryly, "They don't seem to have got very far on the way,
+friend Jeremy; not very far on the way."  I can conceive the
+philosopher returning sadly to the Elysian fields, wondering whether,
+after all, these visits are worth while.  If this is the achievement of
+a hundred years' enjoyment of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, what
+unthinkable revelation may await him on his next visit!  Perhaps ...
+yes, perhaps, it will be better to stay away.
+
+But all the answers of time will not be so disquieting.  It is
+probable, for example, that Benjamin Franklin will enjoy his visit
+immensely.  He will find much to delight his curious and adventurous
+mind.  I see him watching the flying machines as joyously as a child
+and as fondly as a parent.  For among his multitudinous activities he
+experimented with balloons and suffered the gibes of the foolish.  Why,
+asked his critic, did he waste his time over these childish things?
+What, in the name of heaven, was the use of balloons?  And Benjamin
+made the immortal reply, "What is the use of a new-born baby?"  If he
+is among the presences who watch the events of to-day he will be almost
+as astonished as his critics to see the dimensions his "new-born baby"
+has grown to.  He will be astonished at other things.  He will recall
+the day when, in his fine flowered-silk garment, he entered, as the
+delegate of the insurgent farmers of New England, the reception of the
+great--was it not in Downing Street?--and was spat upon by the noble
+lords, to whose dim vision the future of the new-born baby across the
+Atlantic was undecipherable.  He will recall how he put his outraged
+garment away, never to wear it again until he had signed the
+Declaration of Independence.  And now, what miracle is this?  England
+and America reconciled at last.  England, no less than France,
+straining her eyes across the Atlantic for the relief that is hastening
+to her help in the extremest peril of her history from the giant by
+whose unquiet cradle he played his part a century and a half ago....
+Well, no one will rejoice more at the reconciliation or watch the tide
+of relief streaming across the ocean with more goodwill than Benjamin,
+who deplored the breach with England as much as anybody.  But the noble
+lords who spat on him!...
+
+And I can see Napoleon, with his unpleasant familiarity, pinching the
+spiritual ears of the French scientists of his day and saying, "How
+now, gentlemen?  What do you say to the steamboat now?"  Poor wretches,
+how humiliated they will be.  For when Napoleon asked the Academie des
+Sciences to report as to the possibilities of the newly-invented
+steamboat, their verdict was, "Idee folle, erreur grossiere,
+absurdite."  They saw in it only a foolish toy, and not a new-born baby
+destined to be the giant who is performing such prodigies on the seas
+of the world to-day.
+
+But it is not the scientists who will need to hang their heads before
+the revelations that await them.  They will look on with the
+complacency of those who see the mighty harvest of their sowing.
+Perhaps among the presences who surround them they may descry a bulky
+man, with rolling gait, whom they knew in their day on earth as the
+intellectual autocrat of his generation and who levelled the shafts of
+his wit at their foolish experiments.  They will have lost the very
+human frailty of retaliation if they do not remind him of some of those
+shafts that, to the admiring circle which sat at his feet, seemed so
+well-directed and piercing.  Perhaps they will read this to him:
+
+
+Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone
+and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day.  Some
+register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind
+is changeable.  There are men yet more profound, who have heard that
+two colourless liquors may produce a colour by union, and that two cold
+bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce
+the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.
+
+
+Admirable old boy!  What wit you had!  We can still enjoy it even
+though time has turned it to foolishness and planted its barb in your
+own breast.  All your roaring, sir, will not take the barb out.  All
+your genius for argument will not prevail against the witness you see
+of the mighty fruits of those little experiments that filled your
+Olympian mind with scorn.  But you will have your compensations.  Even
+you will be astonished at the place you fill in our thoughts so long
+after your queer figure and brown wig were last seen in Fleet Street.
+You will find that the very age in which you lived is remembered as the
+Age of Johnson, and that the thunders of your voice, transmitted by the
+faithful Bozzy, are among the immortal reverberations from the past.
+Yes, sir, in spite of the scientists, you will go back very well
+content with your visit.
+
+And it may be that the victory of the scientists will assuage the
+disappointment of Jeremy himself.  It is possible that when, back once
+more in whatever region of heaven is reserved for philosophers, he
+begins to reflect on all he has seen, Jeremy will recover his spirits.
+This moral catastrophe of man, he will say, must be seen in relation to
+his astonishing intellectual victory.  I forgot that stage in the
+journey to the heavenly city of Utilitarianism.  This century that has
+passed has witnessed that stage.  It has been a period of inconceivable
+triumph over matter.  Man has discovered all the wonders of the earth
+and is dazzled and drunk with the conquest of things.  His moral and
+social sense has not been able to keep pace with this breathless
+material development.  He has lost his spiritual bearings in the midst
+of the gigantic machine that his genius has fashioned.  He has become
+the slave of his own creation, the victim of the monster of his
+invention, and this calamity into which he has fallen is his blind
+effort to readjust his life to the new scheme of things that the
+machine has imposed on him.  The great parturition is upon him and he
+is shedding gouts of blood in his agony.  But he will emerge from his
+pains.  The material century is accomplished; the conquest of the
+machine is at hand, and with that conquest the moral sense of man will
+revive with a grandeur undreamed of in the past.  The march is longer
+than I thought, but it will gain impetus and majesty from this immense
+overthrow.  The road I built was only premature.  Man was not ready to
+take it.  But it is still there--a little grass-grown and neglected,
+but still beckoning him on to the earthly paradise.  When he rises from
+his wrestle in the dark, his sight will clear and he will surely take
+it....  Yes, I think I shall go back after all....
+
+Unteachable old optimist, murmurs the cynic at his side.
+
+
+
+
+ON SLEEP AND THOUGHT
+
+In the middle of last night I found myself suddenly and quite acutely
+awake.  It is an unusual experience for me.  I knew the disturbance had
+not come from without myself, but from within--from some low but
+persistent knocking at the remote door of consciousness.  Who was the
+knocker?  I ran over the possible visitors before opening the door just
+as one sometimes puzzles over the writing of an address before opening
+a letter.  Ah, yes, the disquieting discovery I had made
+yesterday--that was the intruder.  And, saying this, I opened the door
+and let the fellow in, to sit upon my pillow and lord it over me in the
+darkness.  I had succeeded in suppressing him before I went to
+bed--burying him beneath talk about this and that, some variations of
+Rameau, a few of those Hungarian songs from Korbay's collection, so
+incomparable in their fierce energy and passion, and so on; the mound
+nicely rounded off with Duruy's "History of France," and the headstone
+of sleep duly erected.  Now, I thought, I shall hear nothing more of
+him until I face him squarely to-morrow.  And here, up from the depths
+he had come and taken his seat upon the headstone itself.
+
+It is with sleep as with affairs.  One cracked bell will shatter a
+whole ring; one scheming, predatory power will set the whole world in
+flames.  And one disorderly imp of the mind will upset the whole comity
+of sleep.  He will neither slumber forgetfully nor play with the others
+in dreams, turning the realities and solemnities of the day into a wild
+travesty of fun or agony, in which everything that is incredible seems
+as natural as sneezing, and you stand on your head on the cross of St.
+Paul's or walk up the Strand carrying your head under your arm without
+any sense of surprise or impropriety.  Nor is he one of those obliging
+subjects of the mind who obey their orders like a sensible house-dog,
+sleeping with one eye open and ready to bark, as it were, if anything
+goes wrong.  You know that sort of decent fellow.  You say to him
+overnight, "Now, remember, I have that train to catch in the morning,
+and I must be awake without fail at seven."  Or it may be six, or four.
+And whatever the hour you name, sure enough the good dog barks in time.
+If he has a failing, it is barking too soon and leaving you to discuss
+the nice question whether you dare go to sleep again or whether you had
+better remain awake.  In the midst of which you probably go to sleep
+again and miss your train.
+
+This control of the kingdom of sleep by the apparently dormant
+consciousness can be carried far.  A friend of mine tells me that he
+has even learned to put his dreams under the check of conscious or
+sub-conscious thought.  He had one persistent dream which took the form
+of missing the train.  Sometimes his wife was on board, and he rushed
+on to the platform just in time to see the train in motion and her head
+out of the window with agony written on her face.  Sometimes he was in
+the train and his wife just missed it.  Sometimes they were both
+inside, but saw their luggage being brought up too late.  Sometimes the
+luggage got in and they didn't.  Always something went wrong.  He
+determined to have that dream regularised.  And so before going to bed
+he thought hard of catching the train.  He saturated himself with the
+idea of catching the train.  And the thing worked like a charm.  He
+never misses a train now, nor his wife, nor his luggage.  They all
+steam away on their dream journeys together without a hitch.  So he
+tells me, and I believe him, for he is a truthful man.
+
+You and I, and I suppose everybody, have had evidences of this
+sub-conscious operation in sleep.  That it is common enough is shown by
+the familiar saying, "I will sleep on it."  I have gone to bed more
+than once with problems that have seemed insoluble, have fallen to
+sleep, and have wakened in the morning with the course so clear that I
+have wondered how I could have been in doubt.  And Sir Edward Clarke in
+his reminiscences of the Bar tells how, after a night over his briefs
+he would go to bed with his way through the tangle obscure and
+perplexing, and would wake from sleep with the path plain as a
+pikestaff.  The phenomenon is doubtless due in some measure to rest.
+The mind clears in sleeping as muddy waters clear in standing.  But
+this is not the whole explanation.  Some process has taken place in the
+interval far down in the hinterlands of thought.  You may observe this
+even in your waking hours.  Lord Leverhulme, who I suppose has one of
+the biggest letter-bags in the country, once told me that his habit in
+dealing with his correspondence is to answer at once those letters he
+can reply to off-hand, and to put aside those that need consideration.
+When he turns to the latter he finds the answers have fashioned
+themselves without any conscious act of thought.  This experience is
+not uncommon, and as it occurs when the mind is at the maximum of
+activity it disposes of the idea that rest is the complete explanation.
+
+More goes on in us than we know.  At this moment I am conscious of at
+least six strata of thought.  I am attending to this writing, the
+shaping of the letters, the spelling of the words; I am thinking what I
+shall write; I am sensible that a thrush is singing outside, and that
+the sun is shining; this pervades my mind with the glow of the thought
+that in a few days I shall be in the beechwoods; through this happy
+glow the ugly imp who sat on my pillow last night forces himself on my
+attention; down below there is the boom of the great misery of the
+world that goes on ceaselessly like the deep strum of the double bass
+in the orchestra.  And out of sight and consciousness there are, I
+suspect, deeper and more obscure functions shaping all sorts of things
+in the unfathomed caves of the mind.  The results will come to the
+surface in due course, and I shall wonder where they came from.  It is
+a mistake to suppose that we can only think of one thing at a time.
+The mind can keep as many balls circulating as Cinquevalli.  It can
+keep some of them circulating even without knowing that they exist.
+
+But these profound functions of the mind that know no sleep, and yet do
+not disturb our sleep, are not to be confused with that imp of the
+pillow.  He is a brawler of the day.  He brings the noisy world of fact
+into the cloistered calm or the playground of sleep.  He is known to
+all of us, but most of all to the criminal who has still got a
+conscience.  Macbeth knew him--"Macbeth hath murdered sleep, the
+innocent sleep."  Eugene Aram knew him:
+
+  And a mighty wind had swept the leaves
+    And still the corpse was bare.
+
+
+I know him ... And that reminds me.  It is time I went and had it out
+with my imp of the pillow in the daylight.
+
+
+
+
+ON MOWING
+
+I have hung the scythe up in the barn and now I am going to sing its
+praises.  And if you doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme,
+come with me into the orchard, smell the new-mown hay, mark the swathes
+where they lie and note the workmanship.  Yes, I admit that over there
+by the damson trees and down by the fence there is a sort of unkempt,
+dishevelled appearance about the grass as though it had been stabbed
+and tortured by some insane animal armed with an axe.  It is true.  It
+has been stabbed and tortured by an insane animal.  It was there that I
+began.  It was there that I hacked and hewed, perspired and suffered.
+It was there that I said things of which in my calmer moments I should
+disapprove.  It was there that I served my apprenticeship to the
+scythe.  But let your eye scan gently that stricken pasture and pause
+here where the orchard slopes to the paddock.  I do not care who looks
+at this bit.  I am prepared to stand or fall by it.  It speaks for
+itself.  The signature of the master hand is here.  It is my signature.
+
+And having written that signature I feel like the wounded soldier
+spoken of by the "Wayfarer" in the _Nation_.  He was returning to
+England, and as he looked from the train upon the cheerful Kentish
+landscape and saw the hay-makers in the fields he said, "I feel as
+though I should like to cut grass all the rest of my life."  I do not
+know whether it was the craftsman in him that spoke.  Perhaps it was
+only the beautiful sanity and peace of the scene, contrasted with the
+squalid nightmare he had left behind, that wrung the words from him.
+But they were words that anyone who has used a scythe would echo.  I
+echo them.  I feel that I could look forward joyfully to an eternity of
+sunny days and illimitable fields of waving grass and just go on mowing
+and mowing and mowing for ever.  I am chilled by the thought that you
+can only play the barber to nature once, or at most twice a year.  I
+look back over the summers of the past, and lament my wasted
+opportunities.  What meadows I might have mown had I only known the joy
+of it!
+
+For mowing is the most delightful disguise that work can wear.  When
+once you have got the trick of it, it goes with a rhythm that is
+intoxicating.  The scythe, which looked so ungainly and unmanageable a
+tool, gradually changes its character.  It becomes an instrument of
+infinite flexibility and delicacy.  The lines that seemed so uncouth
+and clownish are discovered to be the refinement of time.  What
+centuries of accumulated experience under the suns of what diverse
+lands have gone to the perfecting of this most ancient tool of the
+fields, shaping the blade so cunningly, adjusting it to the handle at
+so artful an angle, disposing the nebs with such true relationship to
+the action of the body, so that, skilfully used, the instrument loses
+the sense of weight and seems to carry you forward by its own smooth,
+almost instinctive motion.  It is like an extension of yourself, with a
+touch as fine as the brush of a butterfly's wing and a stroke as bold
+and resistless as the sweep of a cataract.  It is no longer a clumsy,
+blundering, dead thing, but as obedient as your hand and as conscious
+as your touch.  You seem to have developed a new member, far-reaching,
+with the edge of a scimitar, that will flick off a daisy or fell a
+forest of stalwart grasses.
+
+And as the intimacy grows you note how the action simplifies itself.
+The violent stabbings and discords are resolved into a harmony as
+serene as a pastoral symphony.  You feel the rhythm taking shape, and
+as it develops the body becomes captive to its own task.  You are no
+longer manipulating a tool.  You and the tool have become magically
+one, fused in a common intelligence, so that you hardly know whether
+you swing the scythe or the scythe bears you forward on its own strong,
+swimming stroke.  The mind, released, stands aloof in a sort of
+delighted calm, rejoicing in a spectacle in which it has ceased to have
+a conscious part, noting the bold swing of the body backwards for the
+stroke (the blade lightly skimming the ground, as the oar gently
+flatters the water in its return), the delicate play of the wrist as
+the scythe comes into action, the "swish" that tells that the stroke is
+true and clean, the thrust from the waist upwards that carries it
+clear, the dip of the blade that leaves the swathe behind, the
+moderate, timely, exact movement of the feet preparatory to the next
+stroke, the low, musical hum of the vibrating steel.  A frog hops out
+in alarm at the sudden invasion of his secrecy among the deep grasses.
+You hope he won't get in the way of that terrible finger, but you are
+drunk with the rhythm of the scythe and are swept along on its
+imperious current.  You are no longer a man, but a motion.  The frog
+must take his chance.  Swish--swish--swish----
+
+Not that the rhythm is unrelieved.  It has its "accidentals."  You
+repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of
+pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the
+theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray
+flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the
+pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so
+deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone.  But all the time
+the song of the scythe goes on.  It fills your mind and courses through
+your blood.  Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish--swish--swish, and
+to that measure you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees
+and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through
+which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.
+
+The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally
+overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain.  You mark the
+shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees.  A thrush
+sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other
+side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and
+begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the
+west.  Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their
+evening meal.  Presently they descend and chase each other over the
+orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to
+the symphony of late summer evenings.  You are pleasantly conscious of
+these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe,
+and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches of old
+song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on
+his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving
+grasses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more
+august harvest....  The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall
+on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the
+valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in
+the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one
+final note of the white-throat....  There is still light for this last
+slope to the paddock.  Swish--swish--swish....
+
+
+
+
+The Temple Press, Letchworth
+
+ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Leaves in the Wind, by A. G. Gardiner
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