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.
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 SuezWhere 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 inMeasure for Measurepassed 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 dangerousIs that temptation that doth goad us onTo sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,With all her double vigour, art and natureOnce stir my temper; but this virtuous maidSubdues 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."
"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 whenhelikes. 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 ofPunchI 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 ofthem.
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 theCologne Gazetteearly 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.
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.
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 thatlooks upwardto 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" ...
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 consignedOur 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—