—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 ofenvoithat 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."
I see that a discussion has arisen in theSpectatoron the "Canadian Boat Song." It appeared inBlackwood'snearly 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 islandMountains 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 seasAmong 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 rhymeTo take into the air my quiet breath.
And again:
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one starSat 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. "Embalmèddarkness," "Verdurousglooms," "Now more than ever seems itrichto die." "Cooled a long age in thedeep-delvèdearth." "DarklingI listen." "She stood in tears amid thealiencorn." "Oh, for a beaker full of thewarm south." "With beaded bubbleswinkingat the brim." "Nohungrygenerations 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.
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....
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.
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.
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 mindSees 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.