A few days ago Mr. Chesterton expressed a doubt whether he had ever read Boswell "through." Knowing Mr. Chesterton, and having a life-long acquaintance with Boswell, I share his doubt. G.K.C. has an amazing gift for seizing the spirit and purport of a book by turning over the pages in handfuls and sampling a sentence here and there. He treats books as the expert wine-taster treats wines, not drinking them in great coarse gulps, but moistening his lips and catching the bouquet on his palate. The parallel is no doubt as misleading as most parallels are apt to be. Good wines have to be "tasted" in this way, but the better the book the deeper should be the draught or the more deliberate and patient the mastication. "Chewed and digested" is Bacon's phrase.
But I am far too much addicted to "skipping" myself to treat the practice as a crime in others. When I was young and industrious and enthusiastic I read as solemnly and slavishly as anyone. I was like a dog with a bone. The tougher the theme the more I exercised my intellectual molars on it. Stout fellows like ZimmermannOn Solitude, and Burke onThe Sublime and Beautiful, and MillOn Libertywere the sort of men for my youthful ardour. I cannot honestly say I enjoyed them, but I can honestly say that I read them, and I can also honestly say that I shall never read them or their like again. I finished my drudgery long ago, and have become a mere idler among books, a person who has served his apprenticeship and can go about enjoying himself, taking a sip here and a longish "pull" there, passing over this vintage, and returning to that and generally behaving like a freeman wandering over the estates of the mind, without a duty to anything but his own fancy.
I, too, doubt whether I have read Boswell through. Why should I read it through? I have read the conversations a hundred times and I hope to read them a hundred times more; but I will make no affidavit about the letters. I suspect that I have been "skipping" the letters unconsciously all my life. AndParadise Regained? My conscience is clear aboutParadise Lost, and I can still mouth the speeches of the first author of our misfortunes whom the judgment of time had converted into the hero of that immortal poem. But can I put my hand on my heart and say I have read theRegainedright through? I cannot. I am not even sure that I have read Shakespeare through. I have a vague notion that in the lusty youth of which I have spoken I did readTitus AndronicusandPericleswith the rest, but I am quite prepared to believe that I only like to believe I did.
There is high precedent for those of us who "skip." Johnson himself was a famous "skipper," and confessed that he seldom finished a book. It is true that he performed the amazing feat of rising two hours before his usual time to read Burton'sAnatomy of Melancholy. He was a truthful man, or I should find difficulty in believing him. Of course the achievement was not so great as it seems, for though Johnson believed in early rising on principle and recommended all young men to practise it, he did not himself rise until noon. But the idea of getting up, if only at ten in the morning, with a feverish desire to read Burton tries my faith even in Johnson's veracity. It is pleasant to dip occasionally into that astonishing rag-box of learning, but most of us are as likely to read Bradshaw's Time Table through as Burton'sAnatomythrough. It is not a book; it is a curiosity.
It is a common experience to find that the habit of "skipping" grows on us as we grow older. It is not merely that we are more tired or more lazy: it is that we are more discreet and more delicate in our intellectual feeding. It is with reading as with eating. When we are young we can eat anything. If we are offered a bun before dinner we express no astonishment, but consume it recklessly. But, grown older and wiser, as Holmes remarks, we receive the offer of a bun before dinner with polite surprise. And so with books. When the magic of Shelley seizes us at seventeen we can devourThe Revolt of Islamas we devoured that large boggy bun, but later we learn to discriminate even with Shelley, and to take great spaces of him as read. And even the most fervent Wordsworthian would admit that his reading of Wordsworth is patchy, and that if the poet had not written a line after he left Grasmere for Rydal Water, his indebtedness to him would not have been sensibly diminished. Who, for example, can honestly say that he has traversed the Sahara of theEcclesiastical Sonnets?
This is not a plea for skimpy reading. It is good for the young to worry their bone even if there is little meat on it. I would have them serve an arduous apprenticeship in the great world of books, cleaving their own way laboriously through the wilderness. The anthology business for the young is a little over-done. The youthful digestion ought not to be weakened by an exclusive diet of "elegant extracts," and spoon-feeding robs us of the joys of discovery and adventure. What delight is there like encountering in the wilderness some great unknown of whom we have never heard? It is like coming into a fortune, or rather it is better than coming into a fortune, for these are "riches fineless" that grow with compound interest and are not subject to the vicissitudes of things. I found a young maiden of my acquaintance the other day in a mood of unusual exaltation. She had fallen in love and was hot with the first rapture of passion. She had encounteredEmmaand was aflame with ardour for more adventures in the serene world that Jane Austen had opened out before her. That is the way, casual and unsought, that the realms of gold should be invaded. Youth should be encouraged to fashion its own taste and discriminate for itself between the good, the better and the best. When that is done we can "skip" as we like, with an easy mind and a good conscience. We have learned our path through the wilderness. We know where the hyacinths grow and where we can catch the smell of the wild thyme, and the copse where the nightingale sings to the moon. And if with this liberty of knowledge we "skip" some of the high-brows, and are found more often in the company of Borrow than of Bacon—well, we have done our task-work and are out to enjoy the sun and the wind on the heath.
It was a wish of Seneca's that the wise and virtuous when they slept could lend their thoughts and their feelings out to less wise and less virtuous people. It would be equally admirable if we could occasionally let our spiritual selves take wing and go on holiday, leaving the body at home to carry on the routine business, receive callers, answer the telephone, pay the bills, and so on. If it were possible for me to take such a holiday I should go to Tewkesbury, where the eighth centenary of the famous Norman church of that town is being celebrated. There was a time when I had no desire to go to Tewkesbury. It was one of the places I did not want to go to because I feared that seeing it would destroy the Tewkesbury of my fancy. No one would hesitate to go to a place like Birmingham or Glasgow, for their names awaken no emotions in the mind, and experience of them can shatter no pleasant images.
But Tewkesbury is a name to conjure with. It belongs to the poetry of things. It is entangled in history and comes with the pomp of trumpets and the echoes of far-off deeds. It has the tang of Shakespeare about it. Was it not with its name that that great star swam into our ken with the earliest of our remembered lines?—
... false, fleeting, perjured ClarenceThat stabbed me on the field by Tewkesbury.
Observe, not "the field at Tewkesbury" or "of Tewkesbury," but "the field by Tewkesbury." A subtle difference, but enough to convince anyone who has been to that field that Shakespeare wandered there in his young days, perhaps boating thither from Stratford some summer day with Ann Hathaway. Was it not Tewkesbury's mustard that Falstaff hurled at Poins—or was it Pistol? "His wits are as thick as Tewkesbury mustard," he said. I like to think that Falstaff stayed at the "Hop Pole" at Tewkesbury on that famous recruiting journey into Gloucestershire, when he ate a pippin in Squire Shallow's orchard, and that it was the mustard he got there that made his eyes water and stuck in his memory. It was certainly at the "Hop Pole" that Mr. Pickwick stopped for dinner on his journey from Bath. That is the last time, I think, that anything important happened at Tewkesbury. Since then it has slept, and one liked to think it was sleeping in a beautiful mediæval dream, undisturbed by anything more modern than an occasional stage-coach or the horn of the red-coated huntsman clattering through the street.
That was how I liked to think of Tewkesbury, and I stayed away from it, lest I should find it was all cinemas, fried-fish shops and tin tabernacles. But one day last summer I was journeying by road from Wales and found Tewkesbury in my path, and that it was convenient to stay like Mr. Pickwick at the "Hop Pole." And now I know that Tewkesbury is as good as its name, and that I can go there and see as perfect a bit of old England as can be seen from the Tamar to the Tweed. Of course, a city like York will give you infinitely more, layer on layer of history written on its stones, telling of the England of the Britons, of the Romans, the Saxons, the Normans, and so onward.
But these are remains—the splendid litter of the centuries. The wonderful thing about Tewkesbury is that it is a living whole, a single town of Tudor England left apparently almost untouched—certainly unspoiled. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century timbered houses, with their upper floors overhanging the pavements, line the three broad compact streets, and between these reverend buildings little doorways admit to multitudinous courts where the poor live. I daresay it oughtn't to be so. I daresay the courts ought to be swept away and the people housed with gardens far afield. But at this moment I am not a social enthusiast, but a lover of the picturesque, and no doubt it is this compact structure of the place that has kept it so perfect a survival of the past. By the gardens and the courts flows Shakespeare's Avon, and just beyond the town it joins the broad flood of the Severn near the Bloody Field where the Wars of the Roses ended—a place of rank grass, left, I was told, untouched since that day of slaughter, nearly half a thousand years ago. "They're afeard o' what they might find," said the old man who directed me. And over all is the great Abbey Church, next to Durham Cathedral perhaps the finest piece of Norman ecclesiastical architecture in England. Thither from the Bloody Field on that day of battle long ago were borne the corpses of the two rivals, and there their bones lie side by side, preaching, for those who care to hear, more potent sermons on the fitful fever of life than ever came from the pulpit.
And this beautiful town is set in a landscape as gracious as "a melody that's sweetly played in tune"—a wide, rich vale, the most fertile part of England. The sun comes up over the Cotswolds in the morning, and sets over the great range of the Malverns in the evening. Between these two sheltering ramparts Tewkesbury lies, dreaming of the Middle Ages. I daresay it has its worries like any other place. But I refuse to be a realist about Tewkesbury. I will indulge my love of romance. I will remember only that as I came away from the "Hop Pole" a vehicle with four jolly-looking fellows inside came up tooting a horn that played old-fashioned airs, and bringing in its train a swarm of boys. And as the boys gathered round the car one of the jolly-looking fellows put his hand in his pocket and drew out a heap of coins that he scattered among them. It was in the true spirit of the place. I fancy Mr. Pickwick did the same thing when he left the "Hop Pole," and I am sure that Falstaff did—in spite of the mustard. I would have done the same thing myself, if I had had the courage and the coppers. The next time I go to Tewkesbury I will fill my pockets with coppers.
I was travelling down to Devonshire the other day when I met a man in the train with whom I fell into conversation. It was a wonderful day. We had left the fog behind us in London and the countryside glowed, rich and warm, under the sunshine of a cloudless November day. It seemed an occasion on which one could have found a thousand agreeable things to talk about, but I noticed that wherever the conversation with the stranger started it always got round to the taxation of land values. Now I happen to be in favour of the taxation of land values. It is a question about which my mind is as clear as it is about anything in this perplexing world. I am prepared to vote in favour of it in due season and to speak in favour of it when I think any useful purpose can be served. But I confess I got painfully bored by this well-meaning man and that I hailed the opportunity of going to the restaurant car to lunch with secret thanksgiving. I don't think I shall ever be caughttête-à-têtewith that missionary of the One Idea again. I have got him on the list of People I Can Do Without.
It is a list made up largely of those who wear a bee in their bonnet. There is no surer prescription for the Complete Bore than the tyranny of an idea. We flee instinctively from the man who is always telling us the same thing, who comes into the circle with one ceaseless theme, to which he hitches the heavens above and the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. There is that excellent publicist, Vernon Pizzey, for example. You have but to say "Good day" to him in the street, and he will buttonhole you, and, with the abstracted air of one who has seen a vision, will open the flood-gates of Birth Control upon you.
When I first knew him he was the passionate pilgrim of Prohibition. Banish alcohol from the face of the earth, and all the problems of life would be solved, and sorrow and sighing would flee away. He has passed out of that phase. It is no longer the abolition of Drink that lights the fires of fanatical faith in his eyes: it is the Abolition of Children. The New Jerusalem which he will build in England's green and pleasant land will have no children playing in its streets. When he hears of a childless home, a ghost of a smile flits over his features, and when he hears of a family of six he looks as though he has heard of some unmentionable sin. He dreams of a golden age when the propagation of children among the poor will be a punishable offence, and when the people of whom he does not approve will be sterilised by order of the court. His prophet is Dean Inge.
I am not concerned here with the merits of his obsession. I refer to him only as an example of those who are ridden by an idea. An idea may be good or bad, but no idea is good enough to claim one's whole waking thoughts. We like people who have many facets to their minds, who hold strong opinions on a variety of subjects and know how to keep them under control, airing them when they are in season and putting them in cold storage when they are not of season. We like them to think in many quantities, to let their thought range over the whole landscape of things, to have plenty of windows to their mind and to open them in turn to all the winds that blow. We ought not to be the slave of one idea, but the master of legions which we should exercise and discipline and from which we should extract a working philosophy of life. However good the text we ought not always to be preaching a sermon from it. I remember when I was a boy a most excellent man, a lawyer, who, every evening in the week, would take his stand on the plinth of a Sebastopol cannon in front of the Shire Hall that faced down the High Street of the country town in which I lived, and from thence would exhort the passers-by to repentance. No one ever heeded him, no one ever even paused to listen to him, and he lives in my memory a solitary figure weighed down with the wickedness of men, giving his life unselfishly to the delivery of his unregarded message, a man whose very agony had become a town jest.
Life is a multitudinous affair, and we suspect the sanity of a mind which is chained to one idea about it. I remember leaving the House of Commons on that tremendous day, the 3rd of August, 1914, when Sir Edward Grey had just made a speech that announced the most world-shaking event in history. In a few hours we should be involved in the greatest war the world had ever seen. An acquaintance of mine left the House with me, and as we seated ourselves in a cab he turned to me and said, "Did you see that outrageous vivisection case down at Wigan?"—or some such place. I forget what I answered, but I remember the strange feeling that came over me that I was cooped up with Mr. Dick. Here was the old, kindly world we had known for a lifetime plunging down into the gulf of unimaginable things. And beside me, indifferent to all the enormous happening, was Mr. Dick, his mind tortured with the wicked doings down at Wigan, or wherever it was.
There is of course another side to the shield of the man with One Idea. He could make out a good case for himself and I think I could make out a good case for him. The mere fact that his passion is disinterested is alone enough to command respect in a world where disinterested enthusiasm is a rare commodity. He is of the stuff of martyrs. He is prepared to die for his idea, or what is harder, to take the whips and scorns of men who are often, spiritually, not fit to black his boots. It is his uncalculating passion that keeps the flame of ideas burning in a dark world. Without him our moral currency would be sadly depreciated and the quality of the general life would lose its salt and savour. I often admire his singleness of purpose. I sometimes even envy a disinterestedness which leaves me ashamed by comparison. But I do not want to spend a week-end with him and I will not travel down to Devonshire with him if I can find a seat in the luggage-van or standing room in the corridor.
It is certainly an unequal world. As I was crossing Piccadilly Circus yesterday my eye fell on a man at work on the building that is being pulled down at the corner of Regent Street, next to the "Criterion."[1] He was standing on a fragment of wall of the disembowelled building that still jutted out a few yards from the side of the "Criterion," which rose like a vertical precipice beside him, without foothold or handhold that a squirrel could cling to. He was perhaps fifty feet from the ground. The width of the wall was, I suppose, a foot—just space enough for heel and toe to find standing-room. He was armed with a pick-axe, and with it he was cutting away the fragile buttress from underneath his feet. His body rose and fell with the strokes of the pick-axe. When he had loosened some portion of the wall, he would stand on one foot and scrape away the debris with the other. As it fell rattling to the ground a cloud of dust boiled up, smothering him and partially hiding him from view. Then he would turn to with the pick again, loosen another portion, and repeat the operation.
[1] The vacant site is now covered by a new block of buildings.
I stood and watched him with respect bordering on admiration. I could not help reflecting what a helpless figure I should have cut in his place and what a short time I should be there. I have been proud of my modest achievements on the rocks, but here was a man who made those achievements seem silly, and he did it as unconcernedly as if he were hoeing potatoes in his garden. Presently he straightened his back, loosened his shoulders, paused, threw a glance up at the vertical cliff above him, and another down the vertical cliff below him, and then resumed.
So I saw him cut away row after row of the brickwork on which he stood. There was a drop of fifty feet, "straight as a beggar can spit," back and front of him—not an inch of room for the play of his feet. Every movement had to be true to the fraction of an inch. Every piece of brickwork he removed involved a new problem within the same inexorable limits. The slightest mistake, and he would plunge down to the rubbish below, and a coroner's jury would say "Accidental death," and that would be the end of his story. Perhaps there would be two lines about him at the bottom of a newspaper column, but nobody would read it, for everybody would be so busy reading how Mr. Kid Lewis put Mr. Frankie Burns to sleep, and how Abe Mitchell did the fourth hole in two, and why Hobbs or somebody else was not caught in the second over.
And this man, rising and falling with the blows of his pick-axe up there on the fragment of wall, is not doing this perilous job occasionally. He is doing it every day. All his working life is spent on some such giddy task as this, swaying to and fro with his axe between a drop of fifty feet on one side and fifty feet on the other. He must never forget—for a moment. He must never be dizzy—for a moment. He must be prepared for any sudden gust of wind that blows. As I watched him he seemed to assume the proportions of a great artist. He seemed to become heroic—a figure carrying his life lightly on that frail ledge of the vertical cliff. I daresay it had never occurred to him to think of himself in either rôle. Yet the mere skill of the man was more delicate than the skill of the rather dull cricketers I saw at Lord's on Saturday. There were 12,000 people standing round hour by hour to watch Lee and Haig pile up the stupendous total of fifty runs inside two hours. I do not blame the spectators. I was one of them myself, and very dull I found it. But nobody bothered to give a glance at the figure swaying to and fro on the crumbling wall. Yet as a mere exhibition of skill it was not inferior to the pedestrian play at Lord's or to a skipping match between Carpentier and Dempsey at £1000 a minute. And remember, he was not engaged in a sham fight. He had a drop of fifty feet back and front. Instant death on either side all the time.
But then he was only doing useful work. I wondered what he got for risking his life every hour of every day. Perhaps as much in a week or a month as theStarwill pay me for writing this article about him. Perhaps as much in a year as an eminent counsel will pocket for a day's "refresher." Perhaps as much in a lifetime as Monsieur Carpentier will take for ten minutes' running exercise with Dempsey in the ring, winding up with a tap in the stomach, a count-out, a handshake (and a wink). No; on second thoughts, not half that, not quarter that.
When I passed through Piccadilly Circus in the evening the man had gone. So had the fragment of wall on which he stood. You may see the mark of the place where the wall rose on the side of the "Criterion." It is the mark of an unknown artist to whom I offer this tribute of my admiration.
For some time past I have noticed on the hoardings of London a placard illustrated with the picture of an American gentleman named Rutherford, who is represented lifting a prophetic fist in the manner of the advertisements of Horatio Bottomley before that prophet of the war had the misfortune to be found out, and declaring that there are "thousands in this city who will never die." I have not had the curiosity to attend his meetings or to inquire into the character of his revelation. I do not know, therefore, whether I am likely to be one of the people whom Mr. Rutherford has his eye upon. But the threat which he holds over my head has led me to look the possibility in the face. I suppose Mr. Rutherford is satisfied that it is an agreeable possibility. He would not have come all the way from America to tell us about it if he had not thought it was good news that he was bringing.
I think he is mistaken. Judging from my own reactions, as the Americans would say, to his prophecy, I fancy the general feeling would not be one of joy but of terror. If anything could reconcile us to the thought of death it would be the assurance that we should never die. For the pleasure as well as the pathos of life springs from the knowledge of its transitoriness.
All beauteous things for which we liveBy laws of time and space decay.But oh, the very reason whyI clasp them is because they die.
All our goings and comings are enriched with the sense of mortality. All our experiences are coloured by the thought that they may return no more. Rob us of the significance of the last words of Hamlet and the realm of poetry would become a desert, treeless and songless. It is because "the rest is silence" that the smallest details of our passage through life have in them the power of kindling thoughts such as these:
Sweet Chance, that led my steps abroad.Beyond the town, where wild flowers grow—A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord,How rich and great the times are now!Know, all ye sheepAnd cows, that keepOn staring that I stand so longIn grass that's wet from heavy rain—A rainbow and a cuckoo's songMay never come together again;May never comeThis side the tomb.
It is not alone the beauty of the sunset that touches us with such poignant emotion: it is because in the passing of the day we see the image of another passing to which we move as unfalteringly as the sun moves into the shadow of the night. When in these autumn days we walk in the woodlands amid the patter of the falling leaves, it is the same subtle suggestion that attunes the note of beauty to a minor key. Through the stillness of the forest there echo the strokes of a distant axe felling some kingly beech. For seventy, perhaps a hundred years it has weathered the storms of life, and now its hour has come and in its falling there is the allegory of ourselves. I think it is that allegory that makes my neighbour so passionately conservative about his trees. They stand too thick about his grounds, but he will not have the axe laid to one of them.
We cannot go an unusual journey without a dim sense of another journey from which we shall not return, nor say a prolonged "good-bye" without the faint echo in our minds of ultimate farewells. And who ever left the old house that has sheltered him so long and grown so familiar to sight and touch without feeling some shadow pass across the spirit that is more than the shadow cast by bricks and mortar? Life is crowded with these premonitions and forebodings that make our pleasures richer by reminding us that they are terminable.
And such is the perversity of human nature that if Mr. Rutherford should turn out to be well-informed, those of us who are marked down for deathlessness would find that the pleasure of life had vanished with its pathos. We should be panic-stricken at the idea of never coming to an end, of never being able to escape from what Chesterfield called "this silly world," and Salisbury "this miserable life." We should yearn for death as the condemned prisoner yearns for life or the icebound whaler for the spring. We do not want to die now, but to be comfortable we want to know that we shall die some day. Being under sentence of death we cling to life like limpets to a rock, but if we were sentenced to life we should shriek for the promise of death. We should hate the sunset that we were doomed to see for ever and ever, and loathe the autumn that mocked us with its falling leaves.
I remember that in one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu remarks that she is so happy that she regrets that she cannot live three hundred years. We all have moments like that, moments when life seems so good that we envy the patriarchs and would be glad if we could abide here longer than Nature permits. But in our gayest moments we could not contemplate the prospect of seeing in the New Year of, let us say, 10024 A.D., with the certainty that we were destined to wait on for the New Year of 100024 A.D., and so on to the crack of doom. The mind would reel before such an enormous vista. We should stagger and faint at the prospect of a journey that had no end and of a future as limitless and unthinkable as space. We should look into the darkness and be afraid. There may be an infinite destiny for us to which this life is only a preparatory school. It is not unreasonable to think it is so—that when this fitful fever is over we may pass out into realms and into a state of being in which the muddle of this strange episode will be resolved. But here we are finite. Here we have no abiding city and all our feelings are conditioned by finite terms. We are rather like the batsman at the wicket. He does not want to get out. When he has made his 50 he strives to make his 100, and when he has made his 100, he is just as anxious to make 200. But it is the knowledge that the innings will end, that every ball may be his last, that gives zest to the game. If he knew that he never could get out, that by an inexorable decree he was to be at the wicket for the rest of his days, he would turn round and knock the stumps down in desperation.
No, Mr. Rutherford, you have mistaken us. We do not want your revelation. The play is worth seeing, though I wish it were more good-humoured and the players a little more friendly; but we do not wish to watch it for ever. We like to know that the curtain will fall and that, a little weary and sleepy, we shall be permitted to go home. We are in no hurry, sir, but we like to know that the curtain is there.
A letter came to me the other day from a gentleman of the name of Blodgett, residing in Chicago. I do not, I regret to say, know Mr. Blodgett, but he has heard about me and even read my books, and he has a desire—which I find it difficult to resent—to possess my autograph. He wants to place it "in the literary shrine in his library" beside the autographs of "G. K. Chesterton, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne, E. V. Lucas, Lord Northcliffe," and other deities that he apparently worships in far-away Chicago. I yielded to Mr. Blodgett's request, for I am not made of the stern stuff that can turn a deaf ear to flattery. I endeavour to mortify the pride that Mr. Blodgett's compliment arouses by reflecting that for one person who wants my autograph there are one million who would wade through blood and tears for Charlie Chaplin's, or Georges Carpentier's, or Mary Pickford's, or the late Monsieur Landru's, or the eminent Mr. Horatio Bottomley's. I recalled the scene I saw at Lord's a few days ago when at the end of an innings as the teams left the field an enormous crowd rushed forward and enveloped them like a plague of locusts, each with an open book in one hand and a pen in the other, and a prayer on the lips for the autograph of some illustrious player. I reflected that no mob ever pursued me with these flattering attentions.
But in vain. The agreeable incense goes to my head. A request for my autograph makes me swell with pomp. However hard I try to be humble, I can't do it. The vision of Mr. Blodgett (of Chicago) rises before me. I see him carrying my illustrious autograph about in his breast-pocket and stopping his friends on Michigan Avenue to flaunt my flourishes before their eyes. I see him arriving home in the evening and shouting the glad tidings that my autograph has come to Mrs. Blodgett and the young Blodgetts up the staircase. And I sink to sleep at night with the agreeable vision of my humble signature resting in the "literary shrine" of Mr. Blodgett beside the august name of "Northcliffe."
But I refer to Mr. Blodgett's letter not because of his request, but because of his manner of addressing me. He writes to me as "Reginald S. Thomson, Esq." I cannot deny that my name (for the purpose of this article) is Reginald. I wish I could. What possessed my revered parents—peace to their ashes—to call me Reginald I do not know. Perhaps it was out of respect for the memory of the saintly Heber, whose precocious piety was set before me, with not much success, for my youthful imitation. But whatever its origin, I cannot recall the time when I did not loathe the name of Reginald. I took the earliest opportunity of disowning it, and for fifty years I have passed through the world under the sign of R. S. Thomson. Our English habit of using initials only for our Christian names was a source of solace to me. It enabled me to forget all about Reginald, and to leave the world in darkness about my disgraceful secret. I left it to suppose, if it supposed at all, that behind the R. there lurked nothing more offensive than Robert, or Richard, or, at the worst, Rufus.
A visit to America, however, betrayed the wretched truth to the world. The Americans are as particular about flourishing their front names as we often are about concealing ours. Mr. Herodotus P. Champ would be cut to the quick if you addressed him as Mr. H. P. Champ. He would regard it as a studied affront. And, being a polite people, the Americans take as much pains to unearth the Christian names of their visitors as their visitors take to hide them. Nothing will convince them that we wear initials because we like them. I had no sooner stepped ashore at New York than I was confronted with Mr. Reginald S. Thomson. Wherever I went I was haunted by that objectionable person. He went with me into parlours and on to platforms. He gibed at me in headlines. He mocked at me with his Portland slip and his white spats and his eye-glass. It was not until I had placed the Atlantic between myself and America that I ceased to be shadowed by Reginald. He is still over there, holding me up to ridicule with his insufferable elegances.
No doubt others have suffered in the same way. It would not surprise me to learn that Mr. H. G. Wells is known from Boston to Los Angeles as Mr. Hannibal G. Wells. Nobody in England knows what lurks behind "H. G." Mr. Wells keeps the secret from his closest friends, but I daresay it is babbled all over America, and that there is not an intelligent schoolboy who does not discuss the latest book of Hector G. Wells or H. Gascoigne Wells, or Horatio Gordon Wells, as the case may be. No doubt Mr. Wells has excellent reasons for not publishing his front names to the world. He may dislike them as much as I dislike Reginald. Parents who give us our names immediately we appear in the world are naturally liable to do us an injury. They have, let us say, been stirred by some royal wedding, and call their poor infant "Lascelles" in a fervour of loyalty. And perhaps Lascelles grows up into a fierce Communist who would prefer the L. to stand for Lenin. What is he to do but to take refuge in initials? And since he alone is concerned, why should we pry into the secrets which those initials conceal?
It would be a simple way of relief if our baptismal names were temporary, and each of us chose the names by which he desired to be known on coming of age. Then they would fit us more happily than Reginald fits me or Hannibal—if it is Hannibal—fits Mr. Wells.
The idea of planting a spinney arose out of the necessity of finding a name for the cottage. It is difficult to find a name for anything, from a baby to a book, but it is most difficult of all to find a name for a house. At least so we found it. Jane wanted "The Knoll," and somebody else, with a taste for Hardy, wanted "The Knap," and someone else, as a tribute to Meredith (and in view of the fact that the upland we had built on was a famous place for skylarks), wanted "Lark Uprising" (what would the postman have thought?), and another wanted "Windy Gap," and so on, and amid the multitude of suggestions the cottage seemed as though it would lose its youth and grow old without any name at all.
Then one day someone said "The Spinney," and in sheer desperation everyone else said, "Why, of course, 'The Spinney.' Perfect. The very thing." The only objection that was made was that there was no spinney. But a good name could not be sacrificed to so negligible a consideration. Moreover, what had we been about to forget to plant so desirable a thing as a spinney? There, below the house, just out of the line of view so as not to blot out the landscape of four counties, was the very spot, and in the garden there were plenty of trees, pine, spruce, chestnut, beech, and lime of twelve or fifteen years' growth ready to hand. It would have been safer and simpler to have set young saplings, but that would not have satisfied the elders. It would have been starting a spinney for another generation to enjoy, and we wanted a spinney that we could sit under ourselves.
If you plant saplings, I think you ought to do it in your youth so that you and the trees can grow to maturity and age together. I often regret that I did not plant an acorn from that glorious tree, the Queen Elizabeth's oak at Chenies, when I was young. It would have been a stalwart fellow by this time with a comfortable shade on summer days. But now, no, I should be too heavily handicapped in the race, and the young oak just starting on its prodigious career would mock my little span. One ought not, of course, to be sentimental over such things, but if you love trees you cannot help it. Witness that story in Tacitus of the noble Roman who owned the garden of Lucullus and who, being sentenced to be burned in his garden, asked permission the night before his execution to go and choose the place for the funeral pyre in order that the flames which consumed him should spare the trees he loved. That is a fine legend by which to be remembered for two thousand years.
I was told the other day a pleasant fact about Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman which will endear him still more to some and make him appear, perhaps, absurd to others. When he went from London to his estate of Belmont in Scotland, it was his practice to walk round his park and take off his hat to the trees he loved most. If Sir Henry had been given to irony, it might be supposed that the gesture was intended as a compliment on the company he had left behind at Westminster. "The more I see of men," he might have meant, adapting Pascal's famous phrase, "the better I like trees." But I do not fancy there was any anger with men in his greeting. There was nothing of the misanthrope in that shrewd and companionable man. He was a good hater, and had as acute a sense of character as any man of his time. He knew a crook or a humbug by instinct, and anything fraudulent or shoddy withered in his presence; but an honest, plain man was always at home with him.
He saluted his favourite trees in the spirit in which Xerxes, when passing with his army through Lydia, decorated with golden ornaments a plane-tree of extraordinary beauty, and left a warrior from the Immortal Band to be its special guard, as you may read in Herodotus. He saluted them because he loved them, and no one who has the spirit of the woodlands in him will think the action odd or even fanciful. It has never occurred to me to go about the woods taking off my hat to the kings of the forest, but that only shows that I have less imagination and less chivalry than he had. I am not sure I shall not do so in future. It is the least courtesy I can offer them for all the pleasure they have given me in life, and the action will seem reasonable enough to anyone who has witnessed those wonderful experiments of Professor Bhose which reveal the inner life of the tree with such thrilling suggestions of consciousness and emotion.
It is not possible to live much among trees without experiencing a subtle sense of comradeship with them. Our intimacy may not go so far as that of Giles Winterbourn, inThe Woodlanders, who could tell what sort of trees he was passing in the dark by the sound of the wind in the branches—but without that erudition it can create an affection almost personal, not unlike that we feel for those quiet companions of whom we have not thought much, perhaps, until we find that their simple constancy and friendliness had made the atmosphere and sunshine in which we moved.
I confess that when I walk through the woods that crown the hills behind the cottage, and see the great boles of the noblest of the beeches marked for felling, I feel very much as when I hear bad news of an old friend. That those glorious fellows, whom I have seen clothing themselves with green in the spring and with gold in the autumn, should be brought low and split into fragments to make chairs and tables seems a sacrilege. It is an unpractical sentiment, of course, and I daresay if I owned the trees I should cut them down too. So I am glad I don't own them, and can just love them and lament them.
I should, however, find it hard to cut down beech-trees of all trees, for after many affairs of the heart with trees, my affections have settled finally on them as the pride of our English woodlands. With what stateliness they spring from the ground, how noble their shade, how exquisite the green of their leaves in spring, how rich the gold of autumn, what a glowing carpet they spread for us in winter! If I go to Epping Forest it is to see the grand patriarchs of the tribe who are gathered together in solemn conclave in Monk's Wood, and if I place Buckinghamshire high among the counties, it is because there you will find a more abundant wealth of beeches than anywhere else in the land.
But I am no narrow sectarian about trees. If I put the beech first, I worship at many shrines. When I go to Chenies it is to pay my devotions to the Duke of Bedford's oaks, and especially the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth's oak, which still strews the greensward with acorns, though in its ancient trunk, hollowed by the centuries, you could seat a tolerably large tea-party. And who would go to Shere without a visit to those stalwart Spanish chestnuts that are the glory of the Duke of Northumberland's park? It is worth a journey to Salisbury, not merely to see the spire and Stonehenge, but to make the acquaintance of those magnificent cedars in Wilton Park. There is an elm at Nuneham that I go to see much as I go to see a venerable relative, and there is a wonderful yew-tree in the churchyard of Tidworth in Surrey that is better worth a pilgrimage than many a cathedral.
But to return to the spinney. We began our adventure a year ago, between the months of November and February, which are the limits within which transplanting can be done. A dozen spruce, two pines, a sycamore and two limes, all standing ten to a dozen feet in their boots, so to speak, were, with enormous gruntings, heavings and perspirations, borne to the chosen spot, and there placed in new-dug holes, earthed up, wired in position, and left to weather the storms. The handy-man shook his head over the operation—"didn't know but what they warn't too big to shift, but happen some on 'em would live." All through the spring and summer I watched those trees struggling for life, like a doctor walking the wards of a hospital and feeling the pulses of his patients. Month by month the spruces flickered on. The fairest of them all was the first to give up the ghost definitely, and then three others followed. It was August before any shoots of new foliage began to appear, and then one by one the remainder put forth tiny buds of life, the last sending out his faint signal of spring as late as October. "Ain't done so bad," said the handy-man, scratching his head to help him to a right judgment.
To-day with more heavings and gruntings the handy-man and I have transplanted another bunch of pines a good fifteen feet in height to the spinney, and for months to come I shall walk the wood again to catch signs of life in my new patients. Meanwhile, in order to provide for the future, we have planted young saplings among the big trees, and altogether my spinney, I think, makes a handsome show. I have just had a walk along the lane below to view it as a stranger might, and, speaking as a stranger, I remarked to myself that that was a nice little spinney beside the cottage on the hill, and when I came to the gate I, still as a stranger, was struck by the appropriateness of the name. I think that that spinney will be my memorial to the countryside, and I want no better. There is no pleasanter thing to be remembered by than trees. They are better than battles or books, for they do not record our passions, our ambitions, or our contentions. They record only that we once passed this way and loved the friendliness of the woods.
"Roughly speaking," says a writer in a recent issue of theNew Statesman, "no man using or wearing a monocle should be appointed to any public post in the United States. Believe me, nothing short of his fine simplicity and intellectual integrity would have enabled Mr. William Archer to 'get away with it.'" The warning occurs in an admirable article dealing with the disastrous way in which official England is usually represented in America. It is a subject of first importance, on which I am in entire agreement with the writer, and about which I could say much from personal knowledge. But the eyeglass will serve. You can see the whole landscape surveyed by the writer through the Englishman's eyeglass.
And, first, let me clear away the suggestion about my good friend William Archer. It is true he carries an eyeglass, and I have seen him on occasion use it to examine documents. But he does not wear an eyeglass, and he does wear spectacles. Neither in fact nor in spirit can he be included in the ranks of the Eyeglass Englishman. Nor, indeed, can all those who do wear an eyeglass be included in that category. I have known men who succeeded in wearing an eyeglass without offence. I have even known a lady who wore one so naturally and with such a suggestion of unconsciousness that you yourself were almost unconscious that she wore it.
But, generally speaking, an eyeglass is an ostentation. It is an ostentation because it is so much more natural, easy and unaffected to wear spectacles, which serve precisely the same uses. You put a pair of spectacles on your nose and forget all about them. And the world forgets all about them. You cannot do that with an eyeglass. The world cannot do that with an eyeglass. Spectacles convey no implications, carry no comment; but an eyeglass is as declaratory as a Union Jack. It is a public announcement of ourselves. It is an intimation to the world that we have arrived. And the world takes note of the fact. When it thinks of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, it thinks of an eyeglass as inevitably as when it thinks of Nelson it thinks of an armless sleeve, or when it thinks of Richard III. it thinks of a hump-back. An eyeglass is as troublesome as a feverish baby. It is an occupation. It is almost a career. It is always dropping out and being reaffixed with an ugly contortion of the muscles of the eye-socket. And if, by long practice, it is kept in position without contortion, you are insensibly kept wondering how the feat is performed and waiting for the laws of Nature to operate.
In a word, a monocle calls attention to itself. It is a calculated affectation. It is an advertisement that we are someone in particular, and that we expect to be observed. It is as much a symbol of class consciousness as the red tie of the Socialist, and it is much less pleasing, for the red tie is an assertion of human equality, while the monocle sets up a claim to social exclusiveness. The wearer of the red tie wants everybody to wear red ties. The more red ties he sees, the happier he feels. If everybody wore red ties it would be very heaven. Surely the millennium is at hand, he would say. He would feel the spasm that Hyndman felt when he noticed that all the porters of a certain station were wearing red ties. "See," he said to John Burns, "see the red ties! the social revolution is on the march." "Nothing of the sort," said Burns. "It's a part of the station uniform." Hyndman's face fell, for he did really want to see everybody wearing the same coloured tie as himself. But if one morning Lord Dundreary (late of the Guards) saw the whole of Piccadilly bursting out into monocles, every policeman wearing a monocle, and every cabman wearing a monocle, and everybody in the buses wearing a monocle, he would feel that the pillars of the firmament were tumbling down. He would take off his monocle and grind it under his heel. He must belong to an exclusive set or cease to find life livable.
The philosophy of the eyeglass is explained in the familiar story of Disraeli and Chamberlain. When the famous Israelite, who was an artifice from the curl plastered on his forehead to the sole of his foot, saw through his eyeglass the terrible Radical Mayor of Birmingham enter the House for the first time, he turned to his neighbour and said: "He wears his eyeglasslike a gentleman." He was satisfied. There was no reason to fear the Mayor of Birmingham. He was "one of us." No one would say that So-and-So "wears his spectacles like a gentleman" any more than he would say that he "wears his hat" (or his boots) "like a gentleman." What Disraeli meant was that Chamberlain could do an exceptional thing with the air of one who was doing an ordinary thing. He knew how to be conspicuous without being unhappy. He wore the badge of the superior person as if he had forgotten it was there. He wore it as though Nature had decorated him at birth with the Order of the Eyeglass. He was a Perfect Gentleman.
There is nothing wrong in being a Perfect Gentleman. It is a very proper ambition; but we ought not to label ourselves Perfect Gentlemen. We ought to be content to leave the world to discover that we are Perfect Gentlemen, and not proclaim the fact by means of a pane of glass hung perilously in the right eye. For, according to the practice of the best circles, it should always be in the right eye. The left eye may be as blind as a bat, but it would never do to wear a pane of glass there. If you do that you do not know the first law of the Cult of the Eyeglass. None of the best people wear the monocle in the left eye. It is like eating peas with your knife, or tucking your serviette in at your collar, as the Germans (who are most Imperfect Gentlemen) do, instead of wearing it on your knees, where it will not get in the way of anything that happens to fall.
It is impossible to think of greatness in the terms of the eyeglass. Shakespeare himself could hardly survive so limiting and belittling a circumstance. Try to think of Milton, in the days before blindness had come upon him, sitting at Cromwell's elbow with an eyeglass in his right eye. Imagine Gladstone or Newman wearing eyeglasses. The mind rejects the image as a sort of sacrilege. Indeed one may almost say that the measure of greatness is the extent of the humiliation which an eyeglass would inflict upon the subject. And, yet again—so dangerous is it to generalise—there are rare cases in which an eyeglass seems the fitting property of the man. Joseph Conrad was such a case. There was in him a haughty aloofness from the drama that he observed with such cold and dispassionate understanding that his eyeglass had a certain significance that gave it warrant. He did not wear it "like a gentleman." He wore it like a being of another creation.
I do not know whether we invented the monocle, nor do I know whether it is a peculiarly English institution; I fancy it is. In any case, it is the universal attribute of the stage Englishman abroad, and in America, where an eyeglass would be an offence against the unwritten law of the republic, it symbolises all those manners of the superior person whose export abroad, and especially to the United States, does our interests much harm. The warning of the writer in theNew Statesmanis badly needed. Let us keep the Eyeglass Englishman (whether he wears an eyeglass or not) at home, where we are used to him, and where he can do no mischief. After all, he does not represent us. He is only one in ten thousand of us. Why should he be chosen to make us misunderstood by people who dislike the idea of social caste and all its appurtenances?
I suppose most people recognised something of themselves in the story, reported in the papers the other day, about the man and his watch. He was hurrying to the station when it occurred to him that he had not got his watch on. So he took his watch out of his pocket to see if he had time to run home and get it. I do not know how the affair continued; but I like to think of him hurrying back, bursting into his house, bouncing upstairs, feeling under his pillow for the watch, finding it was not there, and creating a fine hubbub in his family, before his little daughter remarks that it is in his pocket. And of course he misses the train. We have all done this sort of thing. A very grave and responsible man who sat in Parliament for many years told me that he went up to his bedroom one evening to change into evening-dress. And at the stage of undressing at which the ceremony of winding up his watch usually occurred, he wound it up, put it under his pillow—and got into bed. Happily, before he had fallen asleep he remembered that he had come up, not to undress for bed, but to dress for dinner.
I had an absurd experience of the kind myself not long ago. As everyone knows, there are two tube-stations at Oxford Circus, connected underground. I went down the lift at one station intending to catch a train somewhere, and walked along the subway until I came to a lift, into which a crowd of people were hurrying. I suppose my mind was occupied with some affair, and the mere habit of joining any crowd that is going into any lift swept me in on the tide. The ticket-collector was too busy to check my ticket, and I duly found myself out in the street again at the place from which I had started before I realised what I had done. I have the less hesitation in making this confession because few of us can have failed to have some experience of the sort. Most of our actions are as automatic as the functions of walking, or breathing, or masticating our food. They have become so habitual that we do not have to think about doing them. They perform themselves, as it were, without our help.
If it is your custom to lock up at night and put out the lights, you do so quite mechanically, and if, having locked the sitting-room door and reached the foot of the stairs, your mind chances to wake up and inquire: "Now did you put the lights out?" and sends you back to make sure, you never fail to find that the action has performed itself without any conscious effort on your part. It used to be no uncommon thing for my family to find the front-door securely bolted in broad daylight. I was in those days always the last home at night, and, having opened and closed the door, it was my custom to stoop down and bolt it. If by chance I came in during the morning or afternoon the process was faithfully performed. The habit of bolting the door had become a part of the habit of unlocking it, and it needed a conscious effort of the mind to break the sequence. Or to take another example, anybody can walk asleep down his own stairs quite safely, but if he woke up at the head of the stairs in the dark and began to think how the stairs went on and how many there were, he would not be able to get down them without feeling his way like a blind man.
And most of us, I suppose, know how easy it is to forget the most familiar name when the mind wakes up and urgently asks for it. You are talking, let us say, to Blessington when up comes Whorlow. You know Whorlow as well as you know your own shadow, and if you met him in the street in the ordinary way his name would be on your tongue as naturally as your own. But now your mind interferes. It demands Whorlow's name for the purposes of introduction on the spot—instantly. The passive habit of thinking Whorlow when you see Whorlow vanishes. Your active thought becomes engaged. It rushes round in search of his name, and cannot find it, and you end by mumbling something unintelligible. And probably Whorlow, who is a little sensitive about his name, feels that you have deliberately slighted him.
It is not difficult to credit the stories of the people who forget their own names or their own telephone number. These things have been committed to the automatic workings of the mind. Our active thought is not concerned with them, and when we consciously think about them they escape. As Samuel Butler says, we don't know a thing until we have ceased to know that we know it. If we ask ourselves whether we know it we are on the way to being lost. He takes the case of the accomplished pianist who rattles off a nocturne of Chopin or an impromptu of Schubert without a check or a mistake. The habit of the thing acquired by infinite practice carries him on like the wind. But let him be stopped in mid-flight, as it were, and then begin to think about the notes, and he will flounder and hesitate until the current of habit seizes him again and sweeps him to the close. Anyone can provide illustrations out of his own experience. I can spell Philippi as well as most if I take it at a rush, but if I begin by asking myself how to spell it, I fancy I should get entangled in the "l's" and "p's."
In the case of the man and his watch, we see this conflict of the active and passive mind in its most elementary form. His conscious thought is that he has forgotten his watch and that there is little time to spare to get it. Is there enough time? In comes habit and takes his watch out of his pocket to tell him how long it is before the train starts. The action is so automatic that he does not associate it with the subject of his disquietude. And there he stands, looking at his watch to see if he has time to go home and get it—a perpetual joke which we can all enjoy, none the less, perhaps all the more, because we suspect that we all stand there with him.
"The Abbé, in spite of his fifty-eight years..." I was reading a story of De Maupassant in a railway-train, when this bitter reflection on my age pulled me up with a slight shock. I was on my way to a cricket-match—my annual cricket-match; my team against the village team—and this suggestion that I was an obsolescent old fellow cast a momentary shadow over my spirit. But I remembered that De Maupassant died in the thirties or early forties and that he could not be expected to know that fifty-eight is about the time when a man ought to be getting his second wind.
It is the habit of youth to antedate old age in this offensive way. Jane Austen, who died, I think, when she was under forty, was accustomed in her twenties to write of people who had passed forty as if they had come out of the Ark, and Addison speaks in his essay on the "Widows' Club" of a man of sixty as if the fact was sufficient to show that he was in the last stages of senile decay. I had the curiosity to look up Addison's age at his death and found it was forty-six. It gave me a curious sensation to discover that that grave and elderly spirit had died when he was twelve years my junior. He had always seemed to me so much older than I could ever hope to be that it had never occurred to me to measure my years with his.
It is one of the humbling experiences we have as we grow older to find that, in years, we have left behind so many of those who filled the world with the sound of their name without having ourselves yet done anything to boast about. Alexander only lived half my lifetime; Shelley and Keats when they died were young enough to be the sons of a man of fifty-eight; Napoleon was the first man in Europe at twenty-seven and had reached Waterloo at forty-six; all the vast world of Shakespeare had been created when he was in the early forties; the younger Pitt was Prime Minister twenty years and died at an age when Mr. Lloyd George was still a private member. And so on.
The explanation, I suppose, is that modern conditions have put old age off ten or twenty years. When Jane Austen wrote of elderly men of forty she did so because they were elderly men at forty. What with their weakness for port wine—both Addison and Pitt were notorious for the amount of liquor they carried—and the rudimentary knowledge of disease and its causes, life was a much briefer affair than it is now. Whatever grievance we may have against the age of science, it has made our days long in the land, and what is more important, it has made them healthier. The average man of sixty to-day is, counting age in real values, younger than the average man of fifty in the eighteenth century. That is no doubt one of the reasons why youth does not cut quite such a dash in the world as it did when Napoleon was the first soldier in Europe at twenty-seven, and Pitt the first statesman in Europe at twenty-six. The old fellows go on living and insisting on being young and keeping their jobs.
They even go on playing cricket and watching cricket. When I got on the village playground, I found among the spectators a gay old gentleman of ninety-three, of whom I have written before in these articles, who never misses a match, and who looks on a man of fifty-eight as a person who has hardly yet come to years of discretion. His genial greeting blew away the slight shadow cast over me by Maupassant's unkind cut, and "in spite of my fifty-eight years" I succeeded in giving the scorer a bit of trouble, so much so that I thought it worth while when I was out to go and look over his shoulder at the nice little procession of "ones" and "twos" that followed my name. I should have liked Jane Austen and Maupassant and Addison to have looked over the scorer's shoulder with me. They would have changed their tune about old fellows of fifty-eight.
I see that Dean Inge has been lamenting that he did not live a couple of generations ago. He seems to think that the world was a much more desirable place then, that it has been going to the dogs ever since, and that the only comfortable thought that we can cultivate in this degenerate time is that we shall soon be out of it. Assuming for the moment that the world was a happier place fifty or sixty years ago, I doubt whether it follows that the Dean would have been happier in it than he is in our world to-day. The measure of personal happiness is fortunately not dependent on external circumstances. It is affected by them, of course. Most of us are more agreeable people when we have dined than when we are hungry, when we have slept well than when we have not slept at all, when our horse or our party has won than when it has lost, when things go right than when things go wrong. No philosophy is an anodyne for the toothache, and the east wind plays havoc with the feelings of the best of us. In these and a thousand other ways we are the sport of circumstance, but in this respect we are no better and no worse off than our forbears fifty years ago or five hundred years ago, or than our descendants will be fifty or five hundred years hence.
But our essential happiness or unhappiness is independent of these things. It is a quality of character. It may have a physical basis. Our happiness, said the French lady to Boswell, depends upon the circulation of the blood. It may equally depend on our nervous constitution or the functioning of our organs. I cannot doubt that the Carlyles would have been happier people if they had had better digestions. They lived in that period which is held up to us as the time when it was good to be alive, but it is doubtful whether two more miserable people than they were are to be found on earth to-day, and Carlyle himself damned his own time even more bitterly than the Dean damns this. He would have damned any time in which he had the misfortune to live, for life would always have been a sorrowful affair to him. It was his habit of mind. And the world for each of us is what the mind makes it.
The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
In short, whether life is a comedy or a tragedy or just a humdrum affair that cannot be called either, does not depend upon the time in which we happen to live, for it is all these things at all times. It depends upon our point of view. I fancy Little Tich would have found the world as amusing as a country fair if he had lived in the Rome of Caligula, and I am sure that Carlyle would have found it as sad as a funeral if he had lived in the Garden of Eden. There is no question of merit or virtue in the matter. If there is, it is not the meritorious or the virtuous who are usually the most happy. It is they who take life lightly and indifferently who get the most fun out of it. I doubt whether there was ever a more odious monster on earth than Sulla, whose savageries and debaucheries made him not so much a man as a satyr. Yet, except for the hideous disease from which he died, there can hardly ever have been a more fortunate man or one who found the world, in a gross sense, a more amusing place. Even when his corpse was burned with the accustomed solemnities, the wind blew and the rain fell in perfect time and sequence, "so that," as Plutarch says, "his good fortune was firm even to the last, and did as it were officiate at his funeral." Dean Swift cursed the day he was born, though he lived in the relatively comfortable time of Queen Anne, and being the man he was, he would have cursed the day he was born no matter what period of history he had lived in. He carried an unhappy world in the terrific gloom of his own mind.
Indeed, if we want to play with the idea of how we might have been happy, it is not the thought of living in other times that will satisfy us, but the thought of living other men's lives. If I had the privilege of antedating my birth, I would not bother about the period, but would choose very carefully my personality. Among the ancients I should select to be Herodotus, whose immortal work is saturated with the sunshine of as delighted a spirit as ever walked the earth. And among the moderns I would choose with equal confidence to live the life of Macaulay. It is true that he wept very copiously. I have amused myself sometimes in reading his "Life," by collating the occasions on which he was in tears. He could have said with Michelet, "Le don que Saint Louis demande et n'obtient pas, je l'eus 'Le don des larmes.'" Novels and poetry were bedewed with his tears. He wept whenever he was reminded of the sister he had lost, when he visited his old home in Bloomsbury, when he said "Hail!" and when he said "Farewell!" when friends fell away, and when foes, like Peel, passed into silence. But, in spite of his overcharged affection, what a rich, full, joyous life it was! What zest, what kindliness, what noble feeling, what fine living! I put Macaulay lower in the scale of literature than I once did, but in the scale of humanity there is none higher.
There never was a golden age in which happiness was the universal portion, nor one in which it was denied to those who had the gift within. It is a personal affair, not an affair of time, place or condition, and if we are sad, it is idle to lament that we were not born in days when we could have been merry. Sancho Panza is happy in any age, and Don Quixote is always sorrowful.
I suppose that if we had been asked, any time during the first twenty years of this century, who was the most enviable of living men, Caruso would, in the popular opinion, have had the first place. He had out-soared challenge. He was the idol of both hemispheres. He earned the income of a prince, and he earned it in the most pleasurable of all ways by giving pleasure to others and winning fame for himself. Yet he declared himself to be "often the unhappiest of men." And his unhappiness was that worst form of unhappiness, the canker of success. "When I was unknown," he said, "I sang like a bird, careless, without thought of nerves. But I am bending to-day beneath the weight of renown which cannot increase, but which the least vocal mishap may compromise. That is why I am often the unhappiest of men."
It is the penalty exacted by success. The top of the ladder is a desirable place, and we all like to get there, but having got there we find that the foothold is precarious and that the drop is deep. A fall from the lower rungs of the ladder does us no harm. We can pick ourselves up and start again with a good heart, and without much hurt to our self-esteem. We may get higher, and in any case we shall not fall lower. And in the meantime there is the joy of "getting there" to spur us on. We are happy in the pursuit of happiness. There it dwells at the top rung of the ladder and if only we can reach it all our yearnings will be satisfied and we shall enter into a seraphic peace of possession that will be undisturbed. And having got there we find that all the fun was in the climbing, and that the prize is a fleeting rainbow. There is no way farther up and the way down is easy. The crowd shouts its applause from below, but Martinelli is coming up behind and will shove Caruso over the top.
But Caruso, like Nelson, had the good fortune not to outlive his triumph. "Go at your zenith" was Nelson's maxim, and it is difficult to read the story of his deliberate exposure of himself at Trafalgar without concluding that he sought death. It was a stroke of his emotional and decisive genius, and it left him immortally at the top of the ladder. Had Wellington died at Waterloo he would have been there with him, instead of being remembered as a grumpy old gentleman who blocked the path and said "damn," and had his windows broken by the mob.
It is asking for trouble to expect a permanent dwelling-place at the top of the ladder, and to pin one's happiness to such an uncertain tenure. Life is a great comedian, and plays merciless practical jokes with its most august victims. It thrust the young Corsican up to a height of power unparalleled in the history of the world and then left him to eat his heart out on a bit of rock in a remote ocean, growing prematurely old and fat and diseased. But Napoleon's penalty was light compared with that of the Kaiser, who must surely hold the record for all time as the sport of the gods. Napoleon at least knew what a fickle thing success was. Starting with nothing, he had won the world, and to his cynical andrealpolitikmind there was nothing surprising in his loss of what he had won.
But the Kaiser had never had the salutary teaching of experience. He was born at the top of the ladder, and could conceive of no existence away from that dizzy eminence; he really believed that he belonged to a semi-divine order, and if we had had the misfortune to be born in his circumstances most of us would have had the same illusion. Now, after such splendour of power as Louis XIV. himself never enjoyed, he is cast aside like an old shoe, disowned by his people, repudiated by his relatives, his empire shrunk to the dimensions of a Dutch garden, and he himself become, to all appearances, of no more significance than if he were an Italian organ-grinder or blew the trombone in a German band. He must surely have had a larger measure than any man in history of what Chaucer calls the heaviest of all afflictions:
For of fortune's sharp adversitee,The worst kind of infortune is this,A man to have ben in prosperiteeAnd it remembren when it passèd is.
"And it remembren when it passèd is." It was that bitterness which Caruso feared even when he was at the top of the ladder. It is that bitterness which is about all that life has left to the negligible exile in Holland.