Now there are many who have been through much darker and deeper waters than these, without approaching real melancholia. To the best of my belief I did no more than paddle at the edge of them. Certainly they seemed to close over me, except for that one fact that even where they were deepest, any manual or mental act that required definite thought was sufficient for the moment to give me a breath of air. All pleasure, and, so it seemed to me, all love had become obscured, but there was still some sense of decency left that prevented me from lying down on the floor, and saying in the Italian phrase, "Non po' combattere." There was a double consciousness still. I said to myself, "I give up!" but I didn't act as if I gave up, nor did I tell another human soul that in myself I had done so. I confessed to depression, but didn't talk about it. I wrote a perfectly normal and cordial letter to Francis, saying how welcome he would be, though I felt that there was no such person. Still, I wrote to him, and did not seriously expect that my note would be returned through the dead-letter office. And this is precisely the reason why I have written these last pages; it is to assure all those who know, from inside, what such void and darkness means, that the one anchor is employment, and the absolute necessity is behaving in a normal manner. It does not seem worth while; it seems, too, all but impossible, but it is not quite impossible, and there is nothing which is so much worth while. Until you actually go over the edge, stick to the edge. Do not look down into the abyss, keep your eyes on such ground as there is, and find something there: a tuft of grass, a fallen feather, the root of a wild plant—and look at it. If you are so fortunate as to discover a little bare root there, something easily helped, cover it up with a handful of kindly soil. (You will not slip while you are doing this.) If a feather, be sure that some bird has flown over, and dropped it from a sunlit wing; if a tuft of grass, think of the seed from which it came. Besides, if God wills that you go down into Hell, He is there also....
Hold on, just hold on. Sometimes you will look back on the edge to which you clung, and will wonder what ailed you.
It was so with me. I merely held on till life, with its joys and its ties, began to steal back into me, even as into a dark room the light begins to filter at dawn. At no one second can you say that it is lighter than it was the second before, but if you take a series of seconds, you can see that light is in the ascendant. A certain Friday, for instance, had been quite intolerable, but, just as you look out of the window, and say "It is lighter," I found on Saturday that, though nothing in the least cheerful had happened in the interval, I didn't so earnestly object to existence, while a couple of days later I could look back on Friday and wonder what it had all been about. What it had been about I do not know now: some minute cell, I suppose, had worked imperfectly, and lo! "the scheme of things entire" not only seemed, but, I was convinced, was all wrong. Subjective though the disturbance was, it could project itself and poison the world.
Two things certainly I learned from it, namely, that manual or mental employment, hateful though it is to the afflicted, is less afflicting than idleness; the second, that the more you keep your depression to yourself the better. I wish that the infernal pessimists whose presence blackens London would learn this. These ravens with their lugubrious faces and their croaking accents, hop obscenely about from house to house, with a wallet full of stories which always begin, "They say that—" and there follows a tissue of mournful prognostications. They project their subjective disturbance, and their tale beginning "They say that—" or "I am told that—" generally means that Mr. A. and Mr. B., having nothing to do, and nothing to think about, have sat by the fire and ignorantly wondered what is going to happen. Having fixed on the worst thing, whatever it is, that their bilious imagination can suggest, they go out to lunch, and in accents of woe proceed to relate that "They say that—" and state all the dismal forebodings which their solitary meditations have hatched. In fact, the chief reason for which I wish that I was a Member of Parliament is that I could then bring in a Bill (or attempt to do so) for the Suppression of Pessimists. I would also gladly vote for a Bill that provided for the Suppression of Extreme Optimists on the same grounds, namely, that to be told that the Kaiser has cancer, and that the burgesses of Berlin are already starving, leads to a reaction such as the pessimists produce by direct means. To be told that the Russians are incapable of further resistance on the authority of "They say that—" depresses everybody at once; and to be told that there isn't a potato to be had in all Germany for love or money (particularly money) gives rise to an alcoholic cheerfulness which dies out and leaves you with a headache of deferred hopes. These grinning optimists were particularly hard to bear when the terrible Retreat from Mons was going on, for they screamed with delight at the notion that we were lengthening out the German lines of communication, which subsequently would be cut, as by a pair of nail-scissors lightly wielded, and the flower of the German army neatly plucked like a defenceless wayside blossom. The same smiling idiots were to the fore again during the great Russian retreat, and told us to wait, finger on lip, with rapturous eyes, till the Germans had reached the central steppes of Russia, when they would all swiftly expire of frosts, Cossacks and inanition. But, after all, these rose-coloured folk do very little harm; they make us go about our work with a heady sense of exhilaration, which, though it soon passes off, is by no means unpleasant. At the worst extreme optimists are only fools on the right side, whereas pessimists are bores and beasts on the wrong one.
Pessimists have had a high old time all this month. They do not exactly rejoice when things go ill for us, but misfortune has a certain sour satisfaction for them, because it fulfils what they thought (and said) in September. Thus now they nod and sigh, and proceed to tell us what they augur for November. If only they would keep their misery to themselves, nobody would care how miserable they are; but the gratuitous diffusion of it is what should be made illegal. For the microbe of pessimism is the most infectious of bacteria; it spreads in such a manner that all decent-minded folk, when they have fallen victims to it, ought surely (on the analogy of what they would do if it was influenza) to shut themselves up and refuse to see anybody. But because the disease is one of the mind, it appears that it is quite proper for the sufferer to go and sneeze in other people's faces. There ought to be a board of moral health, which by its regulations would make it criminal to spread mental disorders, such as pessimism. I had so severe an attack of it myself, when the clouds encompassed me, that I have a certain right to propose legislation on the subject. Those afflicted by the painful disease which, like typhoid, is only conveyed through the mouth, in terms of articulate speech, should be fined some moderate sum for any speech that was likely to propagate pessimism. If the disease is acute, and the sufferer feels himself in serious danger of bursting unless he talks, he would of course be at liberty to shut himself up in any convenient room out of earshot, and talk till he felt better. Only it should be on his responsibility that his conversation should not be overheard by anybody, and, in suspension of the common law of England, a wife should be competent to witness against her husband.
It is not because the ravens are such liars that I complain, for lying is the sort of thing that may happen to anybody, but it is the depressing nature of their lies. The famous national outburst of lying that took place over the supposed passage of hundreds of thousands of Russians through England on their way to the battle-fields of France and Flanders was harmless, inspiriting lying. So, too, the splendid mendacity that seized so many of our citizens on the occasion of the second Zeppelin raid. That ubiquitous airship I verily believe was seen hovering over every dwelling-house in London; it hovered in Kensington, in Belgravia, in Mayfair, in Hampstead, in Chelsea, and the best of it was that it never came near these districts at all. In fact, it became a mere commonplace that it hovered over your house, and a more soaring breed of liars arose. One asserted that on looking up he had seen their horrid German faces leaning over the side of the car; another, that the cigar-shaped shadow of it passed over his blind. Of course, it passed over Brompton Square, on which the Zeppelinians were preparing to drop bombs, thinking that the dome of the Oratory was the dome of St. Paul's, and that they had thus a good chance of destroying the Bank of England. But in the stillness of the night, amid the soft murmurs of the anti-aircraft guns, a guttural voice from above was heard to say, "Nein: das ist nicht St Paul's," and the engine of destruction passed on, leaving us unharmed. Was not that a fortunate thing?
Of course, by the time the Zeppelins began to visit us, we had all had a good deal of practice in lying, which accounted for the gorgeous oriental colouring of such amazing imaginings. But the pioneers of this great revival of the cult of Ananias, were undoubtedly that multitude whom none can number, who were ready to produce (or manufacture) any amount of evidence to prove that soon after the outbreak of the war battalions of Russian troops in special trains, with blinds drawn down, were dashing through the country. It is a thousand pities that some serious and industrious historian was not commissioned by his Government to collect the evidence and issue it in tabulated form, for it would have proved an invaluable contribution to psychology. There was never any first-hand evidence on the subject (for the simple reason that the subject had no real existence), but the mass of secondhand evidences went far to prove the non-existent. From Aberdeen to Southampton there was scarcely a station at which a porter had not seen these army corps and told somebody's gardener. The accounts tallied remarkably, the trains invariably had their blinds drawn down, and occasionally bearded soldiers peered out of the windows. There was a camp of them on Salisbury Plain, and hundreds of Englishmen who knew no language but their own, distinctly heard them talking Russian to each other. Sometimes stations (as at Reading) had platforms boarded up to exclude the public, and the public from neighbouring eminences saw the bearded soldiers drinking quantities of tea out of samovars. This was fine imaginative stuff, for the samovar, of course, is an urn, and nobody but a Russian, surely, would drink tea out of an urn. There was collateral evidence, too: one day theCelticwas mined somewhere in the North Sea; she had on board tons of ammunition and big guns, and for a while the hosts of Russia did not appear in the fighting line, because they had remained on Salisbury Plain till fresh supplies of ammunition came. Bolder spirits essayed higher flights: At Swindon Station, so the porter told the gardener, they had been seen walking about the platform stamping the snow off their boots, which proved they had come from far North, where the snow is of so perdurable a quality that it travels like blocks of ice from Norwegian lakes without apparently melting even in the middle of a hot September. Or again, in the neighbourhood of Hatfield the usual gardener had heard that aképihad been picked up on the road, and what do you think was the name of the maker printed inside it? Why, the leading military outfitter of Nijni-Novgorod! There was glory for you, as Humpty-Dumpty said. The gardener fortunately knew who the leading military outfitter of Nijni-Novgorod was, while regarded as a proof what more could anybody want? How could a Russianképihave been dropped on the North Road unless at least a hundred thousand Russians had been going in special trains through England? I suppose you would not want themallto throw theirképisaway.
There were hundreds of such stories, none first hand, but overwhelming in matter of cumulative secondhand evidence, all springing from nowhere but the unassisted brain of ordinary Englishmen. The wish was father to the thought; in the great peril that still menaced the French and English battle-line, we all wanted hundreds of thousands of Russians, and so we said that they were passing through. Some cowardly rationalist, I believe, has explained the whole matter by saying that some firm telegraphed that a hundred thousand Russians (whereby he meant Russian eggs) were arriving. I scorn the truckling materialism of this. The Russian stories were invented, bit by bit, even as coral grows, by innumerable and busy liars, spurred on by the desire that their fabrications might be true. Bitter animosities sprang up between those who did and those who did not believe the Russian Saga. Single old ladies, to whom the idea that Russia was pouring in to help us was very comforting, altered their wills and cut off faithless nephews, and the most stubborn Thomases amongst us were forced to confess that there seemed to be a good deal to say for it, while the fact that the War Office strenuously denied the whole thing was easily accounted for. Of course the War Office denied it, for it didn't want the Germans to know. It would be a fine surprise for the Germans on the West Front to find themselves one morning facing serried rows of Russians.... They would be utterly bewildered, for they had been under the impression that Russia was far away East, on the other side of the Fatherland; but here were the Russian armies! They would think their compasses had gone mad; they would have been quite giddy with surprise, and have got that lost feeling which does so much to undermine the morale of troops. Oh, a great stroke!
But all these Russian and Zeppelin Saga were good heady, encouraging lies, tonic instead of lowering, like the dejected inventions of prostrate pessimists. I do not defend, on principle, the habit of making up stories and saying that a porter at Reading told your gardener; but, given that you are going to do that sort of thing, I do maintain that you are bound to invent such stories as will encourage and not depress your credulous friends. You have no right to attempt to rob them of their most precious possession in times like these, namely, the power of steadfast resistance of the spirit to trouble and anxiety, by inventing further causes of depression. The law forbids you to take away a man's forks and spoons; it ought also to forbid the dissemination of such false news as will deprive him of his appetite for his mutton chop.
Indeed, I fancy that by the law of England as laid down in the statute-book it is treasonable in times of national crisis to discourage the subjects of the King, and I wonder whether it would not be possible, as there has been so little grouse-shooting this year, to have a grouser-shoot instead. A quantity of old birds want clearing off. Guns might be placed, let us say, in butts erected along the south side of Piccadilly, and the grousers would be driven from the moors of Mayfair by a line of beaters starting from Oxford Street. The game would break cover, so I suppose, from Dover Street, Berkeley Street, Half Moon Street, and so on, and to prevent their escaping into Regent Street on the one side and Park Lane on the other, stops would be placed at the entrance of streets debouching here in the shape of huge posters announcing victories by land and sea for the Allied forces. These the grousers would naturally be unable to pass, and thus they would be driven out into Piccadilly and shot. This would take the morning, and after a good lunch at the Ritz Hotel the shooters would proceed to the covers of Kensington. Other days would, of course, be arranged....
But all this month the devastating tide swept on through Serbia. Occasionally there were checks, as, for a moment, it dashed against some little reef before submerging it; but soon wave succeeding wave overleaped such barriers, and now Serbia lies under the waters of the inundation. And in these shortening days of autumn the sky grows red in the East with the dawning of new fires of battle, and to the watchers there it goes down red in the West, where from Switzerland to the sea, behind the trenches, the graveyards stretch themselves out over the unsown fields of France.
Francis arrived on the last day of October, with a week's leave before his regiment embarked for the Dardanelles. For a few hours he was a mere mass of physical needs; until these were satisfied he announced himself as incapable of thinking or speaking of anything but the carnalities.
"Tea at once," he said. "No, I think I won't have tea with you; I want tea sent up to the bath-room. That packet? It's a jar of bath salts—verbena—all of which I am going to use. I saw it in a shop window, and quite suddenly I knew I wanted it. Nothing else seemed to matter. I want a dressing-gown, too. Will you lend me one? And slippers. For a few hours I propose to wallow in a sensual sty. I've planned it all, and for the last week I have thought of nothing else."
He sketched the sty. There was to be tea in the bath-room and a muffin for tea. This he would eat as he lay in a hot bath full of verbena salts. He would then put on his dressing-gown and lie in bed for half an hour, reading a shilling shocker and smoking cigarettes. (End of Part I.) Still in his dressing-gown he would come downstairs, and smoke more cigarettes before my fire, till it was time to have a cocktail. We would dine at home (he left the question of dinner to me, provided only that there should be a pineapple), after which we should go to the movies. We were then to drive rapidly home in a taxi, and, over sandwiches and whisky and soda, he felt that he would return to a normal level again. But the idea of being completely comfortable and clean and gorged and amused for a few hours had taken such hold of him, that he could not "reach his mind" until the howling beast of his body had been satisfied. That, at least, was the plan.
Accordingly, proclamation having come from upstairs that all was ready, Francis departed to his sty, and I, as commanded, waited till such time as he should reappear in my dressing-gown and slippers. But long before his programme (Part I.) could have been carried out he re-entered.
"It didn't seem worth while to get into bed," he said, "so I left that out. I loved the bath-salts, and the tea was excellent. But how soon anything that can be satisfied is satisfied. It's only——"
He leaned forward and poked the fire, stretching his legs out towards the blaze.
"I've travelled a long way since we met," he said, "and the further one goes the simpler the way becomes. The mystics are perfectly right. You can only get what you want, what your soul wants, by chucking away all that you have. The only way to find yourself is to lose yourself. I've been losing myself all these months, and I began to recover little bits of me that I didn't want over the muffin and the verbena. I was afraid I should find more if I tucked up in bed. That's why I didn't. I used to want such lots of things; now there is growing a pile of things I don't want."
I put the cigarette-box near him.
"There are the smokes," I said, "and let me know when you want a cocktail. We'll have dinner when you like. Now I have heard nothing from you for the last three months; let's have a budget."
"Right. Well, the material side of the affair is soon done with. I'm Quartermaster-Sergeant, with stripes and a crown on my arm, as you have noticed, and I live immersed in accounts and stores and supplies. I have to see that the men have enough and are comfortable, and I have to be as economical as I can. That's my life, and it's being my salvation."
He lay back in his chair, the picture of complete indolence, with eyes half closed. But I knew that to be a sign of intense internal activity. Most people, I am aware, when they are aflame with some mental or spiritual topic, walk up and down with bright eyes and gesticulating hands. But it is Francis's great conjuring trick to disconnect his physical self, so to speak, and let it lie indolent; his theory is that thus your vitality is concentrated on thought. There seems something to be said for it, when once you have learned how to do it.
"Of course, in order to get anywhere," he said, "you must go through contemplative periods and stages, and towards the end of the journey, I fancy that you enter into an existence where only that is possible. But before that comes, you have to know the sacredness of common things. It's like this. The first stage is to know that the only thing worth our consideration is the reality that lies behind common things: it is then that you think them worthless and disregard them. But further on you find out that they aren't common, because the reality behind permeates them, and makes them sacred. Later, if you ever get there, you find, I believe, that in your union with the reality behind, they cease to exist again for you. But, good heavens, what miles apart, are the first and third stages! And the danger of the first stage is that, if you are not careful, you imagine it to be the same as the third.
"I was in danger of getting like that, living in perfect comfort and peace on that adorable island. Do you know how a jelly looks the day after a dinner-party, how it is fatigued, and lies down and gets shapeless and soft? I might have stayed in that stage, if the war hadn't summoned me. I did not consciously want material things: I was not greedy or lustful, and I had a perfectly conscious knowledge that God existed in everything. But I didn't reverence things for that reason, nor did I mix myself up in them. I held aloof, and was content to think. Then came the war, and now for nearly fifteen months I have been learning to get close to common things, to see, as I said, that the sacredness of their origin pervades them. It doesn't lie in them, tucked away in some secret drawer, which you have to open by touching a spring. The spring you have to touch is in yourself, you have to open your own perception of what is always before your eyes. It doesn't require any wit or poetic sense to perceive it: it is there, a plain simple phenomenon. But in it is the answer to the whole cosmic conundrum, for there lies the Love that 'moves the sun and the other stars!' Theoretically I knew that, but not practically.
"Now, after a good deal of what you might call spade-work, I'm beginning to feel that, first-hand. For months I hated the drill, and the sordidness (so I said) and the life in which you are so seldom alone. I hated the rough clothes, and the heavy boots and the food. But I never hated the other fellows: I've always liked people. Then when I got on I hated the accounts I had to do, and the supplies I had to weigh, but in one thing I never faltered, and that was in the desire to get at what lay behind it all. There was something more in it than the fact that the work had to be done because England was at war with Germany, and because I wanted to help. That was sufficient to bring me out of Alatri, and it would have been sufficient to carry me along, even if there had been nothing else behind it. But always I had the knowledge of there being something else behind. And clearly the life I was leading gave me admirable conditions for finding that out. Everything was very simple: I had no independence; I had to do what I was told. You may bet that obedience is the key to freedom.
"There were days of storm and days of peace, of course. There were darknesses in which one was tempted to say that there wasn't anything to be perceived. Some persistent devil inside me kept suggesting that an account-book was just an account-book, and a rifle nothing more than a rifle. But I still clung to that which had grown, in all those years at Alatri, to be a matter of knowledge. I knew there was something behind, and I knew what it was, though the mists obscured it, just as when the sea-fog comes down in the winter over the island, and you cannot see the mainland for days together. But you don't seriously question whether the mainland is there because you don't see it. A child might: if you told a child that the mainland had been taken away, he would probably accept what you said.... There were days when I doubted everything, not only the reality at the back of it all, but even the immediate cause for my work, namely, that the regiment was part of the army that was fighting the Germans, and that so it was my job to help.
"And then, one day when I was least expecting it or consciously thinking of it, the knowledge came with that sense of realization that makes all the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. I was among the stores, rather busy, and suddenly the tins of petroleum shone with God. Just that."
He turned his handsome, merry face to me: there was no solemnity in it, it was as if he had told me some cheerful piece of ordinary news.
"Now will you understand me when I say that that moment was in no sense overwhelming, nor did it interfere in the slightest degree with either the common work of the day, drill and accounts and what not, or with the common diversions of the day? It did not even give them a new meaning, for I had known for years that the meaning was there; only, it had not been to me a matter of practical knowledge. It was like—well, you know how slow I am at learning anything on the piano, but with sufficient industry I can get a thing by heart at last. It was like that: it was like the first occasion on which one plays it by heart. It did not yet, nor does it now get between me and all the things that fill the day. It is not a veil drawn between me and them, so that drudgery and little menial offices are no longer worth while: it is just the opposite: it is as if a veil were drawn away, and I can see them and handle them more clearly and efficiently, and enjoy them infinitely more. This warm fire feels more delightfully comfortable than ever a fire did. I take more pleasure in seeing you sitting there near me than ever before. There was never such a good muffin as the one you sent up to the bath-room. That's only natural, if you come to think of it. It would be a very odd sort of illumination, if it served only to make what we have got to do obscure or tiresome or trivial. Instead, it redeems the common things from triviality. It takes weariness out of the world."
"You said the petroleum-tins shone with God," I said. "Can you tell me about that? Was it a visible light?"
"I wondered if you would ask that," he said, "and I wish I could explain it better. There was no visible light, nothing like physical illumination round them. But my eyes told that faculty within me which truly perceives, that they shone. What does St. Paul call it? 'The light invisible,' isn't it? That is exactly descriptive. 'The light invisible, the uncreated light.' I can't tell you more than that, and I expect that it is only to be understood by those who have seen it. I am quite conscious that my description of it must mean nothing. I have long known it was there, and so have you, but till I perceived it I had no idea what it was like."
"There's another thing," said I, "you are going out next week to the Dardanelles. What does the business of killing look like in the light of the light invisible?"
He laughed again.
"It hasn't turned me into a conscientious objector, if you mean that," he said. "I hate the notion of shooting jolly funny rabbits, or merry partridges, though I'm quite inconsistent enough to eat them when they are shot—at least, not rabbits: I would as soon eat rats. But I shall do my best to kill as many Turks as I possibly can. Iknowit's right that we should win this war. I was never more certain about anything. The Prussian standpoint is the devil's standpoint, and since it's our business to fight the devil, we've got to fight the Prussians and all who are allied with them. It seems a miserable way of fighting the devil, to go potting Turks. If I could only get to know the fellows I hope I am going to kill, I would bet that I should find them awfully decent chaps. I shouldn't be surprised if they would shine, too, like the petroleum-tins. But there's no other alternative. No doubt if our diplomatists hadn't been such apes, we should be friends with the Turks, instead of being their enemies, but, as it is, there's no help for it. I've no patience with pacificists; we've got to fight, unless we choose to renounce God. As for the man who has a conscientious objection to killing anybody, I think you will find very often that he has a conscientious objection to being killed. I haven't any conscientious objection to either. I shall be delighted to kill Turks, and I'm sure I don't grudge them the pleasure of killing me."
"But you think they're fighting on the devil's side," I objected. "You don't want to be downed by the devil?"
"Oh, they don't down me by shooting me," he said. "Also, they don't think they are in league with the devil; at least, we must give them the credit of not thinking so, and they've got every bit as good a right to their view as I have. Lord! I am glad, if I may say it without profanity, that I'm not God. Fancy having millions and millions of prayers, good sincere honest prayers, addressed to you every day from opposite sides, entreating you to grant supplications for victory! Awfully puzzling, for Him! You'd know what excellent fellows a lot of our enemies are."
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed at this moment, and Francis jumped up with a squeal.
"Eight o'clock already!" he said. "What an idiot you are for letting me jaw along like this! I'm not dressed yet, nor are you."
"You may dine in a dressing-gown if you like," I said.
"Thanks, but I don't want to in the least. I want to put on the fine new dress-clothes which I left here a year ago. Do dress too; let's put on white ties and white waistcoats, and be smart, and pompous. I love the feeling of being dressed up. Perhaps we won't go to the movies afterwards; what do you think? We can't enjoy ourselves more than sitting in this jolly room and talking. At least, I can't; I don't know about you. Oh, and another thing. You have a day off to-morrow, haven't you, it being Saturday? Let's go and stay in the country till Monday. I've been in a town for so many months. Let's go to an inn somewhere where there are downs and trees, and nobody to bother. If we stayed with people, we should have to be polite and punctual. I don't want to be either. I don't want to hold forth about being a Tommy, except to you. Most people think there's something heroic and marvellous about it, and they make me feel self-conscious. It's no more heroic than eating when you're hungry. You want to: you've got to: your inside cries out for food, it scolds you till you give it some."
We put Francis's plan into execution next morning, and at an early hour left town for a certain inn, of which I had pleasant memories, on the shore of the great open sea of Ashdown Forest, to spend three days there, for I got rid of my work on Monday. St. Martin came with us and gave us warm windless days of sun, and nights with a scrap of frost tingling from the stars, so that in the morning the white rime turned the blades of grass into spears of jewellery, and the adorable sharp scent of autumn mornings pricked the nostrils. The great joyful forest was ablaze with the red-gold livery of beech trees, and the pale gold of birches, and holly trees wore clusters of scarlet berries among their stiff varnished foliage. Elsewhere battalions of pines with tawny stems defied the spirit of the falling leaf, and clad the hill-sides with tufts of green serge, in which there sounded the murmur of distant seas. Here the foot slid over floors of fallen needles, and in the vaulted darkness, where scarce a ray of sun filtered down, there seemed to beat the very heart of the forest, and we went softly, not knowing but that presently some sharp-eared faun might peep round a tree-trunk, or a flying drapery betray a dryad of the woods.
Deeper and deeper we went into the primeval aisles, among the Druid trees that stood, finger on lip, for perhaps even Pan himself had lately passed that way, and they, initiate, had looked on the incarnate spirit of Nature. Then, distantly, the gleam of sunshine between the trunks would show the gates of this temple of forest, and we passed out again into broad open spaces, covered with the russet of bracken, and stiff with ling, on which the spikes of minute blossom were still pink. Here we tramped till the frosted dews had melted and dried, and sat in mossy hollows, where gorse was still a-flower, and smelled of cocoa-nut biscuits. Across the weald the long line of South Downs, made millions of years ago by uncounted myriads of live things, was thrust up like some heaving shoulder of a marine monster above the waves. It seemed necessary to walk along that heavenly ridge, and next day, we drove to Lewes, and with pockets bulging with lunch, climbed on to that fair and empty place. There, with all Sussex lying below us, and the sea stretched like a brass wire along the edge of the land to the south, we made acache,containing the record of the expedition, and buried it in a tin-box below a certain gnarled stump that stood on the edge of the steep descent on to the plain. Francis insisted also on leaving our empty wine bottle there, with a wisp of paper inside it, on which he wrote: "We are now utterly without food, and have already eaten the third mate. Tough, but otherwise excellent. Latitude unknown: longitude unknown: God help us!" And he signed it with the names of Queen Adelaide and Marcus Aurelius. Neither he nor I could think of anything sillier than this, and since, when you are being silly, you have to get sillier and sillier, or else you are involved in anticlimaxes, he rolled over on to his face and became serious again.
"Lord, Lord, how I love life!" he said, "in whatever form it manifests itself. I love these great open and empty places, and the smile of the indolent earth. Great kind Mother, she is getting sleepy, and will soon withdraw all her thoughts back into herself and doze and dream till spring awakens her again. She will make no more birds and beasts and flowers yet awhile, for those are the thoughts she puts out, but collect herself into herself, hibernating in the infinite cave of the heavens. All the spring and the summer she has been so busy, thinking, thinking, and putting forth her thoughts. In the autumn she lies down and just looks at what she has made, and in the winter she sleeps. I love that life of the earth, which is so curiously independent of ours, pagan in its essence, you would think, and taking very little heed of the children of men and the sons of God. How odd she must think our businesses and ambitions, she who only makes, and feeds. What a spendthrift, too, how lavish of life, how indifferent to pain, and death, and all the ills that her nurselings make for themselves. She doesn't care, bless you."
"You called her kind just now," I remarked.
"Yes, she is kind to joy, because joy is productive. She loves health and vitality and love, but she has no use for anything else. It is only one aspect of her, however, the pagan side, which sets Pan a-fluting in the thickets. But what she makes is always greater than she who made it. She gives us and maintains for us till death our physical nature, and yet the moment she has given it us, even before perhaps, it has passed out of her hands, being transfused with God. Then, when she has done with us, she lets death overtake us, and has no more use for us, except in so far that our bodies can enrich her soil. She does not know, the pagan earth, that death is only an incident in our lives. The death of our body, as St. Francis says, is only our sister, for whom we should praise God just as much as for our life, or the sun and moon. Really, I don't know what I should do, how I should behave, if I thought it ever so faintly possible that death was the end of us. Should I take immense care of myself, so as to put off that end as long as possible, and in the interval grab at every pleasure and delight I could find? I don't think so. If I thought that death was the end, I think I should kill myself instantly, out of sheer boredom. All the bubble would have gone out of the champagne. I love all the pleasures and interests of life just because they are part of an infinitely bigger affair. If there wasn't that within them, I don't think I should care about them."
"But if they are only part of the bigger thing," said I, "why don't we kill ourselves at once, in order to get to the bigger thing?"
"Surely for a very good reason, namely, that whatever life lies beyond, it cannot be this life again. And this life is such awful fun: I want lots of it. But it doesn't rank in the same class with the other. I mean that no sensible fellow will want to prolong this at the expense of what comes after. Much as we like it, we are perfectly willing to throw it away if we are shown a sufficiently good cause to throw it away for. It's like a tooth: have it out if it aches. And life would ache abominably if we clung to it unworthily."
Suddenly I felt horribly depressed.
"Oh, Francis, don't die at the Dardanelles," I said.
"I haven't the slightest intention of doing so. I sincerely hope I shall do nothing of the sort. But if I do, mind you remember that I know it is only an incident in life. As we sit here, secure in the sun and the safety, it is easy enough to realize that. But it is harder to realize it when it happens to someone you like, and people are apt to talk rot about the cruel cutting-short of a bright young life. My bright middle-aged life mustn't rouse these silly reflections, please, if it's cut off. They are unreal: there is a touch of cant about them. So promise!"
"If you'll promise not to die, I'll promise not to be vexed at your death. Besides, you aren't middle-aged; you're about fourteen."
"Oh, I hope I'm younger now at thirty-five than I was when I was fourteen. I used to be terribly serious at fourteen, and think about my soul in a way that was positively sickening. I wonder my bright young life wasn't cut short by a spasm of self-edification. I was a prig, and prigs are the oldest people in the world. They are older than the rocks they sit among, as Mr. Pater said, and have been dead many times. You didn't know me then, thank God."
"Were you very beastly?"
"Yes, quite horrible, and so old. Easily old enough to be my own father now, if that's what Wordsworth means when he says the child is father to the man. I thought a lot about my soul, and took great care of it, and wrapped it up. In fact, I set about everything entirely the wrong way. What does Thomas à Kempis say, do you remember? That a man must forsake himself, and go wholly from himself, and retain nothing out of self-love. He must give up his soul too, for it is only by giving it up that he avoids losing it...."
He turned over again on his face, sniffing a sprig of thyme that still lingered into November.
"And yet, oh, how I love all the jolly things in the world!" he said; "but I don't want them to be mine, and I don't think that I am entangled in them. Surely it is right to love them if you don't cling to them. I love the smile of the earth when she wakes in spring, and puts forth her thoughts again. When she thinks about hawthorn, she thinks in little squibs of green leaf, when she thinks about birds she thinks in terms of nightingale-song, or when she thinks about crocuses she sees her thoughts expressed in yellow chalices, with pollen-coated tongues. She thinks she has had enough of the grey winter-withered grass, and, lo, the phalanxes of minute green spears charge and rout it. She thinks in the scent of wall-flowers, and the swift running of lizards on the stone-walls, and pinks of peach-blossom, and foam of orchid-flower. My goodness, what a poet she is!"
"And you aren't attached to all that?" I asked.
"Of course I like it tremendously, but it doesn't entangle me any more. But I took years to disentangle myself, all those years when you thought I was being so lazy and ineffective in Alatri. Ineffective I was, no one ever made less of a splash than I have done; but lazy I wasn't. I thought, and I thought, and unconsciously to myself, while I was sunk, as I imagined, in a stupor of purring content with the world, this war woke me up, and, as you know, I found I wasn't entangled. But I have learned such a lot this year. I always liked people: I liked their funny ridiculous ways, their queernesses and their attractions. But I never got into them before. People are like oranges: the rind smells delicious, you like them first for the rind. Then just inside the rind you find that fluffy white stuff, but inside of all is the substance of them, in which lies their unity with God. There is this, too: when you get down to the fruit, you find that it has the same savour as the rind. I take it that the attraction of people, the thing you love them for, is the first thing you perceive about them, the aromatic rind. It's a hint of what is within, if you get through their fluffy part. You find first of all the emanation of their real selves, next their funny odd ways, and finally themselves. Deep in the heart of everyone you find what seemed at first their most superficial qualities. That's an excursus by the way; think it out for yourself."
The sun was already wheeling westwards, and presently after, as we had half a dozen miles of this high down-land to traverse, we got up and went on our way. Here and there a copse of flaming beech climbed like stealthy fire up from the weald on to this roof of South England, on the ridge of which we walked; but the prevalent wind from the sea had so continuously blown their branches in one direction that now they grew there, brushed back in permanence, as Francis suggested, like the hair of a Knut. Northwards and far below the weald stretched into misty distances, laid out like a map, with here and there a pond, here a group of clustered houses, while a moving plume of steam marked the passage of a train. Mile after mile of springy turf we traversed, empty and yellowing and uniform, save where a patch of brambles lay dark, like the shadow from a cloud. Once or twice we passed a dew-pond dug in the chalk, but otherwise in all those miles we found no sign up here on the heights of the fretful ways and works of man. All was untouched and antique: a thousand years had wrought no more change here than on the liquid plain of the sea. A steady westerly breeze met us all the way, warmed with the leagues of autumn sunshine through which it had travelled all day, and it streamed past us like some quiet flowing river out of the eternal reservoir of the sky. And never, even in children, round whom there still trail the clouds of glory, have I seen such ecstatic and natural enjoyment as was Francis's. Around them, perhaps, linger the lights that play outside the prison-house, but to him, it seemed that into the prison-house itself there streamed in such a jubilation of sunshine that every vestige of shade was banished. Like the petroleum-tins, when first illumination had come to him, the whole world shone with God, and that in no vague and mystical manner, but with a defined and comprehended brightness. Here was no dream-like mysticism, no indifferent contemplation like that of the Quietists, but an active and ecstatic enjoyment, eager and alert, and altogether human. He moved in a fairyland, the magic of which was not imaginary and fabulous; the spell lay in the very fact that it was real. He was convinced by the conviction that comes from personal experience: the glory that enveloped the world was as certain as the streaming wind and the pervasion of the autumn sun.
It was no haphazard intoxication of animal spirits that possessed him, no wild primal delight in health and physical vigour, it was a joy that had had its birth in thought and contemplation, and had passed through dark places and deserts. But, even as the sunlight of ages past sleeps in seams of coal, ready to burst into blaze, so through darknesses and doubts had passed the potential sunlight of his soul, black, you would say, and dormant, but alive and pregnant with flame, when the finger of God touched it into illumination. For him no longer in gloomy recesses sat Pan, the incarnate aspect of the cruelty and the lust of Nature, the sight of whom meant death to the seer, but over all the world shone the face of Christ, Who, by the one oblation of Himself, had transfused His divine nature into all that lived and moved. This was no fact just accepted, and taken for granted: it was the light from which sprang all his joy of life, the one central and experienced truth which made all common things sacred, and opened for him, as for all mystics who have attained the first illumination, the gates of pearl within which shines the Heavenly Kingdom. This was no visionary place: it stood solid about him, an Earthly Paradise no less than a heavenly, and men and women were its citizens, the hills and valleys, the birds and beasts of this actual world were of it, the blaze of the westering sun lit it, and this wind from the West streamed over it. And yet it was the actual kingdom of heaven.
Francis told me that day how he had attained to where he stood. It was by no vague inactive passivity, but by stern and unremitting training of the mind and spirit. He had learned by hard work, first of all, to concentrate his mind on some given concrete object, to the exclusion of all other objects, forcing himself, as he put it, "to flow into this one thing." By slow degrees he had so cultivated this power that he was able at last to be conscious of nothing else than that on which he fixed his attention, making all his faculties of perception concentrate upon it. One of the objects of his meditation had often been the stone-pine in our garden at Alatri, and "opening himself to it," as he said, he saw it not only as it was in shape and form, but into his mind were conveyed its whole nature and formation; not by imagining them, so it seemed to him, for himself, but by receiving suggestions from outside. He felt it growing from the pine-seed of a cone that had dropped there; he felt it as a sapling, and knew how its roots were groping their ways underground, one to the north, another to the south, to anchor it from the stress of winds. He felt the word go forth among the spiders and creeping things that here was a new city a-building for their habitations. Out of the sapling stage it passed into mature life, and stripped itself of its lower branches, concentrating its energy on its crown of foliage. The soft sappy bark hardened itself to resist the rains, the roots spread further and further, and burrowed more deeply: the murmur of sea began to nest in its branches, and its shadow spread like a pool around it. It grew fruitful with cones that opened themselves so that its seed might ripen; it became a town of fertility. All this came, not student-wise, but from eager meditation, a vision evoked not from within, but seen through the open windows of his mind. A new mode of sight dawned on him.
From meditation on concrete and visible things he passed to meditation on abstract qualities, which clothed themselves in images. He saw Mercy, a woman with hands of compassion, touching and remitting the debts of the crowd that brought the penalties they had incurred: he saw Truth, nude and splendid, standing on the beach, fresh from the sea, with a smile for those who ignorantly feared him, and anger blazing from his eyes for those who tried to hide from him, and hands of love for those who came to him. But such visions never came to the scope of his physical sight, only by interior vision did he see Mercy bending to him, and Truth holding out a strong and tender hand. Their presences lived with him, and the gradual realization of them caused a shining company to stand round him.
But they were not what he sought: he sought that which lay behind them, that of which, for all their splendour, they were but the pale symbols and imperfect expressions. They were the heralds of the King, who attended in his presence-chamber, and came forth into the world radiant with his tokens. There were strange presences among them: there came Sorrow with bowed head, and Pain with pierced hands, and that darkness of the soul which still refuses to disbelieve in light. Often he turned his face from these storm-vexed visitants, crying out that they were but phantoms of the pit, and yet not quite endorsing his rejection of them, for their wounded hands shone, and there lurked a secret behind the tragedy of their faces....
We had come to the end of the ridge, and must descend into the plain below us. The sun had just set, and the wind that still blew steadily from the West held its breath for a moment.
"They took their places there," said Francis, "until they became friendly and glorious, and I did not fear them any longer. I knew what they represented, of what they were the symbols. Just as I had contemplated the stone-pine till I saw what was the nature from which it sprang, so I contemplated Sorrow and Doubt, till I saw that they had come from the Garden of Gethsemane. They are as holy as Mercy or Truth, and their touch sanctifies all the pain and sorrow that you and I and the whole world can ever feel. I dwelt within them. I learned to love them. I learned also to do the daily tasks that were mine, no longer with any sense of the triviality of them or with the notion that I might have been better employed on larger things. But for a long time, employed on this common round, nothing more happened: I just went on doing them, believing that they were part of a great whole, but not, I may say, energetically conscious of it. Then one day, as I told you, I saw God shining from the petroleum-tins and the shelves of the store."
There are certain moments in one's life that are imperishably photographed on the mind, and will live there unblurred and unfaded till the end. I think the reason for this (when so much that seemed important at the time, constantly fades from one's memory) is that in some way, great or small, they mark the advent of a new perception, and this sense of enlightenment gives them their everlasting quality. They are thus more commonly associated with childish days, when discoveries are of more frequent occurrence than is the case in later years. Certainly now the smell of lilac is hugely significant to me because of that one moment when, at the exploring age of five, I was first consciously aware of it. It was time to go to bed, though the sunlight still lay level across the garden where we children played, and the nurse who had come to fetch us in, relented, and gave us five minutes' grace, the granting of which at that moment seemed to endow one with all that was really desirable in life. Simultaneously the evening breeze disentangled the web of fragrance from the lilac bush near which I stood, and cast it over me, so that, imperishable to this day, the scent of it is mixed up in my mind with a mood of ecstatic happiness. What went before that, what had been the history of the afternoon, or what was the history of the days that followed, has quite gone, but vignetted for ever for me is the smell of the lilac bush and the rapture of five minutes more play. The first conscious sight of the sea, lying grey and quiet beneath a low sky, is another such picture, and another such, I am sure, will be the sight of Francis's face as he stood there facing westwards, with the glow of molten clouds on it, and with the wind just stirring his hair, as he stood bare-headed, and spoke those last words. The memory of our walk that day may grow dim, much may get blurred and indistinct in my mind, but his face then, alight with joy, not solemn joy at all, but sheer human happiness, will live to me in the manner of the lilac-scent, and the first sight of the sea. It was new; never before had I seen so complete an exuberance, so unshadowed a bliss.
We returned to town next morning. Two days later he rejoined his regiment.
Duty under a somewhat threadbare disguise of pleasure has the upper hand just now, in this energetic city, and we spend a large number of our afternoons each week seated in half-guinea and guinea stalls, and watch delightful entertainments at theatres or listen to concerts at private houses, got up for the benefit of some most deserving charity, and for the really opulent there are seats at three or five guineas. These entertainments are as delightful as they are long, and we have an opportunity two or three times a week of seeing the greater part of our prominent actors and actresses, and hearing the most accomplished singers and players on all or more than all of the musical instruments known to Nebuchadnezzar pour forth a practically endless stream of melody. Certainly it is a great pleasure to hear these delightful things, but, as I have said, it is really duty that prompts us to live for pleasure, for the pleasure, by incessant wear, is getting a little thin. We should not dream of spending so much on seats in theatres if we were not contributing to a cause. Often tea of the most elaborate and substantial style is thrown in, and thus our bodies as well as our minds are sumptuously catered for. Soon, I suppose, when we have once freed our minds from the nightmare of Zeppelins, we shall have these entertainments in the evening with dinner thrown in. The only little drawback connected with them is concerned with the matter of tickets. Naturally you do not want to go alone, and in consequence, when you are asked to take tickets you take two guinea ones if you are rich, and if not two half-guinea ones. There is no question of refusing. You have got to. But it is not so easy as you would imagine to get somebody to go with you to these perpetual feasts of histrionic and vocal talent, for everyone else has already taken two tickets, and is eagerly hunting for a companion at these entertainments on behalf of funds for Serbians, Russians, French, Italians, Red Cross, eggs for hospitals, smokes for sailors, soup kitchens, disabled horses, bandages, kit-bags, mine-sweepers, cough lozenges, for aeroplanists, woollen mufflers, and all the multifarious needs of those who are or have been taking a hand in the fight. Indeed, sometimes I think those entertainments are a little overdone, for a responsible admiral told me the other day that if any more woollen mufflers were sent to the fleet it would assuredly sink, which would be a very disastrous consequence of too ardent a spirit of charity. But till the fleet sinks under the woollies that are poured into it, and the kitchens are so flooded with soup as to be untenable, I suppose we shall continue to take two stalls and wildly hunt about for someone to occupy the second, between the hours of two and seven-thirty. But whether there is a theatrical entertainment or not on any particular day, it is sure to be a flag day. You need not buy two flags, though you have been obliged to take two stalls—until you have lost the first one. But it is as essential as breathing to buy one flag, if you propose to go out of doors at all, and on the whole it is wiser to buy your decoration from the first seller that you see. It is your ransom; the payment of this amiable blackmail ensures your unmolested passage through the streets. True, for a time, you can play a very pretty game which consists in crossing the street when you see a flag-seller imminent, and proceeding along the opposite pavement. Soon another flag-seller will be imminent there also, upon the approach of whom you cross back again to your original pavement. But sooner or later you are bound to be caught: a van or an omnibus obstructs the clear view of the other side of the street, and after being heavily splashed with mud from the roadway, you regain the pavement only to find there is another flag-seller who has been in ambush behind the 'bus that has splashed you. If you are urgently in need of exercise you can step back again before encountering the privateer, but you know that sooner or later you will have to buy a flag, and on the whole it is wiser to buy it at once, and take your exercise with an untroubled mind, and a small garish decoration in your buttonhole. The flag-sellers for the most part, are elegant young females, who appear to enjoy this unbridled licence to their pillaging propensities, and as long as they enjoy it, I suppose flag-days will go on. But it would be simpler and fairer to add a penny to the income-tax, and divide it in just proportions between these harpy charities. Or, if that is too involuntary a method of providing funds for admirable objects, I should suggest that every seller of flags, should, in return for the privilege of helping in such good causes, start her own collection-box with the donation of one sovereign from herself. Then the beleaguered foot-passenger would feel that he was giving to one who had the cause for which she worked really at heart.
Just as patriotism has become a feature in the streets, so the same motif has made its appearance in the realms of art, and at these entertainments of which I have spoken, there has sprung up a new form of dramatic and topical representation. Sometimes it takes the form of a skit, and the light side of committees is humorously put before us, but more often the author, with a deadlier and more serious aim, shows us in symbolical form the Sublimity of Patriotism. Somehow these elevating dramas make me blush. I am not ashamed of being patriotic, but I cannot bear to see patriotism set to slow music in front of the footlights, and in the presence of those blue-coated men with crutches or arms in slings. The general audience feel it too, and as the curtain goes up for the patriotic sketch, an uncomfortable fidgety silence invariably settles down on the house. The manner of the drama is usually somewhat in the following style:
Britannia, in scarlet with a gold crown, is seated in the centre of the stage, and on each side of her is a row of typical female figures, whom she addresses collectively as "Sisters" or "Children." In a few rhyming lines she gives vent to some noble sentiments about the war, and calls on each in turn to express her opinion. As these assembled females represent Faith, Hope, Belgium, Mother, Wife, Sweetheart, Serbia, Child, Justice, Mercy, Russia, Victory and Peace, a very pleasant variety of sentiments is expressed. Faith brandishes a sword with an ingenious arrangement by which electric lights spring out along the blade, and expresses complete confidence in the righteousness of the cause for which she unsheathed it. Hope looks forward to a bright dawn, and fixes her eyes dreamily on the Royal Box. Belgium, giving way to very proper emotion when she mentions Namur (rhyming to "poor"), sinks back on her chair, and Britannia, dismounting from her throne, lays a hand on her shoulder and kisses her hair. She then gives Belgium into the care of Faith, and dashing away a tear, resumes her throne, and asks Mother what she has to say. Mother and Wife then stand hand in hand and assure Britannia that they have sent their son and husband to the war because it was their duty to send him and his to go. Mother knows the righteousness of the cause. Faith crosses, presses the electric light, and with illuminated sword in hand, kisses Mother. Mother kisses Faith. Wife knows it too, and looks forward to the bright dawn of which Hope has spoken (Hope crosses and embraces Wife: momentary Tableau, accompanied on the orchestra by "Land of Hope and Glory." Britannia rises and bows to the audience).
When the applause has subsided, they resume, and Britannia calls on Sweetheart. Sweetheart trips out into the front of the stage, and goes through a little pantomime alone, but it is at once apparent that in her imagination there is a male figure there. There are little embracings: she promises the unseen figure not to cry any more, but to write to him (B.E.F.) every day.
Britannia calls her, "Brave girl."
Britannia (pointing to Child, with a voice already beginning to break with emotion): "And you, my little one?"
Long pause.
Child (in a high treble): "Oh, Mrs. Britannia, do let Daddy come home soon!" (Pause.) "Won't he come home soon, Mrs. Britannia?"
Britannia (choking): "My little one!" (Sobs.) "My little one!"
(Faith, Hope, Mother, etc., all turn aside and hide their faces, with convulsive movements of their shoulders. Eventually Hope looks firmly up at the Royal Box, and a loud click is heard as Faith tries to light the electric sword. As it is out of order, she merely holds it up. This is the cue for the play to proceed.)
Justice is rather fierce, and as she speaks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Britannia rises and with a majestic look sets her teeth and flashes her eyes. Mercy intervenes, telling Justice that they are sisters, Justice acknowledges the soft impeachment, and hides her head on Mercy's shoulder, who reminds her that the quality of Mercy is twice blest, which is very pleasant for her as sheisMercy.
Rolls of drum in the orchestra punctuate what Victory has to say, which is just as easily described as imagined, but is scarcely worth description. Then a soft smile irradiates Britannia's face, and she says:
"And now that Victory's won I callThe fairest sister of you all."
On which Peace advances and crowns Britannia with a green wreath, and a small stuffed pigeon descends from above Britannia's head and hovers. The curtain descends slowly to long soft chords on the orchestra. The applause of relief sounds faintly from various quarters of the house. The curtain instantly ascends again and shows the same picture. It goes up and down five or six times. Then it parts, and Britannia comes out and bows to the house. She smiles at someone behind the curtain, and extends her hand. A small man in a frock coat and an expression of abject misery comes out and clutches it. The audience come to the conclusion that he must be the author, and with the amiable idea of putting him out of his misery applaud again. On which Britannia advances a little to the left and again beckons behind the curtain. On which Child runs out, and (as previously instructed) after an alarmed survey of the house, hides its little face in the ample folds of Britannia's gown. Murmurs of sympathy. Britannia (who has a way with her) encourages the infant (who has done this fifty times before, and is really as brazen as brass) and points to the Royal Box. Child drops curtsy, amid more applause. Faith, Hope, Mother, Wife, History, Geography, Belgium, Peace, Mathematics, Victory, Suicide, Phlebotomy, Green Grocery and any other symbolical figures that there may be, join the group one by one. They all bow, the audience continues applauding: Faith (having mastered the unruly mechanism) lights up her sword. Peace holds aloft the Dove. Belgium's hair falls down....
The lights go up in the theatre, and guinea stall turns to guinea stall with a sigh.
"Oh, George Robey next," she says. "I hope he'll play golf."
Now I want to make my position clear. I think it wonderfully kind of all these eminent ladies to spend all this time and trouble in giving us this patriotic sketch. I think it wonderfully clever of the gentleman who wrote it to have made it all up, and thought of all those rhymes. I think every single sentiment expressed in his drama to be absolutely unexceptionable, and, as we hear from the pulpit, "True in the best sense of the word," without even inquiring what that cryptic utterance means. But there seems to me to be two weighty objections to the whole affair: it is all utterly devoid of the sense of humour and of the sense of decency. You may say that when treating of such deeply-felt matters as Faith and Victory and Mother and Child, a sense of humour would be out of place. I do not agree: it is the absence of the sense of humour that causes it to be so ridiculous. As for the propriety of presenting such things on the stage, I can only say that the Lord Chamberlain ought never to have allowed this and fifty other such pieces to appear, on grounds of indecent exposure. To present under such ruthless imagery the secret and holiest feelings of the heart is much worse than allowing people to appear with no clothes on. It is all true, too: there is its crowning horror. It is just because it is so sacredly true that it is totally unfit for public production. There are things you can't even talk about ... and they are just these things that the author of this abomination has put into the mouths of these eminent actresses. And the bowings and the scrapings, and the return of the actors, all smiles to their friends in the audience.... Oh, swiftly come, George Robey, and let us forget about it!
In this blear-eyed December, which, with its stuffy dark days and absence of sunshine, seems like some drowsy dormouse faintly conscious of being awake, and desiring only to be allowed to go to sleep again, there is an immense amount of activity going on. As in those ample entertainments for the sake of something, there is exhibited on the part of actors, authors and audience an intense desire to be doing something, so in the general life of the country there is a sense of being busy, being strenuous, doing work of some sort in order to experience the narcotic influence of occupation. The country is unhappy, and since England is a very practical country, it is stifling its spiritual unhappiness by being busy. It does things to prevent its thinking about things, and though it does very foolish things, it shows its common-sense in doing something rather than encourage its unhappiness by brooding over it. Herein, it shows its inherent vitality: were it less vital it would abandon itself to gloomy reflection. But it does not: it is tremendously busy, and so with set purpose deprives itself of the tendency to think. That is not very difficult, for, as a nation, we cannot be considered good at thinking.
Now considering that all action of whatever kind is the direct result of thought, it would seem at first sight, when we observe the amazing activities of most people, that these same people must think a great deal. But as a matter of fact, most people, so far from thinking a great deal, hardly think at all, and the greater part of their consistent activity is the result of mere habit. The baby, for instance, who is learning to walk, or the girl who is learning to knit, think immensely and absorbedly about these locomotive and involved accomplishments, just because they have not yet formed the habit of them. But a few years later, the baby who has become a man will give no thought at all to the act of walking and, indeed, to walk (the feat which once so engaged his mind), now sets his mind free to think, and he finds that problems which require to be thought out are assisted to their solution by the act that once required so much attention: similarly the grown-up woman often really talks and attends better to other things when she is engaged in knitting. The accomplishment has soaked in through the conscious to the sub-conscious self, and demands no direction from the practical mind.
It is on the lines of this analogy that we must explain the fact that many very active people are almost incapable of sustained or coherent thought. Many of their activities are matters of habit; they order dinner or look at a picture exhibition or argue about the war with no more thought than the man who walks or the woman who knits. They can be voluble about post-impressionism because at one time they acquired the habit of talking about it, and to do so now requires no more exercise of the reflective or critical qualities than does the ordering of a beef-steak pudding. Oh, if they argue about the war, most people have no original ideas of any kind on the subject: they mix round, as in an omelette, certain facts they have seen in the official telegrams, with certain reflections they have read in the leaders of their papers, and serve up, hot or cold, as their fancy dictates. But they do not think about it.
Thought, in fact, not merely abstract thought, but a far less difficult variety, namely, definite coherent thought about concrete things, is an extremely rare accomplishment among grown up people. We are often told that it is infinitely harder to learn anything when we are of mature age than when we are young, and this is quite true, the reason for it being that we now find it more difficult to think since we have so long relied on muddling along under the direction of habit. And even the people who think they think are not in most cases the real owners of their thoughts. They borrow their thoughts, as from a circulating library, and instead of owning them, return them slightly damaged at the end of a week or two, and borrow some more. They do not think for themselves: they stir about the stale thoughts of others and offer their insipid porridge as a home-industry.
This secondhand method of thinking is strangely characteristic of our race, in contradistinction to French and German methods of thought, and is admirably illustrated by the anecdote concerning the camel. An Englishman, a Frenchman and a German were bidden to write an essay on that melancholy beast, deriving their authorities from where they chose. The Englishman studied books of natural history at the British Museum, and when he had written an essay founded on them, went and shot a camel. The Frenchman took his hat and stick and went to theJardin des Plantes,where he looked at a real camel, and subsequently had a ride or two on its back. But the German did none of these things: he consulted no authority, he looked at no camel, but shutting himself up in his study, he constructed one from his inner consciousness.
Now whether this offspring of mentality was like a real camel or not, history does not tell us. Probably it was not, any more than the new map of Europe planned by Prussian militarism will prove like the map of Europe as it will appear in the atlases published, let us say, in 1918. But even if the German camel was totally unrecognizable as such, its constructor had shown himself capable of entering on a higher plane of thought than is intelligible to the ordinary Englishman. The German, in fact, as we are beginning to learn, is able to sit down and think, and out of pure thought to build up an image. The English are excellent learners, quick to assimilate and apply what others have thought out, the French are vivid and keen observers, but neither have the power of sustained internal thought which characterizes the Teuton, who incidentally is quite the equal of the Englishman at learning and of the Frenchman at observation. The German, for instance, thought out the doctrine of submarine warfare, and to our grievous cost applied it to our shipping. Similarly they thought out the doctrine of trench warfare, supplemented by gas, then the French, with their marvellously quick powers of observation, saw and comprehended and applied. In fact, the two great German inventions conceived by them, and originally used by them, have been adopted and brought to a higher pitch of perfection by their adversaries. But if only any of our allied nations could pick up from them the power of concentrated and imaginative thought, for the root of the matter is imagination! We proverbially muddle through, and when occasion arises, by dint of a certain stubbornness and admirable stolidity, though pommelled and buffeted, eventually learn by experience a successful mode of resistance. But constitutionally, we appear incapable of initiating ideas. We cannot imagine an occasion, but can only meet the occasion when somebody else imagines it.
Of all the disappointments of this year this is the root. We cannot invent: we can only counter. We have not the power of constructive imagination, which is the mother and father of original actions. But when our adversaries indulge in original actions, we can (on occasion) think out an answer to them which is perfectly effective. We can resist and we can hit back when we are hit, but at present we have not shown that we are capable of imagining and dealing the first blow. Perhaps this may come, for it goes without saying that we were notoriously unready at the beginning of the war, and had our hands full and overfull with countering the blows that were rained on us. We were on the defensive and could barely maintain the defence, and could not possibly have collected that coiled force which is necessary for any offensive movement. But if after sixteen months of war we do not begin to show signs of it, it is reasonable to wonder whether the cause of this is not so much that we lack the battering power, but that our statesmen and our generals lack the imagination out of which original plans are made. True, there have been two original schemes, namely, that of forcing the Dardanelles and capturing Bagdad, and if these show the quality of our originality, perhaps we are better without it ...
It is natural that the stress of war should have brought out the deep-rooted, inherent qualities of the nations engaged, and those qualities are just those that strike you first in a man of whatever nationality. When you know him a little better, you think you detect all sorts of other qualities, but when you come really to know him—singly or collectively—he is usually just such as you first thought him to be. Indeed, it is as Francis said about the orange: the rind has the savour of the fruit within, between the two there is a layer of soft, pulpy stuff. But when you get through that, the man, the essential person is like the taste of the rind. This has been immensely true with regard to the war. On the surface the French strike anyone who comes in contact with them as full of admirable fervour: there is the strong, sharp odour about them, there is a savour that penetrates. Then you get to know them just a little better, and you find a woolly and casual touch about them, which you, in your ignorance born out of a little knowledge, take to be the real spirit of the French. But when intimate acquaintance, or the stripping of the surface takes place, how you must alter your estimate again, going back to your first impression. You meet the fervour, the strong sharp odour again, and it goes into the heart of the nation. The Frenchman is apt on first acquaintance to seem too genuine, too patriotically French to be real. But when you get within, when the stress of war has revealed the nation and shown the strong beating of its heart, how the fervour and the intensity of savour persist! What you thought was superficial you find to be the quality that dwells in the innermost. He will easily talk aboutLa FranceandLa gloirewhen you first get acquainted with him, but when he stands revealed you find that he talks about it easily because it is the spring and source of his being.
The same holds with the German. When first you get speaking-acquaintance with a German, you consider him brutal and beery and coarse and loud-tongued. You penetrate a little further, and find him watching by the Rhine and musical and philosophical, a peaceful, aloof dreamer. Such, at any rate, was the experience of Lord Haldane. But when the pulpy, stringy layer is stripped off, when the stress of war makes penetration into his real self, you find him again to be as you first thought him, coarse and brutal and clamant, the most overweening individual in all creation. Both with the French and the German you revised your first impressions when you thought you began to know him, only to find when the real man is revealed that he is as you first thought him. And though it is the hardest thing in the world for anyone to form even an approximately true estimate of the race to which he belongs, I think that the same holds of the English. They are at heart very much what they appear to be on the surface, blundering but tenacious, slow to move, but difficult when once on the move to stop. But really, when I try to think what the English are like, I find I can form no conclusion about them, simply because I am of them.