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Title: Tremendous Trifles

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8092]
[This file was first posted on June 13, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, TREMENDOUS TRIFLES ***




TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

by

G. K. Chesterton






Preface

These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission
of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared.
They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary
recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--
the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep.
Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public,
for bread and cheese.  But trivial as are the topics they
are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the
reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages,
it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post,
a window blind or a wall.  It is a thousand to one that the
reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is,
never realised.  He could not write an essay on such a post or
wall:  he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could
not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its
Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night Felt
as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on.
He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards
window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind--
Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil--Is Modesty Natural?
--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc."  None of us
think enough of these things on which the eye rests.  But don't
let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy?  Let us
exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run
across the landscape as plain as a painted fence.  Let us be
ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or
a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what
follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will
only try.


Contents Chapter
      I  Tremendous Trifles
     II  A Piece of Chalk
    III  The Secret of a Train
     IV  The Perfect Game
      V  The Extraordinary Cabman
     VI  An Accident
    VII  The Advantages of Having One Leg
   VIII  The End of the World
     IX  In the Place de la Bastille
      X  On Lying in Bed
     XI  The Twelve Men
    XII  The Wind and the Trees
   XIII  The Dickensian
    XIV  In Topsy-Turvy Land
     XV  What I Found in My Pocket
    XVI  The Dragon's Grandmother
   XVII  The Red Angel
  XVIII  The Tower
    XIX  How I Met the President
     XX  The Giant
    XXI  The Great Man
   XXII  The Orthodox Barber
  XXIII  The Toy Theatre
   XXIV  A Tragedy of Twopence
    XXV  A Cab Ride Across Country
   XXVI  The Two Noises
  XXVII  Some Policemen and a Moral
 XXVIII  The Lion
   XXIX  Humanity: An Interlude
    XXX  The Little Birds Who Won't Sing
   XXXI  The Riddle of the Ivy
  XXXII  The Travellers in State
 XXXIII  The Prehistoric Railway Station
  XXXIV  The Diabolist
   XXXV  A Glimpse of My Country
  XXXVI  A Somewhat Improbable Story
 XXXVII  The Shop of Ghosts
XXXVIII  The Ballade of a Strange Town
  XXXIX  The Mystery of a Pageant


I

Tremendous Trifles

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly
in the front garden, because their villa was a model one.
The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table;
it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some
mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower
bed with a row of red daisies.  One morning while they were at play
in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman,
leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation.
The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply
interested in his remarks.  For the milkman (who was, I need say,
a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering them
in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for.
And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness,
explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride
across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas
in an afternoon dinner stroll.  The milkman producing a wand from
his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner;
and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a
tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet.  He went striding away
with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas.
But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small
and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when
he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom.
He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find
something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer
boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep.
Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual
backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand
and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the other.  The man looked
at the book and then at the giant, and then at the book again.
And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil
of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe."
So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and,
working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off;
and there was an end of him.

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly
enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long
wished to be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he
immediately became one.  When the transformation was over he found
himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green
jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with
a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of
silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie
stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of
such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident
of the end of the world.  And far away on the faint horizon he
could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more mystical,
of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He
set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has
not come to the end of it yet.

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit
for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced
it is not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction.
It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating
the pages that follow.  Peter and Paul are the two primary influences
upon European literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own
preference in its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it
by what little girls call telling a story.

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy.  The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration.  The other
great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England
by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest
by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere.
Let it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight;
and the two alternative methods still remain.  Mr. Kipling's school
advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without
a frock coat.  The school to which I belong suggests that we should
stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat.
If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat
to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat.
In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely
on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures;
force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose.
The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary
things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent
to continent like the giant in my tale.  But the object of my school
is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man
may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that
is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over
by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace.
If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very
big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke.
If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess
with pride that it is so.  I can imagine no more successful and productive
form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.
But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains;
one has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering,
in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything.
Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took
Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed
him all the kingdoms of the earth.  But the joy of Satan
in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in
beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects
at his feet.  It is from the valley that things look large;
it is from the level that things look high; I am a child
of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help;
but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is
absolutely necessary.  Everything is in an attitude of mind;
and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude.
I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle
on me like flies.  There are plenty of them, I assure you.
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only
for want of wonder.


II

A Piece of Chalk

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up
a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.
I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),
and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any
brown paper.  She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she
mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper.
She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must
be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do;
indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.
Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and
endurance in the material.  I explained to her that I only wanted to draw
pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least;
and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of
tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively
irrelevant in a parcel.  When she understood that I wanted to draw
she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing
that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers
from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I
not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness
in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods,
or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North.  Brown paper
represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation,
and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points
of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,
like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.
All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown
paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical
are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,
for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things
in my pockets.  But I found it would be too long; and the age
of the great epics is past.

. . . . .

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper,
I went out on to the great downs.  I crawled across those colossal
contours that express the best quality of England, because they
are at the same time soft and strong.  The smoothness of them
has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses,
or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth
of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.
As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake.
The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see,
for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like
the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw.  Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going
to sketch from Nature.  I was going to draw devils and seraphim,
and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right,
and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green,
and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright
colours on brown paper.  They are much better worth drawing than Nature;
also they are much easier to draw.  When a cow came slouching
by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it;
but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew
the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me
in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had
seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But
though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape,
it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out
of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the
old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills;
but they sat on the great hills to write it.  They gave out much
less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They
painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding
snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields
of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets.
The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live
green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten
skies became the blue robes of the Virgin.  The inspiration went
in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

. . . . .

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential chalk, behind.  I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk.  Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.
I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the
wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this,
that white is a colour.  It is not a mere absence of colour; it is
a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as
black.  When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses;
when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.  And one of the two or three
defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity,
for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of
religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence
of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and
separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean
not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a
plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or
not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means
something flaming, like Joan of Arc.  In a word, God paints in
many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost
said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age
has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume.
For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless
thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead
of black and grey for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period.
We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver
linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies. Which is
not the case.

Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.

. . . . .

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair.  There was no town
nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable
that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman.
And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as
pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it.
I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients.
Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again,
so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a
man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some
salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on
an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made
entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until
it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on;
it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the
effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that
this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition
and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a
piece of chalk.


III

The Secret of a Train

All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a
loose memory.  I will not merely say that this story is true:
because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story.
It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other
things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which
would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen.
For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many
interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any
of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends
of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten
thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate,
not fictitious.  Not only am I not making up the incidents
(what there were of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere
of the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing.
I remember them vividly, and they were as I shall now describe.

. . . . .

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing
outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London.
And for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind
or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice
fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step
out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London.
I do not know if other people are made like me in this matter;
but to me it is always dreary weather, what may be called
useless weather, that slings into life a sense of action and romance.
On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world
is complete and beautiful, a thing for contemplation. I no more
ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for
adventures in church.  But when the background of man's life is
a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail
man refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in
letters of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall
happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises
up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the
slaughter of a policeman. But this is a digressive way of stating
what I have said already--that the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger
for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to
render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set
out into the country lanes, out of the town of Oxford.  It was,
perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came upon me out of
the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years afterwards
I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir George
Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless.
The fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies;
the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds
and as cloudy.  And when I had walked for some hours the evening
was closing in.  A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon,
as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark.
And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and
to threaten.  The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen;
and then they loosened and let down the dark curtains of the rain.
The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like blows from an enemy
at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over and bawling
in my ears.  I walked on many more miles before I met a man,
and in that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met
him I asked him if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up
the train for Paddington.  He directed me to a small silent station
(I cannot even remember the name of it) which stood well away
from the road and looked as lonely as a hut on the Andes.
I do not think I have ever seen such a type of time and sadness
and scepticism and everything devilish as that station was:
it looked as if it had always been raining there ever since
the creation of the world.  The water streamed from the soaking
wood of it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome
liquid corruption of the wood itself; as if the solid station
were eternally falling to pieces and pouring away in filth.
It took me nearly ten minutes to find a man in the station.
When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him if there was
a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague.  As far as I
understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour.
I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail
of the tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain.
It may have been in half an hour or less, but a train came rather
slowly into the station.  It was an unnaturally dark train;
I could not see a light anywhere in the long black body of it;
and I could not see any guard running beside it. I was reduced
to walking up to the engine and calling out to the stoker to ask
if the train was going to London. "Well--yes, sir," he said, with
an unaccountable kind of reluctance. "It is going to London;
but----" It was just starting, and I jumped into the first
carriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering,
as we steamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined
with desolate poplars, until we slowed down and stopped,
irrationally, in the middle of a field. I heard a heavy noise as
of some one clambering off the train, and a dark, ragged head
suddenly put itself into my window. "Excuse me, sir," said the
stoker, "but I think, perhaps--well, perhaps you ought to know--
there's a dead man in this train."

. . . . .

Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities
and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be
finally overwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have
insisted on getting out and walking.  As it was, I regret to
say, I expressed myself politely, but firmly, to the effect that
I didn't care particularly if the train took me to Paddington.
But when the train had started with its unknown burden I did do
one thing, and do it quite instinctively, without stopping to
think, or to think more than a flash. I threw away my cigar.
Something that is as old as man and has to do with all mourning
and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something
unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there
being only two men in that train, and one of them dead and the
other smoking a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end
of it faded like a funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic
moment of a procession, I realised how immortal ritual is. I
realised (what is the origin and essence of all ritual) that in
the presence of those sacred riddles about which we can say
nothing it is more decent merely to do something. And I realised
that ritual will always mean throwing away something; DESTROYING
our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

When the train panted at last into Paddington Station I sprang
out of it with a suddenly released curiosity. There was a barrier
and officials guarding the rear part of the train; no one was
allowed to press towards it. They were guarding and hiding
something; perhaps death in some too shocking form, perhaps
something like the Merstham matter, so mixed up with human mystery
and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of sanctity;
perhaps something worse than either. I went out gladly enough into
the streets and saw the lamps shining on the laughing faces.  Nor
have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I
wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark.


IV

THE PERFECT GAME

We have all met the man who says that some odd things have
happened to him, but that he does not really believe that they
were supernatural.  My own position is the opposite of this.
I believe in the supernatural as a matter of intellect and reason,
not as a matter of personal experience.  I do not see ghosts;
I only see their inherent probability.  But it is entirely
a matter of the mere intelligence, not even of the motions;
my nerves and body are altogether of this earth, very earthy.
But upon people of this temperament one weird incident will often
leave a peculiar impression.  And the weirdest circumstance
that ever occurred to me occurred a little while ago. It consisted
in nothing less than my playing a game, and playing it quite well
for some seventeen consecutive minutes. The ghost of my grandfather
would have astonished me less.

On one of these blue and burning afternoons I found myself, to my
inexpressible astonishment, playing a game called croquet.  I had
imagined that it belonged to the epoch of Leach and Anthony Trollope,
and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and
luxuriant side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene.
I played it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom I had
a semi-philosophical argument which lasted through the entire contest.
It is deeply implanted in my mind that I had the best of the argument;
but it is certain and beyond dispute that I had the worst of the game.

"Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!"  I cried, patting him affectionately
on the head with a mallet, "how far you really are from the pure
love of the sport--you who can play.  It is only we who play badly
who love the Game itself.  You love glory; you love applause;
you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet.
You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet.
It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation in the abstract.
It is we to whom it is art for art's sake.  If we may see the face
of Croquet herself (if I may so express myself) we are content to
see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is called amateurish;
and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs is but the
French for Lovers. We accept all adventures from our Lady, the most
disastrous or the most dreary.  We wait outside her iron gates (I
allude to the hoops), vainly essaying to enter.  Our devoted balls,
impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within
the pedantic boundaries of the mere croquet ground.  Our balls seek
honour in the ends of the earth; they turn up in the flower-beds
and the conservatory; they are to be found in the front garden
and the next street.  No, Parkinson!  The good painter has skill.
It is the bad painter who loves his art.  The good musician
loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music. With such a
pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game
itself.  I love the parallelogram of grass marked out with chalk or
tape, as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred Fatherland,
the four seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets, and
the click of the balls is music.  The four colours are to me
sacramental and symbolic, like the red of martyrdom, or the white
of Easter Day. You lose all this, my poor Parkinson.  You have to
solace yourself for the absence of this vision by the paltry
consolation of being able to go through hoops and to hit the stick."

And I waved my mallet in the air with a graceful gaiety.

"Don't be too sorry for me," said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm.
"I shall get over it in time.  But it seems to me that the more
a man likes a game the better he would want to play it. Granted that
the pleasure in the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure
of success come naturally and inevitably afterwards? Or, take your
own simile of the Knight and his Lady-love. I admit the gentleman
does first and foremost want to be in the lady's presence. But I
never yet heard of a gentleman who wanted to look an utter ass when
he was there."

"Perhaps not; though he generally looks it," I replied. "But the truth
is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own.  The
happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness, which
can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking,
the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the
love of both lovers, the stronger will be the happiness.  But it is not
true that the stronger the play of both croquet players the stronger
will be the game. It is logically possible--(follow me closely here,
Parkinson!)--it is logically possible, to play croquet too well to
enjoy it at all.  If you could put this blue ball through that distant
hoop as easily as you could pick it up with your hand, then you would
not put it through that hoop any more than you pick it up with your
hand; it would not be worth doing. If you could play unerringly you
would not play at all. The moment the game is perfect the game
disappears."

"I do not think, however," said Parkinson, "that you are in any
immediate danger of effecting that sort of destruction.  I do not
think your croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence.
You are safe for the present."

I again caressed him with the mallet, knocked a ball about, wired myself,
and resumed the thread of my discourse.

The long, warm evening had been gradually closing in, and by this
time it was almost twilight.  By the time I had delivered four
more fundamental principles, and my companion had gone through five
more hoops, the dusk was verging upon dark.

"We shall have to give this up," said Parkinson, as he missed
a ball almost for the first time, "I can't see a thing."

"Nor can I," I answered, "and it is a comfort to reflect that I
could not hit anything if I saw it."

With that I struck a ball smartly, and sent it away into the darkness
towards where the shadowy figure of Parkinson moved in the hot haze.
Parkinson immediately uttered a loud and dramatic cry. The situation,
indeed, called for it.  I had hit the right ball.

Stunned with astonishment, I crossed the gloomy ground, and hit my ball
again.  It went through a hoop. I could not see the hoop; but it was
the right hoop. I shuddered from head to foot.

Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after that
impossible ball.  Again I hit it away into the night, in what I
supposed was the vague direction of the quite invisible stick.
And in the dead silence I heard the stick rattle as the ball
struck it heavily.

I threw down my mallet.  "I can't stand this," I said. "My ball has
gone right three times.  These things are not of this world."

"Pick your mallet up ," said Parkinson, "have another go."

"I tell you I daren't. If I made another hoop like that I should see
all the devils dancing there on the blessed grass."

"Why devils?" asked Parkinson; "they may be only fairies making fun of
you.  They are sending you the 'Perfect Game,' which is no game."

I looked about me.  The garden was full of a burning darkness,
in which the faint glimmers had the look of fire. I stepped across
the grass as if it burnt me, picked up the mallet, and hit the ball
somewhere--somewhere where another ball might be. I heard the dull
click of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued.


V

The Extraordinary Cabman

From time to time I have introduced into this newspaper column the
narration of incidents that have really occurred. I do not mean to
insinuate that in this respect it stands alone among newspaper
columns.  I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better
expressed by some practical parable out of daily life than by any
other method; therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the
extraordinary cabman, which occurred to me only three days ago, and
which, slight as it apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine
emotion bordering upon despair.

On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching
in a little restaurant in Soho in company with three or four
of my best friends.  My best friends are all either bottomless
sceptics or quite uncontrollable believers, so our discussion
at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate and terrible ideas.
And the whole argument worked out ultimately to this: that the
question is whether a man can be certain of anything at all.
I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible
intellectually to entertain certainty, what is this certainty
which it is impossible to entertain? If I have never experienced
such a thing as certainty I cannot even say that a thing is not
certain.  Similarly, if I have never experienced such a thing as
green I cannot even say that my nose is not green.  It may be as
green as possible for all I know, if I have really no experience
of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the room;
because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.
And the difference between us was very deep, because it
was a difference as to the object of the whole thing
called broad-mindedness or the opening of the intellect.
For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun
opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake,
opening infinitely for ever.  But I said that I opened
my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it
again on something solid.  I was doing it at the moment.
And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly
if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

. . . . .

Now when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short
(for it will never be over), I went away with one of my companions,
who in the confusion and comparative insanity of a General Election
had somehow become a member of Parliament, and I drove with him in a cab
from the corner of Leicester-square to the members' entrance of the House
of Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance.
Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper
is a discussion between us which still continues.

It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude
of detail.  After leaving my friend at the House I took the cab
on a few hundred yards to an office in Victoria-street which I
had to visit.  I then got out and offered him more than his fare.
He looked at it, but not with the surly doubt and general
disposition to try it on which is not unknown among normal cabmen.
But this was no normal, perhaps, no human, cabman.  He looked at it
with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly quite genuine.
"Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given me 1s.8d?"
I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now you know,
sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you know
that ain't the fare from Euston."  "Euston," I repeated vaguely,
for the phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia.
"What on earth has Euston got to do with it?"  "You hailed me just outside
Euston Station," began the man with astonishing precision, "and then
you said----" "What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?"
I said with Christian forbearance; "I took you at the south-west
corner of Leicester-square." "Leicester-square," he exclaimed,
loosening a kind of cataract of scorn, "why we ain't been near
Leicester-square to-day. You hailed me outside Euston Station,
and you said----" "Are you mad, or am I?"  I asked with scientific calm.

I looked at the man.  No ordinary dishonest cabman would
think of creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie.
And this man was not a dishonest cabman.  If ever a human
face was heavy and simple and humble, and with great big
blue eyes protruding like a frog's, if ever (in short)
a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and
down the street; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming
on.  And for one second the old nightmare of the sceptic put
its finger on my nerve. What was certainty?  Was anybody
certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the dull rut of the
sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a future life.
The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we
possess a past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically
considered, except a tradition and a picture?  The darkness grew
deeper from the road. The cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate
details of the gesture, the words, the complex but consistent
course of action which I had adopted since that remarkable
occasion when I had hailed him outside Euston Station.  How did I
know (my sceptical friends would say) that I had not hailed him
outside Euston. I was firm about my assertion; he was quite equally
firm about his. He was obviously quite as honest a man as I, and a
member of a much more respectable profession.  In that moment
the universe and the stars swung just a hair's breadth from
their balance, and the foundations of the earth were moved.
But for the same reason that I believe in Democracy, for the same
reason that I believe in free will, for the same reason that I
believe in fixed character of virtue, the reason that could
only be expressed by saying that I do not choose to be a lunatic,
I continued to believe that this honest cabman was wrong,
and I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the corner
of Leicester-square. He began with the same evident and
ponderous sincerity, "You hailed me outside Euston Station,
and you said----"

And at this moment there came over his features a kind
of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment,
as if he had been lit up like a lamp from the inside.
"Why, I beg your pardon, sir," he said.  "I beg your pardon.
I beg your pardon.  You took me from Leicester-square. I remember now.
I beg your pardon."  And with that this astonishing man let out
his whip with a sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of St. George I swear,
is strictly true.

. . . . .

I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the distance
and the mists.  I do not know whether I was right in fancying
that although his face had seemed so honest there was something
unearthly and demoniac about him when seen from behind.
Perhaps he had been sent to tempt me from my adherence to those
sanities and certainties which I had defended earlier in the day.
In any case it gave me pleasure to remember that my sense of reality,
though it had rocked for an instant, had remained erect.


VI

An Accident

Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called
"The Extraordinary Cabman."  I am now in a position to
contribute my experience of a still more extraordinary cab.
The extraordinary thing about the cab was that it did not like me;
it threw me out violently in the middle of the Strand.
If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are as romantic (and as rich)
as I take them to be, I presume that this experience is not uncommon.
I suppose that they are all being thrown out of cabs, all over London.
Still, as there are some people, virginal and remote from the world,
who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I will give
a short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cab
ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.

I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--
that one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged,
will gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that
it is both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern in
these two respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it came
to grief. But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; it
belongs to a beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody is
pretending to be richer than they are, and acting as if they were.
It is comfortable, and yet it is reckless; and that combination
is the very soul of England.  But although I had always
realised all these good qualities in a hansom cab, I had not
experienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put it,
all the aspects of that vehicle.  My enunciation of the merits
of a hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up.
Let me, therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom
cab for the first and, I am happy to believe, the last time.
Polycrates threw one ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates.
I have thrown one hansom cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather
violent metaphor) and the Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated.
Though I am told they do not like to be told so.

I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down one
of the sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own
admirable articles with continual pleasure, and still more
continual surprise, when the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment
on the scraping stones, staggered to his feet again, and went forward.
The horses in my cabs often do this, and I have learnt to enjoy
my own articles at any angle of the vehicle.  So I did not see
anything at all odd about the way the horse went on again.
But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the people on the pavement.
They were all turned towards me, and they were all struck
with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky.
And one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the
elbow as if warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse.
Then I knew that the reins were lost, and the next moment the horse
was like a living thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactly
as they seemed to me; many details I may have missed or mis-stated;
many details may have, so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road.
I remember that I once called one of my experiences narrated in this
paper "A Fragment of Fact."  This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact.
No fact could possibly be more fragmentary than the sort of fact
that I expected to be at the bottom of that street.

. . . . .

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally
found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy has
a deeper meaning than democrats understand; that is, that common
and popular things, proverbs, and ordinary sayings always have
something in them unrealised by most who repeat them.  Here is one.
We have all heard about the man who is in momentary danger,
and who sees the whole of his life pass before him in a moment.
In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is obviously
a thundering lie.  Nobody can pretend that in an accident
or a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the tickets
he had ever taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had ever
passed the brown bread and butter.

But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towards
the traffic of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truth
behind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases.
I did really have, in that short and shrieking period,
a rapid succession of a number of fundamental points of view.
I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds.
My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere men
is more shortly described as extreme fear.  Then there succeeded
a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper
name has ever been found.  The ancients called it Stoicism,
and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean
(if they mean anything) when they talk about Pessimism.
It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that happens--
as if one had got beyond the value of it.  And then, curiously enough,
came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered very
much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic.
It was a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but that
life was much too important ever to be anything but life.
I hope that this was Christianity.  At any rate, it occurred
at the moment when we went crash into the omnibus.

It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,
like an enormous hood or hat.  I then found myself crawling
out from underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they
must have added enormously to that great cause to which the
Anti-Puritan League and I have recently dedicated ourselves.
I mean the cause of the pleasures of the people. As to my demeanour
when I emerged, I have two confessions to make, and they are both
made merely in the interests of mental science.  The first is that
whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the moment before
the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got off with a
cut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.
A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped.
I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state
of irremediable spiritual ruin.  I am very sorry for this now,
and I apologise both to the man and to the paper. I have not the
least idea what was the meaning of this unnatural anger; I mention
it as a psychological confession. It was immediately followed by
extreme hilarity, and I made so many silly jokes to the policeman
that he disgraced himself by continual laughter before all the
little boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him seriously.

. . . . .

There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mention
as a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain.
At intervals of about every three minutes I kept on reminding
the policeman that I had not paid the cabman, and that I hoped
he would not lose his money.  He said it would be all right,
and the man would appear.  But it was not until about half an hour
afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a shock intolerable
that the man might conceivably have lost more than half a crown;
that he had been in danger as well as I. I had instinctively
regarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents, a god.
I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that they
seemed to have been unnecessary.

But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more delicate
charity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin, and neglect
the weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I was once really
tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might have been dead.
Some admirable men in white coats at the Charing Cross Hospital tied
up my small injury, and I went out again into the Strand.  I felt upon
me even a kind of unnatural youth; I hungered for something untried.
So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a hansom cab.


VII

The Advantages of Having One Leg

A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement
and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should
not be either insolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can
live through these great sorrows and even be the better.
What wears one is the little worries."  "That's quite right, mum,"
answered the old woman with emphasis, "and I ought to know,
seeing I've had ten of 'em." It is, perhaps, in this sense
that it is most true that little worries are most wearing.
In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a truth,
contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error.
People who have both small troubles and big ones have the
right to say that they find the small ones the most bitter;
and it is undoubtedly true that the back which is bowed under
loads incredible can feel a faint addition to those loads;
a giant holding up the earth and all its animal creation might
still find the grasshopper a burden. But I am afraid that the
maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used
or abused by people, because they have nothing but the very
smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the
crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity
she would wear the crown of thorns--if she had to.  The gentleman
may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he
would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation.
We need not deny that the grasshopper on man's shoulder is
a burden; but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman
who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant
when he knows there are no elephants in the country.
We may concede that a straw may break the camel's back,
but we like to know that it really is the last straw and
not the first.

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right
to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else.
It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always
do grumble about something else.  To talk quite reasonably about
your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head.
But people with great troubles talk about little ones,
and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often
has his flesh full of the thorns.  But if a man has commonly
a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified
in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills.
I do no deny that molehills can sometimes be important.
Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more
abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before,
they have no atmosphere.  No one ever had a mystical premonition
that he was going to tumble over a hassock.  William III.
died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his
varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain.
But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man
(not William III.)  to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make
them part of his happiness.  Of positive pain or positive poverty
I do not here speak.  I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts,
finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse,
finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures
to be drawn from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence
because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures
which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot,
with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--
a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if
the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation.
If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some
uninhabited landscape.  If we wish to depict what a man really
is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand.
So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means;
so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long
as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship.
Add another figure and the picture is less human--not more so.
One is company, two is none.  If you wish to symbolise
human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you
wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky.
Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we
call our day there is but one star in the sky--a large,
fierce star which we call the sun.  One sun is splendid;
six suns would be only vulgar.  One Tower Of Giotto is sublime;
a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry
of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping
the single star.  And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find
the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg.
To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand
in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness.
As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which
stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity
of some Doric column.  The students of architecture tell us
that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight.
This column of mine fulfils its legitimate function.
It supports weight.  Being of an animal and organic consistency,
it may even improve by the process, and during these few
days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness
or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the
astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might
pass by at any moment, and seeing me in the stork-like attitude
would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude,
"He has a leg."  Notice how this famous literary phrase supports
my contention touching this isolation of any admirable thing.
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect
picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg.
She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive
fact that he had really two legs.  Two legs were superfluous
and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion.  Two legs would have
confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London.
That having had one good leg he should have another--
this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do.
She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had
been a centipede.

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object.  All surrender
of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity,
all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something
so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed.  I feel
grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious
and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other.
The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.
In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is;
in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might
have been.  The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating.
This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and
beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us.
If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself
if only for a moment.  If you wish to realise how fearfully
and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg.
If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things--
wink the other eye.


VIII

The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious
town of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula
in a horse-shoe of river.  You may learn from the guide books
that it was the birthplace of Victor Hugo, and that it is
a military station with many forts, near the French frontier.
But you will not learn from guide books that the very tiles
on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate
colour than the tiles of all the other towns of the world;
that the tiles look like the little clouds of some strange sunset,
or like the lustrous scales of some strange fish. They will not
tell you that in this town the eye cannot rest on anything without
finding it in some way attractive and even elvish, a carved face
at a street corner, a gleam of green fields through a stunted arch,
or some unexpected colour for the enamel of a spire or dome.

. . . . .

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours
so simple and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together
and make a fairy tale.  I sat down for a little outside a café
with a row of little toy trees in front of it, and presently
the driver of a fly (as we should call it) came to the same place.
He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen, a type not
common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian Frenchman,
huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort
of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English.
And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations.
For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets,
this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--
as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion.  After some
talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality
of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness
or embarrassment that he should take me in his fly for an hour's
ride in the hills beyond the town.  And though it was growing late
I consented; for there was one long white road under an archway
and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord.
We drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans,
and I remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we
passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds
which are the trinity of France.  They make what some poet calls
"a tangled trinity," and I am not going to disentangle it.
Whatever those three things mean, how or why they co-exist;
whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are reconciled already;
the three sounds I heard then by an accident all at once make up
the French mystery.  For the brass band in the Casino gardens behind
me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some ramping tune
from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on I heard
also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible loyalties
and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

. . . . .

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having
left France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world.
And, indeed, there was something in the landscape wild
enough to encourage such a fancy.  I have seen perhaps
higher mountains, but I have never seen higher rocks;
I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and sensational,
splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of churches,
cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from heaven.
There was also a quality in the ride which was not only astonishing,
but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have noticed
if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads.
I mean a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole
earth turning about one's head.  It is quite inadequate
to say that the hills rose and fell like enormous waves.
Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails
of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings.
As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset this
dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof.
I stared at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a
wooded plain.  Below me steeps of green swept down to the river.
I stared at them until I fancied that they swept up to the sky.
The purple darkened, night drew nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer
the chasms and draw higher the spires of that nightmare landscape.
Above me in the twilight was the huge black hulk of the driver,
and his broad, blank back was as mysterious as the back
of Death in Watts' picture.  I felt that I was growing
too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things.
I called out to the driver in French, "Where are you taking me?"
and it is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same
language without turning around, "To the end of the world."

I did not answer.  I let him drag the vehicle up dark,
steep ways, until I saw lights under a low roof of little
trees and two children, one oddly beautiful, playing at ball.
Then we found ourselves filling up the strict main street
of a tiny hamlet, and across the wall of its inn was written
in large letters, LE BOUT DU MONDE--the end of the world.

The driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word, as if all
ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place.
I ordered bread for both of us, and red wine, that was good but
had no name.  On the other side of the road was a little plain
church with a cross on top of it and a cock on top of the cross.
This seemed to me a very good end of the world; if the story
of the world ended here it ended well.  Then I wondered whether I
myself should really be content to end here, where most certainly
there were the best things of Christendom--a church and children's
games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.
But as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me,
and at last I started up.

"Are you not satisfied?" asked my companion.  "No," I said,
"I am not satisfied even at the end of the world."

Then, after a silence, I said, "Because you see there are two
ends of the world.  And this is the wrong end of the world;
at least the wrong one for me.  This is the French end of the world.
I want the other end of the world.  Drive me to the other end
of the world."

"The other end of the world?" he asked.  "Where is that?"

"It is in Walham Green," I whispered hoarsely.  "You see it
on the London omnibuses.  'World's End and Walham Green.'
Oh, I know how good this is; I love your vineyards and your
free peasantry, but I want the English end of the world.
I love you like a brother, but I want an English cabman,
who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is.' Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman.
Take, oh, take me to see a London policeman."

He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset,
and I could not tell whether he understood or not. I got back
into his carriage.

"You will understand," I said, "if ever you are an exile even
for pleasure.  The child to his mother, the man to his country,
as a countryman of yours once said.  But since, perhaps, it is
rather too long a drive to the English end of the world,
we may as well drive back to Besançon."

Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept
for Walham Green.


IX

In the Place de La Bastille

On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with
a capering figure, which stands in the place where the people
destroyed a prison and ended an age.  The thing is a curious
example of how symbolic is the great part of human history.
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when it was taken
was not a horrible prison; it was hardly a prison at all.
But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a sure
instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance,
at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat
in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect.
The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy.
He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing
the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots,
that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy
and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth.
The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman
flying across the sea, exactly as the people hated the wizard
who could fetch a flying dragon through the air. It was the same
with Mr. Kruger's hat.  His hat (that admirable hat) was not merely
a joke.  It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the exact
thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the
unbeautiful dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of
political morality.  No; the people are sometimes wrong on the
practical side of politics; they are never wrong on the artistic
side.

. . . . .

So it was, certainly, with the Bastille.  The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform.
It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image.
The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with
a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved fact.
For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism
can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings.
Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made.
It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that
man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it.
Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual,
a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results.
It is a religious service.  If, for instance, the Socialists were
numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank
of England, you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act,
and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem
in the correct manner.  But mankind would never forget it.
It would change the world.

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength
of a society, for the most valuable things in a human
state are the irrevocable things--marriage, for instance.
And architecture approaches nearer than any other art to
being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get rid of.
You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall.
You can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of
very sincere emotion that you tear a town-hall to pieces.
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like a dogma.
Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence like a dogma.
People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world,
like impressionism in painting.  Surely it is obviously
because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in
the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
But along with this decision which is involved in creating a building,
there goes a quite similar decision in the more delightful
task of smashing one.  The two of necessity go together.
In few places have so many fine public buildings been set up
as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been destroyed.
When people have finally got into the horrible habit of preserving
buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few
are pulled down.

. . . . .

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty
and Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like
so many such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and
silent line of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and
prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their
helmets; and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans.
I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before.
I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows
of Friedland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo.
But now they came file after file, like an invasion,
and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that lit
up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie
into which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet
and cry out, "The French soldiers!"  There were the little men
with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals
of Europe as coolly as they now rode through their own.
And when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners
were choked with blue and red; held by little groups of infantry.
The city was garrisoned as against a revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker.
He said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que
c'est que le chome?"  He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler."
I said, "Ni moi non plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious
collectivist proletarian.  The whole thing was curious, and the true
moral of it one not easy for us, as a nation, to grasp, because our
own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction.
To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the English optimism
and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss
about nothing.  It looked like turning out one of the best armies
in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street.
The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less harmlessly.
But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not)
as docile as the English.  But the deeper truth of the matter tingled,
so to speak, through the whole noisy night.  This people has
a natural faculty for feeling itself on the eve of something--of the
Bartholomew or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment.
It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young.
It is perpetually pulling down and building up, as it pulled down
the prison and put up the column in the Place de La Bastille.
France has always been at the point of dissolution. She has found
the only method of immortality.  She dies daily.


X

On Lying in Bed

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience
if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic
apparatus on the premises.  I think myself that the thing
might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom.
Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way,
and laid on the colour in great washes, it might drip down again
on one's face in floods of rich and mingled colour like some
strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages.
I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white
in this form of artistic composition.  To that purpose, indeed,
the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact,
it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.

But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have
discovered it.  For years I have been looking for some blank spaces
in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really
allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des géants."
But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern
rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed.
I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects
hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire.
I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be
already covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper
to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing
a ridiculous resemblance to each other.  I could not understand
why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely
devoid of any religious or philosophical significance)
should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort
of small-pox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think,
when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do."
I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colours,
rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called
Turkish Delight.  I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight
really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres.
Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush,
I found that others had unaccountably been before me,
spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their
childish and barbaric designs.

. . . . .

Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion
when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back
in bed.  Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision,
that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition
of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom.
But alas! like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found
to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant
than the blue sky outside the window.  For my proposal to paint
on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged--
never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights--
and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into
the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded.
Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all
the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces
and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods.
I am sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged
in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that
he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made
into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted
in the heavens.

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed
is hypocritical and unhealthy.  Of all the marks of modernity
that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing
and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary
matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones,
at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality.
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals,
it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.  Thus it is considered
more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics.
Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness
is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.
A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long
as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met
Ibsenite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right
to take prussic acid.  Especially this is so in matters of hygiene;
notably such matters as lying in bed.  Instead of being regarded,
as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience
and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it
were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning.
It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing
good about it or bad about its opposite.

. . . . .

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed,
get up the night before.  It is the great peril of our society
that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows
more fickle.  A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to
be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable
are his principles, his ideals.  But with us the reverse is true;
our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.
Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions,
but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden,
sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top
of a tree.  Let them argue from the same first principles,
but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.
This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis
on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little
emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure,
sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour.
If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail.
A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning.
A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions;
the first experiment is commonly fatal.  Let us pay a little more
attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected.
I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed
of an almost terrible virtue.

For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic
caution to be added.  Even for those who can do their work in bed
(like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done
in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales),
it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional.
But that is not the caution I mean.  The caution is this:
if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or
justification at all.  I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick.
But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse;
then he will get up a healthy man.  If he does it for some secondary
hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get
up a hypochondriac.


XI

The Twelve Men

The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I was,
so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people.
The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden
and arbitrary.  I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea,
and my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there were
also summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions
of men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began
with a C.

It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping
alphabetical way.  At one official blow, so to speak,
Battersea is denuded of all its C's, and left to get on
as best it can with the rest of the alphabet.  A Cumberpatch
is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--
three Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children
are crying out for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street
corner is weeping for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted.
We settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats
(for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea),
and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner
by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood.
We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case
between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar,
neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet.

. . . . .

Just when I was wondering whether the King and the prisoner
were, perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in some
adjoining public house, the prisoner's head appears above
the barrier of the dock; he is accused of stealing bicycles,
and he is the living image of a great friend of mine.
We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles.
We do well and truly try the case between the King and the
prisoner in the affair of the bicycles. And we come to the
conclusion, after a brief but reasonable discussion, that
the King is not in any way implicated. Then we pass on to a
woman who neglected her children, and who looks as if somebody
or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who fancy
that something had.

All the time that the eye took in these light appearances
and the brain passed these light criticisms, there was in
the heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been
able to utter from the beginning, but which is the power behind
half the poems of the world.  The mood cannot even adequately
be suggested, except faintly by this statement that tragedy
is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life.
Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away
from pessimism.  Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these
dark emotions at all, for speech about them is too difficult;
but I mention them now for a specific and particular
reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once.
I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of them there
came a curious realisation of a political or social truth.
I saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what
a jury really is, and why we must never let it go.

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism.  We tend to have trained soldiers
because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better,
trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed
laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on.
The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable
modern writers.  Many Fabians have insisted that a greater
part of our political work should be performed by experts.
Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be
altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

. . . . .

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable,
I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this.
But the true result of all experience and the true foundation
of all religion is this.  That the four or five things
that it is most practically essential that a man should know,
are all of them what people call paradoxes.  That is to say,
that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty
of seeming verbal contradictions.  One of them, for instance,
is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most
pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it.
Another is the paradox of courage; the fact that the way
to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful
cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness.
Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it;
an entirely practical and prosaic statement.

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught
to every infant prattling at his mother's knee is the following:
That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,
and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it.
The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained
should be the man who is trusted would be absolutely unanswerable
if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced
it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance.
But he does not.  He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.
In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are
continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility,
seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

. . . . .

Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men.
But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can
to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun.
And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best,
about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen,
is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they
are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply
that they have got used to it.

Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they
see is the usual man in the usual place.  They do not see
the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.
Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely
declared that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion
be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets.
Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd,
and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional criminals,
the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the
gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture
or a play hitherto unvisited.

Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided,
that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too
important to be trusted to trained men.  It wishes for light upon
that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know,
but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box.
When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered,
or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it
wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve
of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I
remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.


XII

The Wind and the Trees

I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf
about the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks
and roars in something that is at once exultation and agony.
I feel, in fact, as if I were actually sitting at the bottom
of the sea among mere anchors and ropes, while over my head
and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting rush
of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of tremendous ships.
The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root
and all out of the earth like tufts of grass.  Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy,
the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they
were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible
and violent witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind.
I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking
in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees.
He did not like the wind at all; it blew in his face too much;
it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his hat, of which
he was very proud.  He was, as far as I remember, about four.
After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said
at last to his mother, "Well, why don't you take away the trees,
and then it wouldn't wind."

Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake.
Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy
that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere
waving agitated the air around them for miles.  Nothing, I say,
could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is
the trees which make the wind.  Indeed, the belief is so human
and excusable that it is, as a matter of fact, the belief of about
ninety-nine out of a hundred of the philosophers, reformers,
sociologists, and politicians of the great age in which we live.
My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal modern thinkers;
only much nicer.

. . . . .

In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour
of inventing, the trees stand for all visible things
and the wind for the invisible.  The wind is the spirit
which bloweth where it listeth; the trees are the material
things of the world which are blown where the spirit lists.
The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees are
cities and civilisations.  We only know that there is a wind
because the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad.
We only know that there is a real revolution because all
the chimney-pots go mad on the whole skyline of the city.

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more
ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails,
so the human city rises under the wind of the spirit into toppling
temples or sudden spires.  No man has ever seen a revolution.
Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood pouring down the gutters,
the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison
in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.

You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind.
So, also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that
there is a revolution.  And there never has been in the history
of the world a real revolution, brutally active and decisive,
which was not preceded by unrest and new dogma in the reign
of invisible things.  All revolutions began by being abstract.
Most revolutions began by being quite pedantically abstract.

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved.
So there must always be a battle in the sky before there
is a battle on the earth.  Since it is lawful to pray
for the coming of the kingdom, it is lawful also to pray for
the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom.
It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees.
It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it
is in Heaven."

. . . . .

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees.
The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind.
When people begin to say that the material circumstances have
alone created the moral circumstances, then they have prevented
all possibility of serious change.  For if my circumstances
have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I
am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment
is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--
including that one.  To treat the human mind as having an ultimate
authority is necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking.
And nothing will ever be reformed in this age or country unless
we realise that the moral fact comes first.

For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard
in debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists
and total abstainers.  The latter say that drink leads to poverty;
the former say that poverty leads to drink.  I can only wonder at their
either of them being content with such simple physical explanations.
Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat
leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink;
the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct
that resists degradation.

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has
this quality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth," because under
its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth,
instead of seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose.
And a man who says that the English inequality in land is due only
to economic causes, or that the drunkenness of England is due only
to economic causes, is saying something so absurd that he cannot
really have thought what he was saying.

Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under
the influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the
economic theory of history. We have people who represent that all
great historic motives were economic, and then have to howl at the
top of their voices in order to induce the modern democracy to act
on economic motives. The extreme Marxian politicians in England
exhibit themselves as a small, heroic minority, trying vainly to
induce the world to do what, according to their theory, the world
always does. The truth is, of course, that there will be a social
revolution the moment the thing has ceased to be purely economic.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy.
You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

. . . . .

I get up from under the trees, for the wind and the slight
rain have ceased.  The trees stand up like golden pillars
in a clear sunlight.  The tossing of the trees and the blowing
of the wind have ceased simultaneously.  So I suppose there
are still modern philosophers who will maintain that the trees
make the wind.


XIII

The Dickensian

He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw hat;
with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers,
but with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes.
He was gazing with a rather gloomy interest at the cluster,
one might almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew thicker
as our little pleasure boat crawled up into Yarmouth Harbour.
A boat entering this harbour, as every one knows, does not
enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps round
at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear.
The passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic,
and in consequence the bigger ships look colossal.  As we passed
under a timber ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens
like a cathedral, the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden
figurehead carved like a woman, and said, like one continuing
a conversation, "Now, why have they left off having them.
They didn't do any one any harm?"

I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note.
There has been something in our most recent civilisation which is
mysteriously hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.

"They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty," he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts.  "I believe they broke up all the jolly
old figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it."

"Like Mr. Quilp," I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral
with the poker."

His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time
he stood erect and stared at me.

"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked.

"For what?"

"For Dickens," he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.

"No," I answered; "I come for fun, though that is much the same thing."

"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat.
It isn't here."

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred
to the people who live there.  I myself have never come
to the end of the list of Batterseas.  But there are two to
the stranger and tourist; the poor part, which is dignified,
and the prosperous part, which is savagely vulgar.
My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost;
to the latter he would only distantly allude.

"The place is very much spoilt now . . . trippers, you know,"
he would say, not at all scornfully, but simply sadly.
That was the nearest he would go to an admission of the monstrous
watering place that lay along the front, outblazing the sun,
and more deafening than the sea.  But behind--out of earshot
of this uproar--there are lanes so narrow that they seem
like secret entrances to some hidden place of repose.
There are squares so brimful of silence that to plunge into one
of them is like plunging into a pool.  In these places the man
and I paced up and down talking about Dickens, or, rather,
doing what all true Dickensians do, telling each other verbatim
long passages which both of us knew quite well already.
We were really in the atmosphere of the older England.
Fishermen passed us who might well have been characters
like Peggotty; we went into a musty curiosity shop and
bought pipe-stoppers carved into figures from Pickwick.
The evening was settling down between all the buildings
with that slow gold that seems to soak everything when we went
into the church.

In the growing darkness of the church, my eye caught the coloured
windows which on that clear golden evening were flaming with all the
passionate heraldry of the most fierce and ecstatic of Christian arts.
At length I said to my companion:

"Do you see that angel over there?  I think it must be meant
for the angel at the sepulchre."

He saw that I was somewhat singularly moved, and he raised his eyebrows.

"I daresay," he said.  "What is there odd about that?"

After a pause I said, "Do you remember what the angel at
the sepulchre said?"

"Not particularly," he answered; "but where are you off
to in such a hurry?"

I walked him rapidly out of the still square, past the
fishermen's almshouses, towards the coast, he still inquiring
indignantly where I was going.

"I am going," I said, "to put pennies in automatic machines
on the beach.  I am going to listen to the niggers.  I am going
to have my photograph taken.  I am going to drink ginger-beer
out of its original bottle.  I will buy some picture postcards.
I do want a boat.  I am ready to listen to a concertina,
and but for the defects of my education should be ready to play it.
I am willing to ride on a donkey; that is, if the donkey is willing.
I am willing to be a donkey; for all this was commanded me
by the angel in the stained-glass window."

"I really think," said the Dickensian, "that I had better put
you in charge of your relations."

"Sir," I answered, "there are certain writers to whom humanity
owes much, whose talent is yet of so shy or delicate or retrospective
a type that we do well to link it with certain quaint places
or certain perishing associations.  It would not be unnatural
to look for the spirit of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill,
or even for the shade of Thackeray in Old Kensington.
But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for Dickens
is not an antiquity.  Dickens looks not backward, but forward;
he might look at our modern mobs with satire, or with fury,
but he would love to look at them.  He might lash our democracy,
but it would be because, like a democrat, he asked much from it.
We will not have all his books bound up under the title
of 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'  Rather we will have them
all bound up under the title of 'Great Expectations.'
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make
something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism,
and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant. We must
take these trippers as he would have taken them, and tear
out of them their tragedy and their farce. Do you remember
now what the angel said at the sepulchre? 'Why seek ye the
living among the dead?  He is not here; he is risen.'"

With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch of the sands,
which were black with the knobs and masses of our laughing and quite
desperate democracy.  And the sunset, which was now in its final glory,
flung far over all of them a red flush and glitter like the gigantic
firelight of Dickens.  In that strange evening light every figure
looked at once grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell.
I heard a little girl (who was being throttled by another little girl)
say by way of self-vindication, "My sister-in-law 'as got four rings
aside her weddin' ring!"

I stood and listened for more, but my friend went away.


XIV

In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees
and the secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world
moving under the violence of the invisible.  I took this metaphor
merely because I happened to be writing the article in a wood.
Nevertheless, now that I return to Fleet Street (which seems to me,
I confess, much better and more poetical than all the wild woods
in the world), I am strangely haunted by this accidental comparison.
The people's figures seem a forest and their soul a wind.
All the human personalities which speak or signal to me seem to have
this fantastic character of the fringe of the forest against the sky.
That man that talks to me, what is he but an articulate tree?
That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me to tell me
to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches stirred
and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I can continue
to contemplate with calm?  That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering
my person, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that
blast of human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy?
Gradually this impression of the woods wears off.  But this
black-and-white contrast between the visible and invisible, this deep
sense that the one essential belief is belief in the invisible as against
the visible, is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind.
Exactly at the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is,
most bewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet,
on which I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:
"Should Shop Assistants Marry?"

. . . . .

When I saw those words everything might just as well
have turned upside down.  The men in Fleet Street might
have been walking about on their hands.  The cross of
St. Paul's might have been hanging in the air upside down.
For I realise that I have really come into a topsy-turvy country;
I have come into the country where men do definitely believe
that the waving of the trees makes the wind.  That is to say,
they believe that the material circumstances, however black
and twisted, are more important than the spiritual realities,
however powerful and pure.  "Should Shop Assistants Marry?"  I am
puzzled to think what some periods and schools of human history
would have made of such a question.  The ascetics of the East
or of some periods of the early Church would have thought
that the question meant, "Are not shop assistants too saintly,
too much of another world, even to feel the emotions of the sexes?"
But I suppose that is not what the purple poster means.
In some pagan cities it might have meant, "Shall slaves so vile
as shop assistants even be allowed to propagate their abject race?"
But I suppose that is not what the purple poster meant.
We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what it does mean.
It does really mean that a section of the human race is asking
whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are particularly
good for modern shops.  The human race is asking whether Adam
and Eve are entirely suitable for Marshall and Snelgrove.
If this is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be.
We ask whether the universal institution will improve our
(please God) temporary institution.  Yet I have known many
such questions.  For instance, I have known a man ask seriously,
"Does Democracy help the Empire?"  Which is like saying,
"Is art favourable to frescoes?"

I say that there are many such questions asked.
But if the world ever runs short of them, I can suggest
a large number of questions of precisely the same kind,
based on precisely the same principle.

"Do Feet Improve Boots?"--"Is Bread Better when Eaten?"--"Should
Hats have Heads in them?"--"Do People Spoil a Town?"--"Do Walls
Ruin Wall-papers?"--"Should Neckties enclose Necks?"--"Do Hands
Hurt Walking-sticks?"--"Does Burning Destroy Firewood?"--"Is
Cleanliness Good for Soap?"--"Can Cricket Really Improve
Cricket-bats?"--"Shall We Take Brides with our Wedding Rings?"
and a hundred others.

Not one of these questions differs at all in intellectual purport
or in intellectual value from the question which I have quoted from
the purple poster, or from any of the typical questions asked by
half of the earnest economists of our times. All the questions they
ask are of this character; they are all tinged with this same initial
absurdity. They do not ask if the means is suited to the end; they
all ask (with profound and penetrating scepticism) if the end is suited
to the means.  They do not ask whether the tail suits the dog.
They all ask whether a dog is (by the highest artistic canons)
the most ornamental appendage that can be put at the end of a tail.
In short, instead of asking whether our modern arrangements,
our streets, trades, bargains, laws, and concrete institutions are
suited to the primal and permanent idea of a healthy human life,
they never admit that healthy human life into the discussion
at all, except suddenly and accidentally at odd moments;
and then they only ask whether that healthy human life is suited
to our streets and trades.  Perfection may be attainable or
unattainable as an end.  It may or may not be possible to talk
of imperfection as a means to perfection.  But surely it passes
toleration to talk of perfection as a means to imperfection.
The New Jerusalem may be a reality.  It may be a dream.
But surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem
is a reality on the road to Birmingham.

. . . . .

This is the most enormous and at the same time the most secret
of the modern tyrannies of materialism.  In theory the thing ought
to be simple enough.  A really human human being would always put
the spiritual things first.  A walking and speaking statue of God
finds himself at one particular moment employed as a shop assistant.
He has in himself a power of terrible love, a promise of paternity,
a thirst for some loyalty that shall unify life, and in the ordinary
course of things he asks himself, "How far do the existing conditions
of those assisting in shops fit in with my evident and epic destiny
in the matter of love and marriage?"  But here, as I have said,
comes in the quiet and crushing power of modern materialism.
It prevents him rising in rebellion, as he would otherwise do.
By perpetually talking about environment and visible things,
by perpetually talking about economics and physical necessity,
painting and keeping repainted a perpetual picture of iron
machinery and merciless engines, of rails of steel, and of
towers of stone, modern materialism at last produces this
tremendous impression in which the truth is stated upside down.
At last the result is achieved.  The man does not say as
he ought to have said, "Should married men endure being modern
shop assistants?"  The man says, "Should shop assistants marry?"
Triumph has completed the immense illusion of materialism.
The slave does not say, "Are these chains worthy of me?"
The slave says scientifically and contentedly, "Am I even worthy
of these chains?"


XV

What I Found in My Pocket

Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have
made the Empire what it is--a man in an astracan coat,
with an astracan moustache--a tight, black, curly moustache.
Whether he put on the moustache with the coat or whether his Napoleonic
will enabled him not only to grow a moustache in the usual place,
but also to grow little moustaches all over his clothes, I do not know.
I only remember that he said to me the following words:  "A man can't
get on nowadays by hanging about with his hands in his pockets."
I made reply with the quite obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got
on by having his hands in other people's pockets; whereupon he began
to argue about Moral Evolution, so I suppose what I said had some
truth in it.  But the incident now comes back to me, and connects
itself with another incident--if you can call it an incident--
which happened to me only the other day.

I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through
some absent-mindedness) I picked my own. My act can really with some
reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I
had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief;
I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should
find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a
tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my
possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with
them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets.  If once anything
slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.
I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets
are still there; the same presumption applies to the things
that I have dropped into the sea.  But I regard the riches stored
in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance.
They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead;
and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of
extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets.
But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there
is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all
surprised at finding among them.

. . . . .

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence.
I here only wish briefly to recall the special, extraordinary,
and hitherto unprecedented circumstances which led me in
cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pockets.
I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey.
The time was towards evening, but it might have been anything,
for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade
was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting
sheet of quite colourless rain.  I had no books or newspapers.
I had not even a pencil and a scrap of paper with which
to write a religious epic.  There were no advertisements
on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could have plunged
into the study, for any collection of printed words is quite
enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity.
When I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can
exhaust all the aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer
poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap.
But there was no printed word or picture anywhere; there was
nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank wet without.
Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can
be, uninteresting.  So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats,
and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood.
Just as I had begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ
was a carpenter, rather than a bricklayer, or a baker,
or anything else, I suddenly started upright, and remembered
my pockets.  I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury.
I had a British Museum and a South Kensington collection
of unknown curios hung all over me in different places.
I began to take the things out.

. . . . .

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of
Battersea tram tickets.  There were enough to equip a paper chase.
They shook down in showers like confetti.  Primarily, of course,
they touched my patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes;
also they provided me with the printed matter I required,
for I found on the back of them some short but striking
little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively
speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded
as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my railway
journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a few months
longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial
aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro and con
upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic
quality of the tickets that moved me most.  For as certainly as the
cross of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper
meant all that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the
greatest hope of England.

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife,
I need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral
meditations all to itself.  A knife typifies one of the most
primary of those practical origins upon which as upon low,
thick pillows all our human civilisation reposes. Metals, the
mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel,
led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream. I saw into the
intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the
common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent
battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered
against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.
I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth.
I saw all the swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war.
For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife
is a secret sword.  I opened it and looked at that brilliant
and terrible tongue which we call a blade; and I thought that
perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man.
The next moment I knew that I was wrong; for the thing
that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches.
Then I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old,
fierce female thing, the thing we all love, but dare not touch.

The next thing I found was a piece of chalk; and I saw
in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world.
The next was a coin of a very modest value; and I saw in it
not only the image and superscription of our own Caesar,
but all government and order since the world began.
But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and
splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out.
I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket.
I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket.
I allude to my railway ticket.


XVI

The Dragon's Grandmother

I met a man the other day who did not believe in fairy tales.
I do not mean that he did not believe in the incidents narrated
in them--that he did not believe that a pumpkin could turn into
a coach.  He did, indeed, entertain this curious disbelief.
And, like all the other people I have ever met who entertained it,
he was wholly unable to give me an intelligent reason for it.
He tried the laws of nature, but he soon dropped that.
Then he said that pumpkins were unalterable in ordinary experience,
and that we all reckoned on their infinitely protracted pumpkinity.
But I pointed out to him that this was not an attitude we
adopt specially towards impossible marvels, but simply
the attitude we adopt towards all unusual occurrences.
If we were certain of miracles we should not count on them.
Things that happen very seldom we all leave out of
our calculations, whether they are miraculous or not.
I do not expect a glass of water to be turned into wine;
but neither do I expect a glass of water to be poisoned with
prussic acid.  I do not in ordinary business relations act
on the assumption that the editor is a fairy; but neither do I
act on the assumption that he is a Russian spy, or the lost
heir of the Holy Roman Empire.  What we assume in action is
not that the natural order is unalterable, but simply that it
is much safer to bet on uncommon incidents than on common ones.
This does not touch the credibility of any attested tale
about a Russian spy or a pumpkin turned into a coach.
If I had seen a pumpkin turned into a Panhard motor-car
with my own eyes that would not make me any more inclined
to assume that the same thing would happen again.  I should not
invest largely in pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade.
Cinderella got a ball dress from the fairy; but I do not suppose
that she looked after her own clothes any the less after it.

But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened,
though crazy, is common.  The man I speak of disbelieved
in fairy tales in an even more amazing and perverted sense.
He actually thought that fairy tales ought not to be told
to children.  That is (like a belief in slavery or annexation)
one of those intellectual errors which lie very near
to ordinary mortal sins.  There are some refusals which,
though they may be done what is called conscientiously,
yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them,
that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly
corrupt his heart.  One of them was the refusal of milk to young
mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

. . . . .

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured,
short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too
helpless even to find his way to the Church of England. He had a
curious green necktie and a very long neck; I am always meeting
idealists with very long necks. Perhaps it is that their eternal
aspiration slowly lifts their heads nearer and nearer to the stars.
Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that so many of
them are vegetarians: perhaps they are slowly evolving the neck of
the giraffe so that they can eat all the tops of the trees in
Kensington Gardens. These things are in every sense above me.
Such, anyhow, was the young man who did not believe in fairy tales;
and by a curious coincidence he entered the room when I had just
finished looking through a pile of contemporary fiction, and had
begun to read "Grimm's Fairy tales" as a natural consequence.

The modern novels stood before me, however, in a stack; and you can
imagine their titles for yourself.  There was "Suburban Sue:  A Tale
of Psychology," and also "Psychological Sue:  A Tale of Suburbia";
there was "Trixy: A Temperament," and "Man-Hate: A Monochrome," and all
those nice things.  I read them with real interest, but, curiously enough,
I grew tired of them at last, and when I saw "Grimm's Fairy Tales"
lying accidentally on the table, I gave a cry of indecent joy.
Here at least, here at last, one could find a little common sense.
I opened the book, and my eyes fell on these splendid and satisfying
words, "The Dragon's Grandmother."  That at least was reasonable;
that at least was true.  "The Dragon's Grandmother!"  While I was
rolling this first touch of ordinary human reality upon my tongue,
I looked up suddenly and saw this monster with a green tie standing
in the doorway.

. . . . .

I listened to what he said about the society politely enough,
I hope; but when he incidentally mentioned that he did not believe
in fairy tales, I broke out beyond control.  "Man," I said,
"who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?
It is much easier to believe in Blue Beard than to believe in you.
A blue beard is a misfortune; but there are green ties which are sins.
It is far easier to believe in a million fairy tales
than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales.
I would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all
his stories as if they were thirty-nine articles than say
seriously and out of my heart that there can be such a man as you;
that you are not some temptation of the devil or some delusion
from the void.  Look at these plain, homely, practical words.
'The Dragon's Grandmother,' that is all right; that is rational
almost to the verge of rationalism.  If there was a dragon,
he had a grandmother.  But you--you had no grandmother!
If you had known one, she would have taught you to love fairy tales.
You had no father, you had no mother; no natural causes can explain you.
You cannot be.  I believe many things which I have not seen;
but of such things as you it may be said, 'Blessed is he that has
seen and yet has disbelieved.'"

. . . . .

It seemed to me that he did not follow me with sufficient delicacy,
so I moderated my tone.  "Can you not see," I said, "that fairy
tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward;
but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its
nature essentially incredible?  Folk-lore means that the soul
is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels.
Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that
the soul is sick and screaming.  The problem of the fairy tale is--
what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world?  The problem
of the modern novel is--what will a madman do with a dull world?
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad.
In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins,
and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
In the excellent tale of 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' in all the other
tales of Grimm, it is assumed that the young man setting out on his
travels will have all substantial truths in him; that he will be brave,
full of faith, reasonable, that he will respect his parents,
keep his word, rescue one kind of people, defy another kind,
'parcere subjectis et debellare,' etc.  Then, having assumed
this centre of sanity, the writer entertains himself by fancying
what would happen if the whole world went mad all round it,
if the sun turned green and the moon blue, if horses had six legs
and giants had two heads.  But your modern literature takes insanity
as its centre.  Therefore, it loses the interest even of insanity.
A lunatic is not startling to himself, because he is quite serious;
that is what makes him a lunatic.  A man who thinks he is
a piece of glass is to himself as dull as a piece of glass.
A man who thinks he is a chicken is to himself as common as a chicken.
It is only sanity that can see even a wild poetry in insanity.
Therefore, these wise old tales made the hero ordinary and
the tale extraordinary.  But you have made the hero extraordinary
and the tale ordinary--so ordinary--oh, so very ordinary."

I saw him still gazing at me fixedly.  Some nerve snapped in me
under the hypnotic stare.  I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name
of God and Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother--in the name of all
good things--I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more."
Whether or no it was the result of the exorcism, there is no doubt
that he definitely went away.


XVII

The Red Angel

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad
for children.  I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him
I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest
letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even
if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy
tales, because it frightens them.  You might just as well say that
it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry.
All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting
of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation
of so many educational schemes.  If you keep bogies and goblins
away from children they would make them up for themselves.
One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg.
One small child can imagine monsters too big and black
to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly
and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic.
The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he
continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them.
There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure
pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our
own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy.
The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from
the universe of the soul.

. . . . .

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable;
they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very
alarming place.  They dislike being alone because it is verily
and indeed an awful idea to be alone.  Barbarians fear
the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it--
because it is a fact.  Fairy tales, then, are not responsible
for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear;
fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly;
that is in the child already, because it is in the world already.
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea
of the possible defeat of bogey.  The baby has known
the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.
What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to
kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this:  it accustoms him
for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless
terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies
in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe
more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole
black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven.
If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops.
But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read
an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite
equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself
(of similar inexperience and even lower social status)
by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon.
But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little
sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.

Take the most horrible of Grimm's tales in incident and imagery,
the excellent tale of the "Boy who Could not Shudder," and you
will see what I mean.  There are some living shocks in that tale.
I remember specially a man's legs which fell down the chimney
by themselves and walked about the room, until they were rejoined
by the severed head and body which fell down the chimney after them.
That is very good.  But the point of the story and the point
of the reader's feelings is not that these things are frightening,
but the far more striking fact that the hero was not frightened at them.
The most fearful of all these fearful wonders was his own absence
of fear.  He slapped the bogies on the back and asked the devils
to drink wine with him; many a time in my youth, when stifled with some
modern morbidity, I have prayed for a double portion of his spirit.
If you have not read the end of his story, go and read it;
it is the wisest thing in the world.  The hero was at last taught
to shudder by taking a wife, who threw a pail of cold water over him.
In that one sentence there is more of the real meaning of marriage
than in all the books about sex that cover Europe and America.

. . . . .

At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and
St. George.  If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making
him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone.
For the devils, alas, we have always believed in.  The hopeful element in
the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted;
but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.
As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its
most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do
believe in is damnation.  The greatest of purely modern poets summed
up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line--

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition;
and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin
by being gloomy.  A little while ago men believed in no spirits.
Now they are beginning rather slowly to believe in rather slow spirits.

. . . . .

Some people objected to spiritualism, table rappings, and such things,
because they were undignified, because the ghosts cracked jokes or
waltzed with dinner-tables. I do not share this objection in the least.
I wish the spirits were more farcical than they are.  That they
should make more jokes and better ones, would be my suggestion.
For almost all the spiritualism of our time, in so far as it is new,
is solemn and sad.  Some Pagan gods were lawless, and some Christian
saints were a little too serious; but the spirits of modern spiritualism
are both lawless and serious--a disgusting combination.  The specially
contemporary spirits are not only devils, they are blue devils.
This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far
as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology.
Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season
of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.
But if there is anyone who does not comprehend the defect in our
world which I am civilising, I should recommend him, for instance,
to read a story by Mr. Henry James, called "The Turn of the Screw."
It is one of the most powerful things ever written, and it is one
of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought ever to have
been written at all.  It describes two innocent children gradually
growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of
the foul ghosts of a groom and a governess.  As I say, I doubt whether
Mr. Henry James ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent,
do not buy it; it is a spiritual matter), but I think the question
so doubtful that I will give that truly great man a chance.
I will approve the thing as well as admire it if he will write
another tale just as powerful about two children and Santa Claus.
If he will not, or cannot, then the conclusion is clear; we can
deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not with happy mystery;
we are not rationalists, but diabolists.

. . . . .

I have thought vaguely of all this staring at a great red fire that
stands up in the room like a great red angel.  But, perhaps, you have
never heard of a red angel.  But you have heard of a blue devil.
That is exactly what I mean.


XVIII

The Tower

I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the great
Belfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought
(though not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies
of architecture.  It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve
the one startling effect of height.  It is a church on stilts.
But this sort of sublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy
and energy of these Flemish cities.  Flanders has the flattest and most
prosaic landscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings.
Here Nature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable.
Here the fields are as flat as a paved square; but, on the other hand,
the streets and roofs are as uproarious as a forest in a great wind.
The waters of wood and meadow slide as smoothly and meekly
as if they were in the London water-pipes. But the parish
pump is carved with all the creatures out of the wilderness.
Part of this is true, of course, of all art.  We talk of wild animals,
but the wildest animal is man.  There are sounds in music that are
more ancient and awful than the cry of the strangest beast at night.
And so also there are buildings that are shapeless in their strength,
seeming to lift themselves slowly like monsters from the primal mire,
and there are spires that seem to fly up suddenly like a startled bird.

. . . . .

This savagery even in stone is the expression of the special spirit
in humanity.  All the beasts of the field are respectable; it is only
man who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man
is ever undomestic. All animals are tame animals; it is only we who
are wild. And doubtless, also, while this queer energy is common to
all human art, it is also generally characteristic of Christian art
among the arts of the world.  This is what people really mean when
they say that Christianity is barbaric, and arose in ignorance.
As a matter of historic fact, it didn't; it arose in the most
equably civilised period the world has ever seen.

But it is true that there is something in it that breaks
the outline of perfect and conventional beauty, something that dots
with anger the blind eyes of the Apollo and lashes to a cavalry
charge the horses of the Elgin Marbles.  Christianity is savage,
in the sense that it is primeval; there is in it a touch
of the nigger hymn.  I remember a debate in which I had praised
militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could
imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band.
I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ
definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment.
When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish
disciples did begin to rebuke them in the name of good taste.
He said:  "If these were silent the very stones would cry out."
With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic
creation that has been founded on this creed.  With those words
He founded Gothic architecture.  For in a town like this,
which seems to have grown Gothic as a wood grows leaves,
anywhere and anyhow, any odd brick or moulding may be carved off
into a shouting face.  The front of vast buildings is thronged
with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying Him.
Rock itself is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream.
The miracle is accomplished; the very stones cry out.

But though this furious fancy is certainly a specialty of men among
creatures, and of Christian art among arts, it is still most notable
in the art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant
things in detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design.  All
Christian temples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges
Belfry is a gargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like
a giraffe. The same impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind
at every corner of a Flemish town.  And if any one asks,
"Why did the people of these flat countries instinctively raise
these riotous and towering monuments?" the only answer one can
give is, "Because they were the people of these flat countries."
If any one asks, "Why the men of Bruges sacrificed architecture
and everything to the sense of dizzy and divine heights?"
we can only answer, "Because Nature gave them no encouragement
to do so."

. . . . .

As I stare at the Belfry, I think with a sort of smile of some
of my friends in London who are quite sure of how children will
turn out if you give them what they call "the right environment."
It is a troublesome thing, environment, for it sometimes works
positively and sometimes negatively, and more often between the two.
A beautiful environment may make a child love beauty;
it may make him bored with beauty; most likely the two effects
will mix and neutralise each other.  Most likely, that is,
the environment will make hardly any difference at all.
In the scientific style of history (which was recently fashionable,
and is still conventional) we always had a list of countries
that had owed their characteristics to their physical conditions.

The Spaniards (it was said) are passionate because their country
is hot; Scandinavians adventurous because their country is cold;
Englishmen naval because they are islanders; Switzers free
because they are mountaineers.  It is all very nice in its way.
Only unfortunately I am quite certain that I could make up quite
as long a list exactly contrary in its argument point-blank
against the influence of their geographical environment.
Thus Spaniards have discovered more continents than Scandinavians
because their hot climate discouraged them from exertion.
Thus Dutchmen have fought for their freedom quite as
bravely as Switzers because the Dutch have no mountains.
Thus Pagan Greece and Rome and many Mediterranean peoples have
specially hated the sea because they had the nicest sea to deal with,
the easiest sea to manage.  I could extend the list for ever.
But however long it was, two examples would certainly stand up in it
as pre-eminent and unquestionable.  The first is that the Swiss,
who live under staggering precipices and spires of eternal snow,
have produced no art or literature at all, and are by far
the most mundane, sensible, and business-like people in Europe.
The other is that the people of Belgium, who live in a country
like a carpet, have, by an inner energy, desired to exalt their
towers till they struck the stars.

As it is therefore quite doubtful whether a person will go specially
with his environment or specially against his environment,
I cannot comfort myself with the thought that the modern
discussions about environment are of much practical value.
But I think I will not write any more about these modern
theories, but go on looking at the Belfry of Bruges. I would
give them the greater attention if I were not pretty well
convinced that the theories will have disappeared a long time
before the Belfry.


XIX

How I Met the President

Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africa
and a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popular
and convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making
a bright suggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not,
I regret to say, received with the seriousness it deserved.
I suggested that a band of devoted and noble youths, including ourselves,
should express our sense of the pathos of the President's and
the Republic's fate by growing Kruger beards under our chins.
I imagined how abruptly this decoration would alter the appearance
of Mr. John Morley; how startling it would be as it emerged from under
the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. But the younger men, my own friends,
on whom I more particularly urged it, men whose names are in many cases
familiar to the readers of this paper--Mr. Masterman's for instance,
and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt, being young and beautiful,
would do even more justice to the Kruger beard, and when walking
down the street with it could not fail to attract attention.
The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to the Rhodes hat.
An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in Africa
is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat;
the Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing
like a beard; we have shaved it, and it is growing again.
The Kruger beard would represent time and the natural processes.
You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

. . . . .

After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town.
I went down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards
an election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for
the Liberal candidate.  The extraordinary thing was that he got in.
I sometimes lie awake at night and meditate upon that mystery;
but it must not detain us now.  The rather singular incident
which happened to me then, and which some recent events have
recalled to me, happened while the canvassing was still going on.
It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine, settling everywhere
on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out into a kind
of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if
the bushes and the roads were human, and had kindness like men;
as if the tree were a good giant with one wooden leg;
as if the very line of palings were a row of good-tempered gnomes.
On one side of the white, sprawling road a low hill or down
showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the other the land
tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip hills.
The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a dance; and what could be more beautiful
and beneficent than a dance?  At an abrupt turn of it I came upon
a low white building, with dark doors and dark shuttered windows,
evidently not inhabited and scarcely in the ordinary sense inhabitable--
a thing more like a toolhouse than a house of any other kind.
Made idle by the heat, I paused, and, taking a piece of red chalk
out of my pocket, began drawing aimlessly on the back door--
drawing goblins and Mr. Chamberlain, and finally the ideal
Nationalist with the Kruger beard.  The materials did not permit
of any delicate rendering of his noble and national expansion
of countenance (stoical and yet hopeful, full of tears for man,
and yet of an element of humour); but the hat was finely handled.
Just as I was adding the finishing touches to the Kruger fantasy,
I was frozen to the spot with terror.  The black door,
which I thought no more of than the lid of an empty box,
began slowly to open, impelled from within by a human hand.
And President Kruger himself came out into the sunlight!

He was a shade milder of eye than he was in his portraits, and he did
not wear that ceremonial scarf which was usually, in such pictures,
slung across his ponderous form. But there was the hat which filled
the Empire with so much alarm; there were the clumsy dark clothes,
there was the heavy, powerful face; there, above all, was the Kruger
beard which I had sought to evoke (if I may use the verb) from under
the features of Mr. Masterman. Whether he had the umbrella or not I
was too much emotionally shaken to observe; he had not the stone
lions with him, or Mrs. Kruger; and what he was doing in that dark
shed I cannot imagine, but I suppose he was oppressing an Outlander.

I was surprised, I must confess, to meet President Kruger
in Somersetshire during the war.  I had no idea that he was in
the neighbourhood.  But a yet more arresting surprise awaited me.
Mr. Kruger regarded me for some moments with a dubious grey eye,
and then addressed me with a strong Somersetshire accent.
A curious cold shock went through me to hear that inappropriate voice
coming out of that familiar form.  It was as if you met a Chinaman,
with pigtail and yellow jacket, and he began to talk broad Scotch.
But the next moment, of course, I understood the situation.
We had much underrated the Boers in supposing that the Boer
education was incomplete.  In pursuit of his ruthless plot
against our island home, the terrible President had learnt not
only English, but all the dialects at a moment's notice to win
over a Lancashire merchant or seduce a Northumberland Fusilier.
No doubt, if I asked him, this stout old gentleman could
grind out Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and so on,
like the tunes in a barrel organ.  I could not wonder if our plain,
true-hearted German millionaires fell before a cunning so penetrated
with culture as this.

. . . . .

And now I come to the third and greatest surprise of all
that this strange old man gave me.  When he asked me,
dryly enough, but not without a certain steady civility
that belongs to old-fashioned country people, what I wanted
and what I was doing, I told him the facts of the case,
explaining my political mission and the almost angelic qualities
of the Liberal candidate.  Whereupon, this old man became
suddenly transfigured in the sunlight into a devil of wrath.
It was some time before I could understand a word he said,
but the one word that kept on recurring was the word "Kruger,"
and it was invariably accompanied with a volley of violent terms.
Was I for old Kruger, was I?  Did I come to him and want him
to help old Kruger?  I ought to be ashamed, I was . . . and
here he became once more obscure.  The one thing that he made
quite clear was that he wouldn't do anything for Kruger.

"But you ARE Kruger," burst from my lips, in a natural explosion
of reasonableness.  "You ARE Kruger, aren't you?"

After this innocent CRI DE COEUR of mine, I thought at first
there would be a fight, and I remembered with regret that
the President in early life had had a hobby of killing lions.
But really I began to think that I had been mistaken, and that it
was not the President after all.  There was a confounding sincerity
in the anger with which he declared that he was Farmer Bowles,
and everybody knowed it.  I appeased him eventually and parted
from him at the door of his farmhouse, where he left me with a few
tags of religion, which again raised my suspicions of his identity.
In the coffee-room to which I returned there was an illustrated
paper with a picture of President Kruger, and he and Farmer Bowles
were as like as two peas.  There was a picture also of a group
of Outlander leaders, and the faces of them, leering and triumphant,
were perhaps unduly darkened by the photograph, but they seemed
to me like the faces of a distant and hostile people.

I saw the old man once again on the fierce night of the poll,
when he drove down our Liberal lines in a little cart ablaze
with the blue Tory ribbons, for he was a man who would carry his
colours everywhere.  It was evening, and the warm western light was
on the grey hair and heavy massive features of that good old man.
I knew as one knows a fact of sense that if Spanish and German
stockbrokers had flooded his farm or country he would
have fought them for ever, not fiercely like an Irishman,
but with the ponderous courage and ponderous cunning of the Boer.
I knew that without seeing it, as certainly as I knew without
seeing it that when he went into the polling room he put his
cross against the Conservative name.  Then he came out again,
having given his vote and looking more like Kruger than ever.
And at the same hour on the same night thousands upon thousands
of English Krugers gave the same vote.  And thus Kruger was
pulled down and the dark-faced men in the photograph reigned
in his stead.


XX

The Giant

I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
At least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work
by night (journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers,
and such mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning)
must often have stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown
of battlements or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at
daybreak to discover that it was only a haberdasher's shop with huge
gold letters across the face of it.

. . . . .

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight.
I sat down on a bench with my back to the river, happening to
choose such a place that a huge angle and façade of building
jutting out from the Strand sat above me like an incubus.
I dare say that if I took the same seat to-morrow by daylight I
should find the impression entirely false.  In sunlight the thing
might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness it seemed
as if the walls were almost falling upon me.  Never before have I
had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth.
That pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above
and beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb.
I had an irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I
had to fight it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion
but an indolent journalist with a walking-stick.

Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black,
blind face.  It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge
face of a sleeping giant; the eyes were too close together,
and gave it the suggestion of a bestial sneer.  And either
by accident of this light or of some other, I could now read
the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel.  It was the perfect symbol of everything
that I should like to pull down with my hands if I could.
Reared by a detected robber, it is framed to be the fashionable
and luxurious home of undetected robbers.  In the house of man
are many mansions; but there is a class of men who feel normal
nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or in Dartmoor Gaol.
That big black face, which was staring at me with its flaming
eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales.  But, alas!  I was not the giant-killer;
the hour had come, but not the man.  I sat down on the seat again
(I had had one wild impulse to climb up the front of the hotel
and fall in at one of the windows), and I tried to think,
as all decent people are thinking, what one can really do.
And all the time that oppressive wall went up in front of me,
and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.

. . . . .

It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been
the defeated who have won.  The people who were left
worst at the end of the war were generally the people
who were left best at the end of the whole business.
For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the Christians.
But they did not end in the decline of the Christians;
they ended in the decline of the Saracens.  That huge prophetic wave
of Moslem power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns
of Christendom, that wave was broken, and never came on again.
The Crusaders had saved Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem.
The same applies to that epic of Republican war in the eighteenth
century to which we Liberals owe our political creed.
The French Revolution ended in defeat:  the kings came back
across a carpet of dead at Waterloo.  The Revolution had
lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object.
It had cut a chasm.  The world has never been the same since.
No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely
as a pavement.

These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere
stones of the street; but as stones that may sometimes fly.
If it please God, you and I may see some of the stones
flying again before we see death.  But here I only remark
the interesting fact that the conquered almost always conquer.
Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds.
The Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.

And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment;
it deals us death in the end.  It is something if we can shock
and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil;
just as a pebble on a railway can stagger the Scotch express.
It is enough for the great martyrs and criminals of the French revolution,
that they have surprised for all time the secret weakness of the strong.
They have awakened and set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever
the coward in the hearts of kings.

. . . . .

When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his
experience was not such as has been generally supposed.
If you care to hear it I will tell you the real story of Jack
the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the most awful thing which Jack
first felt about the giant was that he was not a giant.
He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, and against
its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like a figure
in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass.
Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man
was treading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain.
The man came nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger,
and at the instant when he passed the possible stature of humanity
Jack almost screamed.  The rest was an intolerable apocalypse.

The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle;
the more he became incredible the more he became solid.
The less one could believe in him the more plainly one could see him.
It was unbearable that so much of the sky should be occupied
by one human face.  His eyes, which had stood out like bow windows,
became bigger yet, and there was no metaphor that could
contain their bigness; yet still they were human eyes.
Jack's intellect was utterly gone under that huge hypnotism
of the face that filled the sky; his last hope was submerged,
his five wits all still with terror.

But there stood up in him still a kind of cold chivalry, a dignity of dead
honour that would not forget the small and futile sword in his hand.
He rushed at one of the colossal feet of this human tower, and when
he came quite close to it the ankle-bone arched over him like a cave.
Then he planted the point of his sword against the foot and leant on it
with all his weight, till it went up to the hilt and broke the hilt,
and then snapped just under it.  And it was plain that the giant felt
a sort of prick, for he snatched up his great foot into his great hand
for an instant; and then, putting it down again, he bent over and stared
at the ground until he had seen his enemy.

Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw
him away; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were
flying from system to system through the universe of stars.
But, as the giant had thrown him away carelessly, he did not strike
a stone, but struck soft mire by the side of a distant river.
There he lay insensible for several hours; but when he awoke again
his horrible conqueror was still in sight.  He was striding away
across the void and wooded plain towards where it ended in the sea;
and by this time he was only much higher than any of the hills.
He grew less and less indeed; but only as a really high mountain
grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railway train.
Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are the
distant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic.
Then the big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big
blue sea, and even as it did so it altered its attitude.
Jack, stunned and bleeding, lifted himself laboriously upon one
elbow to stare.  The giant once more caught hold of his ankle,
wavered twice as in a wind, and then went over into the great sea
which washes the whole world, and which, alone of all things God
has made, was big enough to drown him.


XXI

A Great Man

People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has
always seemed far too impersonal.  It is charged with tearing
away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always
dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men.
The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private;
I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable.  It is exactly
the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this
is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it
is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.
The Yellow Pressman seems to have no power of catching the first
fresh fact about a man that dominates all after impressions.
For instance, before I met Bernard Shaw I heard that he spoke with
a reckless desire for paradox or a sneering hatred of sentiment;
but I never knew till he opened his mouth that he spoke with
an Irish accent, which is more important than all the other
criticisms put together.

Journalism is not personal enough.  So far from digging out
private personalities, it cannot even report the obvious personalities
on the surface.  Now there is one vivid and even bodily impression
of this kind which we have all felt when we met great poets
or politicians, but which never finds its way into the newspapers.
I mean the impression that they are much older than we thought they were.
We connect great men with their great triumphs, which generally
happened some years ago, and many recruits enthusiastic for the thin
Napoleon of Marengo must have found themselves in the presence
of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising politician
confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of boyhood.
It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father.  I mention this truth for only one purpose:
all this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once
met a great man who was younger than I expected.

. . . . .

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening.
It was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set
an instant after noon.  It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened
and the road sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents;
I felt that the treetops that closed above me were the fixed
and real things, certain as the level of the sea; but that
the solid earth was every instant failing under my feet.
In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in splashes,
like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky.
Around me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every
plain or twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns
of every earthly and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature
of the forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force.
For the meaning of woods is the combination of energy with complexity.
A forest is not in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense
with delicacy.  Unique shapes that an artist would copy or a
philosopher watch for years if he found them in an open plain are
here mingled and confounded; but it is not a darkness of deformity.
It is a darkness of life; a darkness of perfection.  And I began
to think how much of the highest human obscurity is like this,
and how much men have misunderstood it.  People will tell you,
for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate;
it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

. . . . .

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out
into deep grass and a road.  I remember being surprised that the
evening was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a
sunset all to itself. I went along that road according to directions
that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling
beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden.
It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character
I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt
on all these things the finger of that quality which the old
English called "faërie"; it is the quality which those can
never understand who think of the past as merely brutal;
it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees.
I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table,
looking smallish in his big chair.  He was already an invalid,
and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow
is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce;
rather they were white like the white thistledown.  I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand,
and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young.
He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met
who was not a mere statue over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent.  He did not talk about
the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that.
He talked about the books he had not written.  He unrolled
a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell.
He asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would
have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman.
It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce.
It was all about a man who was rushing up to the Royal Society
with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet;
and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities;
how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling.
That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.
Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell;
the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love
of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a
blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.
The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood
is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere.
I really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality;
which is supernatural.  I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man
of the Forest:  I had seen an elf.  The trees thronged behind my path;
I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.


XXII

The Orthodox Barber

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert
that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them;
and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.  There is a very real
thing which may be called the love of humanity; in our time it
exists almost entirely among what are called uneducated people;
and it does not exist at all among the people who talk about it.

A positive pleasure in being in the presence of any other human being
is chiefly remarkable, for instance, in the masses on Bank Holiday;
that is why they are so much nearer Heaven (despite appearances)
than any other part of our population.

I remember seeing a crowd of factory girls getting into an empty
train at a wayside country station. There were about twenty of them;
they all got into one carriage; and they left all the rest of the
train entirely empty. That is the real love of humanity.  That is
the definite pleasure in the immediate proximity of one's own kind.
Only this coarse, rank, real love of men seems to be entirely
lacking in those who propose the love of humanity as a substitute
for all other love; honourable, rationalistic idealists.

I can well remember the explosion of human joy which marked
the sudden starting of that train; all the factory girls
who could not find seats (and they must have been the majority)
relieving their feelings by jumping up and down. Now I have never
seen any rationalistic idealists do this. I have never seen twenty
modern philosophers crowd into one third-class carriage for the
mere pleasure of being together. I have never seen twenty Mr.
McCabes all in one carriage and all jumping up and down.

Some people express a fear that vulgar trippers will overrun
all beautiful places, such as Hampstead or Burnham Beeches.
But their fear is unreasonable; because trippers always
prefer to trip together; they pack as close as they can;
they have a suffocating passion of philanthropy.

. . . . .

But among the minor and milder aspects of the same principle,
I have no hesitation in placing the problem of the colloquial barber.
Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist
(I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased
when his barber tries to talk to him.  His barber is humanity:
let him love that.  If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any
substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan.
If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love
the Japanese whom he has not seen?

It is urged against the barber that he begins by talking about
the weather; so do all dukes and diplomatists, only that they talk about
it with ostentatious fatigue and indifference, whereas the barber talks
about it with an astonishing, nay incredible, freshness of interest.
It is objected to him that he tells people that they are going bald.
That is to say, his very virtues are cast up against him;
he is blamed because, being a specialist, he is a sincere specialist,
and because, being a tradesman, he is not entirely a slave.
But the only proof of such things is by example; therefore I will prove
the excellence of the conversation of barbers by a specific case.
Lest any one should accuse me of attempting to prove it by fictitious
means, I beg to say quite seriously that though I forget the exact
language employed, the following conversation between me and a human
(I trust), living barber really took place a few days ago.

. . . . .

I had been invited to some At Home to meet the Colonial Premiers,
and lest I should be mistaken for some partly reformed bush-ranger out of
the interior of Australia I went into a shop in the Strand to get shaved.
While I was undergoing the torture the man said to me:

"There seems to be a lot in the papers about this new shaving, sir.
It seems you can shave yourself with anything--with a stick or a stone
or a pole or a poker" (here I began for the first time to detect
a sarcastic intonation) "or a shovel or a----"

Here he hesitated for a word, and I, although I knew nothing about
the matter, helped him out with suggestions in the same rhetorical vein.

"Or a button-hook," I said, "or a blunderbuss or a battering-ram
or a piston-rod----"

He resumed, refreshed with this assistance, "Or a curtain rod
or a candle-stick, or a----"

"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet
for some time.  Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me.
He explained the thing eloquently and at length.

"The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all.
It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before.
There is always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow.
But none of those schemes ever came to anything; and I don't believe
myself that this will."

"Why, as to that," I said, rising slowly from the chair and trying
to put on my coat inside out, "I don't know how it may be in the case
of you and your new shaving.  Shaving, with all respect to you,
is a trivial and materialistic thing, and in such things
startling inventions are sometimes made.  But what you say
reminds me in some dark and dreamy fashion of something else.
I recall it especially when you tell me, with such evident
experience and sincerity, that the new shaving is not really new.
My friend, the human race is always trying this dodge of making
everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off
one thing it shifts on to another.  If one man has not the toil
of preparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil
of preparing something very curious to put on a man's chin.
It would be nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody.
It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

   "'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
     Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.'

"Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.

"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written
that a man shall not eat his cake and have it; and though
all men talked until the stars were old it would still be true
that a man who has lost his razor could not shave with it.
But every now and then men jump up with the new something
or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there
is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved.
The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree;
everything is evolutionary and relative.  Shavedness is
immanent in man.  Every ten-penny nail is a Potential Razor.
The superstitious people of the past (they say) believed that
a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles to one's
face was a positive affair.  But the higher criticism teaches
us better.  Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow
where Shaving should be.

"Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all means something.
But a baby is the Kingdom of God, and if you try to kiss a baby
he will know whether you are shaved or not.  Perhaps I am mixing
up being shaved and being saved; my democratic sympathies have
always led me to drop my 'h's.' In another moment I may suggest
that goats represent the lost because goats have long beards.
This is growing altogether too allegorical.

"Nevertheless," I added, as I paid the bill, "I have really been
profoundly interested in what you told me about the New Shaving.
Have you ever heard of a thing called the New theology?"

He smiled and said that he had not.


XXIII

The Toy Theatre

There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys;
and it is a fair reason.  The reason is that playing with toys
takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else.
Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world;
and as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to
abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life.
We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy;
we have not enough strength for play.  This is a truth which every one
will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all;
any one who has played with bricks, any one who has played with dolls,
any one who has played with tin soldiers.  My journalistic work,
which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that
work which earned nothing.

. . . . .

Take the case of bricks.  If you publish a book to-morrow
in twelve volumes (it would be just like you) on "The Theory
and Practice of European Architecture," your work may be laborious,
but it is fundamentally frivolous.  It is not serious as the work
of a child piling one brick on the other is serious; for the simple
reason that if your book is a bad book no one will ever be able
ultimately and entirely to prove to you that it is a bad book.
Whereas if his balance of bricks is a bad balance of bricks,
it will simply tumble down.  And if I know anything of children,
he will set to work solemnly and sadly to build it up again.
Whereas, if I know anything of authors, nothing would induce you
to write your book again, or even to think of it again if you
could help it.

Take the case of dolls.  It is much easier to care for an educational
cause than to care for a doll.  It is as easy to write an article on
education as to write an article on toffee or tramcars or anything else.
But it is almost as difficult to look after a doll as to look after
a child.  The little girls that I meet in the little streets of Battersea
worship their dolls in a way that reminds one not so much of play
as idolatry.  In some cases the love and care of the artistic symbol
has actually become more important than the human reality which it was,
I suppose, originally meant to symbolize.

I remember a Battersea little girl who wheeled her large baby sister
stuffed into a doll's perambulator. When questioned on this course of
conduct, she replied: "I haven't got a dolly, and Baby is pretending
to be my dolly." Nature was indeed imitating art.  First a doll had
been a substitute for a child; afterwards a child was a mere substitute
for a doll. But that opens other matters; the point is here that such
devotion takes up most of the brain and most of the life; much as if
it were really the thing which it is supposed to symbolize. The point
is that the man writing on motherhood is merely an educationalist;
the child playing with a doll is a mother.

Take the case of soldiers.  A man writing an article on military strategy
is simply a man writing an article; a horrid sight.  But a boy making a
campaign with tin soldiers is like a General making a campaign with live
soldiers. He must to the limit of his juvenile powers think about the
thing; whereas the war correspondent need not think at all. I remember
a war correspondent who remarked after the capture of Methuen:  "This
renewed activity on the part of Delarey is probably due to his being
short of stores." The same military critic had mentioned a few
paragraphs before that Delarey was being hard pressed by a column which
was pursuing him under the command of Methuen.  Methuen chased Delarey;
and Delarey's activity was due to his being short of stores.
Otherwise he would have stood quite still while he was chased.
I run after Jones with a hatchet, and if he turns round and tries
to get rid of me the only possible explanation is that he has
a very small balance at his bankers.  I cannot believe that any boy
playing at soldiers would be as idiotic as this. But then any one
playing at anything has to be serious. Whereas, as I have only too
good reason to know, if you are writing an article you can say anything
that comes into your head.

. . . . .

Broadly, then, what keeps adults from joining in children's
games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure
in them; it is simply that they have no leisure for them.
It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of toil
and time and consideration for so grand and grave a scheme.
I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete
a play in a small toy theatre, the sort of toy theatre
that used to be called Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured;
only that I drew and coloured the figures and scenes myself.
Hence I was free from the degrading obligation of having to pay
either a penny or twopence; I only had to pay a shilling a sheet
for good cardboard and a shilling a box for bad water colours.
The kind of miniature stage I mean is probably familiar to every one;
it is never more than a development of the stage which Skelt
made and Stevenson celebrated.

But though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I
ever worked at any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work
seems too heavy for me.  I have to break off and betake myself
to lighter employments; such as the biographies of great men.
The play of "St. George and the Dragon," over which I have burnt
the midnight oil (you must colour the thing by lamplight because
that is how it will be seen), still lacks most conspicuously,
alas! two wings of the Sultan's Palace, and also some comprehensible
and workable way of getting up the curtain.

All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality.
In this world we cannot have pure pleasure.  This is partly because
pure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbours.
But it is partly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble.
If I am ever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have
enough time to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I
shall have enough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play
in them without a hitch.

. . . . .

Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's
consideration.  All the essential morals which modern men need
to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered,
it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which
is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact
that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation.
Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting
things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly
figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite
ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has
few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish.  The modern
philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of
the plain cardboard. The most artistic thing about the theatrical
art is the fact that the spectator looks at the whole thing through
a window. This is true even of theatres inferior to my own; even at
the Court Theatre or His Majesty's you are looking through a window;
an unusually large window.  But the advantage of the small
theatre exactly is that you are looking through a small window.
Has not every one noticed how sweet and startling any
landscape looks when seen through an arch?  This strong,
square shape, this shutting off of everything else is not
only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty.
The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing
the scale of events it can introduce much larger events.
Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica.
Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment.
Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily
with falling cities or with falling stars.  Meanwhile the big
theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big.
When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something
of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by
small nationalities.  The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier
into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia.
In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room
for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell.  He would have been stifled
by the British Empire.  Great empires are necessarily prosaic;
for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale.
You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces.
My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens.


XXIV

A Tragedy of Twopence

My relations with the readers of this page have been
long and pleasant, but--perhaps for that very reason--
I feel that the time has come when I ought to confess
the one great crime of my life.  It happened a long time ago;
but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse
to reveal such dark episodes long after they have occurred.
It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League.
That body is so offensively respectable that a newspaper,
in describing it the other day, referred to my friend
Mr. Edgar Jepson as Canon Edgar Jepson; and it is believed
that similar titles are intended for all of us.  No; it is
not by the conduct of Archbishop Crane, of Dean Chesterton,
of the Rev. James Douglas, of Monsignor Bland, and even of that
fine and virile old ecclesiastic, Cardinal Nesbit, that I wish
(or rather, am driven by my conscience) to make this declaration.
The crime was committed in solitude and without accomplices.
Alone I did it.  Let me, with the characteristic thirst
of penitents to get the worst of the confession over, state it
first of all in its most dreadful and indefensible form.
There is at the present moment in a town in Germany (unless he
has died of rage on discovering his wrong), a restaurant-keeper
to whom I still owe twopence. I last left his open-air restaurant
knowing that I owed him twopence.  I carried it away under his
nose, despite the fact that the nose was a decidedly Jewish one.
I have never paid him, and it is highly improbable that I ever shall.
How did this villainy come to occur in a life which has been,
generally speaking, deficient in the dexterity necessary for fraud?
The story is as follows--and it has a moral, though there
may not be room for that.

. . . . .

It is a fair general rule for those travelling on the Continent that
the easiest way of talking in a foreign language is to talk philosophy.
The most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities.
The reason is obvious.  The names of common necessities vary completely
with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint.
How, for instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would
be called a "scuttle"?  If he has ever seen the word scuttle
it has been in the Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle"
is used whenever we give up something to a small Power like Liberals,
instead of giving up everything to a great Power, like Imperialists.
What Englishman in Germany would be poet enough to guess that the Germans
call a glove a "hand-shoe." Nations name their necessities by nicknames,
so to speak.  They call their tubs and stools by quaint, elvish,
and almost affectionate names, as if they were their own children!
But any one can argue about abstract things in a foreign language who has
ever got as far as Exercise IV.  in a primer.  For as soon as he can
put a sentence together at all he finds that the words used in abstract
or philosophical discussions are almost the same in all nations.
They are the same, for the simple reason that they all come
from the things that were the roots of our common civilisation.
From Christianity, from the Roman Empire, from the mediaeval Church,
or the French Revolution.  "Nation," "citizen," "religion," "philosophy,"
"authority," "the Republic," words like these are nearly the same
in all the countries in which we travel.  Restrain, therefore,
your exuberant admiration for the young man who can argue with six
French atheists when he first lands at Dieppe.  Even I can do that.
But very likely the same young man does not know the French for a
shoe-horn. But to this generalisation there are three great exceptions.
(1) In the case of countries that are not European at all, and have
never had our civic conceptions, or the old Latin scholarship.
I do not pretend that the Patagonian phrase for "citizenship"
at once leaps to the mind, or that a Dyak's word for "the Republic"
has been familiar to me from the nursery.  (2) In the case of Germany,
where, although the principle does apply to many words such as "nation"
and "philosophy," it does not apply so generally, because Germany
has had a special and deliberate policy of encouraging the purely
German part of its language.  (3) In the case where one does not know
any of the language at all, as is generally the case with me.

. . . . .

Such at least was my situation on the dark day on which I committed
my crime.  Two of the exceptional conditions which I have mentioned
were combined. I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German.
I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which
hold our European civilisation together--one of which is "cigar."
As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort
of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the
lager, and paid for it.  I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it,
and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the
Taunus mountains.  After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered
that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of
refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had
forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone
of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted.  I said "cigar," and
he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the money to
wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal.  He thought that my
rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar,
and brought me another.  I whirled my arms like a windmill,
seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture
that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general,
not of that particular article.  He mistook this for the ordinary
impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands
filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me.
In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more
cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars
were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment.
I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact
that I had already had the cigar.  I imitated the action
of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar.
The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing
(as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar
he was going to give me.  At last I retired baffled:
he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone.
So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love of money
shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused
to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took
that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months.
I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth
very gently to that unhappy man.

. . . . .

This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud,
and the moral of it is this--that civilisation is founded
upon abstractions.  The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed
by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea.
And civilisation obviously would be nothing without debt.
So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific sociology
(which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation
is material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves
how many of the things that make up our Society, the Law,
or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be
able to convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning
and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.


XXV

A Cab Ride Across Country

Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there
lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue,
but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present
writer to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.

Now it was very difficult to get down to it at all on Sunday afternoon,
owing to the indescribable state into which our national laws
and customs have fallen in connection with the seventh day.
It is not Puritanism; it is simply anarchy.  I should have some
sympathy with the Jewish Sabbath, if it were a Jewish Sabbath,
and that for three reasons; first, that religion is an intrinsically
sympathetic thing; second, that I cannot conceive any religion
worth calling a religion without a fixed and material observance;
and third, that the particular observance of sitting still and doing
no work is one that suits my temperament down to the ground.

But the absurdity of the modern English convention is that it
does not let a man sit still; it only perpetually trips him
up when it has forced him to walk about.  Our Sabbatarianism
does not forbid us to ask a man in Battersea to come and talk
in Hertfordshire; it only prevents his getting there.
I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with joys,
with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style.
I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows.
But I cannot imagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences.
Let the good Moslem go to Mecca, or let him abide in his tent,
according to his feelings for religious symbols. But surely Allah
cannot see anything particularly dignified in his servant being
misled by the time-table, finding that the old Mecca express is
not running, missing his connection at Bagdad, or having to wait
three hours in a small side station outside Damascus.

So it was with me on this occasion.  I found there was no telegraph
service at all to this place; I found there was only one weak
thread of train-service. Now if this had been the authority
of real English religion, I should have submitted to it at once.
If I believed that the telegraph clerk could not send the telegram
because he was at that moment rigid in an ecstasy of prayer,
I should think all telegrams unimportant in comparison.
If I could believe that railway porters when relieved from their
duties rushed with passion to the nearest place of worship,
I should say that all lectures and everything else ought
to give way to such a consideration.  I should not complain
if the national faith forbade me to make any appointments
of labour or self-expression on the Sabbath.  But, as it is,
it only tells me that I may very probably keep the Sabbath
by not keeping the appointment.

. . . . .

But I must resume the real details of my tale.  I found that there
was only one train in the whole of that Sunday by which I could
even get within several hours or several miles of the time or place.
I therefore went to the telephone, which is one of my
favourite toys, and down which I have shouted many valuable,
but prematurely arrested, monologues upon art and morals.
I remember a mild shock of surprise when I discovered that one
could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to be
cut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days,
to the advancement of our national religion.  Through this instrument,
in fewer words than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram,
I ordered a taxi-cab to take me to the railway station.
I have not a word to say in general either against telephones
or taxi-cabs; they seem to me two of the purest and most
poetic of the creations of modern scientific civilisation.
Unfortunately, when the taxi-cab started, it did exactly
what modern scientific civilisation has done--it broke down.
The result of this was that when I arrived at King's Cross my
only train was gone; there was a Sabbath calm in the station,
a calm in the eyes of the porters, and in my breast, if calm
at all, if any calm, a calm despair.

There was not, however, very much calm of any sort in my
breast on first making the discovery; and it was turned
to blinding horror when I learnt that I could not even send
a telegram to the organisers of the meeting.  To leave
my entertainers in the lurch was sufficiently exasperating;
to leave them without any intimation was simply low.
I reasoned with the official.  I said:  "Do you really mean
to say that if my brother were dying and my mother in this place,
I could not communicate with her?"  He was a man of literal
and laborious mind; he asked me if my brother was dying.
I answered that he was in excellent and even offensive health,
but that I was inquiring upon a question of principle.
What would happen if England were invaded, or if I
alone knew how to turn aside a comet or an earthquake.
He waved away these hypotheses in the most irresponsible spirit,
but he was quite certain that telegrams could not reach this
particular village.  Then something exploded in me; that element
of the outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang
up ungovernable, and I decided that I would not be a cad merely
because some of my remote ancestors had been Calvinists.
I would keep my appointment if I lost all my money and all my wits.
I went out into the quiet London street, where my quiet London
cab was still waiting for its fare in the cold misty morning.
I placed myself comfortably in the London cab and told the London
driver to drive me to the other end of Hertfordshire.
And he did.

. . . . .

I shall not forget that drive.  It was doubtful weather, even in
a motor-cab, the thing was possible with any consideration for the driver,
not to speak of some slight consideration for the people in the road.
I urged the driver to eat and drink something before he started,
but he said (with I know not what pride of profession or delicate
sense of adventure) that he would rather do it when we arrived--
if we ever did.  I was by no means so delicate; I bought
a varied selection of pork-pies at a little shop that was open
(why was that shop open?--it is all a mystery), and ate them
as we went along.  The beginning was sombre and irritating.
I was annoyed, not with people, but with things, like a baby;
with the motor for breaking down and with Sunday for being Sunday.
And the sight of the northern slums expanded and ennobled, but did
not decrease, my gloom:  Whitechapel has an Oriental gaudiness
in its squalor; Battersea and Camberwell have an indescribable
bustle of democracy; but the poor parts of North London . . . well,
perhaps I saw them wrongly under that ashen morning and on
that foolish errand.

It was one of those days which more than once this year broke
the retreat of winter; a winter day that began too late to be spring.
We were already clear of the obstructing crowds and quickening our pace
through a borderland of market gardens and isolated public-houses,
when the grey showed golden patches and a good light began
to glitter on everything.  The cab went quicker and quicker.
The open land whirled wider and wider; but I did not lose my sense of
being battled with and thwarted that I had felt in the thronged slums.
Rather the feeling increased, because of the great difficulty
of space and time.  The faster went the car, the fiercer and thicker
I felt the fight.

The whole landscape seemed charging at me--and just missing me.
The tall, shining grass went by like showers of arrows;
the very trees seemed like lances hurled at my heart, and shaving
it by a hair's breadth.  Across some vast, smooth valley I saw
a beech-tree by the white road stand up little and defiant.
It grew bigger and bigger with blinding rapidity.  It charged me
like a tilting knight, seemed to hack at my head, and pass by.
Sometimes when we went round a curve of road, the effect was yet
more awful.  It seemed as if some tree or windmill swung round
to smite like a boomerang.  The sun by this time was a blazing fact;
and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant.
We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek
the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

. . . . .

I gave my address, arriving just when everybody was deciding to leave.
When my cab came reeling into the market-place they decided,
with evident disappointment, to remain.  Over the lecture I draw
a veil.  When I came back home I was called to the telephone,
and a meek voice expressed regret for the failure of the motor-cab,
and even said something about any reasonable payment.
"Whom can I pay for my own superb experience?  What is
the usual charge for seeing the clouds shattered by the sun?
What is the market price of a tree blue on the sky-line
and then blinding white in the sun?  Mention your price for
that windmill that stood behind the hollyhocks in the garden.
Let me pay you for . . ." Here it was, I think, that we
were cut off.


XXVI

The Two Noises

For three days and three nights the sea had charged England
as Napoleon charged her at Waterloo.  The phrase is instinctive,
because away to the last grey line of the sea there was only the look
of galloping squadrons, impetuous, but with a common purpose.
The sea came on like cavalry, and when it touched the shore it
opened the blazing eyes and deafening tongues of the artillery.
I saw the worst assault at night on a seaside parade where the sea
smote on the doors of England with the hammers of earthquake,
and a white smoke went up into the black heavens.  There one
could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is.
I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave.
But the horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness.
It lifts its load of water laboriously:  in that style at once
slow and slippery in which a Titan might lift a load of rock
and then let it slip at last to be shattered into shock of dust.
In front of me that night the waves were not like water:
they were like falling city walls.  The breaker rose first as if it
did not wish to attack the earth; it wished only to attack the stars.
For a time it stood up in the air as naturally as a tower; then it went
a little wrong in its outline, like a tower that might some day fall.
When it fell it was as if a powder magazine blew up.

. . . . .

I have never seen such a sea.  All the time there blew across
the land one of those stiff and throttling winds that one can
lean up against like a wall.  One expected anything to be blown
out of shape at any instant; the lamp-post to be snapped
like a green stalk, the tree to be whirled away like a straw.
I myself should certainly have been blown out of shape if I had
possessed any shape to be blown out of; for I walked along the edge
of the stone embankment above the black and battering sea and could
not rid myself of the idea that it was an invasion of England.
But as I walked along this edge I was somewhat surprised
to find that as I neared a certain spot another noise mingled
with the ceaseless cannonade of the sea.

Somewhere at the back, in some pleasure ground or casino
or place of entertainment, an undaunted brass band was playing
against the cosmic uproar.  I do not know what band it was.
Judging from the boisterous British Imperialism of most
of the airs it played, I should think it was a German band.
But there was no doubt about its energy, and when I came quite
close under it it really drowned the storm.  It was playing such
things as "Tommy Atkins" and "You Can Depend on Young Australia,"
and many others of which I do not know the words, but I should
think they would be "John, Pat, and Mac, With the Union Jack,"
or that fine though unwritten poem, "Wait till the Bull Dog
gets a bite of you."  Now, I for one detest Imperialism,
but I have a great deal of sympathy with Jingoism.
And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken
and innocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature
that it made, if I may so put it, two tunes in my mind.
It is so obvious and so jolly to be optimistic about England,
especially when you are an optimist--and an Englishman.
But through all that glorious brass came the voice
of the invasion, the undertone of that awful sea.
I did a foolish thing.  As I could not express my meaning
in an article, I tried to express it in a poem--a bad one.
You can call it what you like.  It might be called "Doubt,"
or "Brighton." It might be called "The Patriot," or yet
again "The German Band."  I would call it "The Two Voices,"
but that title has been taken for a grossly inferior poem.
This is how it began--

  "They say the sun is on your knees
   A lamp to light your lands from harm,
   They say you turn the seven seas
   To little brooks about your farm.
   I hear the sea and the new song
   that calls you empress all day long.

  "(O fallen and fouled! O you that lie
   Dying in swamps--you shall not die,
   Your rich have secrets, and stronge lust,
   Your poor are chased about like dust,
   Emptied of anger and surprise--
   And God has gone out of their eyes,
   Your cohorts break--your captains lie,
   I say to you, you shall not die.)"

Then I revived a little, remembering that after all there
is an English country that the Imperialists have never found.
The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex England.
It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.
I took up the two tunes again with a greater sympathy for the first--

   "I know the bright baptismal rains,
      I love your tender troubled skies,
    I know your little climbing lanes,
      Are peering into Paradise,
    From open hearth to orchard cool,
    How bountiful and beautiful.

  "(O throttled and without a cry,
   O strangled and stabbed, you shall not die,
   The frightful word is on your walls,
   The east sea to the west sea calls,
   The stars are dying in the sky,
   You shall not die; you shall not die.)"

Then the two great noises grew deafening together, the noise of the
peril of England and the louder noise of the placidity of England.
It is their fault if the last verse was written a little rudely
and at random--

   "I see you how you smile in state
      Straight from the Peak to Plymouth Bar,
    You need not tell me you are great,
      I know how more than great you are.
    I know what William Shakespeare was,
    I have seen Gainsborough and the grass.

  "(O given to believe a lie,
   O my mad mother, do do not die,
   Whose eyes turn all ways but within,
   Whose sin is innocence of sin,
   Whose eyes, blinded with beams at noon,
   Can see the motes upon the moon,
   You shall your lover still pursue.
   To what last madhouse shelters you
   I will uphold you, even I.
   You that are dead.  You shall not die.)"

But the sea would not stop for me any more than for Canute;
and as for the German band, that would not stop for anybody.


XXVII

Some Policemen and a Moral

The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire.  I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping
off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at
a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of
knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something
about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that
reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy.
They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it,
what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war,
name of favourite cat, and so on.  They also said I was damaging the tree;
which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it.
The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this.
After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of
an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and,
I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes,
the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I
professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS
(this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common
to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated,
and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire,
who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary
at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader
of my work.  And when that was said, everything was settled.
They acquitted me and let me pass.

"But," I said, "what of this mangled tree?  It was to the rescue
of that Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like
knight-errants. You, the higher humanitarians, are not deceived
by the seeming stillness of the green things, a stillness like
the stillness of the cataract, a headlong and crashing silence.
You know that a tree is but a creature tied to the ground by one leg.
You will not let assassins with their Swedish daggers shed the green
blood of such a being.  But if so, why am I not in custody;
where are my gyves?  Produce, from some portion of your persons,
my mouldy straw and my grated window.  The facts of which I have just
convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist,
that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank
of Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether
I have been guilty of cruelty to vegetables.  The tree is none
the less damaged even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it
was wounded by a gentleman connected with the Liberal press.
Wounds in the bark do not more rapidly close up because they are
inflicted by people who are stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley.
That tree, the ruin of its former self, the wreck of what was once
a giant of the forest, now splintered and laid low by the brute
superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped
out even by stopping for several months more with some wealthy person.
It is incredible that you have no legal claim to arrest
even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge.
For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"

I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood,
for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came.
It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies.
In that case the somewhat illogical character of their view
of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright
and elfish explanation; perhaps if I had lingered in the glade
till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny policemen
dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts,
arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass.
But taking the bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen,
I find myself in a certain difficulty.  I was certainly
accused of something which was either an offence or was not.
I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house.
The inference seems painfully clear; either it is not
a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood,
or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man.
Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist,
a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work,
often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent.
Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety
of the ancient wood.  Suppose he had thrown knives at trees
and could give no description of a dwelling-place except
that he had been fired out of the last.  As I walked home
through a cloudy and purple twilight I wondered how he would
have got on.

Moral.  We English are always boasting that we are very illogical;
there is no great harm in that.  There is no subtle spiritual evil
in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they
begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.
But there is this to be said, that illogicality in your constitution
or your legal methods may become very dangerous if there happens to be
some great national vice or national temptation which many take advantage
of the chaos.  Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours;
a temperate man may obey his instincts.

Take some absurd anomaly in the British law--the fact, for instance,
that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the
Chiltern Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally
to keep down some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is.
Obviously this kind of illogicality does not matter very much,
for the simple reason that there is no great temptation to take
advantage of it.  Men retiring from Parliament do not have any
furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills.  But if there were
a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable politicians taking
leave of public life would desire to do this (if, for instance,
there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went on saying
that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact)
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day
and taking their property, we should be very silly.  The illogicality
would matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence.
It is only the very good who can live riotous lives.

Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation
such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great
national sin, a far greater sin than drink--the habit of respecting a
gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry.
And snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil,
that it is rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts
and houses.  But it is our great English vice; to be watched
more fiercely than small-pox. If a man wished to hear the worst
and wickedest thing in England summed up in casual English words,
he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribald quarrelling.
He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working man,
when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman."
It never occurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis,"
or "a privy councillor"--that he is simply naming a rank or class,
not a phrase for a good man.  And this perennial temptation to a
shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does, constantly come
in and distort and poison our police methods.

In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watch
upon ourselves.  The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest,
is increasing in the modern world.  A very good and just people,
without this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and
systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers.
But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago,
from mere native good feeling.


XXVIII

The Lion

In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street.  We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his
first feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town
or village; when he looks again he sees that this comparative
absence of the picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain,
precipitous frontage of the houses standing up hard and flat
out of the street like the cardboard houses in a pantomime--
a hard angularity allied perhaps to the harshness of French logic.
When he looks a third time he sees quite simply that it is all because
the houses have no front gardens. The vague English spirit loves to have
the entrance to its house softened by bushes and broken by steps.
It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges half in the house
and half out of it; a green room in a double sense. The Frenchman
desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting places, for the
street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.

. . . . .

The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's
front garden.  There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains.
The street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street.
It is his dining-room, for he dines in the street.  It is his
British Museum, for the statues and monuments in French streets are not,
as with us, of the worst, but of the best, art of the country,
and they are often actually as historical as the Pyramids.
The street again is the Frenchman's Parliament, for France has
never taken its Chamber of Deputies so seriously as we take our House
of Commons, and the quibbles of mere elected nonentities in an official
room seem feeble to a people whose fathers have heard the voice
of Desmoulins like a trumpet under open heaven, or Victor Hugo
shouting from his carriage amid the wreck of the second Republic.
And as the Frenchman drinks in the street and dines in the street
so also he fights in the street and dies in the street, so that
the street can never be commonplace to him.

Take, for instance, such a simple object as a lamp-post. In London
a lamp-post is a comic thing.  We think of the intoxicated
gentleman embracing it, and recalling ancient friendship.
But in Paris a lamp-post is a tragic thing.  For we think
of tyrants hanged on it, and of an end of the world.  There is,
or was, a bitter Republican paper in Paris called LA LANTERNE.
How funny it would be if there were a Progressive paper in England
called THE LAMP POST!  We have said, then, that the Frenchman is the man
in the street; that he can dine in the street, and die in the street.
And if I ever pass through Paris and find him going to bed in the street,
I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilisation.
All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected
with this open-air element.  French democracy and French indecency
are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors.
Compared to a café, a public-house is a private house.

. . . . .

There were two reasons why all these fancies should float through
the mind in the streets of this especial town of Belfort.
First of all, it lies close upon the boundary of France and Germany,
and boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world.
To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus children will always
play on the edge of anything.  They build castles on the edge
of the sea, and can only be restrained by public proclamation
and private violence from walking on the edge of the grass.
For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come
to the beginning of it.

Hence this town seemed all the more French for being on the very margin
of Germany, and although there were many German touches in the place--
German names, larger pots of beer, and enormous theatrical barmaids
dressed up in outrageous imitation of Alsatian peasants--yet the fixed
French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks of something else.
All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little
soldiers went plodding through the streets with an air of stubborn
disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French
soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more than you.
It is a part, I suppose, of the realism of the nation which has made
it good at war and science and other things in which what is necessary
is combined with what is nasty.  And the soldiers and the civilians
alike had most of them cropped hair, and that curious kind of head
which to an Englishman looks almost brutal, the kind that we call
a bullet-head. Indeed, we are speaking very appropriately when we call
it a bullet-head, for in intellectual history the heads of Frenchmen
have been bullets--yes, and explosive bullets.

. . . . .

But there was a second reason why in this place one should think
particularly of the open-air politics and the open-air art
of the French.  For this town of Belfort is famous for one of
the most typical and powerful of the public monuments of France.
From the café table at which I sit I can see the hill beyond the town
on which hangs the high and flat-faced citadel, pierced with
many windows, and warmed in the evening light.  On the steep
hill below it is a huge stone lion, itself as large as a hill.
It is hacked out of the rock with a sort of gigantic impression.
No trivial attempt has been made to make it like a common statue;
no attempt to carve the mane into curls, or to distinguish
the monster minutely from the earth out of which he rises,
shaking the world.  The face of the lion has something of the bold
conventionality of Assyrian art.  The mane of the lion is left
like a shapeless cloud of tempest, as if it might literally
be said of him that God had clothed his neck with thunder.
Even at this distance the thing looks vast, and in some
sense prehistoric.  Yet it was carved only a little while ago.
It commemorates the fact that this town was never taken
by the Germans through all the terrible year, but only laid
down its arms at last at the command of its own Government.
But the spirit of it has been in this land from the beginning--
the spirit of something defiant and almost defeated.

As I leave this place and take the railway into Germany the news comes
thicker and thicker up the streets that Southern France is in a flame,
and that there perhaps will be fought out finally the awful modern battle
of the rich and poor.  And as I pass into quieter places for the last
sign of France on the sky-line, I see the Lion of Belfort stand at bay,
the last sight of that great people which has never been at peace.


XXIX

Humanity:  an Interlude

Except for some fine works of art, which seem to be there by accident,
the City of Brussels is like a bad Paris, a Paris with everything noble
cut out, and everything nasty left in.  No one can understand Paris
and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance
and justification of its frivolity.  It is called a city of pleasure;
but it may also very specially be called a city of pain.  The crown of
roses is also a crown of thorns.  Its people are too prone to hurt others,
but quite ready also to hurt themselves.  They are martyrs for religion,
they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.
For the indecency of many of their books and papers is not of the sort
which charms and seduces, but of the sort that horrifies and hurts;
they are torturing themselves.  They lash their own patriotism into life
with the same whips which most men use to lash foreigners to silence.
The enemies of France can never give an account of her infamy or decay
which does not seem insipid and even polite compared with the things which
the Nationalists of France say about their own nation.  They taunt and
torment themselves; sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves.
Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself,
it made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about.  The spirit is
the same from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola.
The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth.
The new realists torture men morally for a physical truth.

Now Brussels is Paris without this constant purification of pain.
Its indecencies are not regrettable incidents in an
everlasting revolution.  It has none of the things which make good
Frenchmen love Paris; it has only the things which make unspeakable
Englishmen love it.  It has the part which is cosmopolitan--
and narrows; not the part which is Parisian--and universal.
You can find there (as commonly happens in modern centres)
the worst things of all nations--the DAILY MAIL from England,
the cheap philosophies from Germany, the loose novels of France,
and the drinks of America.  But there is no English broad fun,
no German kindly ceremony, no American exhilaration, and,
above all, no French tradition of fighting for an idea.
Though all the boulevards look like Parisian boulevards,
though all the shops look like Parisian shops, you cannot look
at them steadily for two minutes without feeling the full
distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters
like Clemenceau and Deroulède.

. . . . .

For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels I began
to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again; and I
had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out of the city.
In this tram there were two men talking; one was a little man with a
black French beard; the other was a baldish man with bushy whiskers,
like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce.  And about the time
that we reached the suburb of the city, and the traffic grew thinner,
and the noises more few, I began to hear what they were saying.
Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easy to follow,
because they were all long words.  Anybody can understand long words
because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin.

The man with the black beard said:  "It must that we have the Progress."

The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying:
"It must also that we have the Consolidation International."

This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened
with some care, and I think I picked up the thread of it.
One of the Belgians was a Little Belgian, as we speak
of a Little Englander.  The other was a Belgian Imperialist,
for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to be altogether
a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire.
Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being
an empire only means kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers
was the Imperialist, and he was saying: "The science, behold there
the new guide of humanity."

And the man with the beard answered him:  "It does not suffice to
have progress in the science; one must have it also in the sentiment
of the human justice."

This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were much
too keen on their argument to hear me. The views I have often heard in
England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast.
Though Belgian by nation they must both have been essentially French.
Whiskers was great on education, which, it seems, is on
the march.  All the world goes to make itself instructed.
It must that the more instructed enlighten the less instructed.
Eh, well then, the European must impose upon the savage the science
and the light.  Also (apparently) he must impose himself on
the savage while he is about it.  To-day one travelled quickly.
The science had changed all.  For our fathers, they were
religious, and (what was worse) dead.  To-day humanity had
electricity to the hand; the machines came from triumphing;
all the lines and limits of the globe effaced themselves.
Soon there would not be but the great Empires and confederations,
guided by the science, always the science.

Here Whiskers stopped an instant for breath; and the man with
the sentiment for human justice had "la parole" off him in a flash.
Without doubt Humanity was on the march, but towards the sentiments,
the ideal, the methods moral and pacific. Humanity directed itself
towards Humanity.  For your wars and empires on behalf of civilisation,
what were they in effect? The war, was it not itself an affair of the
barbarism? The Empires were they not things savage?  The Humanity had
passed all that; she was now intellectual.  Tolstoy had refined all
human souls with the sentiments the most delicate and just. Man was
become a spirit; the wings pushed. . . .

. . . . .

At this important point of evolution the tram came to a jerky stoppage;
and staring around I found, to my stunned consternation, that it
was almost dark, that I was far away from Brussels, that I could not
dream of getting back to dinner; in short, that through the clinging
fascination of this great controversy on Humanity and its recent complete
alteration by science or Tolstoy, I had landed myself Heaven knows where.
I dropped hastily from the suburban tram and let it go on without me.

I was alone in the flat fields out of sight of the city.
On one side of the road was one of those small, thin woods
which are common in all countries, but of which, by a coincidence,
the mystical painters of Flanders were very fond.  The night was
closing in with cloudy purple and grey; there was one ribbon of silver,
the last rag of the sunset.  Through the wood went one little path,
and somehow it suggested that it might lead to some sign of life--
there was no other sign of life on the horizon.  I went along it,
and soon sank into a sort of dancing twilight of all those tiny trees.
There is something subtle and bewildering about that sort of frail
and fantastic wood.  A forest of big trees seems like a bodily barrier;
but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a spiritual barrier.
It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could not pass a phantom.
When I had well lost the last gleam of the high road a curious
and definite feeling came upon me.  Now I suddenly felt something
much more practical and extraordinary--the absence of humanity:
inhuman loneliness.  Of course, there was nothing really lost
in my state; but the mood may hit one anywhere.  I wanted men--
any men; and I felt our awful alliance over all the globe.
And at last, when I had walked for what seemed a long time, I saw
a light too near the earth to mean anything except the image of God.

I came out on a clear space and a low, long cottage, the door
of which was open, but was blocked by a big grey horse,
who seemed to prefer to eat with his head inside the sitting-room.
I got past him, and found he was being fed by a young man
who was sitting down and drinking beer inside, and who saluted
me with heavy rustic courtesy, but in a strange tongue.
The room was full of staring faces like owls, and these I
traced at length as belonging to about six small children.
Their father was still working in the fields, but their mother
rose when I entered.  She smiled, but she and all the rest
spoke some rude language, Flamand, I suppose; so that we
had to be kind to each other by signs.  She fetched me beer,
and pointed out my way with her finger; and I drew a picture
to please the children; and as it was a picture of two men
hitting each other with swords, it pleased them very much.
Then I gave a Belgian penny to each child, for as I said on chance
in French, "It must be that we have the economic equality."
But they had never heard of economic equality, while all
Battersea workmen have heard of economic equality, though it
is true that they haven't got it.

I found my way back to the city, and some time afterwards I actually
saw in the street my two men talking, no doubt still saying,
one that Science had changed all in Humanity, and the other that
Humanity was now pushing the wings of the purely intellectual.
But for me Humanity was hooked on to an accidental picture.
I thought of a low and lonely house in the flats, behind a veil
or film of slight trees, a man breaking the ground as men have
broken from the first morning, and a huge grey horse champing
his food within a foot of a child's head, as in the stable
where Christ was born.


XXX

The Little Birds Who Won't Sing

On my last morning on the Flemish coast, when I knew that
in a few hours I should be in England, my eye fell upon one
of the details of Gothic carving of which Flanders is full.
I do not know whether the thing is old, though it was certainly
knocked about and indecipherable, but at least it was certainly
in the style and tradition of the early Middle Ages.
It seemed to represent men bending themselves (not to say
twisting themselves) to certain primary employments.
Some seemed to be sailors tugging at ropes; others, I think,
were reaping; others were energetically pouring something
into something else.  This is entirely characteristic of
the pictures and carvings of the early thirteenth century,
perhaps the most purely vigorous time in all history.
The great Greeks preferred to carve their gods and heroes
doing nothing.  Splendid and philosophic as their composure
is there is always about it something that marks the master
of many slaves.  But if there was one thing the early
mediaevals liked it was representing people doing something--
hunting or hawking, or rowing boats, or treading grapes,
or making shoes, or cooking something in a pot. "Quicquid agunt
homines, votum, timor, ira voluptas." (I quote from memory.)
The Middle Ages is full of that spirit in all its monuments and
manuscripts.  Chaucer retains it in his jolly insistence on
everybody's type of trade and toil. It was the earliest and
youngest resurrection of Europe, the time when social order was
strengthening, but had not yet become oppressive; the time when
religious faiths were strong, but had not yet been exasperated.
For this reason the whole effect of Greek and Gothic carving is
different. The figures in the Elgin marbles, though often reining
their steeds for an instant in the air, seem frozen for ever
at that perfect instant.  But a mass of mediaeval carving
seems actually a sort of bustle or hubbub in stone.
Sometimes one cannot help feeling that the groups actually
move and mix, and the whole front of a great cathedral has
the hum of a huge hive.

. . . . .

But about these particular figures there was a peculiarity
of which I could not be sure.  Those of them that had any heads
had very curious heads, and it seemed to me that they had their
mouths open.  Whether or no this really meant anything or was
an accident of nascent art I do not know; but in the course
of wondering I recalled to my mind the fact that singing was
connected with many of the tasks there suggested, that there
were songs for reapers and songs for sailors hauling ropes.
I was still thinking about this small problem when I walked
along the pier at Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering
a measured shout as they laboured, and I remembered that sailors
still sing in chorus while they work, and even sing different
songs according to what part of their work they are doing.
And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey was over, the sight
of men working in the English fields reminded me again that there
are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural routines.
And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be
quite unknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry.
How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain
ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do
anything of the kind while producing any of the modern things?
Why is a modern newspaper never printed by people singing in chorus?
Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?

. . . . .

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while
auditing and bankers while banking?  If there are songs for all
the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there
not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank?
As the train from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens,
I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen.
Thus, the work of bank clerks when casting up columns might begin
with a thundering chorus in praise of Simple Addition.

"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting:  'Two and Two are four.'
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."

"There's a run upon the Bank--Stand away!  For the Manager's
a crank and the Secretary drank,
 and the Upper Tooting Bank
      Turns to bay!
Stand close:  there is a run On the Bank.  Of our ship, our royal one,
let the ringing legend run,
 that she fired with every gun
      Ere she sank."

. . . . .

And as I came into the cloud of London I met a friend of mine
who actually is in a bank, and submitted these suggestions
in rhyme to him for use among his colleagues.  But he was not
very hopeful about the matter.  It was not (he assured me)
that he underrated the verses, or in any sense lamented their
lack of polish.  No; it was rather, he felt, an indefinable
something in the very atmosphere of the society in which we
live that makes it spiritually difficult to sing in banks.
And I think he must be right; though the matter is very mysterious.
I may observe here that I think there must be some mistake in
the calculations of the Socialists.  They put down all our distress,
not to a moral tone, but to the chaos of private enterprise.
Now, banks are private; but post-offices are Socialistic:
therefore I naturally expected that the post-office would fall into
the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of my surprise when the
lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing) dismissed the
idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done.  She
seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression
than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the
verses themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse
of the Post-Office Hymn ran thus:

"O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
 Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
 The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
 Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

"Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully
certain it seemed that the most important and typical modern
things could not be done with a chorus.  One could not,
for instance, be a great financier and sing; because the
essence of being a great financier is that you keep quiet.
You could not even in many modern circles be a public man
and sing; because in those circles the essence of being
a public man is that you do nearly everything in private.
Nobody would imagine a chorus of money-lenders. Every one
knows the story of the solicitors' corps of volunteers who,
when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all said
simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence." Men can sing while
charging in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at
the end of my reflections I had really got no further than
the sub-conscious feeling of my friend the bank-clerk--that
there is something spiritually suffocating about our life;
not about our laws merely, but about our life. Bank-clerks
are without songs, not because they are poor, but because
they are sad.  Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards
I passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which
was shaken with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own
tongue.  THEY were singing anyhow; and I had for an instant
a fancy I had often had before: that with us the super-human
is the only place where you can find the human.  Human nature
is hunted and has fled into sanctuary.


XXXI

The Riddle of the Ivy

More than a month ago, when I was leaving London for a holiday,
a friend walked into my flat in Battersea and found me surrounded
with half-packed luggage.

"You seem to be off on your travels," he said.  "Where are you going?"

With a strap between my teeth I replied, "To Battersea."

"The wit of your remark," he said, "wholly escapes me."

"I am going to Battersea," I repeated, "to Battersea viâ Paris, Belfort,
Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit.  It contained
simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once
more I find Battersea.  Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise,
somewhere in the ultimate archipelago of the earth, there is one little
island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and great
white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotch
travellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumour
that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called
Battersea."

"I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you," said my friend,
with an air of intellectual comparison, "that this is Battersea?"

"It is quite unnecessary," I said, "and it is spiritually untrue.
I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or
any England.  I cannot see that door.  I cannot see that chair:
because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes.
The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that
is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays.
Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France?  Do you suppose
that I go to Germany in order to see Germany?  I shall enjoy them both;
but it is not them that I am seeking.  I am seeking Battersea.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy,
and that if you utter that word 'paradox' I shall hurl it at your head.
I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical.
It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go
to England is to go away from it."

But when, after only a month's travelling, I did come back
to England, I was startled to find that I had told the exact truth.
England did break on me at once beautifully new and beautifully old.
To land at Dover is the right way to approach England (most things
that are hackneyed are right), for then you see first the full,
soft gardens of Kent, which are, perhaps, an exaggeration,
but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich rusticity of England.
As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with whom I had fallen
into conversation felt the same freshness, though for another cause.
She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm
in that simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans,
who are the most idealistic people in the whole world.
Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator.
And the American has become so idealistic that he even idealises money.
But (to quote a very able writer of American short stories)
that is another story.

"I have never been in England before," said the American lady,
"yet it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it
for a long time."

"So you have," I said; "you have been away for three hundred years."

"What a lot of ivy you have," she said.  "It covers the churches
and it buries the houses.  We have ivy; but I have never seen it
grow like that."

"I am interested to hear it," I replied, "for I am making a little
list of all the things that are really better in England.
Even a month on the Continent, combined with intelligence,
will teach you that there are many things that are better abroad.
All the things that the DAILY MAIL calls English are better abroad.
But there are things entirely English and entirely good.
Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front gardens,
and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom cabs,
and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks.  Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman
or a German.  Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a
light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of
Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the
matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept
everything; bacon did write Shakespeare."

"I cannot look at anything but the ivy," she said,
"it looks so comfortable."

While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many
weeks an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour
in which he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved
because it represented something in the nature of permanent public
opinion of England, above the ebb and flow of the parties.
Now Mr. Balfour is a perfectly sincere patriot, a man who, from his
own point of view, thinks long and seriously about the public needs,
and he is, moreover, a man of entirely exceptionable intellectual power.
But alas, in spite of all this, when I had read that speech I
thought with a heavy heart that there was one more thing that I had
to add to the list of the specially English things, such as kippers
and cricket; I had to add the specially English kind of humbug.
In France things are attacked and defended for what they are.
The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic,
and defended because it is Catholic.  The Republic is defended
because it is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican.
But here is the ablest of English politicians consoling everybody
by telling them that the House of Lords is not really the House
of Lords, but something quite different, that the foolish accidental
peers whom he meets every night are in some mysterious way experts
upon the psychology of the democracy; that if you want to know
what the very poor want you must ask the very rich, and that if you
want the truth about Hoxton, you must ask for it at Hatfield.
If the Conservative defender of the House of Lords were a logical
French politician he would simply be a liar.  But being an English
politician he is simply a poet.  The English love of believing that
all is as it should be, the English optimism combined with the strong
English imagination, is too much even for the obvious facts.
In a cold, scientific sense, of course, Mr. Balfour knows that nearly
all the Lords who are not Lords by accident are Lords by bribery.
He knows, and (as Mr. Belloc excellently said) everybody in Parliament
knows the very names of the peers who have purchased their peerages.
But the glamour of comfort, the pleasure of reassuring himself
and reassuring others, is too strong for this original knowledge;
at last it fades from him, and he sincerely and earnestly
calls on Englishmen to join with him in admiring an august and
public-spirited Senate, having wholly forgotten that the Senate
really consists of idiots whom he has himself despised;
and adventurers whom he has himself ennobled.

"Your ivy is so beautifully soft and thick," said the American lady,
"it seems to cover almost everything.  It must be the most poetical
thing in England."

"It is very beautiful," I said, "and, as you say, it is very English.
Charles Dickens, who was almost more English than England,
wrote one of his rare poems about the beauty of ivy.
Yes, by all means let us admire the ivy, so deep, so warm,
so full of a genial gloom and a grotesque tenderness.
Let us admire the ivy; and let us pray to God in His mercy
that it may not kill the tree."


XXXII

The Travellers in State

The other day, to my great astonishment, I caught a train; it was
a train going into the Eastern Counties, and I only just caught it.
And while I was running along the train (amid general admiration)
I noticed that there were a quite peculiar and unusual number of
carriages marked "Engaged." On five, six, seven, eight, nine carriages
was pasted the little notice:  at five, six, seven, eight, nine windows
were big bland men staring out in the conscious pride of possession.
Their bodies seemed more than usually impenetrable, their faces more
than usual placid.  It could not be the Derby, if only for the minor
reasons that it was the opposite direction and the wrong day.
It could hardly be the King.  It could hardly be the French President.
For, though these distinguished persons naturally like to be private
for three hours, they are at least public for three minutes.
A crowd can gather to see them step into the train; and there was no
crowd here, or any police ceremonial.

Who were those awful persons, who occupied more of the train
than a bricklayer's beanfeast, and yet were more fastidious
and delicate than the King's own suite?  Who were these that
were larger than a mob, yet more mysterious than a monarch?
Was it possible that instead of our Royal House visiting the Tsar,
he was really visiting us?  Or does the House of Lords
have a breakfast?  I waited and wondered until the train
slowed down at some station in the direction of Cambridge.
Then the large, impenetrable men got out, and after them
got out the distinguished holders of the engaged seats.
They were all dressed decorously in one colour; they had neatly
cropped hair; and they were chained together.

I looked across the carriage at its only other occupant, and our
eyes met.  He was a small, tired-looking man, and, as I afterwards learnt,
a native of Cambridge; by the look of him, some working tradesman there,
such as a journeyman tailor or a small clock-mender. In order to make
conversation I said I wondered where the convicts were going.
His mouth twitched with the instinctive irony of our poor, and he said:
"I don't s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little
spades and pails."  I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein
of literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down
to Cambridge chained together like this.  And as he lived in Cambridge,
and had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme.  Then when
we had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak,
grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea.
I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all
modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said:  "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it."
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of
the English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense
of pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.

. . . . .

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out.
For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical
purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted.
At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth
himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence.
Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent:
it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing
that is always coarse and turbulent: for it means appealing to the
self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different
people.  Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never
have the cheek to govern:  and (according to Christian ethics) the
precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the
cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my friend
in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument about crime
and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all:  as if physical kindness would cure everything:
as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible.
This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental;
it is simply snobbish.  For if comfort gives men virtue,
the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous--which is absurd.
Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery
type of sentimentalists:  I mean the sentimentalist who says,
with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you
with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--
always supposing the man's hands were tied.

This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak
and unbalanced.  And it is only these two types, the sentimental
humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears
in the modern babel.  Yet you very rarely meet either of them
in a train.  You never meet anyone else in a controversy.
The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met:
he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful.
So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could
be "done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better it
would be if nothing need be done.  But something must be done.
"I s'pose we 'ave to do it."  In short, he is simply a sane man,
and of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man
who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

. . . . .

Now the real difficulty of discussing decently this problem
of the proper treatment of criminals is that both parties
discuss the matter without any direct human feeling.
The denouncers of wrong are as cold as the organisers of wrong.
Humanitarianism is as hard as inhumanity.

Let me take one practical instance.  I think the flogging
arranged in our modern prisons is a filthy torture; all its
scientific paraphernalia, the photographing, the medical attendance,
prove that it goes to the last foul limit of the boot and rack.
The cat is simply the rack without any of its intellectual reasons.
Holding this view strongly, I open the ordinary humanitarian books or
papers and I find a phrase like this, "The lash is a relic of barbarism."
So is the plough.  So is the fishing net.  So is the horn or
the staff or the fire lit in winter.  What an inexpressibly feeble
phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of barbarism!
It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow,
and we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion.
There is nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism.
Man is a relic of barbarism.  Civilisation is a relic of barbarism.

But torture is not a relic of barbarism at all. In actuality it is simply
a relic of sin; but in comparative history it may well be called a relic
of civilisation. It has always been most artistic and elaborate when
everything else was most artistic and elaborate. Thus it was detailed
exquisite in the late Roman Empire, in the complex and gorgeous sixteenth
century, in the centralised French monarchy a hundred years before the
Revolution, and in the great Chinese civilisation to this day. This is,
first and last, the frightful thing we must remember. In so far as we
grow instructed and refined we are not (in any sense whatever) naturally
moving away from torture. We may be moving towards torture.  We must know
what we are doing, if we are to avoid the enormous secret cruelty which
has crowned every historic civilisation.

The train moves more swiftly through the sunny English fields.
They have taken the prisoners away, and I do not know what they
have done with them.


XXXIII

The Prehistoric Railway Station

A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not
think so; he did not think so because he himself was even more
modern than the railway station.  He did not think so because
he was himself feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine.
He could not value the ancient silence of the railway station.

"In a railway station," he said, "you are in a hurry,
and therefore, miserable"; but you need not be either unless
you are as modern as Ruskin.  The true philosopher does not
think of coming just in time for his train except as a bet
or a joke.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be
late for the one before.  Do this, and you will find in a railway
station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral.
It has many of the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building;
it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and, above all,
it has recurrence or ritual.  It is dedicated to the celebration
of water and fire the two prime elements of all human ceremonial.
Lastly, a station resembles the old religions rather than the new
religions in this point, that people go there.  In connection
with this it should also be remembered that all popular places,
all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retain the best
routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or machines
used by any privileged class.  Things are not altered so quickly
or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people.
Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the
Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations.
The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have
brazen and vulgar names.  Their names are either snobbish, like the
Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole.
But when I go in a third-class carriage from the nearest circle station
to Battersea to the nearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names
of the stations are one long litany of solemn and saintly memories.
Leaving Victoria I come to a park belonging especially to St. James
the Apostle; thence I go to Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes
to the awful Abbey; Charing Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom;
the next station is called a Temple; and Blackfriars remembers
the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood.

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million
feet of the crowd.  At the worst the uneducated only wear
down old things by sheer walking.  But the educated kick them
down out of sheer culture.

I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty
railway station, where I have no business of any kind.
I have extracted a vast number of chocolates from automatic machines;
I have obtained cigarettes, toffee, scent, and other things
that I dislike by the same machinery; I have weighed myself,
with sublime results; and this sense, not only of the
healthiness of popular things, but of their essential
antiquity and permanence, is still in possession of my mind.
I wander up to the bookstall, and my faith survives even
the wild spectacle of modern literature and journalism.
Even in the crudest and most clamorous aspects of the newspaper
world I still prefer the popular to the proud and fastidious.
If I had to choose between taking in the DAILY MAIL and taking
in the TIMES (the dilemma reminds one of a nightmare), I should
certainly cry out with the whole of my being for the DAILY MAIL.
Even mere bigness preached in a frivolous way is not so
irritating as mere meanness preached in a big and solemn way.
People buy the DAILY MAIL, but they do not believe in it.
They do believe in the TIMES, and (apparently) they do not buy it.
But the more the output of paper upon the modern world is
actually studied, the more it will be found to be in all its
essentials ancient and human, like the name of Charing Cross.
Linger for two or three hours at a station bookstall (as I am doing),
and you will find that it gradually takes on the grandeur
and historic allusiveness of the Vatican or Bodleian Library.
The novelty is all superficial; the tradition is all interior
and profound.  The DAILY MAIL has new editions, but never a new idea.
Everything in a newspaper that is not the old human love
of altar or fatherland is the old human love of gossip.
Modern writers have often made game of the old chronicles
because they chiefly record accidents and prodigies; a church
struck by lightning, or a calf with six legs. They do not seem
to realise that this old barbaric history is the same as new
democratic journalism. It is not that the savage chronicle has
disappeared. It is merely that the savage chronicle now appears
every morning.

As I moved thus mildly and vaguely in front of the bookstall, my eye
caught a sudden and scarlet title that for the moment staggered me.
On the outside of a book I saw written in large letters, "Get On
or Get Out."  The title of the book recalled to me with a sudden
revolt and reaction all that does seem unquestionably new and nasty;
it reminded me that there was in the world of to-day that utterly
idiotic thing, a worship of success; a thing that only means surpassing
anybody in anything; a thing that may mean being the most successful
person in running away from a battle; a thing that may mean being
the most successfully sleepy of the whole row of sleeping men.
When I saw those words the silence and sanctity of the railway station
were for the moment shadowed.  Here, I thought, there is at any rate
something anarchic and violent and vile.  This title, at any rate,
means the most disgusting individualism of this individualistic world.
In the fury of my bitterness and passion I actually bought the book,
thereby ensuring that my enemy would get some of my money.  I opened it
prepared to find some brutality, some blasphemy, which would really be
an exception to the general silence and sanctity of the railway station.
I was prepared to find something in the book that was as infamous
as its title.

I was disappointed.  There was nothing at all corresponding
to the furious decisiveness of the remarks on the cover.
After reading it carefully I could not discover whether
I was really to get on or to get out; but I had a vague
feeling that I should prefer to get out.  A considerable part
of the book, particularly towards the end, was concerned
with a detailed description of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Undoubtedly Napoleon got on.  He also got out. But I could not
discover in any way how the details of his life given here were
supposed to help a person aiming at success. One anecdote described
how Napoleon always wiped his pen on his knee-breeches. I suppose
the moral is:  always wipe your pen on your knee-breeches, and you
will win the battle of Wagram. Another story told that he let loose
a gazelle among the ladies of his Court.  Clearly the brutal practical
inference is--loose a gazelle among the ladies of your acquaintance,
and you will be Emperor of the French.  Get on with a gazelle or get
out. The book entirely reconciled me to the soft twilight of the
station. Then I suddenly saw that there was a symbolic division
which might be paralleled from biology.  Brave men are vertebrates;
they have their softness on the surface and their toughness
in the middle.  But these modern cowards are all crustaceans;
their hardness is all on the cover and their softness is inside.
But the softness is there; everything in this twilight
temple is soft.


XXXIV

The Diabolist

Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element
of truth.  Things that really happened have been mentioned,
such as meeting President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab.
What I have now to relate really happened; yet there was no
element in it of practical politics or of personal danger.
It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with another man.
But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible thing
that has ever happened to me in my life.  It happened so long
ago that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue,
only of its main questions and answers; but there is one sentence
in it for which I can answer absolutely and word for word.
It was a sentence so awful that I could not forget it if I would.
It was the last sentence spoken; and it was not spoken to me.

The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school.
An art school is different from almost all other schools or
colleges in this respect:  that, being of new and crude creation
and of lax discipline, it presents a specially strong contrast
between the industrious and the idle.  People at an art school
either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all.
I belonged, along with other charming people, to the latter class;
and this threw me often into the society of men who were very
different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine.  I was idle because I was very much occupied;
I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own
extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist.
But there were others also at loose ends who were engaged in
discovering what Carlyle called (I think with needless delicacy)
the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.

I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards.  In this connection there are
two very curious things which the critic of human life may observe.
The first is the fact that there is one real difference between men
and women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk
in threes.  The second is that when you find (as you often do)
three young cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk
together every day you generally find that one of the three cads and
idiots is (for some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot.
In these small groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is
almost always one man who seems to have condescended to his company;
one man who, while he can talk a foul triviality with his fellows,
can also talk politics with a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.

It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger
still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he
would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours
of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even
in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and close
and red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one,
but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two
pails. He looked like a sort of Super-jockey; as if some archangel
had gone on the Turf.  And I shall never forget the half-hour in
which he and I argued about real things for the first and the last
time.

. . . . .

Along the front of the big building of which our school
was a part ran a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think,
than those that lead up to St. Paul's Cathedral.  On a black
wintry evening he and I were wandering on these cold heights,
which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the stars.
The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning
and blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning
something in the grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went
whirling past us like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark.
Above us also it was gloom; but if one stared long enough
at that upper darkness, one saw vertical stripes of grey
in the black and then became conscious of the colossal façade
of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if
Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.

. . . . .

The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said
it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it
I knew it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and
full that I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.

"I am becoming orthodox," I said, "because I have come, rightly or
wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief
that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a
crime, for an error begets crimes.  An Imperialist is worse than a
pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches
piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary.
A Free Lover is worse than a profligate.  For a profligate is
serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a Free Lover
is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion.
I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous."

"You mean dangerous to morality," he said in a voice of wonderful
gentleness.  "I expect you are right. But why do you care about morality?"

I glanced at his face quickly.  He had thrust out his neck as he had
a trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light
of the bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights.
His long chin and high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath;
so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit.
I had an unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness;
and even as I paused a burst of red sparks broke past.

"Aren't those sparks splendid?"  I said.

"Yes," he replied.

"That is all that I ask you to admit," said I. "Give me
those few red specks and I will deduce Christian morality.
Once I thought like you, that one's pleasure in a flying
spark was a thing that could come and go with that spark.
Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire.
Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space.
But now I know that the red star is only on the apex
of an invisible pyramid of virtues.  That red fire is only
the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see.
Only because your mother made you say 'Thank you' for a bun
are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars
of an instant or for the white stars of all time.  Only because you
were humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now
enjoy any fireworks that you chance to see.  You only like them
being red because you were told about the blood of the martyrs;
you only like them being bright because brightness is a glory.
That flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues.
Seduce a woman, and that spark will be less bright.
Shed blood, and that spark will be less red.  Be really bad,
and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper."

He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of
his soul.  A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion
produced humility or humility a simple joy:  but he admitted both.
He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own?
Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out:
will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ."

"Do you see that fire ?"  I asked.  "If we had a real fighting democracy,
some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are."

"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way.  "Only what you call
evil I call good."

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted
the steps swept and cleaned.  I followed later, and as I went to find
my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his
voice again, but the words were inaudible.  I stopped, startled:
then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying,
"Nobody can possibly know."  And then I heard those two or three
words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget.
I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you I have done everything else.
If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong."
I rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I
did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.

I have since heard that he died:  it may be said, I think,
that he committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure,
not with tools of pain.  God help him, I know the road he went;
but I have never known, or even dared to think, what was that place
at which he stopped and refrained.


XXXV

A Glimpse of My Country

Whatever is it that we are all looking for?  I fancy that it is
really quite close.  When I was a boy I had a fancy that Heaven
or Fairyland or whatever I called it, was immediately behind my
own back, and that this was why I could never manage to see it,
however often I twisted and turned to take it by surprise.
I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot
like a teetotum in the effort to find that world behind his back
which continually fled from him.  Perhaps this is why the world
goes round.  Perhaps the world is always trying to look over
its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it,
yet without which it cannot be itself.

In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive
of that which is the goal of all our endeavours as something which is
in some strange way near.  Science boasts of the distance of its stars;
of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak.
But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost
menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned.
Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand"; and Looking-glass Land is
only through the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished
if the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in
which all the mystics are lost.  I should not be at all surprised if I
turned one corner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp;
I should not be surprised if I turned a third corner and found
myself in Elfland.

I should not be surprised at this; but I was surprised the other day
at something more surprising.  I took a turn out of Fleet Street
and found myself in England.

. . . . .

The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation.
In the darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there
is one thing that should always be remembered about the very
nature of our country.  It may be shortly stated by saying that
England is not such a fool as it looks.  The types of England,
the externals of England, always misrepresent the country.
England is an oligarchical country, and it prefers that its
oligarchy should be inferior to itself.

The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worse
than the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is, in all or
almost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners.
Our countrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher
places of the national life.  It may be a strange sight to see
the blind leading the blind; but England provides a stranger.
England shows us the blind leading the people who can see.
And this again is an under-statement of the case.  For the English
political aristocrats not only speak worse than many other people;
they speak worse than themselves.  The ignorance of statesmen is
like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected thing.
If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you will
be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things.
It makes one nervous at first.  And I have never been sufficiently
intimate with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life
in Parliament to appear sillier than he was.

It is the same with the voters.  The average man votes below himself;
he votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one.
A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships
or gets married.  A man ought to vote with his head and heart,
his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music;
also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet.
If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it
should creep into his vote.  If he has ever heard splendid songs,
they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross.
But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all
elections is that it is something less than itself.  The question
is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes.
The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

. . . . .

This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men.
Its types do not typify.  And on the occasion of which I speak
I found this to be so especially of that old intelligent middle
class which I had imagined had almost vanished from the world.
It seemed to me that all the main representatives of the middle
class had gone off in one direction or in the other; they had either
set out in pursuit of the Smart Set or they had set out in pursuit
of the Simple Life.  I cannot say which I dislike more myself;
the people in question are welcome to have either of them, or, as is
more likely, to have both, in hideous alternations of disease and cure.
But all the prominent men who plainly represent the middle class have
adopted either the single eye-glass of Mr Chamberlain or the single
eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.

The old class that I mean has no representative.  Its food was plentiful;
but it had no show.  Its food was plain; but it had no fads.
It was serious about politics; and when it spoke in public it
committed the solecism of trying to speak well.  I thought that
this old earnest political England had practically disappeared.
And as I say, I took one turn out of Fleet Street and I found
a room full of it.

. . . . .

At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The club
was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the
ne'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might be
merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all
the hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth
century. The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet
there was not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I
often have in listening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion.
The Toryism of this club was like the Toryism of Johnson,
a Toryism that could use humour and appealed to humanity.
The democracy of this club was like the democracy of Wilkes,
a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight duels;
a democracy that can face things out and endure slander;
the democracy of Wilkes, or, rather, the democracy of Fox.

One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers.
Each man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as
well as he could from sheer fury against the other man.
This is the greatest of our modern descents, that nowadays a man
does not become more rhetorical as he becomes more sincere.
An eighteenth-century speaker, when he got really and honestly furious,
looked for big words with which to crush his adversary.
The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with.
He looks for little facts and little sneers.  In a modern speech
the rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening
to which nobody listens.  But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate,
or one of the harder kind of Socialists, becomes really sincere,
he becomes Cockney.  "The destiny of the Empire," or "The destiny
of humanity," do well enough for mere ornamental preliminaries,
but when the man becomes angry and honest, then it is a snarl,
"Where do we come in?" or "It's your money they want."

The men in this eighteenth-century club were entirely different;
they were quite eighteenth century.  Each one rose to his feet
quivering with passion, and tried to destroy his opponent,
not with sniggering, but actually with eloquence. I was arguing
with them about Home Rule; at the end I told them why the English
aristocracy really disliked an Irish Parliament; because it would
be like their club.

. . . . .

I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I
saw pasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels and how London
was rising against something that London had hardly heard of.
Then I suddenly saw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world
is an immense and tumultuous ocean, full of monstrous and living things.
And I saw that across the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin,
sheet of ice, of wicked wealth and of lying journalism.

And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I
heard it crack.


XXXVI

A Somewhat Improbable Story

I cannot remember whether this tale is true or not.  If I read
it through very carefully I have a suspicion that I should come
to the conclusion that it is not.  But, unfortunately, I cannot read
it through very carefully, because, you see, it is not written yet.
The image and the idea of it clung to me through a great part
of my boyhood; I may have dreamt it before I could talk; or told it
to myself before I could read; or read it before I could remember.
On the whole, however, I am certain that I did not read it,
for children have very clear memories about things like that;
and of the books which I was really fond I can still remember,
not only the shape and bulk and binding, but even the position
of the printed words on many of the pages.  On the whole, I incline
to the opinion that it happened to me before I was born.

. . . . .

At any rate, let us tell the story now with all the advantages
of the atmosphere that has clung to it.  You may suppose me,
for the sake of argument, sitting at lunch in one of those quick-lunch
restaurants in the City where men take their food so fast that it
has none of the quality of food, and take their half-hour's
vacation so fast that it has none of the qualities of leisure;
to hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.
They all wore tall shiny hats as if they could not lose an instant
even to hang them on a peg, and they all had one eye a little off,
hypnotised by the huge eye of the clock.  In short, they were the slaves
of the modern bondage, you could hear their fetters clanking.
Each was, in fact, bound by a chain; the heaviest chain ever tied
to a man--it is called a watch-chain.

Now, among these there entered and sat down opposite to me a man
who almost immediately opened an uninterrupted monologue.
He was like all the other men in dress, yet he was startlingly
opposite to them in all manner.  He wore a high shiny hat
and a long frock coat, but he wore them as such solemn things
were meant to be worn; he wore the silk hat as if it were a mitre,
and the frock coat as if it were the ephod of a high priest.
He not only hung his hat up on the peg, but he seemed
(such was his stateliness) almost to ask permission of the hat
for doing so, and to apologise to the peg for making use of it.
When he had sat down on a wooden chair with the air of one
considering its feelings and given a sort of slight stoop
or bow to the wooden table itself, as if it were an altar,
I could not help some comment springing to my lips.
For the man was a big, sanguine-faced, prosperous-looking man,
and yet he treated everything with a care that almost
amounted to nervousness.

For the sake of saying something to express my interest I said,
"This furniture is fairly solid; but, of course, people do treat
it much too carelessly."

As I looked up doubtfully my eye caught his, and was fixed
as his was fixed in an apocalyptic stare.  I had thought him
ordinary as he entered, save for his strange, cautious manner;
but if the other people had seen him then they would have screamed
and emptied the room.  They did not see him, and they went on making
a clatter with their forks, and a murmur with their conversation.
But the man's face was the face of a maniac.

"Did you mean anything particular by that remark?" he asked at last,
and the blood crawled back slowly into his face.

"Nothing whatever," I answered.  "One does not mean anything here;
it spoils people's digestions."

He limped back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief;
and yet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief.

"I thought perhaps," he said in a low voice, "that another of them
had gone wrong."

"If you mean another digestion gone wrong," I said, "I never heard
of one here that went right.  This is the heart of the Empire,
and the other organs are in an equally bad way."

"No, I mean another street gone wrong," and he said heavily
and quietly, "but as I suppose that doesn't explain much to you,
I think I shall have to tell you the story.  I do so with all
the less responsibility, because I know you won't believe it.
For forty years of my life I invariably left my office, which is
in Leadenhall Street, at half-past five in the afternoon, taking with
me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in the left hand.
For forty years two months and four days I passed out of the side
office door, walked down the street on the left-hand side,
took the first turning to the left and the third to the right,
from where I bought an evening paper, followed the road on
the right-hand side round two obtuse angles, and came out just
outside a Metropolitan station, where I took a train home.
For forty years two months and four days I fulfilled this course
by accumulated habit:  it was not a long street that I traversed,
and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it.
After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I
went out in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand
and my bag in the left, and I began to notice that walking along
the familiar street tired me somewhat more than usual; and when I
turned it I was convinced that I had turned down the wrong one.
For now the street shot up quite a steep slant, such as one
only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in this part
there were no hills at all.  Yet it was not the wrong street;
the name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were
the same; the lamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective
was the same; only it was tilted upwards like a lid.
Forgetting any trouble about breathlessness or fatigue I ran
furiously forward, and reached the second of my accustomed turnings,
which ought to bring me almost within sight of the station.
And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the pavement.
For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a steep
staircase or the side of a pyramid.  There was not for miles
round that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill.
And this was a slope like that of the Matterhorn.  The whole
street had lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck
and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance,
as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked out in pink letters
the name over my paper shop.

"I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops and coming to a
part of the road where there was a long grey row of private houses.
I had, I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was a long
iron bridge in empty space.  An impulse seized me, and I pulled up
the iron trap of a coal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty
space and the stairs.

"When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, having
apparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings and
gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was
in shadow; his dress was dark and ordinary; but when I saw him standing
so perfectly still I knew somehow that he was not of this world.
And the stars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought
to be endured by the eyes of men.

"'If you are a kind angel,' I said, 'or a wise devil, or have anything
in common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed of devils.'

"After a long silence he said, 'What do you say that it is?'

"'It is Bumpton Street, of course,' I snapped.  'It goes to Oldgate
Station.'

"'Yes,' he admitted gravely; 'it goes there sometimes. Just now, however,
it is going to heaven.'

"'To heaven?'  I said.  'Why?'

"'It is going to heaven for justice,' he replied. 'You must have treated
it badly.  Remember always that there is one thing that cannot be endured
by anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworked
and also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women--everybody does.
But you can't neglect women--I defy you to.  At the same time,
you can neglect tramps and gypsies and all the apparent refuse of the
State so long as you do not overwork it. But no beast of the field, no
horse, no dog can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and
yet have less than his honour. It is the same with streets.  You have
worked this street to death, and yet you have never remembered its
existence. If you had a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would
have hung this street with garlands and given it the name of a god.
Then it would have gone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired
of your tireless insolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to
heaven. Have you never sat on a bucking horse?'

"I looked at the long grey street, and for a moment it seemed to me
to be exactly like the long grey neck of a horse flung up to heaven.
But in a moment my sanity returned, and I said, 'But this
is all nonsense.  Streets go to the place they have to go.
A street must always go to its end.'

"'Why do you think so of a street?' he asked, standing very still.

"'Because I have always seen it do the same thing,' I replied,
in reasonable anger.  'Day after day, year after year, it has always
gone to Oldgate Station; day after . . .'

"I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury
of the road in revolt.

"'And you?' he cried terribly.  'What do you think the road thinks
of you?  Does the road think you are alive?  Are you alive?
Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station. . . .'
Since then I have respected the things called inanimate."

And bowing slightly to the mustard-pot, the man in
the restaurant withdrew.


XXXVII

The Shop Of Ghosts

Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can
get for a halfpenny.  I make an exception, of course, of the sun,
the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles.
You can get them for nothing.  Also I make an exception of another thing,
which I am not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which
the lowest price is a penny halfpenny.  But the general principle
will be at once apparent.  In the street behind me, for instance,
you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a halfpenny.
To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairy tale.
You can get quite a large number of brightly coloured sweets for
a halfpenny.  Also you can get the chance of reading this article
for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter.

But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array
of valuable things you can get at a halfpenny each you
should do as I was doing last night.  I was gluing my nose
against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop
in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets of Battersea.
But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a
child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made.
Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them;
they were all dirty; but they were all bright. For my part,
I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since
the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You
must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion
in the modern world.

. . . . .

As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses,
at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red
Noah's arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance.
That lit shop-window became like the brilliantly lit
stage when one is watching some highly coloured comedy.
I forgot the grey houses and the grimy people behind me as one
forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds at a theatre.
It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were small,
not because they were toys, but because they were objects far away.
The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater omnibus,
passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to Bayswater.
The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was blue
with distance.  The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming
and only man is black.  The red Noah's ark was really the enormous
ship of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea,
red in the first morning of hope.

Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction,
such brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the
face of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles
or moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the
slowness of their growth and the suddenness of their termination.
The return to real thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man.
Very often indeed (in my case) it is bumping into a man.
But in any case the awakening is always emphatic and,
generally speaking, it is always complete.  Now, in this case,
I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop;
but in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final.
There was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told
me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I
had already done some odd thing.  I felt as if I had worked
a miracle or committed a sin.  It was as if I had at any rate,
stepped across some border in the soul.

To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop
and tried to buy wooden soldiers.  The man in the shop was very old
and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half
his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial.
Yet though he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering
in his eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling
asleep in a not unkindly decay.  He gave me the wooden soldiers,
but when I put down the money he did not at first seem to see it;
then he blinked at it feebly, and then he pushed it feebly away.

"No, no," he said vaguely.  "I never have.  I never have.
We are rather old-fashioned here."

"Not taking money," I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly
new fashion than an old one."

"I never have," said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose;
"I've always given presents.  I'm too old to stop."

"Good heavens!"  I said.  "What can you mean?  Why, you might
be Father Christmas."

"I am Father Christmas," he said apologetically, and blew
his nose again.

The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside.
At any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining
shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street;
I might have strayed into some new and sunless world.
But something had cut the chords of common sense, and I could
not feel even surprise except sleepily.  Something made me say,
"You look ill, Father Christmas."

"I am dying," he said.

I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again.

"All the new people have left my shop.  I cannot understand it.
They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent
sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators.
They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary;
they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse.
They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly
parts are too earthly; I don't know what they want, I'm sure.
How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things
too earthly?  How can one be too good, or too jolly?
I don't understand.  But I understand one thing well enough.
These modern people are living and I am dead."

"You may be dead," I replied.  "You ought to know.
But as for what they are doing, do not call it living."

. . . . .

A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected
to be unbroken.  But it had not fallen for more than a few
seconds when, in the utter stillness, I distinctly heard
a very rapid step coming nearer and nearer along the street.
The next moment a figure flung itself into the shop and stood
framed in the doorway.  He wore a large white hat tilted back
as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons,
a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat.
He had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor;
he had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the
shop and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and
uttered the exclamation of a man utterly staggered.

"Good lord!" he cried out; "it can't be you!  It isn't you!
I came to ask where your grave was."

"I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens," said the old gentleman, with a
feeble smile; "but I'm dying," he hastened to add reassuringly.

"But, dash it all, you were dying in my time," said Mr. Charles Dickens
with animation; "and you don't look a day older."

"I've felt like this for a long time," said Father Christmas.

Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door
into the darkness.

"Dick," he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive."

. . . . .

Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne.
He carried his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face
had even a look of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted
by his eyes, which were literally as humble as a dog's. His sword
made a great clatter, as if the shop were too small for it.

"Indeed," said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley
and his Christmas Day."

My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker.
It seemed to be filled with newcomers.

"It hath ever been understood," said a burly man, who carried
his head humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think
he was Ben Jonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo,
under our King James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty
customs were fallen sick, and like to pass from the world.
This grey beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than now."

And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood,
say in some mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying."

"I have felt like this a long time," said Father Christmas,
in his feeble way again.

Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.

"Since when?" he asked.  "Since you were born?"

"Yes," said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair.
"I have been always dying."

Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling
a mob to rise.

"I understand it now," he cried, "you will never die."


XXXVIII

The Ballade of a Strange Town

My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed
affection for the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there
was so restful that we almost felt it as a home, and hardly
strayed out of it.

We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees
growing in wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines
of the Cathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent,
in the poem, heard the bell which told them they were not too late.
But we took as much pleasure in the people, in the little boys
with open, flat Flemish faces and fur collars round their necks,
making them look like burgomasters; or the women, whose prim,
oval faces, hair strained tightly off the temples, and mouths
at once hard, meek, and humorous, exactly reproduced the late
mediaeval faces in Memling and Van Eyck.

But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose from under his
little tree, and pointing to a sort of toy train that was puffing smoke
in one corner of the clear square, suggested that we should go by it.
We got into the little train, which was meant really to take
the peasants and their vegetables to and fro from their fields
beyond the town, and the official came round to give us tickets.
We asked him what place we should get to if we paid fivepence.
The Belgians are not a romantic people, and he asked us (with a
lamentable mixture of Flemish coarseness and French rationalism)
where we wanted to go.

We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and the only
question was whether we could get there for fivepence.
At last, after a great deal of international misunderstanding
(for he spoke French in the Flemish and we in the English manner),
he told us that fivepence would take us to a place which I
have never seen written down, but which when spoken sounded
like the word "Waterloo" pronounced by an intoxicated patriot;
I think it was Waerlowe.

We clasped our hands and said it was the place we had been seeking
from boyhood, and when we had got there we descended with promptitude.

For a moment I had a horrible fear that it really was the field
of Waterloo; but I was comforted by remembering that it was
in quite a different part of Belgium.  It was a cross-roads,
with one cottage at the corner, a perspective of tall trees like
Hobbema's "Avenue," and beyond only the infinite flat chess-board
of the little fields.  It was the scene of peace and prosperity;
but I must confess that my friend's first action was to ask
the man when there would be another train back to Mechlin.
The man stated that there would be a train back in exactly one hour.
We walked up the avenue, and when we were nearly half an hour's
walk away it began to rain.

. . . . .

We arrived back at the cross-roads sodden and dripping, and,
finding the train waiting, climbed into it with some relief.
The officer on this train could speak nothing but Flemish,
but he understood the name Mechlin, and indicated that when we came
to Mechlin Station he would put us down, which, after the right
interval of time, he did.

We got down, under a steady downpour, evidently on the edge of Mechlin,
though the features could not easily be recognised through the grey
screen of the rain. I do not generally agree with those who find rain
depressing. A shower-bath is not depressing; it is rather startling.
And if it is exciting when a man throws a pail of water over you,
why should it not also be exciting when the gods throw many pails?
But on this soaking afternoon, whether it was the dull sky-line
of the Netherlands or the fact that we were returning home without
any adventure, I really did think things a trifle dreary.
As soon as we could creep under the shelter of a street
we turned into a little café, kept by one woman. She was incredibly
old, and she spoke no French. There we drank black coffee and what
was called "cognac fine." "Cognac fine" were the only two French
words used in the establishment, and they were not true.  At least,
the fineness (perhaps by its very ethereal delicacy) escaped me.
After a little my friend, who was more restless than I,
got up and went out, to see if the rain had stopped and if we
could at once stroll back to our hotel by the station.
I sat finishing my coffee in a colourless mood, and listening
to the unremitting rain.

. . . . .

Suddenly the door burst open, and my friend appeared, transfigured
and frantic.

"Get up!" he cried, waving his hands wildly.  "Get up! We're in the
wrong town!  We're not in Mechlin at all. Mechlin is ten miles,
twenty miles off--God knows what! We're somewhere near Antwerp."

"What!"  I cried, leaping from my seat, and sending the furniture flying.
"Then all is well, after all!  Poetry only hid her face
for an instant behind a cloud.  Positively for a moment I
was feeling depressed because we were in the right town.
But if we are in the wrong town--why, we have our adventure after all!
If we are in the wrong town, we are in the right place."

I rushed out into the rain, and my friend followed me somewhat
more grimly.  We discovered we were in a town called Lierre,
which seemed to consist chiefly of bankrupt pastry cooks,
who sold lemonade.

"This is the peak of our whole poetic progress!" I cried
enthusiastically.  "We must do something, something sacramental
and commemorative!  We cannot sacrifice an ox, and it would be
a bore to build a temple. Let us write a poem."

With but slight encouragement, I took out an old envelope
and one of those pencils that turn bright violet in water.
There was plenty of water about, and the violet ran down
the paper, symbolising the rich purple of that romantic hour.
I began, choosing the form of an old French ballade;
it is the easiest because it is the most restricted--

   "Can Man to Mount Olympus rise,
      And fancy Primrose Hill the scene?
    Can a man walk in Paradise
      And think he is in Turnham Green?
    And could I take you for Malines,
      Not knowing the nobler thing you were?
    O Pearl of all the plain, and queen,
    The lovely city of Lierre.

   "Through memory's mist in glimmering guise
      Shall shine your streets of sloppy sheen.
    And wet shall grow my dreaming eyes,
      To think how wet my boots have been
    Now if I die or shoot a Dean----"

Here I broke off to ask my friend whether he thought it
expressed a more wild calamity to shoot a Dean or to be a Dean.
But he only turned up his coat collar, and I felt that for him
the muse had folded her wings.  I rewrote--

   "Now if I die a Rural Dean,
     Or rob a bank I do not care,
    Or turn a Tory.  I have seen
     The lovely city of Lierre."

"The next line," I resumed, warming to it; but my friend interrupted me.

"The next line," he said somewhat harshly, "will be a railway line.
We can get back to Mechlin from here, I find, though we
have to change twice.  I dare say I should think this jolly
romantic but for the weather.  Adventure is the champagne
of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.
Here is the station."

. . . . .

We did not speak again until we had left Lierre, in its sacred
cloud of rain, and were coming to Mechlin, under a clearer sky,
that even made one think of stars.  Then I leant forward and said
to my friend in a low voice--"I have found out everything.
We have come to the wrong star."

He stared his query, and I went on eagerly:  "That is what makes life
at once so splendid and so strange.  We are in the wrong world.
When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it
was wrong, I was happy.  So the false optimism, the modern happiness,
tires us because it tells us we fit into this world.  The true
happiness is that we don't fit.  We come from somewhere else.
We have lost our way."

He silently nodded, staring out of the window, but whether I had impressed
or only fatigued him I could not tell.  "This," I added, "is suggested
in the last verse of a fine poem you have grossly neglected--

  "'Happy is he and more than wise
      Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
    The world through all the grey disguise
      Of sleep and custom in between.
    Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
      But shall we know when we are there?
    Who know not what these dead stones mean,
      The lovely city of Lierre.'"

Here the train stopped abruptly.  And from Mechlin church steeple
we heard the half-chime: and Joris broke silence with "No bally
HORS D'OEUVRES for me:  I shall get on to something solid at once."

                L'Envoy

   Prince, wide your Empire spreads, I ween,
     Yet happier is that moistened Mayor,
   Who drinks her cognac far from fine,
     The lovely city of Lierre.


XXXIX

The Mystery of a Pageant

Once upon a time, it seems centuries ago, I was prevailed on to take
a small part in one of those historical processions or pageants
which happened to be fashionable in or about the year 1909.
And since I tend, like all who are growing old, to re-enter
the remote past as a paradise or playground, I disinter a memory
which may serve to stand among those memories of small but strange
incidents with which I have sometimes filled this column.
The thing has really some of the dark qualities of a detective-story;
though I suppose that Sherlock Holmes himself could hardly unravel
it now, when the scent is so old and cold and most of the actors,
doubtless, long dead.

This old pageant included a series of figures from the eighteenth century,
and I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson.  Seeing that Dr. Johnson
was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all over gravy,
snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest man
in London, I mention this identification as a fact and not as a vaunt.
I had nothing to do with the arrangement; and such fleeting suggestions
as I made were not taken so seriously as they might have been.
I requested that a row of posts be erected across the lawn, so that I
might touch all of them but one, and then go back and touch that.
Failing this, I felt that the least they could do was to have
twenty-five cups of tea stationed at regular intervals along
the course, each held by a Mrs. Thrale in full costume.
My best constructive suggestion was the most harshly rejected of all.
In front of me in the procession walked the great Bishop Berkeley,
the man who turned the tables on the early materialists by maintaining
that matter itself possibly does not exist.  Dr. Johnson,
you will remember, did not like such bottomless fancies as Berkeley's,
and kicked a stone with his foot, saying, "I refute him so!"
Now (as I pointed out) kicking a stone would not make the metaphysical
quarrel quite clear; besides, it would hurt.  But how picturesque
and perfect it would be if I moved across the ground in the symbolic
attitude of kicking Bishop Berkeley!  How complete an allegoric group;
the great transcendentalist walking with his head among the stars,
but behind him the avenging realist pede claudo, with uplifted foot.
But I must not take up space with these forgotten frivolities;
we old men grow too garrulous in talking of the distant past.

This story scarcely concerns me either in my real or my
assumed character.  Suffice it to say that the procession took place
at night in a large garden and by torchlight (so remote is the date),
that the garden was crowded with Puritans, monks, and men-at-arms,
and especially with early Celtic saints smoking pipes,
and with elegant Renaissance gentlemen talking Cockney.
Suffice it to say, or rather it is needless to say, that I got lost.
I wandered away into some dim corner of that dim shrubbery,
where there was nothing to do except tumbling over tent ropes,
and I began almost to feel like my prototype, and to share his
horror of solitude and hatred of a country life.

In this detachment and dilemma I saw another man in a white wig
advancing across this forsaken stretch of lawn; a tall, lean man,
who stooped in his long black robes like a stooping eagle.
When I thought he would pass me, he stopped before my face,
and said, "Dr. Johnson, I think.  I am Paley."

"Sir," I said, "you used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity.
If you can guide me now to wherever this infernal thing begins you
will perform a yet higher and harder function."

His costume and style were so perfect that for the instant I really
thought he was a ghost.  He took no notice of my flippancy, but,
turning his black-robed back on me, led me through verdurous glooms
and winding mossy ways, until we came out into the glare of gaslight
and laughing men in masquerade, and I could easily laugh at myself.

And there, you will say, was an end of the matter.  I am
(you will say) naturally obtuse, cowardly, and mentally deficient.
I was, moreover, unused to pageants; I felt frightened in the dark
and took a man for a spectre whom, in the light, I could recognise
as a modern gentleman in a masquerade dress.  No; far from it.
That spectral person was my first introduction to a special incident
which has never been explained and which still lays its finger
on my nerve.

I mixed with the men of the eighteenth century; and we fooled
as one does at a fancy-dress ball.  There was Burke as large as life
and a great deal better looking.  There was Cowper much larger
than life; he ought to have been a little man in a night-cap,
with a cat under one arm and a spaniel under the other.
As it was, he was a magnificent person, and looked more
like the Master of Ballantrae than Cowper.  I persuaded him
at last to the night-cap, but never, alas, to the cat and dog.
When I came the next night Burke was still the same beautiful
improvement upon himself; Cowper was still weeping for his dog
and cat and would not be comforted; Bishop Berkeley was still waiting
to be kicked in the interests of philosophy.  In short, I met all
my old friends but one.  Where was Paley?  I had been mystically
moved by the man's presence; I was moved more by his absence.
At last I saw advancing towards us across the twilight garden
a little man with a large book and a bright attractive face.
When he came near enough he said, in a small, clear voice, "I'm Paley."
The thing was quite natural, of course; the man was ill and had
sent a substitute.  Yet somehow the contrast was a shock.

By the next night I had grown quite friendly with my four
or five colleagues; I had discovered what is called a mutual
friend with Berkeley and several points of difference with Burke.
Cowper, I think it was, who introduced me to a friend of his,
a fresh face, square and sturdy, framed in a white wig.
"This," he explained, "is my friend So-and-So. He's Paley."
I looked round at all the faces by this time fixed and familiar;
I studied them; I counted them; then I bowed to the third Paley
as one bows to necessity.  So far the thing was all within
the limits of coincidence.  It certainly seemed odd that this
one particular cleric should be so varying and elusive.
It was singular that Paley, alone among men, should swell and
shrink and alter like a phantom, while all else remained solid.
But the thing was explicable; two men had been ill and there
was an end of it; only I went again the next night, and a
clear-coloured elegant youth with powdered hair bounded up to me,
and told me with boyish excitement that he was Paley.

For the next twenty-four hours I remained in the mental condition
of the modern world.  I mean the condition in which all natural
explanations have broken down and no supernatural explanation has
been established.  My bewilderment had reached to boredom when I
found myself once more in the colour and clatter of the pageant,
and I was all the more pleased because I met an old school-fellow,
and we mutually recognised each other under our heavy clothes
and hoary wigs.  We talked about all those great things for which
literature is too small and only life large enough; red-hot memories
and those gigantic details which make up the characters of men.
I heard all about the friends he had lost sight of and those he had
kept in sight; I heard about his profession, and asked at last
how he came into the pageant.

"The fact is," he said, "a friend of mine asked me, just for to-night,
to act a chap called Paley; I don't know who he was. . . ."

"No, by thunder!"  I said, "nor does anyone."

This was the last blow, and the next night passed like a dream.
I scarcely noticed the slender, sprightly, and entirely new figure
which fell into the ranks in the place of Paley, so many times deceased.
What could it mean?  Why was the giddy Paley unfaithful among
the faithful found?  Did these perpetual changes prove the popularity
or the unpopularity of being Paley?  Was it that no human being
could support being Paley for one night and live till morning?
Or was it that the gates were crowded with eager throngs of the British
public thirsting to be Paley, who could only be let in one at a time?
Or is there some ancient vendetta against Paley?  Does some secret
society of Deists still assassinate any one who adopts the name?

I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery;
and that for two reasons.  First, the story is so true
that I have had to put a lie into it.  Every word of this
narrative is veracious, except the one word Paley.
And second, because I have got to go into the next room
and dress up as Dr. Johnson.




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