When we put an old man into power, and give praise to mere persistence
in living, our charity has taken no wrong turn. The very inefficiency,
helplessness, and wistful vanity of the old make them unequalled objects
of our Christian virtues. It would be easy enough to be cruel to them,
for, unlike the young, they are at our mercy. They have lost all that
goes to sustain youth, which could be careless of the world while it was
still dreaming dreams, making love, and able to shout and sing, while
life stepped out to the quick drumming of the blood. To the old,
Eternity is no longer about them, and the far horizons have vanished.
Their hours are remorselessly ticked away. There is no longer time to
do everything and be everything: he will be a fortunate man who has
rounded off even one little piece of work before the light goes. It is a
monstrously silly fable that the aged are indifferent to praise,
position and honour, that they have outgrown the little vanities of the
world. The fact that a few old men have retired from the world because
they were weary and infirm does not support the legend; and one has only
to listen to their talk to discover how far such ancients have got
beyond vanity. As for your active old men, they ceaselessly bestir
themselves in pursuit of notice and applause. And well they might. With
the dwindling of time and the shedding of illusions, their imagination
has ceased to minister to their vanity. They require some confirmation
from the world of their good opinion of themselves. Now that the far
horizons, infinitely beguiling in youth, have vanished, the world itself
shines more brightly against the steadily deepening background, and a
dedication, a respectful hearing, a salute here, some little notice
there, these become matters of some moment; they warm the heart when all
other fires are being heaped with pale ashes. Consider the position of
an old man. His lines are fixed and he cannot begin again; all his
argosies left the quayside long ago, and if some of them do not bring
him some return, he will find cold comfort now in his tales of their
setting out. Now that he is no longer a potential Shakespeare, Beethoven
or Lincoln, as he was in youth, your ageing man will try hard to become
Deputy-Mayor of Suddleton: he will have the cash in hand. Deny him that,
and he has nothing left.
This being so, what is there to be said against this habit of ours. We
are not cruel to the young, but we are certainly kind to the old.
Nothing could be better, for even supposing that a few youngsters here
and there suffer from our neglect, they have only to grow old to remedy
it, and if they have not persistence enough to keep on steadily
increasing their ages, they are not the men for us. The pity is, not
that we have such a habit, but that, having had it for centuries, we are
now letting it go at the bidding of mere popular prejudice. Our old
English habit of mind wants fortifying: we should push back the age at
which a man is entitled to public notice and let our youngsters do their
swaggering in private or among their brother fledglings. With some
little contriving, it ought to be possible to make this a land in which
every man under sixty has his future before him and no past to brood
over, every office and place of profit is filled with an elder, and the
cackling of gratified senile vanity is heard night and day. Make way for
Justice Shallow, and give an ear to Polonius, and be content, for your
Prince Hal can look after himself, and as for your Hamlets, their
maladies are past your doctoring and their felicity is beyond the
shouting of a mob or the solemn foolery of a committee.
THE DREAM
The afternoon sun, rather reproachfully, reillumined the page at which I
was vacantly staring. I sank a little lower into my armchair, raised the
book a trifle, and made a further pretence of reading. A few more words
filtered into my brain; then the warm sun, the drowsy air, the still
afternoon, drowned sense after sense....
I was hurrying along a dark side-street between two rows of houses,
tall, featureless buildings, close-shuttered and with no lights showing.
It was a vile night, of what season I could not tell, but seemingly
wintry, for there were frequent icy gusts of wind snatching at the
chimneys, and an occasional spatter of rain. I dashed forward, not
trying to pick my way through the pools and mud, but splashing along as
quickly as possible, a growing feeling of panic urging me on. I had no
idea what was afoot, or at least the rational part of me knew nothing
of the matter, but it was clear that some terror was behind. At last,
panting for breath, I reached what I knew to be the back gate of my own
house. It was open, and I had sufficient strength to press forward
through a kind of courtyard of no great size, gain the house-door, which
was also unbolted, and lock myself in the house. I found myself in a
great draughty kitchen, in which there was no fire but only the
cheerless flickering light of two candles. I knew it to be my own place;
everything seemed familiar, though actually, of course, it was all
strange. Behind the massive door, now securely bolted, I felt easier
than I had done outside in that ill-favoured street; but even yet the
fear of a hunted creature remained with me; I hardly dared to breathe,
made no movement, but only listened intently.
There was nothing to be heard above the wind. Yet I still felt that the
terror had not been evaded, that it was drawing nearer, though what form
it would take I could not guess, having been precipitated so suddenly
into the adventure. I was flying from something, of that there could be
no doubt, but whether my pursuers were wild beasts, men or devils, there
was no knowing. Whatever they were, it looked as if I had evaded them
in the darkness; and as I was hidden away in one out of many similar
houses, in a labyrinth of streets (for I knew somehow that I was in a
large town, though not a modern one), it looked very unlikely that I
should be discovered. I breathed more freely.
Then suddenly, to my horror, I heard above the wind the tramp of many
feet coming down the street I had just left. It was not the sound of
soldiers marching, nor yet the vague tumult of a moving crowd; but
something between the two, the noise of men going in some sort of
formation, men of set purpose. It was this then that I had been fearing,
for now I fell into a dreadful panic, and hastened to put out the two
candles, so that not even a tiny ray of light through the shutters
should draw attention to the house. The whole row was in darkness; there
was nothing apparently to mark off one house from another; I was safe
enough. Probably the men did not even know that I had turned down this
side street; they could not have seen me in such a black night. So I
reasoned with myself, but got little comfort out of it.
Meanwhile, the sound was drawing nearer, and the crowd, or whatever it
was, seemed to have fallen into a fairly regular step, as if assured of
its destination. A moment later, the men burst out into a kind of
marching song, which they voiced fiercely in a deep-throated unison. Two
lines of the chorus remain with me yet:
‘You shall know him by his jolly red mouth,
And the bushy black beard on his chin.’
the last line being repeated with startling emphasis. It seems absurd
enough now, but at the time it was charged with menace, as if the very
sound of it called up all manner of dreadful associations. Having fallen
into such a swinging step, it appeared unlikely that the mob outside
would make a halt; but to my utter dismay, as soon as the sound passed
close to my window it stopped, there was a shuffling of feet, and then a
great voice, the very herald of doom, cried out: ‘This is the house!’ At
this, I crouched lower, and could do nothing else: there was a crawling
and heaving in the pit of my stomach. I heard the outer gate being
thrust open, then a stir in the courtyard, and a moment later, there
came a thundering knock at the door. ‘Open the door!’ cried that
terrifying voice. I could not move. Had I gone through the house,
escape might have been possible; but it appeared to be one of the rules
of this fearful game that I should not be able to move.
‘Open the door!’ came the cry again. Then there followed a medley of
sound, shouts and yells and the trampling of feet, after which there
came a series of terrific blows at the door. They were bursting it open.
For a few moments it resisted the attack, but the battering increased in
violence, and soon it was all over. One mighty effort, a yell of
triumph, and the door came splintering in.... But only to let in a flood
of yellow sunshine, the murmur of the flies, and the sight of my own
room. The windy night, the dark side street, the great draughty kitchen,
the besieging crowd, all had vanished, huddled away into the lumber-room
of such phantasmagoria; one twist of the brain’s kaleidoscope and the
strange tale was in progress, another twist and it was gone. I glanced
at my watch and found that I had only been asleep for some ten minutes;
I had only halted for a second near the Ivory Gate. Yet in that fraction
of time, the chapter of romance, well conceived and deftly executed, was
begun and ended, though the tale itself has neither beginning nor end.
Surely, of all things in life, these fantastic dramas, coming and going
between a few heart-beats, are the most personal and the most wonderful:
ourselves alone are the authors and actors; we sketch out the scenario,
fill in the dialogue, cast the parts and play them all ourselves; we it
is who design and execute the scenery, clear the stage, and set the
piece in motion; we it is who yawn in the stalls, shudder in the pit,
and cheer from the gallery; from first to last, it is our own affair,
and we alone can step forward briskly at the curtain to receive our own
plaudits. Life cannot show elsewhere such a fine egotistical matter as
this business of dreaming, and a dream, well done, makes even literature
seem little more than its attenuated, halting shadow.
ON FILLING IN FORMS
To the uneducated, filling in forms of any kind is a considerable task.
The curt official demands puzzle them; the various particulars they are
asked to give do not readily come to hand; and, not least, the actual
business of writing, unfamiliar as it is, seems very long and wearisome.
It is no wonder then that the uneducated detest printed forms, and even
extend their dislike to the official bodies that issue such things and
compel honest labouring men to scratch their heads over them. But it is
curious that this dislike is shared by many of us who are not entirely
without letters, who can write our names and addresses and what not with
tolerable facility and despatch. We have not the same reason for our
distaste as the man to whom the feel of a pen is strange; and with our
superior knowledge, such as it is, it would seem that we have less
excuse, for at least we can understand that such things as forms may be
necessary in a world given over to figures and tabulation. Our distaste
for the business, then, seems irrational and nothing more nor less than
a characteristically English prejudice. Where there are definite grounds
for our objection, such as a mistrust of the official motive in
collecting information, or a feeling that we are being compelled
unnecessarily to take trouble and so forth, it is not mere prejudice;
but with most of us, grounds or no grounds, the feeling remains; and
whether this filling in of forms appears to be urgent and necessary or
not, we approach it, according to our mood, with something like
irritation or depression. There are people, of course, who do not feel
in this way, people who take kindly to all the methods of the
bureaucrat, who revere an official form whether it is reasonable or not,
and love organisation and routine for their own sakes. When a person
comes to believe that humanity will yet be saved by double-entry and the
card-index system, the beauty and significance of an official form,
correctly filled in and neatly docketed, is put beyond question. We
imagine that to one of Mr. Sidney Webb’s admirers, the very sight of a
printed form with inviting blank spaces will call forth the genuine
aesthetic emotion; to such a one a form is not only desirable in itself
but also beautiful because it exists as a symbol of a whole vision of
life, namely, that ordered system, rigid with its hierarchy of officials
in which some minds find their earthly paradise. When a man holds such
doctrines he has become mystical and is past arguing with; our objection
to bureaucratic paraphernalia, its forms and dockets and what not, is
nothing to him but the grimacing and babbling of the half-witted. On
this question of the value of forms, there are plainly two parties that
can neither come to terms nor yet agree to ignore each other. We stand
on each side of a great gulf, staring across, and occasionally making
half-witted, menacing cries and gestures. Let us keep to our own side.
If our dislike of forms has little or nothing in common with that of the
uneducated, who merely hate the unfamiliar task of recording; and if it
seems to exist with sufficiently reasonable grounds, we must either
bring to light reasons yet hidden or confess ourselves the victims of a
stupid prejudice. It may be, of course, that we dislike forms for the
same reason that our opponents, the official-minded, adore them,
namely, because they can be taken as symbols of a certain kind of life
for which we, on our part, have no admiration. But this will not explain
our irritation at having to set down a few paltry particulars on demand:
the real reason cuts more deeply, for it is a personal matter,
unconnected with our social and political views. Unlike the lovers of
forms, who have arid minds and are devoid of fancy, we on our side are
for the most part full-minded, expansive, imaginative fellows, and in
this can be found the reason for our dislike. We are asked to give an
account of ourselves, but not a genuine account of ourselves, the kind
we deliver to an old friend over the last few pipes and the dying fire;
that kind of account we would give with pleasure at any seasonable hour
to any fairly sympathetic listening official. No, our names, ages,
occupations, and so forth, must be set down in various ruled columns on
pieces of blue paper (usually of poor quality), which shall hereafter
stand in our stead. But no piece of paper, blue, buff, or virgin white,
can stand in our stead. No mere handful of facts can represent our
unique and exquisite selves. If all the facts had to be given, we might
be able to do something with them; they might gradually take shape into
something like a personality; but to be compelled to give only a few,
and those not the most essential, so that the beggarly total shall be
sent abroad to represent us, this is to be subjected to a pitiless
process of abstraction. It is an affront to the spirit. And it is
useless to argue that the few facts demanded are sufficient for the
particular official purpose for which they are required. Purpose or no
purpose, we are human beings, and if we are to be made known to other
human beings, let us be visible in all our colour and light. John Smith,
Rosedene, Leicester Road, Cashier, 53 years of age, and the rest, is a
libellous travesty of old Jack Smith, who always smokes a cherry-wood
pipe and is the best amateur rose-grower in the East Midlands. Glancing
at such a colourless list of petty details as--Henry Robinson, Coal
Merchant’s Clerk, aged 27, Single, who would imagine it was meant to
represent young Robinson who is so often seen about with the fair-headed
girl from the Post Office, who has a temperament and is known to be the
author of the greatest blank-verse tragedy of the time, a work so far
above its age that no theatrical manager will look at it? Think
of--William Shakespeare, Stratford and London, age 35, Married, Three
Children, Occupation--Player; or William Wordsworth, Rydal Mount,
Distributor of Stamps, Married, Church of England, and so on; these
things are at once grotesque and pitiful. A man in prison is simply
known by a number, and it is said that this alone tends to make him lose
some of his self-respect. So, too, when we find ourselves subjected to
this bowelless process, when we are bending over the printed forms and
staring dully at their stupid demands, something of the same kind is
happening to us as we answer question after question; we feel our
personality evaporating as it were; the lines growing more angular and
the colours fading; until what is left is not even a caricature, not
even a flickering shadow of our real essential selves. And all the while
we know that we carry with us a personality, richly deft and
fantastically coloured, something as opulent as the Indies and as
mysterious as China. Hence the irritation, the depression, the half
instinctive revolt, the protest that does not even find words for
itself. And we shall do well as the forms come snowing down upon us, to
recognise the revolt and assert the protest, for it may be that when we
come to the end of filling in these things, we shall find ourselves to
be nothing better than the paltry details we have so often set down: we
shall have lost our souls.
THREE MEN
The first is (or was) a schoolmaster. When he was in his later teens,
long before I met him, he had worked for an Oxford scholarship, and he
had worked so hard that a few days before the examination he was found
at a late hour babbling incoherently over his books, a nervous wreck. He
never took the examination and never went to Oxford, but, when he
recovered, passed into a little day-school. Nevertheless, Oxford had
entered into his soul. To me, he was more like an Oxford man, or what an
Oxford man ought to be, than any other person I have ever met. He had
all the larger and more genial traits clearly marked, with just the
least delicious hint of pleasant caricature, like a good actor
presenting a character-study of a younger Don. There were little
peculiar traits too, as of some mythical college, of a ghostly Balliol
or an unsubstantial ‘House.’ It may have been the result of deliberate
cultivation, or it may have been the gift of one of the younger gods, a
compensation for that disastrous breakdown; I do not know, but it was
harmless enough, and delicate fooling for a spectator.
I have not seen him for years, but I can call him well to mind even now;
a little man with hair loosely parted in the centre and falling over his
temples, and eyeglasses insecurely perched halfway down a long nose. In
the small town in which he (and I too) lived at that time, there were in
all five working-men’s clubs. He was a member of all five. Why, I do not
know, except that beer was very much cheaper in these places than it was
elsewhere. But even that does not explain why he was a member of them
all. But so it was. Nightly into one or other of these working-men’s
clubs, he carried his insecure eyeglasses and his Oxford manner, and was
well received, with the respect due to ‘a character,’ rather than with
the hardly suppressed laughter that followed him elsewhere. There he
would take a friend, and over the beer (which was both cheap and
excellent) he would talk at length, letting the ball of conversation
roll easily down the long cadences of his speech. His favourite theme, I
remember, was the utter worthlessness of the middle-classes, to which
he belonged, and he was the first person of my acquaintance to speak of
them as ‘the bourgeois.’ It is years since I last saw him, but I trust
that some school still knows him, chalky and pedantic, day by day, and
that at least five working-men’s clubs still see him, magnificent over
his beer, night by night.
The second man was a spectacled smoky fellow, getting on in years, whom
I knew but slightly. His trade was the writing of boys’ stories, not for
expensive illustrated books but for penny dreadfuls. What else he had
done to earn his bread, when he was only an aspirant, I do not know, but
that was his trade when I knew him. Year after year, he chronicled the
adventures of Dick This or Jack the Other at School or among Pirates or
Red Indians; and his pay was one guinea for every thousand words, which
was not bad, for he could turn out a good many thousand words in a week
and could also fill up with Boom! Crash! Bang! a kind of writing that
boys like. Although the scenes of his tales were laid in all parts of
the world, there was no nonsense about him; he did not travel in search
of local colour, but used a gazetteer and trusted to his powers of
invention, which were well-tried and excellent. But his heart was not in
the work and he took no pride in it. At regular intervals he would
simply send off so many thousand words to the Boys’ Monster Tales
Publishing Company Limited, and his stories came out under many
different names, not one of which was his own. He had a wife but no
family, few friends, and belonged to no club or society. The thing he
lived for was a great work in metaphysics, at which he had been engaged
for many years, and which was to be called ‘The Mind of the Universe.’
All his spare time and energy were given to thinking out the problems
that he had set himself, and he would weary his few visitors with
interminable talk in a philosophical jargon of his own making. Years
before, he had read a little handbook on Spinoza, which had brought a
new set of problems into his world, and which had so intrigued him that
he had determined to devote the remainder of his life to metaphysics.
But he had also made up his mind not to study the philosophers, because
their theories might keep him from original thought: he meant to think
everything out for himself. When he had erected his system, the world
would recognise it for what it was, and forgive his preposterous
stories of ‘Jack Marraway and the Terror of the Prairie’ and the rest.
He was wrong. I am no metaphysician but I know that his stories were
better than his grand original system of metaphysics. For, after years
of labour, he had only succeeded in enunciating paradoxes that were
stale jokes in Ionia, in dragging out cumbersome creaking theories that
even the long extinct State University of Hochensteilschwarzburg would
have rejected at a glance; and all written in that terrible jargon of
his. Yet it was a manly thing to do, and though all his labour was worth
little, it was not in vain, for it gave him secret incommunicable
pleasure and he felt himself to be a man marked off from the common run
of men; which he was. For the rest, he smoked prodigious quantities of
‘Meadowsweet Flake’--a vile tobacco, grossly doctored and scented.
The other man I never knew personally, but I received many accounts of
him, and his reputation, the legend of him, has been very dear to me. He
was a shopkeeper and sold, at a considerable profit, optical
instruments, spectacles and whatnot. But what set him apart from other
men was that he had had more bad verse through his hands than any other
person in these islands. It was his one great hobby to collect bad verse
and publish it in anthologies. He must have known more poetasters than
any other man living or dead. On the death of a well-known politician,
or immediately after any great public event, he would set to work and
gather up all the offscourings of the ‘Poets’ Corners’ of obscure
country papers. Thus, he it was, and no other, who edited _The Best
Poetical Tributes to the late Joseph Chamberlain_, and many other
anthologies. His system was, I fancy, to compel every contributor to
become a subscriber and take several copies of the volume in hand, so
that it was ensured a sale. The verse was always bad, the very worst
conceivable, for no one who wrote good verse would have suffered him to
live. Why he did it--and he produced innumerable volumes--is a mystery,
for there could not have been much money in it, and the same energy and
impudence would have given him a fortune in the quack medicine business.
I have thought sometimes that he was a satirist of a particularly deep
kind, but I have been assured by those who knew him that he was entirely
serious and innocently proud of the good work he was doing. Nor did he
allow his literary service to interfere with his trade. In the centre
of his shop-window there was a coloured life-size bust of Shakespeare
with a pair of eyeglasses on its nose. The bust hinted delicately to all
passers-by that though our man was but a shopkeeper, he too had served
the Muse and was the editor of the Hundred Best, etc.; the eyeglasses,
through which one caught the mild glance of the poet, indicated the
nature of the shop. It was admirable! And though the man himself is
dead, the shop remains and with it the bust. I saw it only a short time
ago, and was gladdened; indeed, there seems something lacking now when I
see Shakespeare without his eyeglasses; but one cannot, of course, be
dogmatic about such matters of taste.
All three men lived in one town, where I too lived for a season. And
there were others, more wonderful still, whom I cannot describe in this
place, nor perhaps in any other, for I write to be believed.
THE BOGEY OF SPACE
When Lafcadio Hearn comes to the end of _The Romance of the Milky Way_,
he tells us, a little wistfully, that the lovely old Japanese legend,
which makes the heavens ‘seem very near and warm and human,’ has
sometimes enabled him ‘to forget the monstrous facts of science, and the
stupendous horror of Space.’ And elsewhere, he writes of the terror that
he felt, in common with his philosophic guide, Herbert Spencer, at the
notion of infinite Space--‘the mere vague idea of that everlasting Night
into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring neither light nor
warmth.’ Most of us, I think, have been kept from sleep, at some time or
other, by similar emotions. ‘Of the Kosmos in the last resort,’ wrote
Stevenson, ‘science reports many doubtful things and all of them
appalling.’ From time to time, astronomers, thinking of nothing but
their strange study, have brought us news of the macrocosm, bewildering
measurements, and ghastly phenomena, the full import of which, suddenly
realised in a quiet hour, has left us sick at heart. From these
monstrous data our imagination has dizzily fashioned a vision of the
universe compared with which the hells of the theologians seemed lively
and companionable.