folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts
into oblivion. It is not so with me, to whom sleep is a coy mistress,
much given to a teasing inconstancy and for ever demanding to be
wooed--‘lest too light winning make the prize light.’ I used to read,
with wonder, those sycophantic stories of the warlike supermen, the
great troublers of the world’s peace, Cromwell, Napoleon, and the like,
who, thanks to their ‘iron wills,’ could lie down and plunge themselves
immediately into deep sleep, to wake up, refreshed, at a given time.
Taking these fables to heart, I would resolve to do likewise, and, going
to bed, would clench my teeth, look as determined as possible in the
darkness, and command the immediate presence of sleep. But alas! the
very act of concentration seemed to make me more wakeful than ever, and
I would pass hours in tormenting sleeplessness. I had overlooked the
necessity of having an ‘iron will,’ my own powers of will having little
or none of this peculiar metallic quality. But how uncomfortable it must
have been living with these iron-willed folks! Who would want to
remonstrate and argue with them? It would be worse than beating an anvil
with a sledge-hammer. I must confess that I always suspect the men who
boast that they unvaryingly fall asleep as soon as they get into
bed--those ‘as soon as my head touches the pillow’ fellows. To me, there
is something inhuman, something callous and almost bovine, in the
practice. I suspect their taste in higher matters. Iron wills apart,
there must be a lack of human sympathy or depth in a man who can thus
throw off, with his clothes, his waking feelings and thoughts, and
ignore completely those memories and fancies which
“...will sometimes leap,
From hiding-places ten years deep.”
To share a bed-room with one of these fellows is to lose one’s faith in
human nature, for, even after the most eventful day, there is no
comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the
balance of the day’s pleasure and pain. They sink, at once, into stupid,
heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all
snore abominably!
The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in
their ineffectuality. In _Lavengro_ (or is it _Romany Rye_?) there is an
impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of
Wordsworth’s poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow’s
malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has
never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted
on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any
reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.
Discussing the question, some time ago, with an old friend, she gave me
her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine herself
performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind
becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain.
Her favourite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb
upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I
tried--though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine--but it was
of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and
gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in
general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my
friend T. and what he said, and what I said, and I wondered how T. was
faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it
went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or
the Rocky Mountains--but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth
describes in _Prometheus Unbound_, that vague region filled with
Dreams and the light imaginings of men,
is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall.
And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it.
But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening
the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for re-reading (not
for the first, and, please Heaven! not the last time) Lamb’s letters, I
came upon the following, in a note to Southey; ‘But there is a man in my
office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning to night, and never
gets beyond corporal and material verities!... When I can’t sleep o’
nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon a given subject, and go
prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have
literally found it answer.’ ... There is promise in this, and we all
have our Mr. H.’s, whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts
upon us like a dose of laudanum. This very night I will dismiss such
trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the
phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore.
ON TRAVEL BY TRAIN
Remove an Englishman from his hearth and home, his centre of corporal
life, and he becomes a very different creature, one capable of sudden
furies and roaring passions, a deep sea of strong emotions churning
beneath his frozen exterior. I can pass, at all times, for a quiet,
neighbourly fellow, yet I have sat, more than once, in a railway
carriage with black murder in my heart. At the mere sight of some
probably inoffensive fellow-passenger my whole being will be invaded by
a million devils of wrath, and I ‘could do such bitter business as the
day would quake to look on.’
There is one type of traveller that never fails to rouse my quick
hatred. She is a large, middle-aged woman, with a rasping voice and a
face of brass. Above all things, she loves to invade smoking
compartments that are already comfortably filled with a quiet company of
smokers; she will come bustling in, shouting over her shoulder at her
last victim, a prostrate porter, and, laden with packages of all
maddening shapes and sizes, she will glare defiantly about her until
some unfortunate has given up his seat. She is often accompanied by some
sort of contemptible, whining cur that is only one degree less offensive
than its mistress. From the moment that she has wedged herself in there
will be no more peace in the carriage, but simmering hatred, and
everywhere dark looks and muttered threats. But everyone knows her.
Courtesy and modesty perished in the world of travel on the day when she
took her first journey; but it will not be long before she is in hourly
danger of extinction, for there are strong men in our midst.
There are other types of railway travellers, not so offensive as the
above, which combines all the bad qualities, but still annoying in a
varying degree to most of us; and of these others I will enumerate one
or two of the commonest. First, there are those who, when they would go
on a journey, take all their odd chattels and household utensils and
parcel them up in brown paper, disdaining such things as boxes and
trunks; furthermore, when such eccentrics have loaded themselves up
with queer-shaped packages they will cast about for baskets of fruit and
bunches of flowers to add to their own and other people’s misery. Then
there are the simple folks who are for ever eating and drinking in
railway carriages. No sooner are they settled in their seats but they
are passing each other tattered sandwiches and mournful scraps of
pastry, and talking with their mouths full, and scattering crumbs over
the trousers of fastidious old gentlemen. Sometimes they will peel and
eat bananas with such rapidity that nervous onlookers are compelled to
seek another compartment.
Some children do not make good travelling companions, for they will do
nothing but whimper or howl throughout a journey, or they will spend all
their time daubing their faces with chocolate or trying to climb out of
the window. And the cranks are always with us; on the bleakest day, they
it is who insist on all the windows being open, but in the sultriest
season they go about in mortal fear of draughts, and will not allow a
window to be touched.
More to my taste are the innocents who always find themselves in the
wrong train. They have not the understanding necessary to fathom the
time-tables, nor will they ask the railway officials for advice, so
they climb into the first train that comes, and trust to luck. When they
are being hurtled towards Edinburgh, they will suddenly look round the
carriage and ask, with a mild touch of pathos, if they are in the right
train for Bristol. And then, puzzled and disillusioned, they have to be
bundled out at the next station, and we see them no more. I have often
wondered if these simple voyagers ever reach their destinations, for it
is not outside probability that they may be shot from station to
station, line to line, until there is nothing mortal left of them.
Above all other railway travellers, I envy the mighty sleepers,
descendants of the Seven of Ephesus. How often, on a long, uninteresting
journey, have I envied them their sweet oblivion. With Lethe at their
command, no dull, empty train journey, by day or night, has any terrors
for them. Knowing the length of time they have to spend in the train,
they compose themselves and are off to sleep in a moment, probably
enjoying the gorgeous adventures of dream while the rest of us are
looking blankly out of the window or counting our fingers. Two minutes
from their destination they stir, rub their eyes, stretch themselves,
collect their baggage, and, peering out of the window, murmur: ‘My
station, I think.’ A moment later they go out, alert and refreshed,
Lords of Travel, leaving us to our boredom.
Seafaring men make good companions on a railway journey. They are always
ready for a pipe and a crack with any man, and there is usually some
entertaining matter in their talk. But they are not often met with away
from the coast towns. Nor do we often come across the confidential
stranger in an English railway carriage, though his company is
inevitable on the Continent and, I believe, in America. When the
confidential stranger does make an appearance here, he is usually a very
dull dog, who compels us to yawn through the interminable story of his
life, and rides some wretched old hobby-horse to death.
There is one more type of traveller that must be mentioned here, if only
for the guidance of the young and simple. He is usually an elderly man,
neatly dressed, but a little tobacco-stained, always seated in a corner,
and he opens the conversation by pulling out a gold hunter and remarking
that the train is at least three minutes behind time. Then, with the
slightest encouragement, he will begin to talk, and his talk will be all
of trains. As some men discuss their acquaintances, or others speak of
violins or roses, so he talks of trains, their history, their quality,
their destiny. All his days and nights seem to have been passed in
railway carriages, all his reading seems to have been in time-tables. He
will tell you of the 12.35 from this place and the 3.49 from the other
place, and how the 10.18 ran from So-and-so to So-and-so in such a time,
and how the 8.26 was taken off and the 5.10 was put on; and the
greatness of his subject moves him to eloquence, and there is passion
and mastery in his voice, now wailing over a missed connection or a
departed hero of trains, now exultantly proclaiming the glories of a
non-stop express or a wonderful run to time. However dead you were to
the passion, the splendour, the pathos, in this matter of trains, before
he has done with you you will be ready to weep over the 7.37 and cry out
in ecstasy at the sight of the 2.52.
Beware of the elderly man who sits in the corner of the carriage and
says that the train is two minutes behind time, for he is the Ancient
Mariner of railway travellers, and will hold you with his glittering
eye.
THE PEEP
My friend Glindersby is a changed man, and, for my part, I think it a
change for the better. For the one thing that had always spoiled
Glindersby for the company of sane men was his ever-recurring praise of
the present age and its mechanical ingenuities. Though brought up to a
noble old profession, he was one of those who are for ever crying up the
marvels that we have of late brought into the world; he would subscribe
to such things as _Wonders of Modern Science_ or _Engineering Marvels of
the World_, and could be found gloating over vilely-coloured prints of
airships and electric lifts. Because there was a railway at Kamchatka or
a telephone at Tangiers, he could not understand why all men should not
be happy. In short, he was one of those latter-day fanatics who, in a
kind of ecstasy, are always crying out to each other, ‘Look at Radium
...!’ and ‘What will they do next!’ and other phrases from their dark
liturgy. This was Glindersby’s one failing, and it had, I knew, kept him
from much good company. Now, I say, he is changed, for he seems to have
lost his old damaging enthusiasm, and in the late hours of fireside
confessional he has now begun telling a certain trumpery tale, a piece
of hocus-pocus if there ever was one, to account for the change.
A short time ago, at the house of some friends, a cranky set, he was
introduced to a Hindoo who had just arrived in this country, and who
might be called Ram Dar Chubb. They said little to each other on that
first evening, but a few days later they met in the street, and the
Hindoo suggested that they should visit his rooms. Glindersby,
suspecting that the other was feeling lonely in this new world of white
faces and black streets, expressed his pleasure, and accompanied the
hospitable Ram Dar up three flights of stairs. He was soon making
himself comfortable in a sitting-room that seemed to contain nothing out
of the common, with the exception of a large graven metal bowl and some
Oriental knick-knacks on a small side-table. The two men quickly plunged
into talk, and Glindersby, beginning with the difference between the
Eastern and Western civilisations, was not long before he was
declaiming--almost breathlessly--upon his favourite themes. Here at last
he had found fit audience; Ram Dar was an ideal listener. And Glindersby
rose to the occasion; telephones, telegraphy, airships, turbine engines,
calculating machines, electric kettles, and a thousand other marvels
were all his concern. There was no end to his talk of valves, pressures,
and horse power. Very soon he had paraphrased the introduction and at
least half a dozen chapters of _Wonders of Modern Science_ and
_Engineering Marvels of the World_, and his monologue soon became as
highly coloured and altogether detestable as their monstrous prints.
Looking sturdily across at the immobile brown face, he expanded,
boasted, and bragged, until it might have appeared that he himself was
ready at any time to bridge the Channel and irrigate the Sahara Desert.
Throughout this untimely rhapsody Ram Dar sat motionless, his attitude
expressive of that eternal patience of the East which all Glindersby’s
hearers ought to have had.
‘Conquest of Nature’s just begun,’ cried Glindersby, who by this time
was almost dithyrambic, and talked in capital letters and dots as if he
were one of Mr. Wells’ characters. ‘You’ve been standing still for
thousands of years.... Stagnation!... Now we’re going forward.... Made
bigger advance in last hundred years than in all the thousands
before.... Wireless Telegraphy!... Aeroplanes!... Space annihilated....
Just beginning.’ And he leaned forward impressively: ‘What will it be in
one hundred years’ time?... Or three hundred?... Or seven hundred?...
Nature finally conquered.... All her forces harnessed..... Man....
Master of the World.... Stupendous buildings!... Marvellous
machinery!... Fleets of Airships!... What wouldn’t I give for a peep
into the Future!...’
‘You would look into the future?’ broke in his hearer, for the first
time.
Glindersby was somewhat taken aback by this unexpected interruption. ‘I
would give anything to see what we shall achieve,’ he cried, ‘only, of
course, it’s--er--impossible.’
There was a flash of white teeth opposite. ‘No, it can be done,’
murmured Ram Dar, ‘Past, Present, Future! It is all an illusion. We have
known these things a long time. You wish to look into the Future?...’
And he rose to his feet.
Still suspecting some pleasantry, the other forced a laugh, and
stammered out: ‘Above all things.... Pity no way of doing it.... Final
Conquest of Nature.’
By this time, the Hindoo had pulled forward the little side-table, on
which stood the great metal bowl. To Glindersby’s astonishment, the
latter was filled with a liquid blacker than ink, and had, fastened to
the edge, several little pans, into which Ram Dar quickly poured a
quantity of grey powder.
‘How far forward will you look, and at what place?’ asked Ram Dar as he
proceeded to set fire to the little heaps of powder.
Glindersby stared at the dense fumes that were encircling the great
bowl. Half mechanically, almost unwillingly, he gasped out: ‘Oh,
Coventry ... go-ahead place, I b’lieve ... eight hundred years hence.’
There was some muttering in a strange tongue, and then a dark hand waved
across the rolling, sickly-smelling fumes. ‘Come!’ cried the voice of
the Hindoo, who must have trafficked with the devil, whom he resembled
at that moment.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, Glindersby found himself in the midst
of the fumes, bending over the bowl and staring at the ebony surface of
the liquid within. ‘Near Coventry.... Your year, two thousand seven
hundred and thirty....’ The voice seemed to come from miles away. Next
moment, the fumes, the bowl, everything had vanished, and he seemed to
be looking, as from a great height, at a large meadow where a number of
sheep with their lambs were browsing. It seemed a bright morning in
early summer. There was no shadow of smoke; the air was perfectly clear.
In one corner of the meadow a boy was seated under a large elm. He was
bare-legged, sandalled and simply clad in a bright blue robe, and, all
the time, he appeared to be playing upon a little pipe. Near by was a
small shrine garlanded with red roses, and the grass around was strewn
with crimson petals scattered by the breeze. Cloud-shadows drifted
across the grass; the sheep moved steadily forward, with their lambs
capering about them; a few more crimson petals were shaken from the
shrine; the boy still fingered his little pipe in the shade of the
elm....
‘It is not what you expected to find,’ cried a voice in his ear; and
Glindersby looked up and saw the smiling face of Ram Dar Chubb above the
bowl over which they had both been bending.
I say that Glindersby is a changed man, and that I, for one, approve the
change in him. But I think that this story of his is full of lies; and
that as for Ram Dar Chubb, he is an obvious invention, and cheap at
that.
ON VULGAR ERRORS
I often feel sorry that so many quaint and pretty fancies, such as we
find gravely weighed by Sir Thomas Brown in his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_,
have fluttered away from our knowing modern world like so many
butterflies. After all, there was little harm and often a great deal of
poetry or grotesque humour in these ‘vulgar errors,’ as Sir Thomas
called them. Now that the ordinary man has flung away these
gaily-coloured fancies, I do not know that he is any better off with
such dismal scraps of learning as are coming his way at the present
time. His ancestors were fanciful fellows with little exact knowledge;
his descendants may occupy themselves with a vast accumulated store of
learning; meanwhile, he himself, our contemporary, has relinquished his
old fancies and quaint dreams, and received little or nothing, as yet,
in return. Now, barren of belief, he stands waiting for the meagre
crumbs of science.
The Wandering Jew no longer creeps past our doors; we buried him long
ago, and there is the end of a grand old tale. No Salamanders live in
our fires. No more do ‘swans, a little before their death, sing most
sweetly’; another gleam of poetry has faded from the world. We meet with
the Unicorn and the Phœnix only in coats-of-arms and commercial
advertisements. The Basilisk, or Cockatrice, which came from a cock’s
egg, hatched under a toad or serpent, and which could kill at a distance
by the power of the eye, no longer haunts the world; perhaps we do not
regret him, yet the briefest glance at him, while he was looking some
other way, would have been an experience worth remembering. The mermaids
and mermen have long since ridden away from our coasts on their
water-horses, driving their water-bulls before them. The giants have
eaten the pigmies, and have themselves succumbed to indigestion. Our
acetylene lights have frightened away Jack-o’-Lanthorn himself, and
there is no green cheese in the moon, and very little cheese worth
eating on the earth.
Does the Glastonbury thorn still blossom at Christmastide? Certainly
the ass still bears the sign of the Cross on its back, and the haddock
still shows the black marks left by the finger and thumb of St. Peter.
Do our seamen still take cauls with them to guard against drowning? I am
afraid that barnacles, when broken off from the sides of a ship, no
longer turn into geese. Nor do mandrakes shriek out when they are
uprooted, these days. Do our country girls still put the Bible, with
sixpence between the pages of Ruth, under their pillows at night, in
order to dream of their future husbands? How many of us put bay leaves
under our pillows so that we may have true dreams?
Sneezing, in our time, does not call for a blessing. Nor do we bless the
moon when it is at the full, nor ask our ladies to drop it a curtsey at
the time of its rebirth. Omens trouble us no longer; it does not matter
how we put on our stockings and shoes, or, at least, we do not feel that
good or ill fortune is bound up with the order of our dressing. We do
not attempt to read our destiny in the leaping flames on the hearth, nor
look for purses and coffins in the coals that fly out from time to time.
On the rare occasions when we see a lighted candle, we do not expect to
find it presageful, and we are not likely to try divination from the
behaviour of the gas or electric light. A tingling ear, an itching nose,
a burning cheek, and other little pranks of the blood and nerves pass as
a jest among us. We allow no trafficking with amulets and charms, except
as the merest decoration, and we attempt to read the future only through
our pass-books. We leave Fate severely alone, not because we think that
it is of no importance, but because our lives do not seem of sufficient
consequence to be meddled with; wherein we are more modest than our
forefathers, but also, I think, more miserable.
All these quaint beliefs have gone in the wind, and it is well, for the
world cannot stand still. As I have said before, there was little harm
in them, and often a great deal of poetry; they have furnished some good
folk, high and low, with many a heartening tale for the chimney-corner;
their weft of phantasy has been woven into many a fine ballad or
romance. But, shrinking from the fierce light of Truth, these fanciful
notions left us long ago.
Yet we must not hasten to plume ourselves. Have we not our own over-ripe
crop of errors? Are we not for ever swallowing lies a thousand times
more hurtful than the old pleasing or idle fancies? We cannot weave
immortal romances out of the woof of falsehood that comes to us now; if
we want tales, we must hire some fellow to put his tongue in his cheek
and mechanically turn out volume after volume of ‘bright fiction.’ We
cannot believe in the Salamander, a poetical notion, but we are always
ready to take it on trust that Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who votes for us, is
a very great hero, and Mr. Greatheart, who keeps his own counsel, is a
very deep scoundrel.
The old fancies were sustained by the people’s sense of wonder; they
arose naturally and no one benefited by them, except an occasional
sorcerer. Our vulgar errors are not a natural growth, but are forced
upon us by the cunning and powerful members, who tell us what we are to
believe. We do not acknowledge the Basilisk, with his deadly stare, but
we have still a touching faith in Such-and-Such, the scientific
reformer, with his insufferable jargon. We do not put bayleaves under
our pillows to have true dreams, but we put the _Daily Dope_ on our
breakfast-tables so that we may have false ones. And we are too apt to
believe that (in the fine phrase of a modern novelist) ‘we are all very
fine people,’ which is a very vulgar error indeed, and more mischievous
than Jack-o’-Lanthorn and more deadly than the Cockatrice.
ON GOSSIP
Any and every kind of tittle-tattle goes by the name of gossip, no
matter whether the subject is the price of cauliflowers, or the foreign
policy of Chile, or--darkening to scandal--the weather. In this place, I
would limit gossip to that discussion of other people’s characters and
affairs which is so well known to us, and to every other society. And I
would call it scandal and have done with it, only scandal is a dog with
a very bad name, while gossip still capers and frisks, unchecked though
not encouraged. There is also this distinction: we--that is, you and
I--may condescend to gossip: it is the others who talk scandal.