everywhere an unfailing recreation. It began with the wild gestures and
uncouth jabbering of our remote ancestors, squatting in their caves;
perhaps it will end only when the last fire is quenched. Wise men,
priests, philosophers, and prophets have thundered against it, but their
very imprecations only floated about as flotsam and jetsam on the vast
ocean of gossip; their very names have come down to us only as a
whispered rumour. The stream of talk flows on, and as yet no
denunciations have dammed it up. Gossip is an endless game without
rules; a thing untouched by changing fashions and varying modes of
thought; one of the few everlasting diversions of humanity. Men, who
have had more say in public if less in private, have always been prompt
to accuse women of devoting too much of their time and energy to this
dubious sport. Gossip, they have declared, is woman’s greatest pastime.
But here at least our feminists, who have spluttered over so many
imaginary wrongs, have passed by one undoubted grievance, for the truth
is, men are as much given to gossiping as women. Man’s talk may sound
more important because it involves wider interests, yet a good deal of
it is nothing more nor less than gossip.
Now it seems to me that in this perpetual chatter about other people,
which we all hasten to denounce, but which gives all of us pleasure at
some time or other, our delight springs, broadly speaking, from two
main sources, one of which is good and the other bad. And according to
which predominates gossip may be described as profitable or hurtful to
those people concerned in it.
The good side of gossip arises out of that eager, seemingly insatiable
curiosity which distinguishes men from the brutes and civilised men from
savages. Much of our idlest chatter is secretly leavened by this
curiosity, which is in its purest form a noble thing. For what is the
pursuit of knowledge but the play of a splendid but entirely irrational
inquisitiveness? Most of the higher branches of knowledge, metaphysics,
pure mathematics, and so on, serve no practical purpose; sober
philosophers and studious mathematicians are in reality the wildest of
fellows, for ever pursuing a laborious quest into the absolute Unknown.
A great deal of this fine curiosity goes to the making of gossip, which
is something more than a casual exchange of news. When we talk over the
Smiths and the Browns, not only do we record events, but we examine
motives and estimate character, and in a roundabout way we exchange
ideas. The greatest historian can do little more; his subject is of more
importance, that is all. The difference between Mrs. Jones giving the
real reason why the Johnsons left the town so suddenly, and Professor
Jones, writing the _Life and Times of Cardinal Richelieu_, is one of
degree only; both are undertaking the same kind of work, and probably
both are stirred by the same motives. We are all historians without
knowing it.
Our gossip and scandal is a grub, which in a hundred years’ time, with
the advent of the historian, will become a chrysalis; and in four or
five hundred years’ time, the hard shell will be burst open, and there
will be seen the winged splendour of epic poetry or romantic drama. Have
not all the subjects of history and epic poetry once been nothing more
than eager talk in the court or the kitchen? ‘Have you heard the
latest?’--the cry went: then followed the pretty little scandal of
Helen, wife of Menelaus, and the Troy affair; or perhaps a full account
of that queer business of Prince Hamlet at the Court of Denmark; or the
whole story of those strange doings at Verona, in which Montague’s son,
young Romeo, cut such a figure. The names and stories that were
whispered in ante-rooms and bawled out in taverns, centuries ago, will
yet provoke future historians, fire poets and romancers yet unborn, and
will yet move unknown generations to wild laughter and tears, to anger
and pity. How many noble studies have arisen out of this eternal
curiosity of men! How many lovely things have flowered from this common
soil of Gossip!
The other source of our pleasure in this personal kind of gossip is less
innocent; indeed, it is--and ever has been--a great worker of mischief.
It proceeds, I believe, from the strain of the Pharisee that is in most
of us. When we discuss the weaknesses and misfortunes of others, we are
not solely prompted by that spirit of curiosity to which I have
referred. Nor is it, as a rule, direct enmity or mere malice that
prompts us, for the people we discuss may be almost unknown to us, or,
on the other hand, they may be old, well-tried friends. But when we are
indulging in this sort of talk, we suddenly feel a sense of our own
superiority, we glow with added self-respect. Thus, there are four or
five of us chattering, and someone mentions the absent Jones, who is a
common acquaintance. ‘Ah! Poor old Jones!’ we exclaim; and are quickly
in full cry after the quarry. ‘The trouble with old Jones, ...’ one
begins. ‘You know, he ought not to have, ...’ opens the next critic. ‘As
I’ve told Jones many a time, ...’ cries a third. So voice after voice
swells the chorus of criticism. The superficial show of concern and
sympathy is a mere formality and deceives nobody; everyone is eager to
contribute his or her scrap of censure; eyes are brightening, tongues
are loosened. That slight but distinctly uncomfortable sense of
inferiority which we may possibly have felt in the actual presence of
Jones is now compensated for by a marked sense of our own superiority
and a glow of self-satisfaction.
Unless we are on our guard, we are ready to sacrifice victim after
victim for the sake of this delectable but transitory feeling. Every
night, in countless drawing-rooms, knives are reddened and altars smoke
to propitiate this dark god of self-righteousness. And the victim of
this dreadful worship is too often young and open-hearted and
beautiful--and a woman.
A ROAD AND SOME MOODS
I have been living lately near a fine highway, which cuts across the
blurred edge of a town and makes straight for the open country. By this
road a man may quickly escape from the town and start upon almost any
journey. The road will take him some part of the way to Edinburgh, or
Moscow, or Bagdad, or the mountains of the moon. Or he may use it, as I
do, for a saunter in the morning sunshine.
The road rises as it leaves the town, and a little way beyond my windows
it climbs to a summit, so that, walking forward, one sees nothing in
front but the sharp, slightly curved edge of the road against the sky.
Though I have travelled this way so often, each time that I set eyes on
the clean cut of the road and the great emptiness beyond, something in
me is thrilled, faintly yet perceptibly, like taut wires troubled by a
gust of wind. I know well, none better, what lies at the other side of
the hill, the easy stretch of highway descending into a pleasant green
valley; yet the sight of the little summit still holds for me some vague
promise. But every hill in the world is brother to that ‘peak in
Darien.’ One day, maybe, I shall stand on the crest of this tiny hill,
and find that all beyond is changed. I shall look down, maybe, upon a
sea covered with strange ships, or into the thronged streets of a
magical city.
The other morning I left the house for the first time for several days,
and walked slowly up the road. There was a touch of autumn abroad. In
the mellow sunlight the trees were putting on their last splendid
livery. The air was still, and had in it a faint odour of burning
leaves.
In such a season, golden, spacious, but already whispering of the end,
there will often come to a man a certain solemn mood, a vein of not
unpleasing melancholy, and for a little while he will see all life
moving to a grave measure, an adagio for strings. But the mood that
encompassed me that morning was very different, and much less welcome.
As I walked forward I seemed to sink into depression:
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness--and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.
In a fair state of health and unassailed by bad fortune, I walked in
that genial sunshine--as a man will--the victim of self-torment or
inexplicable misery, the Old Man of the Sea heavy on my shoulders.
Now when I came to the summit of the road and looked down the other
side, my whole mood was changed in a flash. And for no other reason than
this: an inn stands there, a little way back from the road, and its
walls had been newly done a creamy white, so that they showed dazzlingly
against the foliage near by. That is all.
But the moment that my eyes fell upon these gleaming white walls my mood
was changed, and I saw another vision of life. At that moment, as when a
loved person enters a room, it seemed to me as if the footlights of the
world were suddenly turned up, and I could hear the strings and flutes
of the great orchestra of life. I saw the road before me dancing away to
the hills, and the hills themselves standing in silent jubilation. It
was one of those rare moments when the passion, the wonder, the mystery
of life smite through a man’s flesh and bone, and set his spirit
towering above good and evil fortune, fearless, exultant, eager for the
best and worst of human existence. Such moments come to us on a sudden
wave of exultation, and then leave us to be carried gently forward by
the customary easy flow of thoughts and emotions. What marks their
passage in a man’s life, what heroic promptings they bring, what
valorous decisions are born of their passing cannot be told, least of
all by the man himself. I know that I stayed for a few seconds on the
crest of the hill, and then continued my walk. The rare moment had come
and gone, sweeping away my former dull mood and leaving me in a pleasant
reverie. I walked along, thinking, maybe, of inns and the part they have
played in Romance, or of whitened walls and the time when even London
was a city of white buildings; or I thought about myself (as you do),
and what a fine fellow I should be if I were not a fool. It is no great
matter what I thought.
But mark how little of a man’s life he can explain, no matter how often
he opens the doors and searches the dusty lumber rooms of his mind.
There was no reason, in or out of nature, for my first mood of
depression. And, to me, there would seem as little reason for the sudden
change, the momentary exultation, and the pleasant aftermath. At times
the sight of a mountain of felicity will not raise a man’s spirits; at
other times, if his foot trips over a molehill, he will cry out in
ecstasy at the goodness of life. We never talk to less purpose than when
we say of a man who is almost a stranger: ‘He ought to be happy, for he
has this and that at his command.’ Knowing our man, and being aware of
what life is doing with him and what he is doing with life, we might
hazard a guess at his state of mind, but even then it is perilous. Mark
also how we realise the beauty and blessing of life itself only in rare,
inexplicable moments, and then most keenly. It comes to us then like a
sudden blare of trumpets in the wind. We are always ready to talk and
write about the wonder of human existence, but, unless we are something
more than common men, we do not pass the day and lie down at night
thrilled by the thought of our participation in this greatest of games.
We go our way as best we can, carried forward or swept back by the ebb
and flow of circumstance, and are by turn triumphant, masterful,
listless, fearful, despairing.
Perhaps to some of us the moments of revelation, the flashes of insight,
never come at all; to the best of us they come but rarely. Life has
seemed to us, for months or years maybe, an overcrowded, beggarly
repast, at which a man must snatch at morsels and crumbs of joy: now, in
one flash of time, it will seem a divine banquet, the high festival of
immortal creatures. The moment passes, but something has been left
behind.
ON A CERTAIN CONTEMPORARY ESSAYIST
IN the early thirties of the last century, readers of _Fraser’s
Magazine_ were puzzled, startled or irritated by a certain
‘Clothes-Philosophy,’ which was expounded to them month by month by an
almost unknown Scotch fire-eater, a lover of brand-new words and riotous
syntax. Such readers were privileged to witness the first great eruption
of the Carlyle volcano. Doubtless it took most of them nearly twenty
years to bring themselves to say that they had enjoyed the spectacle,
and even then they were probably lying; but still, it was a privilege.
But lest we should be too humble about our own day, I hasten to point
out that we too have our ‘Clothes-Philosophy,’ and that it is cast in a
simpler, more pleasing mould than the older one. It is, too, much more
of a true ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ and is no elaborate mystification, no
clumping Teutonic allegory, born in a study, but the real thing, coming
newly every week or month from the tailor’s counter. Although he has his
place here as a man of letters and may never have handled a needle or a
pair of scissors, Mr. H. Dennis Bradley, I am sure, will not object to
being called a tailor. It would be absurd of him to do so, for it is
this very trade of tailoring, hitherto somewhat slighted, that he is now
ennobling with his pen. But it would be equally absurd if we, on our
part, set down Mr. Bradley merely as an astute advertiser who simply
wants to make us buy his suits, one who is satisfied with clothing our
carcases and is ready to leave mind and soul untended.
If Mr. Dennis Bradley is not at heart a man of letters, then I do not
know the breed. From the very beginning, I divined the essential quality
in him. I see him, in my mind’s eye, turning from the bundles of spring
suitings, from the company of cloth merchants and cutters, into his
sanctum to be alone with his art, or rather, his second and greater art,
that of writing. There, I see him laboriously yet lovingly beating out
phrase after phrase until each little essay is worthy of his great
public. Lamb once said of a man that he would have been a tailor only
he lacked the spirit. But think of how Lamb would have praised Mr.
Bradley, who has the spirit to be not only an excellent tailor but a
writer as well; and not, mark you, merely a tailor playing at authorship
and trying to keep the needle and thread out of our sight, but an author
and tailor at one and the same time, giving us, as it were, the
literature and philosophy of shopkeeping and suit-making. This is to be
a man of note, an originator, a force in letters. I fancy I can hear the
unborn professors rustling their papers on ‘Bradley and His Age’ or ‘The
Old Bond Street Circle.’
Being an original, Mr. Dennis Bradley cannot be fitted into any of our
little pigeon-holes; he is not easily labelled; but as I have already
spoken of his essays, we will keep the term and call him an essayist.
His work, however, has had, and still has, so many phases that we shall
do well to discriminate a little. There has been, for example, a change
in his manner; and it has shown us, on the whole, a steady development,
that advance towards the perfection of the instrument which marks the
true artist. In his early work there was an irregularity, a wildness, a
careless profusion, which promised much but hinted that the artist was
not yet fully grown. He tried, if I remember rightly, to push his prose
as near to poetry as it would go; and it was only later, when the
thought became more weighty, that he turned to the quieter yet more
impressive manner, the chiselled form and the pregnant phrase. During
this early period, one of his favourite themes was Youth and Age; no new
thing, it is true, but one to which he gave new significance by his
characteristic treatment. When he exalted Youth and covered Age with
ridicule, was he not interpreting the spirit of the times? One can
discover, in that alone, the born man of letters. The times,
disillusioned, were all for Youth, and he, divining it, stepped forth as
our spokesman. Just because he happened to be also a tailor, just
because young men happen to spend more on clothes than old men do, is no
reason why Mr. Bradley should be robbed of his praise as a writer
sensitive to our subtle changes of feeling.
Although there are some persons, not unpretending in criticism, who
would have us believe that they prefer the earlier, wilder note, happily
they are few, and most of us, I imagine, pass with pleasure to the
later, more chastened form. Here we can remark his versatility, his
admirable method of appealing to one type of mind after another. Now, he
will give us a bright little philosophical treatise, and, sweeping away
the accumulation of trivialities, he will dig in a brisk sentence or two
to the roots of life, as in his essay on ‘The Three Essentials.’ Now, he
will frankly appeal to the hard-headed man of affairs, and will
annihilate half-a-dozen economic heresies in one paragraph. Sometimes it
is the social rather than the purely economic problem that engages him.
But his large sweep does not make for easy classification, and I, for
one, cannot attempt to discriminate between such things, say, as ‘A
Prophet on Profits,’ ‘Comparisons,’ and ‘Economy and Rubbish.’ Now and
again, it is true, he seems to lay himself open to the charge of
sacrificing everything to the topical appeal; but, after all, these are
critical times, when men are looking for light; and, at the worst, the
manner, unique in our letters, will remain to beguile us. Moreover,
there also will remain the personal note, for like all your true
essayists he does not hesitate to reveal his personality, to make the
reader his confidant.
But when all is said and done, the most remarkable thing about Mr.
Bradley, the thing that makes him unique, is his double rôle. One would
have thought that his author-self would have come to despise and ignore
his tailor-self. But no--their allegiance holds, and is, indeed,
stronger than ever. In the early days, there was not always a perfect
understanding between the two. The author would come forward and have
his say, without leaving any opening for the tailor, who had perforce to
push his way to the front and shout the louder. In short, the transition
from pure literature to commerce was not always well done: one was often
uncomfortably aware of a hiatus. But now--to be apt in metaphor--such
creases have been ironed out and the whole thing fits together and is
apparently seamless. We begin in the outside world, with all its
heart-breaking problems, its gloom and strife; we are driven hither and
thither, menaced with ruin; and yet when we come to the end, always we
find ourselves in the same solemn temple, our one place of refuge,
serene as demi-gods among the spring and autumn suitings. We never know
at first what terrible problem we shall be asked to face, but always we
have but to follow this new Ariel of ours to be led out of the world
into the sanctuary in Old Bond Street. There are times, indeed, when the
author, the victim of temperament, is so plunged into gloom that it is
the tailor alone who saves the situation, who arrives just when we seem
altogether lost, so that his inevitable final refrain of ‘Lounge Suits,
Dinner Suits, Dress Suits, and Overcoats’ comes to our ears like a
benediction.
Surely it is pleasant to reflect that one so unique in our letters is
able, week by week and month after month, to appeal to such a large
public, to dower his work with such lordly space and noble type, to have
his own illustrator, even though this last is somewhat out of key, being
a trifle too flippant and sybaritic for such solemn letterpress. I will
wager that this ‘Clothes-Philosophy’ of ours has made more friends, not
least among editors and others, than ever did the one our grandfathers
knew. Which is a fine feather for Mr. Bradley’s cap--if ever he should
take to wearing one.
ON LIFE AND LUCKY-BAGS
Reader, does your mind ever run back to the time when you were in
receipt of a regular allowance, when you could be described almost as a
‘person of independent means’? The other day I mused in this vein, and
fell to thinking of the day before yesterday, when I was a chubby,
pudding-fed lad, and the aforesaid allowance amounted to four shillings
and fourpence at the end of a year, but was delivered into my hands at
the rate of one penny per week. Saturday morning was the appointed time,
I believe. Of course, I often received other and larger sums; aunts and
uncles were usually good for half-a-crown, or even more, and
grandfathers in those days seemed to be literally made of silver coin.
But the Saturday penny differed from these occasional presents in that
it was my very own; there were no hints of money-boxes and savings-banks
and ‘rainy-days’; the penny was placed in my hand, and could be used
immediately as a sacrifice on the glittering altar of Juvenile Folly.
This was very much to my taste, for, like most healthy children, I
scorned those doubtful deities, Thrift and Prudence; even now I can
hardly bring myself to accord them the worship which is, from what I
hear, their due.
A number of my playmates received their weekly pennies at the same
time--almost at the same moment, I imagine--and it was our invariable
custom to retire in a body to a little shop near by. It was a tiny
fancy-goods and sweet shop, whose owner must have subsisted almost
entirely on the patronage of such small fry as ourselves. To us, as we
clustered round the window, it was a veritable land of Heart’s Delight,
for a penny was a potent talisman in those days, and we had the choice
of a bewildering array of entirely useless articles. (What do children
receive on Saturday mornings these times, I wonder; a ten shilling note
or a War Bond?). So, clutching our pennies in warm, moist little hands,
we would spend a delicious half-hour gazing through the shop window, a
round-eyed, shrill-voiced crowd of speculators, until, after much
discussion, our minds made up, we would clatter--one by one--into the
shop and come out triumphantly hugging our purchases. The rest was a
swift descent into prosaic life. The great moment had come and gone.
Now, sympathetic reader, I will discover to you the depths of my folly.
For you must know that some poetic rogue, some Autolycus of the
fancy-goods trade, had invented and placed upon the market the thing
called the lucky-bag. It was my bane, and the cause of my weekly
undoing. Never was there such a snare for an imaginative child! It was a
large, sealed paper-packet, bulging auspiciously; it contained articles
of great variety, and some, so ran the legend on the cover, were of
‘immense value.’ Here was wealth, touched with chance and mystery and
magic; here was El Dorado within sight. When I add that the price of
this marvel was exactly one penny, there is nothing more to be said.
At first we were all victims. But, alas!--nothing of ‘immense value’ was
forth-coming. The packets contained nothing of more importance than some
trivial little wooden article, and a few contemptible pink sweets--a
vile pennyworth! The bulging, which gave one the idea that the bag was
crammed with bulky toys, was caused, I regret to say, by a sheet of
stiff brown paper artfully disposed beneath the outer covering. So my
companions, worldly wise in their generation, laughed to scorn the wiles
of the lucky-bag merchant, and betook themselves to other and more solid
purchases--a top, a ball, or a pennyworth of bulls-eyes or toffee. Here
they receive a pennyworth for a penny and were satisfied.
It was otherwise with me. I wanted the land of Heart’s Delight for a
penny, and though I have never got it, there were moments when, holding
the newly-bought, unopened bag in my hand, I had glimpses of joys beyond
mere pennyworths of this and that. Week after week, month after month,
the lure of the magic packet held me in thrall. There were times when I
would resolve to break my bonds, and traffic no more with the cheater,
the mocker of sweet innocence, but it was all to no purpose; as soon as
I approached the fateful shop and caught sight of the bulging packets my
resolutions went like smoke, and once again my penny would be swept into
the till, and once more I would stand, with heart beating high, looking
into the mysterious bag.