I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in
my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been,
I understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters.
Battersea was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of
human localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great
sheets of water, there must be something quite incomparable in the
landscape (or waterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be a
vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher’s
must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange
smoothness of the gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the
corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the
unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly
poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an
archipelago.
Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in
reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite
as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an
opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible
than the ordinary “Indignant Ratepayer” who sees in them an opportunity
for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield
or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but
scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and
as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very
longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear
or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative
inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often
hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway
station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of
having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to
him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder
and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and
the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon.
Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly,
it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and
started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’
habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the
two fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things.
Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham
Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in
many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come up
to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But in the case of all
such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional
point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the
things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily
life.
For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to
have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the
well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and
running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and
sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting
little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an
idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and when people say
it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic;
but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are
exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man
running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a
wife.
Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard
himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no
animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that
hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the
future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high
ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional
attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever
be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest
degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that
they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were
inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who
were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat
in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be
filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected
pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment
giving to the crowd.
The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic
worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of
cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated.
Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark
pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification
and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven
by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they
attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed
tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly
afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day
in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed
out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative;
it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should,
and would come out easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself
that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the
struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that
you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are
roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that
you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and
English.” Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at
all that my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that
every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a
flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts
to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding
ring.
So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to
suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed
poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been
caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect,
and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really
romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly
considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if
anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For
as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said: “Wine is good with
everything except water,” and on a similar principle, water is good
with everything except wine.