(Faith, Hope, Mother, etc., all turn aside and hide their faces, with
convulsive movements of their shoulders. Eventually Hope looks firmly
up at the Royal Box, and a loud click is heard as Faith tries to light
the electric sword. As it is out of order, she merely holds it up. This
is the cue for the play to proceed.)
Justice is rather fierce, and as she speaks about an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth, Britannia rises and with a majestic look sets her
teeth and flashes her eyes. Mercy intervenes, telling Justice that they
are sisters, Justice acknowledges the soft impeachment, and hides her
head on Mercy's shoulder, who reminds her that the quality of Mercy is
twice blest, which is very pleasant for her as she _is_ Mercy.
Rolls of drum in the orchestra punctuate what Victory has to say,
which is just as easily described as imagined, but is scarcely worth
description. Then a soft smile irradiates Britannia's face, and she
says:
"And now that Victory's won I call
The fairest sister of you all."
On which Peace advances and crowns Britannia with a green wreath, and a
small stuffed pigeon descends from above Britannia's head and hovers.
The curtain descends slowly to long soft chords on the orchestra. The
applause of relief sounds faintly from various quarters of the house.
The curtain instantly ascends again and shows the same picture. It
goes up and down five or six times. Then it parts, and Britannia comes
out and bows to the house. She smiles at someone behind the curtain,
and extends her hand. A small man in a frock coat and an expression
of abject misery comes out and clutches it. The audience come to the
conclusion that he must be the author, and with the amiable idea
of putting him out of his misery applaud again. On which Britannia
advances a little to the left and again beckons behind the curtain.
On which Child runs out, and (as previously instructed) after an
alarmed survey of the house, hides its little face in the ample folds
of Britannia's gown. Murmurs of sympathy. Britannia (who has a way
with her) encourages the infant (who has done this fifty times before,
and is really as brazen as brass) and points to the Royal Box. Child
drops curtsy, amid more applause. Faith, Hope, Mother, Wife, History,
Geography, Belgium, Peace, Mathematics, Victory, Suicide, Phlebotomy,
Green Grocery and any other symbolical figures that there may be, join
the group one by one. They all bow, the audience continues applauding:
Faith (having mastered the unruly mechanism) lights up her sword. Peace
holds aloft the Dove. Belgium's hair falls down....
The lights go up in the theatre, and guinea stall turns to guinea stall
with a sigh.
"Oh, George Robey next," she says. "I hope he'll play golf."
* * * * *
Now I want to make my position clear. I think it wonderfully kind
of all these eminent ladies to spend all this time and trouble in
giving us this patriotic sketch. I think it wonderfully clever of the
gentleman who wrote it to have made it all up, and thought of all those
rhymes. I think every single sentiment expressed in his drama to be
absolutely unexceptionable, and, as we hear from the pulpit, "True in
the best sense of the word," without even inquiring what that cryptic
utterance means. But there seems to me to be two weighty objections
to the whole affair: it is all utterly devoid of the sense of humour
and of the sense of decency. You may say that when treating of such
deeply-felt matters as Faith and Victory and Mother and Child, a sense
of humour would be out of place. I do not agree: it is the absence of
the sense of humour that causes it to be so ridiculous. As for the
propriety of presenting such things on the stage, I can only say that
the Lord Chamberlain ought never to have allowed this and fifty other
such pieces to appear, on grounds of indecent exposure. To present
under such ruthless imagery the secret and holiest feelings of the
heart is much worse than allowing people to appear with no clothes on.
It is all true, too: there is its crowning horror. It is just because
it is so sacredly true that it is totally unfit for public production.
There are things you can't even talk about ... and they are just these
things that the author of this abomination has put into the mouths of
these eminent actresses. And the bowings and the scrapings, and the
return of the actors, all smiles to their friends in the audience....
Oh, swiftly come, George Robey, and let us forget about it!
* * * * *
In this blear-eyed December, which, with its stuffy dark days and
absence of sunshine, seems like some drowsy dormouse faintly conscious
of being awake, and desiring only to be allowed to go to sleep again,
there is an immense amount of activity going on. As in those ample
entertainments for the sake of something, there is exhibited on the
part of actors, authors and audience an intense desire to be doing
something, so in the general life of the country there is a sense
of being busy, being strenuous, doing work of some sort in order
to experience the narcotic influence of occupation. The country is
unhappy, and since England is a very practical country, it is stifling
its spiritual unhappiness by being busy. It does things to prevent
its thinking about things, and though it does very foolish things,
it shows its common-sense in doing something rather than encourage
its unhappiness by brooding over it. Herein, it shows its inherent
vitality: were it less vital it would abandon itself to gloomy
reflection. But it does not: it is tremendously busy, and so with set
purpose deprives itself of the tendency to think. That is not very
difficult, for, as a nation, we cannot be considered good at thinking.
Now considering that all action of whatever kind is the direct
result of thought, it would seem at first sight, when we observe
the amazing activities of most people, that these same people must
think a great deal. But as a matter of fact, most people, so far from
thinking a great deal, hardly think at all, and the greater part of
their consistent activity is the result of mere habit. The baby, for
instance, who is learning to walk, or the girl who is learning to knit,
think immensely and absorbedly about these locomotive and involved
accomplishments, just because they have not yet formed the habit of
them. But a few years later, the baby who has become a man will give
no thought at all to the act of walking and, indeed, to walk (the feat
which once so engaged his mind), now sets his mind free to think, and
he finds that problems which require to be thought out are assisted
to their solution by the act that once required so much attention:
similarly the grown-up woman often really talks and attends better to
other things when she is engaged in knitting. The accomplishment has
soaked in through the conscious to the sub-conscious self, and demands
no direction from the practical mind.
It is on the lines of this analogy that we must explain the fact that
many very active people are almost incapable of sustained or coherent
thought. Many of their activities are matters of habit; they order
dinner or look at a picture exhibition or argue about the war with no
more thought than the man who walks or the woman who knits. They can be
voluble about post-impressionism because at one time they acquired the
habit of talking about it, and to do so now requires no more exercise
of the reflective or critical qualities than does the ordering of a
beef-steak pudding. Oh, if they argue about the war, most people have
no original ideas of any kind on the subject: they mix round, as in an
omelette, certain facts they have seen in the official telegrams, with
certain reflections they have read in the leaders of their papers, and
serve up, hot or cold, as their fancy dictates. But they do not think
about it.
Thought, in fact, not merely abstract thought, but a far less difficult
variety, namely, definite coherent thought about concrete things, is an
extremely rare accomplishment among grown up people. We are often told
that it is infinitely harder to learn anything when we are of mature
age than when we are young, and this is quite true, the reason for it
being that we now find it more difficult to think since we have so
long relied on muddling along under the direction of habit. And even
the people who think they think are not in most cases the real owners
of their thoughts. They borrow their thoughts, as from a circulating
library, and instead of owning them, return them slightly damaged at
the end of a week or two, and borrow some more. They do not think for
themselves: they stir about the stale thoughts of others and offer
their insipid porridge as a home-industry.
This secondhand method of thinking is strangely characteristic of our
race, in contradistinction to French and German methods of thought,
and is admirably illustrated by the anecdote concerning the camel. An
Englishman, a Frenchman and a German were bidden to write an essay
on that melancholy beast, deriving their authorities from where they
chose. The Englishman studied books of natural history at the British
Museum, and when he had written an essay founded on them, went and shot
a camel. The Frenchman took his hat and stick and went to the _Jardin
des Plantes,_ where he looked at a real camel, and subsequently had a
ride or two on its back. But the German did none of these things: he
consulted no authority, he looked at no camel, but shutting himself up
in his study, he constructed one from his inner consciousness.
* * * * *
Now whether this offspring of mentality was like a real camel or not,
history does not tell us. Probably it was not, any more than the new
map of Europe planned by Prussian militarism will prove like the map
of Europe as it will appear in the atlases published, let us say, in
1918. But even if the German camel was totally unrecognizable as such,
its constructor had shown himself capable of entering on a higher
plane of thought than is intelligible to the ordinary Englishman. The
German, in fact, as we are beginning to learn, is able to sit down and
think, and out of pure thought to build up an image. The English are
excellent learners, quick to assimilate and apply what others have
thought out, the French are vivid and keen observers, but neither have
the power of sustained internal thought which characterizes the Teuton,
who incidentally is quite the equal of the Englishman at learning and
of the Frenchman at observation. The German, for instance, thought out
the doctrine of submarine warfare, and to our grievous cost applied
it to our shipping. Similarly they thought out the doctrine of trench
warfare, supplemented by gas, then the French, with their marvellously
quick powers of observation, saw and comprehended and applied. In
fact, the two great German inventions conceived by them, and originally
used by them, have been adopted and brought to a higher pitch of
perfection by their adversaries. But if only any of our allied nations
could pick up from them the power of concentrated and imaginative
thought, for the root of the matter is imagination! We proverbially
muddle through, and when occasion arises, by dint of a certain
stubbornness and admirable stolidity, though pommelled and buffeted,
eventually learn by experience a successful mode of resistance. But
constitutionally, we appear incapable of initiating ideas. We cannot
imagine an occasion, but can only meet the occasion when somebody else
imagines it.
Of all the disappointments of this year this is the root. We cannot
invent: we can only counter. We have not the power of constructive
imagination, which is the mother and father of original actions. But
when our adversaries indulge in original actions, we can (on occasion)
think out an answer to them which is perfectly effective. We can resist
and we can hit back when we are hit, but at present we have not shown
that we are capable of imagining and dealing the first blow. Perhaps
this may come, for it goes without saying that we were notoriously
unready at the beginning of the war, and had our hands full and
overfull with countering the blows that were rained on us. We were on
the defensive and could barely maintain the defence, and could not
possibly have collected that coiled force which is necessary for any
offensive movement. But if after sixteen months of war we do not begin
to show signs of it, it is reasonable to wonder whether the cause of
this is not so much that we lack the battering power, but that our
statesmen and our generals lack the imagination out of which original
plans are made. True, there have been two original schemes, namely,
that of forcing the Dardanelles and capturing Bagdad, and if these show
the quality of our originality, perhaps we are better without it ...
It is natural that the stress of war should have brought out the
deep-rooted, inherent qualities of the nations engaged, and those
qualities are just those that strike you first in a man of whatever
nationality. When you know him a little better, you think you detect
all sorts of other qualities, but when you come really to know
him--singly or collectively--he is usually just such as you first
thought him to be. Indeed, it is as Francis said about the orange: the
rind has the savour of the fruit within, between the two there is a
layer of soft, pulpy stuff. But when you get through that, the man, the
essential person is like the taste of the rind. This has been immensely
true with regard to the war. On the surface the French strike anyone
who comes in contact with them as full of admirable fervour: there is
the strong, sharp odour about them, there is a savour that penetrates.
Then you get to know them just a little better, and you find a woolly
and casual touch about them, which you, in your ignorance born out
of a little knowledge, take to be the real spirit of the French. But
when intimate acquaintance, or the stripping of the surface takes
place, how you must alter your estimate again, going back to your first
impression. You meet the fervour, the strong sharp odour again, and
it goes into the heart of the nation. The Frenchman is apt on first
acquaintance to seem too genuine, too patriotically French to be real.
But when you get within, when the stress of war has revealed the nation
and shown the strong beating of its heart, how the fervour and the
intensity of savour persist! What you thought was superficial you find
to be the quality that dwells in the innermost. He will easily talk
about _La France_ and _La gloire_ when you first get acquainted with
him, but when he stands revealed you find that he talks about it easily
because it is the spring and source of his being.
The same holds with the German. When first you get
speaking-acquaintance with a German, you consider him brutal and beery
and coarse and loud-tongued. You penetrate a little further, and find
him watching by the Rhine and musical and philosophical, a peaceful,
aloof dreamer. Such, at any rate, was the experience of Lord Haldane.
But when the pulpy, stringy layer is stripped off, when the stress
of war makes penetration into his real self, you find him again to
be as you first thought him, coarse and brutal and clamant, the most
overweening individual in all creation. Both with the French and the
German you revised your first impressions when you thought you began to
know him, only to find when the real man is revealed that he is as you
first thought him. And though it is the hardest thing in the world for
anyone to form even an approximately true estimate of the race to which
he belongs, I think that the same holds of the English. They are at
heart very much what they appear to be on the surface, blundering but
tenacious, slow to move, but difficult when once on the move to stop.
But really, when I try to think what the English are like, I find I can
form no conclusion about them, simply because I am of them.
* * * * *
I have just had a long letter from Francis, a letter radiant with
internal happiness. The exterior facts of life cannot much contribute
to that, for the place where he now is consists, so he tells me,
entirely of bare hill-side, lined with shallow trenches, bullets and
swarms of drowsy flies. He hints in a cryptic manner his belief that he
will not remain there very long, leaving me to make any conjecture I
please. But in the lines and between them I read, as I said, a radiance
of happiness. He knows, with a strength that throttles all qualms of
the flesh, that does not, indeed, allow them to exist at all, the
bright shining of the light invisible, that diffused illumination in
which no shadow can be cast. And as in that walk we had on the downs,
the knowledge fills him not only with inward bliss, but with intense
physical enjoyment, so that he can be humorous over the horrors of
existence on that damned promontory. He is genuinely amused: for nobody
was ever such a poor hand at dissimulation as Francis. He finds things
to enjoy in that hell; more than that, he finds that hell enjoyable:
his letter breathed that serenity of well-being which is the least
imitable thing in the world.
Meantime, he wants the news of everyday happenings, "without any
serious reflections, or the internal stomach-ache of pessimists."
These rather pointed remarks refer, I am afraid, to my last letter to
him, to which he does not otherwise allude. He quotes Mr. Longfellow's
best-known poem (I am afraid also) in the spirit of mockery, and says:
"'Life is real, life is earnest,' and if you doubt it,
come out to Suvla Bay and see. We are damned earnest out
here, and I haven't seen anybody who doubts that Life is
extremely real: so are the flies. What I want to know
is the little rotten jokes and nonsense, the things you
talk about when you don't think what you are talking
about. Here's one: the other day I was opening a tin of
potted meat, and a bit of shrapnel came and took the
tin clean out of my hand. It didn't touch me; it simply
whisked it neatly away. Another inch and my hand would
have gone with it. But I hope you don't think I gave
thanks for the lucky escape I had had. Not a bit: I was
merely furious at losing the potted meat. It lay outside
the trench (a trench out here is a tea-spoonful of earth
and pebbles which you pile up in front of you, and then
hide yourself behind it), and I spent the whole of the
afternoon in casting for it, with a hook on a piece of
string. I was much more interested in that than in the
military operations. I wanted my potted meat, which
I think you sent me. Well, what I should like you to
write to me about, is the things that the part of me
which wanted the potted meat would like to hear about.
Patriotism and principles be blowed, bless them! That's
all taken for granted--'granted, I'm sure,' as the
kitchen-maid said.
"Francis.
"P.S.--You alluded to a grey parrot, in one letter. For
God's sake, tell me about the grey parrot. You just
mentioned a grey parrot, and then no more. Grey parrot
is what I want, and your cat, and all the little, rotten
things that are so tremendously important. Write me a
grey parrot letter."
Well, the grey parrot is rather interesting ... and her name is
Matilda, and if you want to know why she is Matilda, you have only
got to look at her. If words have any suggestiveness to your mind, if
there is to you any magic about them, or if they, unbidden, conjure
up images, I should not be surprised if the word "Matilda" connoted
to you a grey parrot. It would be more surprising if, when you become
acquainted with my grey parrot, you did not become aware that she
_was_ Matilda. I don't see how you can get away from the fact that she
must, in the essentials of her nature, be Matilda. Presently you will
see what Matilda-ism is: when it is stated, you will know that you
knew it all along, but didn't know you knew it. The same sort of thing
happened to somebody, when he became aware that all his life he had
been writing prose. And very good prose it was.... Here, then, begins
the introduction to Matilda-ism, in general terms to be applied later.