possesses; sometimes it possesses the man, for influence often is an
unconscious element in his life which exhales from him like the
fragrance from a flower or miasma from a swamp. You cannot investigate
it. It is moral force. Some men possess much of it, others less, the
residue of mankind none. That is the mystery of influence. You cannot
regulate it, calculate it, or tabulate it in standard quantities. Its
operation is noiseless as a shadow, dangerous as lightning, profound as
eternity, beautiful as the five wise virgins, or devilish as
Mephistopheles.
We speak here of personal influence. There is an influence of a baser
sort which is powerful in its way--the influence of money. Money is
extraneous matter. Wealth magnifies a man in people's eyes, but the man
himself may be small without the money inflation. Strip the rich man of
his shekels, and you strip him of his significance. He counts no more
than an empty egg-shell after the rats have eaten the meat out of it.
Frequently the extraordinary man is only an ordinary man placed in
extraordinary circumstances.
There is also the influence of position. That is not the genuine
article. It is alien honour conferred like the odour of attar of roses
clinging to an empty earthen jar. Position gives power. Some people who
sit in the chair of authority use their power to the full, but it is the
power of position, not of character or individuality. The only
advantage of power is to be able to do more good than other people. All
the world knows the difference, the ghastly difference, between Cardinal
Wolsey in favour and Cardinal Wolsey in disgrace. Catastrophe lies
between these extremes of fortune. The man remains the same in both
states, but the world moves with the times, and gives no credit to an
overrun banking account. He is a fallen star. He drops out of the
seventh heaven of popularity into abysmal darkness. Banished the Royal
presence, who cares for Cardinal Wolsey? He has no favours to transmit.
No man is his friend, for he can befriend no man. Position makes and
unmakes a man, like sunshine makes or unmakes a summer day.
Influence of truest and finest brand is personal. It emanates from the
man, not from his circumstances. Some men handle their fellow-creatures
with dexterity and ease, like an experienced whip controls the horse he
sits behind. Quietness and firmness are in the human touch, and the
animal bends submissively to every movement of the reins; so some men
command their fellow-creatures, and they submit their wills to the
master mind that rides them, and how the spell governs they cannot say.
Other men are ciphers in society. "Only Mr. So-and-so" consigns a man
to the outposts of social extinction, and mixes him up with the
unclassified masses of limp, negligible, and insignificant people who
welter and gambol with their kennel companions, but they cannot head the
pack on hunting days.
Influential men are not common in the community. Only the elect few
shine; many are reflectors of borrowed light. Influence is a gift. It
is caught, not taught. It is all decided for us when nestlings in the
cradle, and perhaps before we nestle. The schoolboy unconsciously
wields a mystic power in the playground, and his chums hover round him
as king of the revels. Animal magnetism exudes from every pore of his
youthful skin. He leads in every escapade, and others fall in without
question. He is not taught the trick; it comes natural for him to lead
as for the rank and file to follow.
On what principle Nature bestows her favours it is difficult to hazard,
more difficult than to discover what principle guides the British
Government in distributing her coveted decorations to the British
public. Nature is romantic. Exercising her sovereignty she gives her
honours as she pleases. No money can buy them. Blue-blooded pedigrees
have no preferential tariff. Nature mocks our conventionality, spurns
our orders of merit, and winks at our social somebodies. Often she
openly prefers a costermonger to a King--stamps aristocratic grace on a
gipsy, and refuses it to a Duchess. There are insignificant great men
who would be hustled in a crowd if they wore no badge, while to social
nobodies Nature attaches a halo of distinction which the crowd delights
to honour as subjects offer incense to a King.
Personality is an attribute that carries a man far on the road to
success. Personality is an endowment which proclaims a man one of
Nature's aristocrats. It is Nature's advertisement of her best, and she
is proud of her handiwork. Personality is a fascinating asset; it lends
dignity to common clay; it gives a man a standing outside the crowd,
which he occupies with ineffable content and full advantage to himself.
Some people have "an air" about them, and the atmosphere they move in is
intoxicating to those dwelling under the spell of their presence. You
cannot crush people who have personality. Over and over again it turns
the scales in their favour in the competitions of life. Their virtues
may not be of the celestial, their talent may lack glitter, but their
personality grips you with its pomp and splendour, and they sit amongst
the mighty, imposing themselves on gods and men. The envious man admits
their success, and slurringly says: "They are commonplace: there is
nothing astonishing in them except their success." He consoles himself
with the banal reflection that, other things being equal, he is quite as
good as they. But the strange mystery of presence steps in and prevents
other things ever being equal.
Some men lack engaging personality, they have no physical charm or
force, yet they exert strenuous influence. They possess great mental or
moral qualities. There is a Divine spark in the clay that scintillates
and collects attention. They are luminous bodies, and emit light. They
are men with virtue in them, and virtue flows out of them. The
extremely fascinating character of Jesus Christ moves in splendour adown
the ages, giving out vital energy. It draws men to-day irresistibly, as
it constrained men nearly two thousand years ago to follow Him homeless
and penniless through the highways and by-ways of Palestine, without
worldly honour or pay to recompense them. There is a strange, silent,
penetrating, perplexing, yet mighty influence working round about us; it
is the influence of the life of Christ holding us up. I do not mean His
life as crudely reflected to us in the modern Church. Jesus Christ has
a larger influence outside the Church than in it. Christ would be a
stranger in the sanctuary to-day if He visited it as the peasant of
Galilee.
Jesus Christ never commissioned His disciples to build up in the world
such a colossal organization as the Church has swollen itself into with
windy pride. In every country in Europe the Church is the biggest
business concern and the wealthiest institution, the most aristocratic
society and the most retrogressive force. The national Churches are
slavishly worldly and chastely genteel concerns; they would boycott the
kingdom of Christ if they thought it were trying to enter the world
through their gilded gates.
The kingdom of Christ is democratic. It might interfere with tithes and
endowments and vested interests. I fancy Christ will establish His
kingdom without calling in the Church to help Him. I could not picture
Christ making use of a Bishop in knee-breeches, lawn sleeves, and with a
seat in the House of Lords, when engaging disciples to evangelize the
world. But I can picture Christ falling speechless when brought face to
face with a Bishop geared in full canonical uniform; and if in His
ignorance of ecclesiastical functionaries Jesus politely inquired, "Who
is the aristocratic old gentleman wearing knee-breeches and a
broad-brimmed hat, and to what institution does he belong?" on being
told he was speaking to one of the leading representatives of His own
spiritual institution, I can picture Christ melting away in anguish of
heart from the venerable presence of the great divine to solace Himself
in the company of fishermen and mechanics--men whose hearts are warm and
manners natural, even if their creed is a bit unorthodox from the
ecclesiastical standpoint.
And there is the good St. Francesco, the stainless and blameless saint,
born of the little Tuscan hill city, the perpetual flowering rose of
Assisi, whose godly fragrance gives off for ever to sweeten the life of
mankind--St. Francis of Assisi, the humble child of God, the dear
brother of men, dead these five hundred years gone by; but he is now
lying warm upon the lap of Christendom, nursed for one of the noblest,
gentlest spirits, aglow with the fervour of an endless life. He is a
living, controlling force to-day in the world's long battle for
righteousness, and ever pouring into our ears the sweetness of Christ.
Men are governed more wisely by the dead than by the living. Interned
within the calmness of their shades, the mighty dead speak to us, and no
cross-currents of envy, prejudice, or malice ruffle the serenity of
their counsel. Influence is not always beneficent; it is malignant
sometimes, and contaminates like the plague. Evil qualities can be as
attractive as wholesome virtues. The poets brand the Devil with a
commanding personality. John Wilkes, the notorious demagogue in the
reign of George III., was the ugliest man in England, yet he impressed
himself marvellously on his generation. He was a popular hero; he
possessed natural gaiety of disposition and an irrepressible fund of
impudence and wit. He was the most brilliant controversialist of his
day. He was a charming rake with an insinuating smile, and he wore the
manners of a fine English gentleman, which captivated his enemies and
conciliated the King. He had exceptional powers of fascination, and he
boasted that--ugly as he was--with the start of a quarter of an hour he
could get the better of any man, however good-looking, in the graces of
any lady.
*X*
*THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE*
Our friend Mrs. Alinson took me sharply in hand one day, and tendered me
good advice gratuitously over the tea-table. Mrs. Alinson is a lady
magnificent in bulk, energetic in action, torrential in tongue, and
warm-hearted in disposition, second to none amongst the daughters of
men.
When as a young man I first came to town she adopted me, mothered me
socially, and manoeuvred for my success. She did not approve of my
associates, and rated me soundly in her loud, pushful, stridulant voice,
which commands attention: "Mr. Drake is not a desirable acquaintance for
you to pursue, my dear. He don't belong to our set, and his reputation
is tainted; unpleasant rumours cloud round his name. Take my advice and
cut him. You only want to know nice people."
Shrewd, disinterested, motherly advice for Mrs. Alinson to bestow on a
tenderfoot unfamiliar with the pitfalls of society. Surely only a lady
of sweet discerning disposition could give it; a lady whom everybody
loves and whom nobody gainsays; a lady the final arbiter of taste in
"nice people" who opens the door to a new-comer and no man shuts, who
shuts the door on a new-comer and no man opens. I accepted her dictum
as good current coin of the elect world we moved in, to be honoured
without reserve. Its metal rang genuine on the social counter. Mr.
Drake henceforth is a stranger to me; it would imperil my position in
society to know him.
After tea we parted, and I went to the cinema. I often go to a cinema
because it amuses me when I want amusement. It is light and inexpensive
diversion. Superior people sneer at the cinema, and call it low-grade
amusement: a common glanty-show that pleases common people. However, as
I have no shares in music-halls or wasting investments in theatre-land,
I am impartial in my pleasures, and can take a shilling seat in a
picture palace with clean conscience and merry heart. In the cinema we
met our dear friend Lady ----, who was enjoying the moving pictures.
She invited us to her reception on the following Saturday afternoon; at
the conclusion of the show, when parting from her, she said: "It's very
kind of you to promise for next Saturday. Please don't tell Mrs.
Alinson you are coming, or she will be sure to come too, and I don't
want her. The friends I am inviting don't care to meet her."
This was a staggering blow struck at the serene goddess to whom we bent
the obedient knee. Was there another social kingdom where she had no
sovereignty, where her passing shadow, like a malign influence, was a
thing to be shunned? Was she a false goddess, or no goddess at all?
She pictured herself the controlling hand which steered the current of
gay life in our midst. Was she at the helm, or was it a mild illusion
that muddled her amiable brain? Here are people actually who will not
open their doors to receive her, nor permit her feet to tread their
dusty carpet--and she thought omnipotence was in her nod.
These colliding facts perplexed us. They suggested the ridiculous, and
offer food for reflection on the comedy of human manners. Here, on the
one hand, is a portrait we draw of ourselves, and there opposite hangs
on the wall a portrait other people draw of us. Place these two sketches
side by side and consider, do they represent the same person? Is there
resemblance between them enough to establish identity in a British court
of law? How can there be? We do not see ourselves as others see us.
We each observe the interesting object that engages our attention from
different points of the compass. We see our good points of character and
make the best of them; our neighbours detect our little sins and make
the worst of them. So we clothe ourselves in sunlight and paint our
neighbours drab. Mrs. Alinson, fortunate woman, had no glimmering idea
what other people thought of her; it was not given her to see herself as
others see her. She lives stolidly; eats, drinks, dresses, talks,
surrounded by a shining halo of self-complacency through which her
mentality cannot penetrate. She is good-natured, thinks excellently of
herself, and believes other people's feelings towards her are equally
well disposed. You and I, happily, are unconscious of the quaint esteem
in which our neighbours hold us, and wisely there we ring the curtain
down. If the truth were told, half our acquaintances are our
enemies--behind our backs.
Soon after the split in the Liberal party on the first Home Rule Bill,
which sundered so many political friendships, Frank Holl was painting
the portrait of John Bright. He mentioned to his sitter that he was
about to paint the portrait of Mr. Gladstone. "It must be a very
painful thing to you, Mr. Bright," he hazarded, "that after all these
years of comradeship you two should sever your connection?" "Indeed it
is," replied Bright with a sigh; "to think that after we have so long
worked together we should be forced apart in the evening of our lives!
And by what? A bogy that has risen up within him, beckoning him away
from duty and sense. Do you know, Mr. Holl, I seriously fear that my
dear old friend's mind is giving way."
When the artist was at Hawarden painting Mr. Gladstone, the subject of
Mr. Bright's portrait cropped up. "Ah!" said Mr. Gladstone, "and how
did you find him?" "Fairly well; and he spoke very affectionately of
you, Mr. Gladstone." "Did he indeed?" replied the sitter sorrowfully.
"It was a cruel blow that parted us--and on so clear a question, too!
Tell me, Mr. Holl"--and here his lips quivered, for he was evidently
moved with strong emotion--"tell me, did you notice anything in the
manner of my old friend which would lead you to suppose that his reason
was becoming unhinged?"
We cannot see another man's personality in full rounded vision. We get
peeps at him; broken lights and flickering shadows of his character
dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we can capture the man
and rifle him of his every locked-up thought and uncover his soul's
nakedness.
The popular writer analyzes, probes, dissects human character on paper,
and we marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into people. He plucks
the gay plumage off the poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the
stripped and quivering body an unpleasant spectacle for the public to
contemplate through the glass case of a six-shilling novel. The novelist
is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for
his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a
paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing
with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on the
doorstep. The novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful
philosopher. He works like Conan Doyle's great detective Sherlock
Holmes, who can unravel any mystery he himself concocts in the pages of
the _Strand Magazine_, but is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a real
murderer or laying bare an elusive crime.
If some famous men who in their day and generation lived in cheap houses
and mixed with common people, and died unparagraphed in daily papers,
could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious
companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would spin with
amazement at themselves for having arrived in splendour; they would
stagger at the worship paid them by reverent posterity.
During life they were great artists in mufti. They were regarded as
unimportant persons by their own contemporaries, and to-day they are
posted amongst the demi-gods of history. They knew themselves to be
good workmen who did a good day's work for a fair day's pay, and then,
like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences,
they laid down their tools, and their life-story ended there. They
little knew that they had the bud of immortality swelling in their
veins, soon to break and flower into endless renown.
Human nature is a conundrum to itself hard to crack, as it is to other
people, even its friends and neighbours who eat and drink with it at
table. We do not know that heaps of posthumous fame may presently cover
our strange next-door neighbour. To us he is only a negligible quantity
in the affairs of the day, with a little gift of the pen or some queer
scientific hobby that absorbs him. In this swift age of ours Time and
Space are being brought to heel in masterly control, but our neighbours
remain mysterious to us as Adam was to Eve until the affair of the apple
found the man out. Even Shakespeare to his contemporaries did not
appear a towering genius, but only one of themselves--a common literary
hack with an uncommon gift of turning a sentence and making it tell. It
was a trick they all tried to catch from him, but he just went one
better than they.
Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen were unconscious that they were
entertaining an archangel unawares. Nothing he said or did outside his
scribbling for the playhouse is on record. He had no trusty Boswell at
his elbow to note his pothouse wit and succulent wisdom, sparks from the
fire of his genius, flung off impromptu in merry moments at the Mermaid
Tavern over a flagon of malmsey. His pals thought him a jovial fellow
well met, and when he died no crumbs of biography were swept up by
loving hands to keep his memory green.
But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was
utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never
published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his
plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and
Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio
edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print. The first edition is
full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage
versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those
well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents
to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn,
scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt
wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and
crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with
incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these
fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned
commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays
and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves
over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word.
The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the
text has yet to be tidied up.
*XI*
*THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY*
Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling
kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market
to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the
mud of the world's scorn and picked up as a toy for _Punch_ to provoke
laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit
exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new
caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be
tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy
perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a
misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the
salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy
cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to
the admirers who retinue his movements.
Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the
war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small
brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of
peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We
shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over
broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we
did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but
wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there
used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into
power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought.
Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will
want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is
the compelling idea that holds the public fancy.
But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of
reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the
doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that
enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this
naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively
dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes
differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a
different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the
expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with
words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and
divergent opinions clash and confound us.
We all believe in Utopia, but none of us hold the clue to the high road
that gallops straight into it. We take trial trips over new ground and
get sloughed up on false trails. Plato and Socrates, Francesco d'Assisi
and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have each been famous architects
of Utopia in the dim dreamland of the past, and each propounded his own
scheme as being the very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise ever
constructed for man to dwell in. They all have some aims and ends in
common, considering thoughtfully the welfare of the people bodily and
morally: but the distinctive personality of the architect slyly creeps
in, and on the rock of personal vanity they split into rival factions
and a general quarrel ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man ever
devised for the emancipation of the human race. And so the egg of
social reform gets addled before it is hatched, and alas! the glittering
city of ten thousand joys for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and
farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.
One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild the city of Human Happiness
by hand labour. Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal proportions
and flowering beauty. He starts with the individual as the foundation
and finishes with the individual as top-stone. He works by gradual and
peaceful process to attain his splendid purpose. His method of work is
unpopular because it is slow.