A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class
carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire,
proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a
comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and
divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the
further corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of
benevolent appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent
appearance who appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.
For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile
beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his
ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.
When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good
temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his
senior, who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and
said formally:
“I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?”
“Not at all,” said the old boy; “it is a habit I have long grown
accustomed to in others.”
The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his
matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none.
He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo
it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man
very gently whether he had any matches.
The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a
little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket.
The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man
the while with a more complacent eye.
“It is very kind of you, sir,” he said a little less stiffly. He handed
back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his
place, and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a
moment or two after a favour, said: “I see that you play cards.”
“I do,” said the old man simply; “would you like a game?”
“I don’t mind,” said the young man, who had always heard that it was
unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.
The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior
begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his
knees. “I’ll show you a trick worth two of that,” he said, and taking
one of the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are
movable from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young
man and made a table of the cushion between them. “Now,” said he
genially, “what’s it to be?”
“Well,” said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, “do you
know piquet?”
“Oh, yes,” said his companion with another happy little laugh of
contentment with the world. “I’ll take you on. What shall it be?”
“Pennies if you like,” said the young man nonchalantly.
“Very well, and double for the Rubicon.”
“How do you mean?” said the young man, puzzled.
“You will see,” said the old man, and they began to play.
The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few
pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite
enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a
little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the
discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked
out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:
“It’s a happy world.”
“Yes,” answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of
youth, “but it all comes to an end.”
“It isn’t its coming to an end,” said the elder man, declaring a point
of six, “that’s not the tragedy; it’s the little bits coming to an end
meanwhile, before the whole comes to an end: that’s the tragedy....”
But he added with another of his jolly laughs: “We must play. Piquet
takes up all one’s grey matter.”
They played and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin:
it was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again the young man
said:
“What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was?”
“Oh,” said the old man as though he couldn’t remember, and then he
added: “Oh, yes, I mean you’ll find, as you grow older, people die and
affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in company
with higher things, there’s what Shelley called the ‘contagion of the
world’s slow stain.’”
Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardour of the game; but
as they played the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the
conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated and was probably of
the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval
architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an
office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated
would never quote a tag: he was wrong there. As he had allowed his
thoughts to wander somewhat the young man lost that game rather
heavily, and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to
the bad. It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to
speak, and did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again.
“Things change, you know,” he said, “and there is the contagion of the
world’s slow stain. One gets preoccupied: especially about money. When
men marry they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It’s bad for
them, but it can’t be helped.”
“You cut,” said the young man.
His elder cut and they played again. This time as they played their
game the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his
observations interruptedly:
“Four kings,” he said.... “It isn’t that a man gets to think money
all-important, it is that he has to think of it all the time.... No,
three queens are no good. I said four kings.... four knaves.... The
little losses of money don’t affect one, but perpetual trouble about it
does, and” (closing up the majority of tricks which he had just gained)
“many a man goes on making more year after year and yet feels himself
in peril.... _And_ the last trick.” He took up the cards to shuffle
them. “Towards the very end of life,” he continued, “it gets less, I
suppose, but you’ll feel the burden of it.” He put the pack over for
the younger man to cut. When that was done he dealt them out slowly. As
he dealt he said: “One feels the loss of little material things:
objects to which one was attached, a walking-stick, or a ring, or a
watch which one has carried for years. Your declare.”
The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret
to say that the young man was Rubiconed, and was thirty shillings in
the elder’s debt.
“We’ll stop if you like” said the elder man kindly.
“Oh, no,” said the youth with nonchalance, “I’ll pay you now if you
like.”
“Not at all, I didn’t mean that,” said the older man with a sudden
prick of honour.
“Oh, but I will, and we’ll start fair again,” said the young man.
Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold, the older man
gave him change, they shuffled again, and they went on with their play.
“After all,” said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of
no more than five, “it’s all in the day’s work.... It’s just a day’s
work,” he repeated with a saddened look in his eyes, “it’s a game that
one plays like this game, and then when it’s over it’s over. It’s the
little losses that count.”
That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell
out fifteen and six. But the brakes were applied, Bristol was reached,
the train came to a standstill, and the young man, looking up a little
confused and hurried, said: “Hello, Bristol! I get out here.”
“So do I,” said the older man. They both stood up together, and the
jolt of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other’s arms.
“I am really very sorry,” said the youth.
“It’s my fault,” said the old chap like a good fellow, “I ought to have
caught hold. You get out and I’ll hand you your bag.”
“It’s very kind of you,” said the young man. He was really flattered by
so much attention, but he knew himself what a good companion he was and
he could understand it; besides which they had made friends during that
little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in
an honest game.
There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out
of it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled
at them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about, and stood
for a moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the
young man’s bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a
fine upstanding figure—he saw his bag handed by some mistake to the
second of the old man’s friends, a porter came by at the moment pushing
through the crowd with a trolley, an old lady made a scene, the porter
apologized, the crowd took sides, some for the porter, some for the old
lady; the young man, with the deference of his age, politely asked
several people to make way, but when he had emerged from the struggle
his companion, his companion’s friends, and his own bag could not be
found; or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the
great mass that pushed and surged upon the platform.
He made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and
by losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm, when,
just as his excitement was growing more than querulous, a very heavy,
stupid-looking man in regulation boots tapped him on the shoulder and
said: “Follow me.” He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but
another gentleman of equal weight, wearing boots of the same pattern,
linked his arm in his and between them they marched him away, to a
little private closet opening out of the stationmaster’s room.
“Now, sir,” said he who had first tapped him on the shoulder, “be good
enough to explain your movements.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said the young man.
“You were in the company,” said the older man severely, “of an old man,
bald, with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from
London; you joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be
met at this station and it will be to your advantage if you make a
clean breast of it.”
The young man was violent and he was borne away.
But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references and he was
released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but
from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it
contained no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid or
rather owed six guineas, four shirts, as many collars and dress ties, a
silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut-glass bottles,
a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very
confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was
gone, but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though
in his flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle
ridiculous. As he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his
temper he had indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook
upon Thermodynamics. This book he _thought_ he remembered having put
into the bag, and if he had it belonged to his library, but he could
not quite remember this point, and when the Library claimed it he
stoutly disputed their claim.
In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made
out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and
experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy.
“King Lear”
The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago and was
called Christendom in its final development split and broke in pieces.
The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and
it will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation
of each from all was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is
passed.
In the task of reuniting what was broken—it is the noblest work a
modern man can do—the very first mechanical act must be to explain one
national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe,
now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which
they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to
them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to
it, perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian
civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not
final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is
the act of introducing one national soul to another.
Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe.
You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely
judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its
qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take
such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its
sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation;
this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His
efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is
fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.
Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote
and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make
anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional
passage may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to
him dead. Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who
know what Racine is, he at last sees him—and these changes in the mind
come very suddenly—he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse
task, to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of
presenting England to the French intelligence—or, indeed, to any other
alien intelligence—you may choose the play “King Lear.”
That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the
community in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their
order.
First, it is not designed to its end; at least it is not designed
accurately to its end; it is written as a play and it is meant to be
acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays
and in acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while
in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare’s plays to perform.
Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which
you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on,
so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end
it is to serve, and having, as it were, a life of its own which
proceeds apart from its effect? This quality which makes so many
English things growths rather than instruments is most evident in the
great play.
Again, it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought
abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic
in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it mars the framework of the
thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable
vitality. When a man has read “King Lear” and lays down the book he is
like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a
storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is
possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes,
that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One
feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the
literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in
the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the
national life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of
expansion in English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and
that even through the bonds established by those models the instinct of
expansion breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the
occasional running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself
with the end of the eighteenth century.
The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things—nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things—which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every
play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of
the English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what
is not known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But
“King Lear,” though it contains a lesser number of lines of this
mystical and half-religious effect than, say, “Hamlet,” yet as a
general impression is the more mystical of the two plays. The element
of madness, which in “Hamlet” hangs in the background like a
storm-cloud ready to break, in “King Lear” rages; and it is the use of
this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play. It has been
said (with no great profundity of criticism) that English fiction is
chiefly remarkable for its power of particularization of character, and
that where French work, for instance, will present ideas, English will
present persons. The judgment is grossly insufficient, and therefore
false, but it is based upon a proof which is very salient in English
letters, which is that, say, in quite short and modern work the sense
of complete unity deadens the English mind. The same nerve which
revolts at a straight road and at a code of law revolts against one
tone of thought, and the sharp contrast of emotional character, not the
dual contrast which is common to all literatures, but the multiple
contrast, runs through “King Lear” and gives the work such a tone that
one seems as one reads it to be moving in a cloud.
The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a
fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence
which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which
he is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible
were not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary
adventurousness present in all that went before.
It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable. And it may not be
fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words,
namely, that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a
product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general
movement is a storm its element is one of those sudden silences that
come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the
wind.