|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
effect on my Modestine.
Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
language in which nothing pleased me.
This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
of his school days. “There was,” he said, “a boy in my class at school
who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
he is dead, he took early to drinking.”
It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
of my own garments murmuring, “Where _did_ I put my hat?” Then one day a
brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
which to hang them.
I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
hope) pardonable result.
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