|An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture
to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that
life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to
answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked
what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “The best thing
that ever happened to me was to be born,” he replied. But that is not an
answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether
life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on
balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it
that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet
make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the
dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he
has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have
cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things
that have happened to you--falling in love, making friends, climbing
mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the
sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write
off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside.
It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart
who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it
grows difficult on reflection.
In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree--sycamore or chestnut
for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their
generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade--to sit, I say, and
think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the
Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by,
sees “spinning like a midge” below.
And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and
asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play
to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped
away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we
should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will
be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer.
That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool
million--come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair
to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better
than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to
confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser
pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to
yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the
grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best
worth remembering are the things you rejected.
I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose
pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of
life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers
in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those
occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon
under that sycamore tree--which of them, now that it is all over, will
have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one
and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the
earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the
mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and
where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew
dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and
Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect,
with what delight they will look back on the great moments of
life--Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus
feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his
mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin
thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung
from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The
banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.
But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will,
I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we
won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or
shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our
name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament.
It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human
comradeship we had on the journey--the friendships of the spirit,
whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or
art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its
affections--
For gauds that perished, shows that passed,