George Eliot warned us somewhere not to expect Isaiah and Plato in every
country house, and the warning was characteristic of the time when one
really might have met Ruskin or Herbert Spencer. How uncalled for it
would be now! If Isaiah or Plato were to appear at any country house,
what a shock it would give the company, even if no one present had heard
of their names and death before! We do not know how prophets and
philosophers would behave in a country house, but, to judge from their
books, their conversation could not fail to embarrass. What would they
say when the daughter of the house inquired if her Toy-Pom was not
really rather a darling, or the host proclaimed to the world that he
never took potatoes with fish? What would the host and daughter say if
their guest began to prophesy or discuss the nature of justice? There is
something irreligious in the incongruity of the scene.
The age of the wise, in those astonishing eighteen-seventies, was
succeeded by the age of the epigram, when someone was always expected to
say something witty, and it was passed on, like a sporting tip, through
widening circles. Such sayings as "I can resist everything but
temptation" were much sought after. Common sense became piquant if
reversed, and the good, plain man disappeared in laughter. When a
languid creature told him it was always too late to mend, and never too
young to learn, he was disconcerted. The bases of existence were shaken
by little earthquakes, and he did not know where to stand or what to
say. He felt it was nonsense, but as everyone laughed and applauded he
supposed they were all too clever for him--too clever by half, and he
went away sadder, but no wiser. "If Christ were again on earth," said
Carlyle, of an earlier generation, "Mr. Milnes (Lord Houghton) would ask
him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the good things
he had said." Frivolity only changes its form, but the epigrams of the
early 'nineties were not Christlike, and Mr. Milnes would have been as
much astray among them as the good, plain man.
The epigrammatist still lingers, and sometimes dines; but his roses have
faded, and the weariness of his audience is no longer a pose. A tragic
ghost, he feels like one who treads alone some banquet-hall, not,
indeed, deserted, but filled with another company, and that is so much
drearier. The faces that used to smile on him are gone, the present
faces only stare and if he told them now that it may be better to have
loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but both are good, they
would conceal a shiver of boredom under politeness. It is recognised
that life with an epigrammatist has become unendurable. "Witty?" (if one
may quote again the Carlyle whom English people are forgetting) "O be
not witty: none of us is bound to be witty under penalties. A
fashionable wit? If you ask me which, he or a death's head, will be the
cheerier company for me, pray send _not_ him."
Evidently there are some creatures too bright if not too good for human
nature's daily food. They are like the pudding that was all raisins,
because the cook had forgotten to put in the suet. Sensible people put
in the suet pretty thick, and they find it fortifying. Here in England,
for instance, it has been the standing sneer of upstart pertness that
ordinary men and women always set out upon their conversations with the
weather. Well, and why on earth should they not? In every part of the
world the weather is the most important subject. India may suffer from
unrest, but the Indian's first thought is whether she suffers from
drought. Russia may seethe with revolution, but ninety-nine per cent. of
Russians are thinking of the crops. France may be disturbed about
Germany, but Frenchmen know the sun promises such a vintage as never
was. War may threaten Russia, but the outbreak depends upon the harvest.
Certainly, in our barren wildernesses of city it does not much matter
whether it rains or shines, except to the top hats and long skirts of
the inhabitants. But mankind cannot live on smuts and sulphur, and our
discussions on the weather keep us in touch with the kindly fruits of
the earth; we show we are not weaned from Nature, but still remember the
cornfields and orchards by which we live. Every cloud and wind, every
ray of sunshine comes filled with unconscious memories, and secret
influences extend to our very souls with every change in weather. Like
fishes, we do not bite when the east wind blows; like ducks and eels, we
sicken or go mad in thunder.
Why should we fuddle our conversation with paradoxes and intellectual
interests when nature presents us with this sempiternal theme? Ruskin
observed that Pusey never seemed to know what sort of a day it was. That
showed a mind too absent from terrestrial things, too much occupied
with immortality. Here in England the variety of the weather affords a
special incitement to discussion. It is like a fellow-creature or a
race-meeting; the sporting element is added, and you never know what a
single day may bring forth. Shallow wits may laugh at such talk, but
neither the publishers' lists nor the Cowes Regatta, neither the Veto
nor the Insurance Act can compare for a moment with the question whether
it will rain this week. Why, then, should we not talk about rain, and
leave plays and books and pictures and politics and scandal to narrow
and abnormal minds? To adapt a Baconian phrase, the weather is the one
subject that you cannot dull by jading it too far.
Nor does it arouse the evil passions of imparting information or
contradicting opinions. When someone says, "It is a fine day," or "It's
good weather for ducks," he does not wish to convey a new fact. I have
known only one man who desired to contradict such statements, and,
looking up at the sky, would have liked to order the sun in or out
rather than agree; and he was a Territorial officer, so that command was
in his nature. But mention the Lords, or the Church, or the Suffrage,
and what a turmoil and tearing of hair! What sandstorms of information,
what semi-courteous contradiction! Whither has the sweet gregariousness
of human converse strayed? Black looks flash from the miracle of a
seeing eye; bad blood rushes to thinking foreheads; the bonds of hell
are loosed; pale gods sit trembling in their twilight. "O sons of Adam,
the sun still shines, and a spell of fair weather never did no harm, as
we heard tell on; but don't you think a drop of rain to-night would
favour the roots? You'll excuse a farmer's grumbling."
People do not associate in order to receive epigrammatic shocks, nor to
be fed up with information and have their views put right. They
associate for society. They feel more secure, more open-hearted and
cheerful, when together. Sheep know in their hearts that numbers are no
protection against the dog, who is so much cleverer and more terrible
than they; but still they like to keep in the flock. It is always
comfortable to sit beside a man as foolish as oneself and hear him say
that East is East and West is West; or that men are men, and women are
women; or that the world is a small place after all, truth is stranger
than fiction, listeners never hear any good of themselves, and a true
friend is known in adversity. That gives the sense of perfect
comradeship. There is here no tiresome rivalry of wits, no plaguy
intellectual effort. One feels one's proper level at once, and needs no
longer go scrambling up the heights with banners of strange devices. At
such moments of pleasant and unadventurous intercourse, it will be found
very soothing to reply that cold hands show a warm heart, that only
town-dwellers really love the country, that night is darkest before the
dawn, that there are always faults on both sides, that an Englishman's
home is his castle, but travel expands the mind, and marriage is a
lottery.
Such sentences, delivered alternately, will supply all the requisites of
intercourse. The philosopher rightly esteemed no knowledge of value
unless it was known already, and all these things have been known a very
long time. Sometimes, it is true, a conversation may become more
directly informative and yet remain amicable, as when the man on the
steamer acquaints you with the facts that lettuce contains opium, that
Lincoln's Inn Fields is the size of the Great Pyramid's base, that Mr.
Gladstone took sixty bites to the mouthful, that hot tea is a cooling
drink, that a Frenchwoman knows how to put on her clothes, that the
engineer on board is sure to be a Scotsman, that fish is good for the
brain because it contains phosphorus, that cheese will digest everything
but itself, that there are more acres in England than words in the
Bible, and that the cigars smoked in a year would go ten thousand and a
quarter times round the earth if placed end to end. These facts are also
familiar to everyone beforehand, and they present a solid basis for
gregarious conversation. They put the merest stranger at his ease. They
make one feel at home.
Some of the trades and professions secure the same object by special
phrases. When you hear that the horses are fat as butter, the men keen
as mustard, and everything right as rain, you know you are back to the
army again. The kindly mention of the Great Lexicographer, the Wizard of
the North, the Sage of Chelsea, and London's Particular calls up the
vision of a street descending into the vale of St. Paul's. But such
phrases are fleeting. They hardly last four generations of mankind, and
already they wither to decay. "Every cloud has a silver lining," "It's a
poor heart that never rejoices," "There are as good fish in the sea as
ever were caught"--those are the observations that give stability and
permanence to the intercourse of man. They are not clever; they contain
no paradox; like the Ugly Duckling, they cannot emit sparks. But one's
heart leaps up at hearing them, as at the sight of a rainbow. For, like
the rainbow, they are an assurance that while the earth remaineth,
seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,
shall never cease.