The title has become equivocal, since there are more green shades in
employment now than were dreamed of by Andrew Marvell. Science is a
great maker of homophones, without respect for the poets. There is,
for instance, the demilune of lined buckram borne by the weak-eyed on
their foreheads, the phylactery of the have-beens--I lay myself open
to be believed a cripple, or to look an old fool. A vivacious reviewer
in _Punch's_ "Booking Office," will have a vision of me as a babbling
elder peering at society from below a green pent. However--I must
risk it. It says exactly what I mean; and what I have written I have
written.
The point is that, having worked hard for a good many years, I can now
consider my latter end under conditions favourable to leisurely and
extended thought, sometimes in a garden made, if rightly made, in my
own image, sometimes in a house which was built aforetime, in a day
when men wrought for posterity as well as for themselves. In such
seed-plots it is impossible that one's thoughts should not take colour
as they rise. Whithersoever I look I see as much permanency as is good
for any sojourner upon earth; I see embodied tradition, respect for
Nature's laws, attention to beauty, subservience to use; all this
within doors. Outside, the trees, the flowers are my calendar;
the birds chime the hours; periodically the church-bell calls the
travellers home. Between all these friendly monitors it is hard if
one cannot keep the mean. If the passing-bell tempts me to moralise
overmuch I may turn to the creatures, and learn to live for the
moment. I should be slow to confess how much worldly wisdom I have
won from what we choose to call the lower orders of creation, because
nobody willingly betrays the whereabouts of his buried treasure, or
the amount of it. Mr. Pepys, I remember, forgot both on a certain
occasion, and had a devil of a time until he recovered his hoard. But
my wealth was not made with hands, or not with my hands.
My house is fortunately placed, too, in the village street, so that I
am in touch with my neighbours and their daily concerns, which I make
mine so far as they are pleased to allow it. I am aware of them all
day long by half a hundred signs; I know the trot of their horses, the
horns of their motor-cars--that shows that there are not too many of
them--the voices of their children, the death-shrieks of their pigs,
the barking of their dogs. Not a day passes but one or other is in,
to have some paper signed, to air a grievance, or to ask advice. The
vicar and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say,
each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can
expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the
pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to
other people. Nor--unless you are a fool--can you be strict with your
categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping
you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance
in this village of five hundred souls. "I have now been in Italy two
days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I know my Italians pretty well!"
When he had been there two years he knew better.
If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly,
leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts
as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to
those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes,
either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I
hope I have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have,
as we say now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None.
I want people to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the
Trade Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me.
I have my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and
England, and am convinced that only through the first will the other
two thrive. I want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want
men to have work and women to have children. Any check on production,
Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me.
As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr.
Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on
war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have
returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical
eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years'
experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget
it. If there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this
tormented earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an
insufficient reason for hating them _in sæcula sæculorum_. A German
is a human being, and very likely Mr. Bottomley is one too, and not a
big-head in a pantomime; such also may be Mrs. Partington's nephew and
the editor of the _Morning Post_. There does not seem much difference
between them, and we must be charitable.
The sojourner in the green shade will find himself, as I have found
myself, more interested in people (but not those people) than in
books. We have too many books, as I discovered when I left London for
good. I sold six tons, and again another six, when, after two years in
West Sussex, I came home. Now I have collected about me the things I
can't do without, the things of which I read at least portions every
year, as well as a few which it is good to have handy in case of
accidents. Book-collecting is a foppery, a pastime of youth, when
spending money is as necessary as taking exercise, and you are better
for an object in each case. But I find that I now read with motives
other than those of old. I am now more interested in the author than
in his book. That must mean that I am more interested in life than
in art. I am reading at this moment Professor Child's edition of the
Ballads, and though I am occasionally moved to tears by the beauty
and tragic insight of things like _The Wife of Usher's Well_;
_Clerk Saunders_, or _Lord Thomas and Fair Annie_, I am sure that
considerations altogether unliterary move me more--such, for instance,
as curiosity to know who composed, and for whom they composed, these
lovely tales. I don't suppose that we shall ever know the name, or
anything of the personality of any one poet of them. Those poets were
as anonymous as our church-builders, and if they were content to be so
we should be content to have it so. But one would be happy to know of
what kind they were, and perhaps even happier (certainly I should) to
realise their auditors. Did they write for men or women? That is one
of my consuming quests. The staves of the _Iliad_ were for men: that
seems certain. Those of the _Odyssey_ not so certainly. But take this
from _May Collin_, and consider it.
You know the story, how "She fell in love with a false priest, and
rued it ever mair"? The priest followed her "butt and ben," and gave
her no peace. They took horses and money and rode out together "Until
they came to a rank river, Was raging like the sea." There the priest
declared his purpose:
"Light off, light off now, May Collin,
It's here that you must dee;
Here I have drown'd seven kings' daughters,
The eighth now you must be."
So her torture begins. He bids her cast off "her gown that's of the
green," because it is too good to rot in the sea-stream; next her
"coat that's of the black "; next her "stays that are well-laced";
lastly her "sark that's of the holland"--all for the same reason. Then
the girl speaks:
"Turn you about now, false Mess John,
To the green leaf of the tree;
It does not fit a mansworn man
A naked woman to see."
The point is that he obeys her. She catches him round the body and
flings him into the tide. _Women were listening to that tale_.
If I am to deal with life it must be in my own way, for there's no
escape from one's character. I may be a good poet or a bad one--that's
not for me to say; but I am a poet of sorts. Now a poet does not
observe like a novelist. He does not indeed necessarily observe at
all until he feels the need of observation. Then he observes, and
intensely. He does not analyse, he does not amass his facts; he
concentrates. He wrings out quintessences; and when he has distilled
his drops of pure spirit he brews his potion. Something of the kind
happens to me now, whether verse or prose be the Muse of my devotion.
A stray thought, a chance vision, moves me; presently the flame is
hissing hot. Everything then at any time observed and stored in the
memory which has relation to the fact is fused and in a swimming flux.
Anon, as the Children of Israel said to Moses, "There came forth
this calf." One cannot get any nearer, I believe; and while I do not
pretend that I have said all there is to say about anything here, I
shall maintain that I have said all that need be said about the things
which I touch upon. In an essay, as in a poem, the half is greater
than the whole, if it is the right half. If it is the wrong half, why,
then the shorter it is the better.
As most of these commentaries were written during the year which is
mercifully over, it would not have been possible, even if it had been
sought, to avoid current topics. Why should a writer shrink from being
called a journalist? He need not cease to be writer. But if he wishes
to be true to his original calling, to make his hope and election
sure, he must always be careful to seek the universal in the
particular; and that is where your idealist has such a pull, for he
can see nothing else. And if he does that he need not be afraid that
the conventions of Time and Space will be a hindrance to his book's
path. He will be readable a century hence; he will be readable in the
Antipodes; and that is as near infinity as any of us, short of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, need trouble about. In the country one reads, not
skims, the daily paper; and if one's comments are leisurely, perhaps
they are all the better. At any rate one is not tempted to see the end
of the world in a strike, or a second Bonaparte in Signor d'Annunzio.
To me that poet seems rather a comic-opera brigand. I suspect him of
a green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail. But if you regard him
_sub specie eternitatis_, then I fear we must see in him all Italy
in epitome. That was how Italy went to war--but you must live in the
country to understand things like that, out of range of the tumult and
the shouting.
No more of Signor d'Annunzio here or elsewhere in these pages; but of
ourselves and our needs somewhat. Nobody could have lived through last
year without considering anxiously whither we are tending and with
what pretence. As the occasion moved me I have said my say about those
matters, and here the reader will have as much of it as I am ready
just now to give him. This is perhaps some sort of an apology for
what may be found hereafter of a hortatory kind. I may be charged with
wanting to do people "good." Well, if trying to make them happy is
trying to do them good, then I confess the charge. There is no doubt
whatever that they are not happy now. They hate too many people, they
pant and toil after the wrong things; they serve false gods and forget
the true ones. That is what we think about it in the country; and I am
of the country's opinion.
We need, it seems to me, many things--religion, love, work,
seriousness and so on; but what we need most of all, as I believe, is
to wash our hands. For five years they have been groping and wrenching
in the vitals of other people. They are foul and we are still drunk
with the reek. In God's name, let us wash and then we can begin to
build up the world again. We see the need of that out in the country,
but so far as I can judge by what I read or have seen of London,
there's no notion of it there.
But there's not much about London in this book.