the failing eyesight and decaying teeth in children. I think
I have already stated that these troubles were due to the
excessive amount of sugar or sweetstuffs consumed. All sweet
things cause an excessive exudation of saliva from the gums,
which affect and impair both the teeth and the eyesight for,
despite of what dentist and doctor may say, there is an
intimate relation between the two. Dr Sims Wallace, the
eminent lecturer on Dental Surgery, recommends _Beer_ or dry
_Champagne_ as an excellent mouth wash. They are also
pleasant to the throat and stomach!"
The reader is now in a position to estimate for himself the extent to
which he can rely on Raphael's judgment, and to decide how far he will
accept the horoscope Raphael has cast for Mr Lloyd George. On this he
writes:
"This gentleman has figured so prominently in our national
affairs for the last few years, that it may not be out of
place if I give a few remarks on his horoscope. The time of
his birth is stated to have been January 17th, 1863, 8h.
55m. A.M., but neither myself, nor other Astrologers, are
satisfied with this hour. I think he was born some minutes
sooner. At his birth the Sun was in exact Square to Jupiter,
and also in Square to Mars, and Mars was in Opposition to
Jupiter. These are very ominous and important aspects. The
former denotes great extravagance, and waste of money, and
the latter gives impetuosity, and danger to the person."
He then proceeds to give a "brief analysis" of Mr Lloyd George's
horoscope:
"The Sun near Ascendant--self-praise, egotism,
self-satisfaction, fondness for publicity and notoriety.
"Venus and Mercury on Ascendant--fluency in speech,
agreeableness, desire to please, fondness for Music, Arts,
and Sciences.
"Mars in 2nd, in Opposition to Jupiter, unfavourable for
financial undertakings, extravagance, carelessness, and
losses in speculation.
"Uranus in 4th, trouble at end of life.
"Jupiter in the 8th, benefit or help from marriage partner.
"Moon near cusp of the 11th, many friends, especially females.
"The Aspects denote--Sun Square Jupiter and Mars,
recklessness in expenditure, public disapprobation, and an
unfavourable and sudden ending to life.
"Venus in Trine to Saturn, and Moon in Sextile to
Jupiter--domestic relations of the happiest description, and
the wife a great help."
I frankly doubt if any man can foretell the future of Mr Lloyd George.
No one knows what he will say or do to-morrow. We know what phrases he
will use, but we do not know on what side he will use them, or what he
will mean by them. All we know is that Sir William Sutherland will say
ditto.
Let us, then, return to safer fields of prophecy. What, really, is
going to happen in 1921? I think I know. Human beings will behave like
bewildered sheep. They will be chiefly notable for their lack of moral
courage. Good men will apologise for the deeds of bad men, and bad men
will do very much as they please. Cruel and selfish faces will be seen
in every railway carriage and in every omnibus, but readers of the
respectable Press will refuse to believe that there are any cruel
people outside Germany and Russia. Not one but all the Ten
Commandments will be broken, and turkeys will be eaten on Christmas
Day. Men will die of disease, violence, famine and old age, and others
will be born to take their place. Intellectuals will be
pretentious--mules solemnly trying to look like Derby winners. There
will be a considerable amount of lying, injustice, and
self-righteousness. Dogs will be fairly decent, but some of them will
bite. Above all, the human conscience will survive. It will survive.
It will continue to be the old still, small voice we know--as still
and as small as it is possible to be without disappearing into silence
and nothingness. And some of us will get a certain amusement out of it
all, and will prefer life rather than death. We shall also go on
puzzling ourselves as to what under the sun it all means. Not even a
murderer will be without a friend or a pet dog or cat or bird. That is
what 1921 will be like. That, at least, is as certain as the time of
the high tide at Aberdeen on the 24th of January.
VIII
ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE
It was only the other day that I came upon a full-grown man reading
with something like rapture a little book--_Ships and Seafaring Shown
to Children_. His rapture was modified however, by the bitter
reflection that he had already passed so great a part of his life
without knowing the difference between a ship and a barque; and, as
for sloops, yawls, cutters, ketches, and brigantines, they were simply
the Russian alphabet to him. I sympathise with his regret. It was a
noble day in one's childhood when one had learned the names of
sailing-vessels, and, walking to the point of the harbour beyond the
bathing-boxes, could correct the ignorance of a friend: "That's not a
ship. That's a brig." To the boy from an inland town every vessel that
sails is a ship. He feels he is being shown a new and bewildering
world when he is told that the only ship that has the right to be
called a ship is a vessel with three masts (at least), all of them
square-rigged. When once he has learned his lesson, he finds an
unaccustomed delight in wandering along the dirtiest coal-quay, and
recognising the barques by the fact that only two of their three masts
are square-rigged, and the brigs by the fact that they are
square-rigged throughout--a sort of two-masted ships. Vessels have
suddenly become as real to him in their differences as the different
sorts of common birds. As for his feelings on the day on which he can
tell for certain the upper fore topsail from the upper fore
top-gallant sail, and either of these from the fore skysail, the
crossjack, or the mizzen-royal, they are those of a man who has
mastered a language and discovers himself, to his surprise, talking it
fluently. The world of shipping has become articulate poetry to him
instead of a monotonous abracadabra.
It is as though we can know nothing of a thing until we know its name.
Can we be said to know what a pigeon is unless we know that it is a
pigeon? We may have seen it again and again, with its bottle-shoulders
and shining neck, sitting on the edge of a chimney-pot, and noted it
as a bird with a full bosom and swift wings. But if we are not able to
name it except vaguely as a "bird," we seem to be separated from it by
an immense distance of ignorance. Learn that it is a pigeon however,
and immediately it rushes towards us across the distance, like
something seen through a telescope. No doubt to the pigeon-fancier
this would seem but the first lisping of knowledge, and he would not
think much of our acquaintance with pigeons if we could not tell a
carrier from a pouter. That is the charm of knowledge--it is merely a
door into another sort of ignorance. There are always new differences
to be discovered, new names to be learned, new individualities to be
known, new classifications to be made. The world is so full of a
number of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or the
scientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he lived
for a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredom
never. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsy
young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his
attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled
like a million larks. He raised his eyes to the heavens, then shook
his head. "There are too many of them," he complained wearily. It
should be remembered, however, that he was drunk, and that he did not
know astronomy. There could be too many stars only if they were all
turned out on the same pattern, and made the same pattern on the sky.
Fortunately, the universe is the creation not of a manufacturer but of
an artist.
There is scarcely a subject that does not contain sufficient Asias of
differences to keep an explorer happy for a lifetime. It would be easy
to do nothing but chase butterflies all one's days. It is said that
thirteen thousand species of butterflies have been already discovered,
and it is suggested that there may be nearly twice as many that have
so far escaped the naturalists. After so monstrous a figure, we are
not surprised to learn that there are sixty-eight species of
butterflies in Great Britain and Ireland. We should be astonished,
however, had we not already expended our astonishment on the larger
number. How many of us are there who could name even half-a-dozen
varieties? We all know the tortoiseshell and the white and the
blue--the little blue butterflies that flutter over the gold and red
of the cornfields. But the average man does not even know by name such
varieties as the Camberwell Beauty, the Dingy Skipper, the
Pearl-bordered Fritillary, and the White-letter Hairstreak. As for the
moth, are there not as many sorts of moths as there are words in a
dictionary? Many men give all the pleasant hours of their lives to
learning how to know the difference between one of them and another.
One used to see these moth-hunters on windless nights in a Hampstead
lane pursuing their quarry fantastically with nets in the light of the
lamps. In pursuing moths, they pursue knowledge. This, they feel, is
life at its most exciting, its most intense. They regard a man who
does not know and is not interested in the difference between one moth
and another as a man not yet thoroughly awakened from his pre-natal
sleep. And, indeed, one could not conceive a more appalling sort of
blank idiocy than the condition of a man who could not tell one thing
from another in any department of life whatever. We would rather
change lives with a jelly-fish than with such a man. This luxury of
variety was not meant to be ignored. We throw ourselves into it with
exhilaration as a swimmer plunges into the sea. There are few forms of
happiness I know which are more enviable than that of those who have
eyes for birds and flowers. How they rejoice on learning that,
according to one theory, there are a hundred and three different
species of brambles to be found in these islands! They would not have
them fewer by a single one. It is extraordinarily pleasant even for
one who is mainly ignorant of the flowers and their families to come
on two or three varieties of one flower in the course of a country
walk. As a boy, he is excited by the difference between the pin-headed
and the thrum-headed primrose. As he grows older, he scans the
roadside for little peeping things that to a lazy eye seem as like
each other as two peas--the dove's foot geranium, the round-leaved
geranium and the lesser wild geranium. "As like each other as two
peas," we have said: but _are_ two peas like each other? Who knows
whether the peas have not the same differences of feature among
themselves that Englishmen have? Half the similarities we notice are
only the results of our ignorance and idleness. The townsman passing a
field of sheep finds it difficult to believe that the shepherd can
distinguish between one and another of them with as much certainty as
if they were his children. And do not most of us think of foreigners
as beings who are all turned out as if on a pattern, like sheep? The
further removed the foreigners are from us in race the more they seem
to us to be like each other. When we speak of negroes, we think of
millions of people most of whom look exactly alike. We feel much the
same about Chinamen and even Turks. Probably to a Chinaman all English
children look exactly alike, and it may be that all Europeans seem to
him to be as indistinguishable as sticks of barley-sugar. How many
people think of Jews in this way! I have heard an Englishman
expressing his wonder that Jewish parents should be able to pick out
their own children in a crowd of Jewish boys and girls.
Thus our first generalisations spring from ignorance rather than from
knowledge. They are true, so long as we know that they are not
entirely true. As soon as we begin to accept them as absolute truths,
they become lies. One of the perils of a great war is that it revives
the passionate faith of the common man in generalisations. He begins
to think that all Germans are much the same, or that all Americans are
much the same, or that all Conscientious Objectors are much the same.
In each case he imagines a lay figure rather than a human being. He
may hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search of
truth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try to
think about a human being instead. I do not wish to deny the
importance of generalisations. It is not possible to think or even to
act without them. The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge of
and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and
poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all
things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations.
They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order
of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in
pursuit of a generalisation--the perfect generalisation of the
universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series
of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call the
known world? To know the resemblances of things is even more important
than to know the differences of things. Indeed, if we are not
interested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a mere
scrap-book pleasure. If we are not interested in the latter, on the
other hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate into
guesswork and assertion and empty phrases. Shakespeare is greater than
all the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how very
like human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybody
else, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other. He was
master of the particular as well as of the universal. How much poorer
the world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only to
human beings but to the very flowers--if he had not been able to tell
the difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and the
gillyflower!
IX
THE INTELLECTUAL SIDE OF HORSE-RACING
Horse-racing--or, at least, betting--is one of the few crafts that are
looked down on by practically everybody who does not take part in it.
"It's a mug's game," people say. Even betting men talk like this.
There is a street called Mug's Row in a north of England town: it is
so called because the houses in it were built by a bookmaker. Whether
it was the bookmaker or his victims that gave the street its name I do
not know. To call a bookmaker a mug would seem to most people an abuse
of language. Yet the only bookmaker I have ever really known used to
confess himself a mug in the most penitent fashion. He was a mug,
however, not because he could not make money, but because he could not
keep it. The poor of his suburb, when in difficulties, he declared,
used always to come to him instead of going to the clergy, and he was
unable to refuse them. But then he was bitter against the clergy. As a
young man, he had been a Sunday school teacher, and so far as I could
gather, he might have gone on being a Sunday school teacher till the
present day if he had not suddenly been assailed with doubts one
Sabbath afternoon as he expounded the story of David and Goliath.
Whether it was that he looked on David as having taken an
unsportsmanlike advantage of the giant or whether he doubted that so
much could be done with such little stones, he did not make quite
clear. Anyhow, from that day on, he never believed in revealed
religion. He quarrelled with his clergyman. He broke the Sabbath. He
began to drink beer and to go to race-meetings. He rapidly rose from
the position of carpenter to that of bookmaker, and, were it not for
his infernal gift of charity, he would probably now be driving his own
car and be hall-marked with a Coalition title. Even as it was, he was
much more prosperous than any carpenter. Whenever he produced money,
it was in pocketfuls and handfuls. Strange that a bookmaker, who by
his trade must be accustomed to miracles, should find it difficult to
believe in David and Goliath. He was possibly a man who betted on
form, and on form Goliath should undoubtedly have won. David was an
outsider. He had no breeding. He would have been surprised if he could
have foreseen how his victory would rankle some thousands of years
later in the soul of an honest English bookmaker.
It is, however, just these matters of form and breeding that raise
horse-racing and betting above the intellectual level of a game of
nap. Betting men who ignore these things are as unintellectual as the
average novelist. There are some, for instance, who shut their eyes
and bring down a pin or a pencil on a list of names of the horses, in
the hope that in this way they may discover a winner. No doubt they
may. It is perhaps as good a way as any other. But there is something
trivial in such methods. This is mere gambling for the sake of
excitement. There is no more fundamental brainwork in it than in a
game I saw being played in a railway carriage the other day, when a
man drew a handful of coins from his pocket and bet his friend
half-a-sovereign that there would be more heads than tails lying
uppermost. This is a game at which it is possible to lose five pounds
in two minutes. It is the sort of game to which a betting man will
resort when _in extremis_, but only then. The ruling passion is
strong, however. I have a friend who on one occasion went into retreat
in a Catholic monastery. Two well-known bookmakers had also gone into
temporary retreat for the good of their souls. My friend told me that
even during the religious services the bookmakers used to bet as to
which of the monks would stand up first at the conclusion of a prayer,
and that in the solemn hush of the worship he would suddenly hear a
hoarse whisper: "Two to one on Brownie"--a brother with hair of that
colour--and the answer: "I take you, Joe." I have even heard of men
betting as to which of two raindrops on a window-pane will reach the
bottom first. It is possible to bet on cats, rats or flies. Calvinists
do not bet, because they believe that everything that happens is a
certainty. The extreme betting man is no Calvinist, however. He
believes that most things are accidents, and the rest catastrophes.
Hence his philosophy is almost always that of Epicurus. To him every
day is a new day, at the end of which it is his aim to be able to say,
like Horace, _Vixi_, or, as the text ought perhaps to read, _Vici_.
The intellectual betting man, on the other hand, has a position
somewhere between the extremes of Calvinism and Epicureanism. He
worships neither certainty nor chance. He reckons up probabilities.
When Mr Asquith picked out Spion Kop as the winner of the Derby, he
did so because he went about the business of selection not with a pin
or a pencil, but with one of the best brains in England. In the course
of his long conflicts with the House of Lords he had probably
interested himself somewhat profoundly in questions of heredity and
pedigree, and he was thus well equipped for an investigation into the
records of the parentage and grandparentage of the various Derby
horses. All that the ordinary casual better knows about Spion Kop is
that he is the son of Spearmint, which won the Derby in 1906. This,
however, would not alone make him an obviously better horse than
Orpheus, whose sire, Orby, won the Derby in 1907. The student of
breeding must be a feminist, who pays as much attention to the female
as to the male line. It was by the study of the female line that the
most cunning of the sporting journalists were able to eliminate
Tetratema from the list of probable winners. Tetratema, as son of the
Tetrarch, was excellently fathered for staying the mile-and-a-half
course at Epsom. More than this, as a writer in _The Sportsman_
pointed out: "The Tetrarch himself is by Roi Herode, a fine stayer,
and his maternal grand-dam was by Hagioscope, who rarely failed to
transmit stamina." It is when we turn to Tetratema's mother, Scotch
Gift--or is it his grandmother something else?--apparently, that we
discover his hereditary vice. This mare our journalist exposed to
scathing and searching criticism, and concluded that "there can be
nothing unreasonable in the inference, based on the records of this
family, that the chances are against a Derby winner having descended
from the least distinguished of ... four sisters." Even so, however,
the writer a few sentences later abjures Calvinism, and denies that
there is anything certain in what he calls breeding problems. "It
seemed," he writes, "wildly improbable at one time that Flying Duchess
would produce a Derby winner, for I believe it is correct that two of
Galopin's elder brothers ran in a bus, and there were two others quite
useless So, on the face of it, the chances were against Galopin, the
youngest brother." I quote these passages as evidence of the immense
demand the serious pursuit of horse-racing puts on the intellect. The
betting man must be as well versed in precedents as a lawyer and in
genealogical trees as a historian. At school, I always found the
genealogical trees the most difficult and bewildering part of history.
Yet the genealogical tree of a king is a simple matter compared to
that of a horse. All you have to learn about a king is the names of
his relations: regarding a horse, however, you must know not only the
names but the character, staying power and domestic virtues of every
male and female with whom he is connected during several generations.
If a man spent as much labour in disentangling the cousinship of the
royal families of ancient Egypt, he would be venerated as a scholar in
five continents. Oxford and Cambridge would shower degrees on him. Sir
William Sutherland would get him a place on the Civil List. Hence it
seems to me that tipping the winners is not, as is too often regarded,
"anybody's job": it is work that should be undertaken only by men of
powerful mind. No man should be allowed to qualify as a tipster unless
he has taken a degree at one of the Universities. The ideal tipster
would at once be a great historian a great antiquary, a great
zoologist, a great mathematician, and a man of profound common-sense.
It is no accident that an ex-Prime Minister was one of the few
Englishmen to spot the winner of the Derby of 1920. Mr Asquith must
have gone patiently through all Spion Kop's relations, weighing up the
chances whether it was an accident or owing to the weather that such
an one fifteen years ago was beaten by a neck in a six-furlong race,
studying incidents in every one of their careers, seeing that none of
them had ever had a great-uncle a bus-horse, bringing out a table of
logarithms to decide difficult points.... We need not be surprised
that there are fewer great tipsters than great poets. Shakespeare
alone has given us a portrait of the perfect tipster--"looking before
and after ... in apprehension how like a god!"
It is perhaps, however, when we leave questions of breeding and come
to those of form, that we realise most fully the amazing
intellectualism of the betting life. In the study of form we are faced
by problems that can be solved only by the higher algebra. Thus, if
Jehoshaphat, carrying 7 st., ran third to Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4
lb., in a mile race, and Jezebel, carrying 8 st. 4 lb., was beaten by
a neck by Woman and Wine, carrying 7 st. 9 lb., over a mile and a
quarter, and Woman and Wine, carrying 8 st. 1 lb., was beaten by Tom
Thumb, carrying 9 st. in a mile 120 yds., and Tom Thumb, carrying 9
st. 7 lb., was beaten by Jehoshaphat over seven furlongs, we have to
calculate what chance Tom Thumb has of beating Jezebel in a race of a
mile and a half on a wet day. There are men to whom such calculations
may come easy. To Mr Asquith they are probably child's play. For
myself, I shrink from them and, if I were a betting man, would no
doubt in sheer desperation be driven back on the method of pin and
pencil. But it is obvious that the sincere betting man has to make
such calculations daily. Every morning the student of form finds his
sporting page full of such lists as the following:--
0 0 0 CONCLUSIVE (7-5), Kroonstad-Conclusion. 8th of 9 to
Poltava (gave 17lb.) Gatwick May (6f) and 7th of 19 to
Orby's Pride (rec 4lb) Kempton May (5f).
3 3 3 RAPIERE (7-4), Sunder--Gourouli. Lost 3-4 length and 3
lengths to Bantry (gave 2lb) and Marcia (rec 7lb) Newmarket
May (1m), GOLDEN GUINEA (gave 20lb) not in first 9. See
BLACK JESS.
0 0 4 ROYAL BLUE (7-0), Prince Palatine--China Blue. See
NORTHERN LIGHT.