first 4 to St Corentin (gave 121b) Lingfield last week (7f).
Here Ap. (7f) lost 3 lengths to Victory Speech (rec 1lb),
RAPIERE (gave 13lb, favourite) ½ length off.
0 LLAMA (6-11), Isard II.--Laughing Mirror. Nowhere to
Silver Jug (gave 15lb) Newbury Ap. (7f).
Is not a page of Thucydides simpler? Is Persius himself more succinct
or obscure? Our teachers used to apologise for teaching us Latin
grammar and mathematics by telling us that they were good mental
gymnastics. If education is only a matter of mental gymnastics,
however, I should recommend horse-racing as an ideal study for young
boys and girls. The sole objection to it is that it is so engrossing;
it might absorb the whole energies of the child. The safety of Latin
grammar lies in its dullness. No child is tempted by it into
forgetting that there are other duties in life besides mental
gymnastics. Horse-racing, on the other hand, comes into our lives with
the effect of a religious conversion. It is the greatest monopolist
among the pleasures. It affects men's conversation. It affects their
entire outlook. The betting man's is a dedicated life. Even books have
a new meaning for him. _The Ring and the Book_--it is his one and only
epic. And it is the most intellectual of epics. That is my point.
X
WHY WE HATE INSECTS
It has been said that the characteristic sound of summer is the hum of
insects, as the characteristic sound of spring is the singing of
birds. It is all the more curious that the word "insect" conveys to us
an implication of ugliness. We think of spiders, of which many people
are more afraid than of Germans. We think of bugs and fleas, which
seem so indecent in their lives that they are made a jest by the
vulgar and the nice people do their best to avoid mentioning them. We
think of blackbeetles scurrying into safety as the kitchen light is
suddenly turned on--blackbeetles which (so we are told) in the first
place are not beetles, and in the second place are not black. There
are some women who will make a face at the mere name of any of these
creatures. Those of us who have never felt this repulsion--at least,
against spiders and blackbeetles--cannot but wonder how far it is
natural. Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like the
old-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice? The nearest I
have come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a cat
retrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and making
a dish of it. There are also certain crawling creatures which are so
notoriously the children of filth and so threatening in their touch
that we naturally shrink from them. Burns may make merry over a louse
crawling in a lady's hair, but few of us can regard its kind with
equanimity even on the backs of swine. Men of science deny that the
louse is actually engendered by dirt, but it undoubtedly thrives on
it. Our anger against the flea also arises from the fact that we
associate it with dirt. Donne once wrote a poem to a lady who had been
bitten by the same flea as himself, arguing that this was a good
reason why she should allow him to make love to her. It is, and was
bound to be, a dirty poem. Love, even of the wandering and polygynous
kind, does not express itself in such images. Only while under the
dominion of the youthful heresy of ugliness could a poet pretend that
it did. The flea, according to the authorities, is "remarkable for its
powers of leaping, and nearly cosmopolitan." Even so, it has found no
place in the heart or fancy of man. There have been men who were
indifferent to fleas, but there have been none who loved them, though
if my memory does not betray me there was a famous French prisoner
some years ago who beguiled the tedium of his cell by making a pet and
a performer of a flea. For the world at large, the flea represents
merely hateful irritation. Mr W.B. Yeats has introduced it into poetry
in this sense in an epigram addressed "to a poet who would have me
praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and of mine":
You say as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these,
But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?
When we think of the sufferings of human beings and animals at the
hands--if that is the right word--of insects, we feel that it is
pardonable enough to make faces at creatures so inconsiderate. But
what strikes one as remarkable is that the insects that do man most
harm are not those that horrify him most. A lady who will sit bravely
while a wasp hangs in the air and inspects first her right and then
her left temple will run a mile from a harmless spider. Another will
remain collected (though murderous) in presence of a horse-fly, but
will shudder at sight of a moth that is innocent of blood. Our fears,
it is evident, do not march in all respects with our sense of physical
danger. There are insects that make us feel that we are in presence of
the uncanny. Many of us have this feeling about moths. Moths are the
ghosts of the insect world. It may be the manner in which they flutter
in unheralded out of the night that terrifies us. They seem to tap
against our lighted windows as though the outer darkness had a message
for us. And their persistence helps to terrify. They are more
troublesome than a subject nation. They are more importunate than the
importunate widow. But they are most terrifying of all if one suddenly
sees their eyes blazing crimson as they catch the light. One thinks of
nocturnal rites in an African forest temple and of terrible jewels
blazing in the head of an evil goddess--jewels to be stolen, we
realise, by a foolish white man, thereafter to be the object of a
vendetta in a sensational novel. One feels that one's hair would be
justified in standing on end, only that hair does not do such things.
The sight of a moth's eye is, I fancy, a rare one for most people. It
is a sight one can no more forget than a house on fire. Our feelings
towards moths being what they are, it is all the more surprising that
superstition should connect the moth so much less than the butterfly
with the world of the dead. Who save a cabbage-grower has any feeling
against butterflies? And yet in folk-lore it is to the butterfly
rather than to the moth that is assigned the ghostly part. In Ireland
they have a legend about a priest who had not believed that men had
souls, but, on being converted, announced that a living thing would be
seen soaring up from his body when he died--in proof that his earlier
scepticism had been wrong. Sure enough, when he lay dead, a beautiful
creature "with four snow-white wings" rose from his body and fluttered
round his head. "And this," we are told, "was the first butterfly that
was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies
are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter
Purgatory." In the Solomon Islands, they say, it used to be the
custom, when a man was about to die, for him to announce that he was
about to transmigrate into a butterfly or some other creature. The
members of his family, on meeting a butterfly afterwards, would
exclaim: "This is papa," and offer him a coco-nut. The members of an
English family in like circumstances would probably say: "Have a
banana." In certain tribes of Assam the dead are believed to return in
the shape of butterflies or house-flies, and for this reason no one
will kill them. On the other hand, in Westphalia the butterfly plays
the part given to the scapegoat in other countries, and on St Peter's
Day, in February, it is publicly expelled with rhyme and ritual.
Elsewhere, as in Samoa--I do not know where I found all these
facts--probably in _The Golden Bough_--the butterfly has been feared
as a god, and to catch a butterfly was to run the risk of being struck
dead. The moth, for all I know, may be the centre of as many legends
but I have not met them. It may be, however, that in many of the
legends the moth and the butterfly are not very clearly distinguished.
To most of us it seems easy enough to distinguish between them; the
English butterfly can always be known, for instance, by his clubbed
horns. But this distinction does not hold with regard to the entire
world of butterflies--a world so populous and varied that thirteen
thousand species have already been discovered, and entomologists hope
one day to classify twice as many more. Even in these islands, indeed,
most of us do not judge a moth chiefly by its lack of clubbed horns.
It is for us the thing that flies by night and eats holes in our
clothes. We are not even afraid of it in all circumstances. Our terror
is an indoors terror. We are on good terms with it in poetry, and play
with the thought of
The desire of the moth for the star.
We remember that it is for the moths that the pallid jasmine smells so
sweetly by night. There is no shudder in our minds when we read:
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream,
And caught a little silver trout.
No man has ever sung of spiders or earwigs or any other of our pet
antipathies among the insects like that. The moth is the only one of
the insects that fascinates us with both its beauty and its terror.
I doubt if there have ever been greater hordes of insects in this
country than during the past spring. It is the only complaint one has
to make against the sun. He is a desperate breeder of insects. And he
breeds them not in families like a Christian but in plagues. The
thought of the insects alone keeps us from envying the tropics their
blue skies and hot suns. Better the North Pole than a plague of
locusts. We fear the tarantula and have no love for the tse-tse fly.
The insects of our own climate are bad enough in all conscience. The
grasshopper, they say, is a murderer, and, though the earwig is a
perfect mother, other insects, such as the burying-beetle, have the
reputation of parricides, But, dangerous or not, the insects are for
the most part teasers and destroyers. The greenfly makes its colonies
in the rose, a purple fellow swarms under the leaves of the apples,
and another scoundrel, black as the night, swarms over the beans.
There are scarcely more diseases in the human body than there are
kinds of insects in a single fruit tree. The apple that is rotten
before it is ripe is an insect's victim, and, if the plums fall green
and untimely in scores upon the ground, once more it is an insect that
has been at work among them. Talk about German spies! Had German spies
gone to the insect world for a lesson, they might not have been the
inefficient bunglers they showed themselves to be. At the same time,
most of us hate spies and insects for the same reason. We regard them
as noxious creatures intruding where they have no right to be, preying
upon us and giving us nothing but evil in return. Hence our
ruthlessness. We say: "Vermin," and destroy them. To regard a human
being as an insect is always the first step in treating him without
remorse. It is a perilous attitude and in general is more likely to
beget crime than justice. There has never, I believe, been an empire
built in which, at some stage or other, a massacre of children among a
revolting population has not been excused on the ground that "nits
make lice." "Swat that Bolshevik," no doubt, seems to many
reactionaries as sanitary a counsel as "Swat that fly." Even in regard
to flies, however, most of us can only swat with scruple. Hate flies
as we may, and wish them in perdition as we may, we could not slowly
pull them to pieces, wing after wing and leg after leg, as thoughtless
children are said to do. Many of us cannot endure to see them slowly
done to death on those long strips of sticky paper on which the flies
drag their legs and their lives out--as it seems to me, a vile
cruelty. A distinguished novelist has said that to watch flies trying
to tug their legs off the paper one after another till they are twice
their natural length is one of his favourite amusements. I have never
found any difficulty in believing it of him. It is an odd fact that
considerateness, if not actually kindness, to flies has been made one
of the tests of gentleness in popular speech. How often has one heard
it said in praise of a dead man: "He wouldn't have hurt a fly!" As for
those who do hurt flies, we pillory them in history. We have never
forgotten the cruelty of Domitian. "At the beginning of his reign,"
Suetonius tells us "he used to spend hours in seclusion every day,
doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpened
stylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in
there with Cæsar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: 'Not even a
fly.'" And just as most of us are on the side of the fly against
Domitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider.
We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of
the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive
humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a
spider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether
he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of
flies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in
such matters. I cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but I
am content to believe that this may be owing to my ignorance of some
of the facts of the case. There are, on the other hand, two acts of
destruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased. One of
these occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedly
against a stone. I have never thought of the incident from the snail's
point of view. I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell on
the stone as though it were music. I felt the same sort of mild thrill
of pleasure the other day when I found a beautiful spotted ladybird
squeezing itself between two apples and settling down to feed on some
kind of aphides that were eating into the fruit. The ladybird, the
butterfly, and the bee--who would put chains upon such creatures?
These are insects that must have been in Eden before the snake.
Beelzebub, the god of the other insects, had not yet any engendering
power on the earth in those days, when all the flowers were as strange
as insects and all the insects were as beautiful as flowers.
XI
VIRTUE
There is grave danger of a revival of virtue in this country. There
are, I know, two kinds of virtue, and only one of them is a vice
Unfortunately, it is the latter a revival of which is threatened
to-day. This is the virtue of the virtuously indignant. It is virtue
that is not content merely to be virtuous to the glory of God. It has
no patience with the simple beauty and goodness of the saints. Virtue,
in the eyes of the virtuously indignant, is hardly worthy to be called
virtue unless it goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom it may
devour. Virtue, according to this view, is a detective, inquisitor,
and flagellator of the vices--especially of the vices that are so
unpopular that the mob may be easily persuaded to attack them. One of
the chief differences between the two kinds of virtue, I fancy, is
that while true virtue regards the mob-spirit as an enemy, simular
virtue (if we may adopt the Shakespearean phrase) looks to the mob as
its cousin and its ally. To be virtuous in the latter sense is
obviously as easy as hunting rats or cats. Virtue of this kind is
simply the eternal huntsman in man's breast with eyes aglint for a
victim. It is Mr Murdstone's virtue--the persecutor's virtue. It is
the virtue that warms the bosom of every man who is more furious with
his neighbour's sins than with his own. If virtue is merely an
inflammation against our neighbour's sins, what man on earth is so
mean as to be incapable of it? To be virtuous in this fashion is as
easy as lying. Those who abstain from it do so not out of lack of
heart, but from choice. We have read of the popularity of the
ducking-stool in former days for women taken in adultery. Savage mobs
may have thought that by putting their hearts into this amusement they
were making up to virtue for the long years of neglect to which, as
individuals, they had subjected her. They might not have been virtue's
lovers, but at least they could be virtue's bullies. After all, virtue
itself is no bad sport, when chasing, kicking, thumping, and yelling
are made the chief part of the game. Sending dogs coursing after a
hare is nothing to it. Man's enjoyment of the chase never rises to the
finest point of ecstasy save when his victim is a human being. Man's
inhumanity to man, says the poet, makes countless thousands mourn. But
think also of the countless thousands that it makes rejoice! We should
always remember that the Crucifixion was an exceedingly popular event,
and in no quarter more so than among the virtuously indignant. It
would probably never have taken place had it not been for the close
alliance between the virtuously indignant and the mob.
To be fair to the virtuously indignant and the mob, they do not insist
beyond reason that their victim shall be a bad man. Good hunting may
be had even among the saints, and who does not enjoy the spectacle of
a citizen distinguished mainly for his unblemished character being
dragged down into the dust? We have no reason to believe that the
people who were burned during the Inquisition were worse than their
neighbours, yet the mob, we are told, used to gather enthusiastically
and dance round the flames. The destructive instincts of the mob are
such that in certain moods it is ready to destroy any kind of man,
just as the destructive instincts of a puppy are such that in certain
moods it is ready to destroy any sort of book--whether Smiles's
_Self-Help_ or _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ is a matter of perfect
indifference. The virtuously indignant maintain their power by
constantly inciting and feeding this appetite for destruction. Hence,
when we feel virtuously indignant, we would do well to inquire of
ourselves if that is the limit and Z of our virtue. Have we no sins of
our own to amend that we have all this time for barking and biting at
the vices of our neighbours? And if we must attack the sins of our
fellows, would it not be the more heroic course to begin with those we
are most tempted by, instead of those to which we have no mind? Do not
let the drunkard feel virtuous because he is able with an undivided
heart to denounce simony, and do not let the forger, who happens to be
a teetotaller because of the weakness of his stomach, be too
virtuously indignant at the red-nosed patron of the four-ale bar. Any
of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of
the vices that do not attract us. Most of us can boast than we have
never been cruel to a hippopotamus or had dealings with a succubus or
taken a bribe of a million pounds to betray a friend. On these points
we can look forward with perfect confidence to the scrutiny of the Day
of Judgment. I fear, however, the Recording Angel is likely to devote
such little space as he can afford to each of us to the vices we have
rather than to the vices we have not. Even Charles Peace would have
been acquitted if he had been accused of brawling in church instead of
murder. Hence it is to be hoped that passengers in railway trains will
not remain content with gloating down upon the unappetising sins of
which the forty-seven thousand are accused by Mr Pemberton Billing.
Steep and perilous is the ascent of virtue, and the British public may
well be grateful to Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley if they help it with
voice or outstretched hand to climb to the snowy summits. So far as
can be seen, however, all that Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley do is to
interrupt the British public in its upward climb and orate to it on
the monstrous vices of the Cities of the Plain. This may be an
agreeable diversion for weary men, but it obviously involves the
neglect of virtue, not the pursuit of it. Most people imagine that to
pursue vice is to pursue virtue. But the wisdom of the ages tells us
that the only thing to do to vice is to fly from it. Lot's wife was a
lady who looked round once too often to see what was happening to the
forty-seven thousand. Let Mr Billing and Mr Bottomley beware. Their
interest in the Cities of the Plain will turn them into pillars of
salt a thousand years before it turns them into pillars of society.
As for virtue, then, how is it to be achieved? Merely by blackening
the rest of the world, we cannot hope to make ourselves white. Modern
writers tell us that we cannot make ourselves white even by blackening
ourselves. They denounce the sense of sin as a sin, and tell us that
there is nothing of which we should repent except repentance. We need
not stay to discuss this point. We know well enough that, so long as
the human intellect (to leave the human conscience out of the
question) survives, men will be burdened with the sense of
imperfection and think enviously of the nobility of Epaminondas or
Julius Cæsar or St Francis of Assisi. For we have to count even Julius
Cæsar among the virtuous, though the scandalmongers would not have it
so. His vices may have made him bald and brought about his
assassination. But he had the heroic virtues--courage and generosity
and freedom from vindictiveness. When we read how he wept at the death
of his great enemy, and how "from the man who brought him Pompey's
head he turned away with loathing, as from an assassin," we bow before
the nobility of his character and realise that he was something more
than a stern man and an adulterer. Pompey, too, had this gift of
virtue--this capacity for turning away from foul means of besting his
enemies. When he had captured Perpenna in Spain, the latter offered
him a magnificent story of a plot, the knowledge of which would have
put the lives of many leading Romans in his power. "Perpenna, who had
come into possession of the papers of Sertorius, offered," says
Plutarch, "to produce letters from the chief men of Rome, who had
desired to subvert the existing order and change the form of
government, and had therefore invited Sertorius into Italy. Pompey,
therefore, fearing that this might stir up greater wars than those now
ended, put Perpenna to death and burned the letters without even
reading them." It was hard on Perpenna, but in burning the letters at
least Pompey gave us an example of virtue. It is Plutarch's feeling
for the beauty of such noble actions that has made his biographies a
primer of virtue for all time. None of his heroes are primarily "good"
men. There is scarcely one of them who could have been canonised by
any Church. They have enough of the weaknesses of flesh and blood to
satisfy even the most exacting novelist of these days. On the other
hand, they nearly all had that capacity for grandeur of conduct which
distinguishes the noble man from the base. Plutarch never pretends
that mean and filthy motives and generous motives do not jostle one
another strangely in the same breast, but his portraits of great men
give us the feeling that we are in presence of men redeemed by their
virtues rather than utterly destroyed by their vices. Suetonius, on
the other hand, is the historian of the forty-seven thousand. His book
may be recommended as scandalmongering--hardly as an aid to virtue.
Here we have the servants' evidence of Roman history, the plots and
the secret vices. Suetonius, fortunately, has the grace not to write
as though in narrating his story of vice he were performing a virtuous
act. If we are to have stories of fashionable sinners, let us at least
have them naked and not dressed up in the language of outraged virtue.
Scandal is sufficiently entertaining by itself. There is no need to
lace it with self-righteousness.
XII
JUNE
There is always a cuckoo that stays out later than the other
cuckoos....
Two goldfinches came and sang in the catalpa-tree in the garden....
It is difficult to decide with which sentence to begin. There are so
many pleasures. The goldfinches have not come back again, however.
They and the faint blue flowers of the catalpa turned a sinister
growth for an interval into a small Paradise of colour and song. Then
the flowers fell. They had no more life than snow in May. Coming as
they did at the end of years of barrenness, they astonished one like
the blossoming of the Rose of Sharon. But now the bough is dark and
sinister and melancholy again. Sparrows squabble over their love
affairs in it. The, cuckoo that stays out later than the other cuckoos
is the triumphant survivor.