savings bank book. A policeman, giving evidence, said: "Until the 6th
of December she was in the Wacks." "You say," said the judge, rather
bewildered by the good appearance of the girl, "that she was in the
workhouse!" "In the Wacks, my lord." "I think he means the Royal Air
Force," prosecuting counsel helped the judge out of his perplexity.
And the word "Wraf" went from mouth to mouth round the court. The girl
was guilty, but the judge told her that he was not going to send her
to prison. "I don't think it would do you any good, and I don't think
the interests of society call for it," he said. "What I'm going to do
is to bind you over to come up for judgment if called upon. Now, go
away home, and be a good girl, and, if you are, you won't hear
anything more about it. You have done a very disgraceful thing, but
you can live it down by good conduct in the future." There was another
thief, a boy of eighteen, who had been deserted by his mother at the
age of three, and whom the judge also told, though not in those words,
to go and sin no more. There was also a boy who had forged his
father's consent to his marriage, and he and his girl wife were
lectured like children and sent home to do better in future. As the
judge said to the boy: "This is not a thing you are likely to do
again." His wife, who was expecting a baby, had to be carried fainting
from the dock. Counsel could not bring himself to say that she was
expecting a baby. He said that she was "in a certain condition." The
modesty of the law is marvellous. One of the most interesting of the
prisoners was a little sleek-headed man accused of fraud, who kept
moving his head about like a tortoise's out of its shell. His head was
black and shining where it was not bald and shining. He had
gold-rimmed spectacles and a sallow face. He glided his hands over the
knobs on the front of the dock with a reptilian smoothness. He had
persuaded a number of tradesmen and hotel-keepers that he was an
English peer. He had even complained to one shopkeeper of the
smallness of a wallet, as he needed something larger to hold the
title-deeds relating to the peerage. In another case, a young man,
staying in a house, had stolen, along with other things, his hostess's
false teeth, her best dress and a great quantity of underclothing. A
parcel of clothing had been recovered from a second-hand shop and was
shown to the lady when in the witness-box. She took up one of the
garments and fingered it. "Well," said the prosecuting counsel,
encouragingly, "is that your best dress?" "Naoh," she said
melancholily, "that's me ypron." Then there was a young man who stole
a motor-bicycle by presenting a revolver at the head of the owner. He
denied that he had stolen it, and maintained that, after he had
apologised to the owner "for having treated him so abruptly," they had
become friendly and he had been told to take the bicycle away and pay
for it later. Alas! there is a limit to human credulity. Besides, the
young man had a crooked mouth. After two days in court, one begins to
believe that one can tell an honest man from a liar by looking at him.
Probably one is over-confident.
XXII
THE THREE-HALFPENNY BIT
As a rule, there is nothing that offends us more than a new kind of
money. We felt humiliated in the early days of the war when we were no
longer paid in heavy little discs of gold, and had to accept paper
pounds and ten-shillingses. We even sneered at the design. We always
sneer at the design of new money or a new stamp. But we hated the
paper even more than the design. We could not believe it had any
value. We spent it as though it were paper. One would as soon have
thought of collecting old newspapers as of playing the miser with it.
That is probably the true secret of the fall in the value of money.
Economists explain it in other ways. But it seems likeliest that paper
money lost its value because we did not value it. Shopkeepers took
advantage of our foolish innocence, and the tailor demanded sums in
paper that he would never have dared to ask in gold. I doubt if the
habit of thrift will ever be restored till the gold currency comes
back. Gold is the only metal for which human beings have any lasting
respect. No one but a child would save up pennies. There is something
in gold--the colour, perhaps, reminding us of the sun, the god of our
ancestors--that puts us into the mood of worshippers. The children of
Israel found it impossible not to worship the golden calf. They have
gone on worshipping it ever since. Had the calf been of paper, they
would, I feel confident, have remained good Christians.
The influence of hatred on the expenditure of money is seen in our
attitude to threepenny bits. Nine out of ten people feel sincerely
indignant when a threepenny bit is given to them in their change. The
shopkeeper who gives you two threepenny bits instead of a sixpence
knows this and, as he hands you the money, says apologetically: "Do
you mind?" You say: "Not at all," but you do. You know that they will
be a constant misery to you till you get rid of them. You know that if
you give one of them to a bus conductor, even if he is able to
restrain himself, he will feel like throwing you off the top of the
bus. When at length you spend one of them in a post office--one never
has the same scruples about Government institutions--you hurry out
with a guilty air, not having dared to look the lady at the counter in
the eye. In the nineteenth century, when people went to church, they
used to get rid of their threepenny bits at the collection. They at
once relieved themselves of a nuisance, and enjoyed the luxury of
flinging the gleam of silver on to the plate. Many a good Baptist has
trusted to his threepenny bit's being mistaken for a sixpence, by the
neighbours, at least--perhaps even by Heaven. He has a notion that the
widow's mite was a threepenny bit, and feels that his gift is in a
great tradition.
The popular hatred of certain coins, however, goes back to a far
earlier date than the invention of the threepenny bit. Even gold, when
it was first introduced into the English coinage, was met with such a
storm of denunciation that it had to be withdrawn. This was in the
time of Henry III., who issued a golden penny to take the place of the
silver penny that had hitherto been the chief English coin. It was
only in the reign of Edward III. that gold coins became established in
England They may have helped to recommend themselves to the nation by
their intensely anti-French character. They bore the French arms, and
announced that King Edward was King of England and France. France is a
country lying close to the shores of England, and is of great
strategic importance to her. I do not know whether the copper coins
which first came into England in the time of Charles II. raised any
clamour of public protest. The nation, I fancy, was so relieved to get
back to cakes and ale that it was not inclined to be censorious about
the new halfpennies and farthings. In the old days, people had made
their own halfpennies and farthings by the simple process of cutting
pennies into halves and quarters. They also issued private coins on
the same principle on which we nowadays write cheques. Municipalities
and shopkeepers alike issued these tokens, or promises to pay, and
without them there would not have been sufficient currency for the
transaction of business. The copper coins of Charles II. were intended
to put a stop to this unofficial sort of money, but towards the end of
the eighteenth century there was such a scarcity of copper currency
that local shopkeepers and bankers defied the law and again began to
issue their own coins. I have in my possession what looks like a
George III. shilling, with the King's head on one side and, on the
other, inside a wreath of shamrocks, the inscription: "Bank Token, 10
Pence Irish, 1813." It was turned up by the plough on a Staffordshire
farm a few years ago. Speaking of this reminds me that a separate
Irish coinage continued even after the Union of 1800. It was not till
1817 that English gold and silver became current in Ireland, and Irish
pennies and halfpennies were struck as late as the reign of George IV.
The Scottish coins came to an end more than a century earlier. The
name of one of them, however, the "bawbee," has survived in popular
humour. Some people say that the name is merely a corruption of
"baby," referring to the portrait of Queen Mary as an infant. It seems
to me as unlikely a derivation as could be imagined.
Of all the English coins, the first appearance of which occasioned
popular anger, none had a worse reception than the two-shilling piece
which appeared in 1849. "This piece," says Miss G.B. Rawlings in
_Coins and How to Know Them_, a book rich in information, "was
unfavourably received, owing to the omission of 'Dei Gratia' after the
Queen's name, and was stigmatised as the godless or graceless florin."
The florin, however, so called after a Florentine coin, had come to
stay, but since 1851 it has been as godly in inscription as any of the
other money in one's pocket. The coin has survived, but hardly the
name. One can with an effort call a spade a spade, but who would think
of calling a florin a florin? The coin itself for a time bore the
inscription: "One Florin, Two Shillings," as though the name called
for translation. Since the introduction of the florin, there have been
many coins that aroused popular hatred. The four-shilling piece,
especially, that was struck in the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee,
was received with a howl of execration. Men went about in constant
dread of argument with shopkeepers as to whether they had given them a
four-shilling or a five-shilling piece. In the interests of the
national good temper the coin ceased to be struck after 1890
Englishmen, however, disliked the entire Jubilee coinage. They
disliked the Queen's portrait, and they disliked especially a sixpence
which could be easily gilded to look like a half-sovereign. The
sixpences were hurriedly withdrawn, but schoolboys continued to
treasure them in the belief that they were worth fabulous sums. Like
groats, the delight of one's childhood, they began to be desirable as
soon as they ceased to be common. When King Edward VII. came to the
throne, there was another outburst of hatred of new money. The chief
objection to it was that the King's effigy had been designed by a
German and had not even been designed well. It was at this time,
perhaps, when people began to hate the money in their pockets, that
the reign of modern extravagance began. To get rid of a sovereign
bearing a design by Herr Fuchs seemed a patriotic duty. Thrift and
pro-Germanism were indistinguishable.
Much as men detest new sorts of money in their own country, however,
many of us take a childish pleasure on our first arrival in France in
handling strange and unfamiliar coins. One of the great pleasures of
travel is changing one's money. There is a certain lavishness about
the coinage of the Continent that appeals to our curiosity. Even in
getting a five-franc piece we never know whether it will bear the
emblem of a republic, a kingdom or an empire. Coins of Greece and
Italy jingle in our pocket with those of the impostor, Louis Napoleon,
and those of the wicked Leopold, King of the Belgians. In Switzerland
I remember even getting a Cretan coin, which I was humiliated by being
unable to pass at a post office. The postal official took down a huge
diagram containing pictures of all the European coins he was allowed
to accept. He studied Greek coins and, for all I know, Jugo-Slav
coins, but nowhere could he find the image of the coin I had proffered
him. Crete for him did not exist. He shook his head solemnly and
handed the coin back. Is there any situation in which a man feels
guiltier than when his money is thrust back on him as of no value?
This happens oftener, perhaps, in France than in any other country.
France has the reputation of being the country of bad money. The
reputation is, I believe, exaggerated, though I have known a Boulogne
tram conductor to refuse even a 50-centime piece as bad. I remember
vividly a warning given to me on this subject during my first visit to
France. I was sitting with a friend in an estaminet in a small village
in the north of France, when an English chauffeur insinuated himself
into the conversation. He was eager to give us advice about France and
the French. "I like the French," he said, "but you can't trust them.
Look out for bad money. They're terrors for bad money. I'd have been
done oftener myself, only that luckily I married a Frenchwoman. She's
in the ticket office at the Maison des Delits--you probably know the
name--it's a dancing-hall in Montmartre. Any time I get a bad 5 franc
piece, I pass it on to her, and she gets rid of it in the change to
some Froggie. My God, they _are_ dishonest! I wouldn't say a word
against the French, but just that one thing. They're dishonest--damned
dishonest." He sat back on the bench, a figure of insular rectitude
but of cosmopolitan broadmindedness. Is it not the perfect compromise?
XXIII
THE MORALS OF BEANS
"Nine bean-rows will I have there," cries Mr Yeats in describing his
Utopia in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_. I have only two. They run east
to west between the second-early potatoes and the red-currant bushes.
They are broad beans. They are in flower just now, and every flower is
a little black-and-white butterfly. That, however, is the good side of
the account. If you look closer at them, you will see that each of
them appears as if its head had been dipped into coal-dust. There is a
congregation of the blackest of all insects hiding in horrid
congestion among the leaves and flowers at the top. Compared to them,
the green-fly on the roses has almost charm. There is something slummy
and unwashed-looking about the black blight. These insects are as foul
as a stagnant pond. Though they have wings, they seem incapable of
flight. They are microbes of a larger growth--a disease and a
desecration. On the other hand, there is one good point about them:
they are very stupid. Instead of spreading themselves out along the
entire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they mass
themselves in hordes in the very tops of the plants as though they had
all some passionate taste for rocking in the wind like the baby on the
tree-top. This is what gives the gardener his opportunity. He has but
to walk along the rows, pinching off the top of each plant, and
filling his flat little basket (called, I believe, a trug) with them,
and lo, the beans are safe, and produce all the finer and fuller pods
as a result of their having been stunted.
At this point the moral thrusts out its head. There are those who
believe that beans have no morals. To call a man "Old bean" gives him,
it is said, a pleasant feeling that he is something of a dog. Gilbert,
again, in _Patience_ has a reference to "a not-too-French French bean"
that suggests a ribald estimate of this family of plants. The broad
bean, on the other hand, seems to me to exude morality--not least,
when it parts with its head to save its life. There is no better
preacher in the vegetable garden. It is the very Chrysostom of the
gospel of frustration--the gospel that a great loss may be a great
gain--the gospel that through their repressions men may all the more
successfully achieve their ends.
Nor is this gospel confined to the sect of the beans (which are by a
happy paradox both broad and evangelical). The apple-trees bear the
same message in their unpruned branches--unpruned owing to a long
absence from home during the winter. It is an amazing fact--I speak as
an amateur--but it is an amazing fact, if it is a fact, that an
apple-tree, if it is left to itself, will not grow apples. It has an
entirely selfish purpose in life. Its aim is to be a tree, living to
itself, producing a multitude of shoots and leaves. It succeeds in
living a rich and fruitful life only when the gardener has come with
the abhorred shears and lopped its branches till it must feel like a
frustrate thing. The fruit is the fruit of frustration. Were it not
for this frustration, it would ultimately return to a state of
wildness, and would become a crabbed and barren weed, fit only to be a
perch for birds.
Thus, it seems to me, the broad bean and the apple-tree are persuasive
defenders of civilisation and of those concomitants of civilisation
morality and the arts. Heretics frequently arise, both in ethics and
in the arts, who say: "No more restraints! Give the bean its head."
There are psycho-analysts who appear to regard frustration as the one
serious evil in life, and the apostles of _vers libre_ denounce metre
and rhyme because these merely serve to frustrate the natural impulses
of the imagination. As a matter of fact, it is this very frustration
that gives poetry much of its depth and vehemence. Great genius
expresses itself, not in the freedom of formlessness, but in the
limitations of form. Shakespeare's passion turned instinctively to the
most frustrative of all poetic forms--that of the sonnet--in order to
express itself in perfection. It is, as a rule, those who have nothing
to say who wish to say it without the terrible frustrations of form.
Obviously, there is a golden mean in the arts as in all things, and
there comes a point at which form passes into formalism. Genius
requires just enough frustration to increase its vehemence, and so to
transmute nature into art. It is possible that some frustration of a
comparable kind is needed in order to transmute nature into morality,
and that the man who would, in Milton's phrase, make of his life a
poem must submit to commandments as difficult as those of metre or
rhyme. It is not merely the Christians and the Stoics who have
maintained this; Epicurus himself was a believer in virtue as a means
to happiness. This, indeed, is a commonplace written all over the face
of nature. There is no great happiness without opposition except for
children. The climber struggles with the hill, the rower with the
water, the digger with the earth. They are all men who live on the
understanding that the pleasures of difficulty are greater even than
the pleasures of ease.
The biographies of famous men are prolific of examples that support
the theory of frustration. Homer, they say, was blind, and the legend
seems to suggest that his blindness, far from injuring, abetted his
genius. Tyrtæus, being physically unable to fight, became the poet of
fighting, and achieved more with his words than did most men with
their weapons. Demosthenes, again, was an orator frustrated by many
defects. Everyone knows the story of his wretched articulation and how
he shut himself up and practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth in
order to overcome it. Few of the great orators, indeed, seem to have
succeeded in oratory without difficulty. Neither Cicero nor Burke
spoke with the natural ease of many a young man in a Y.M.C.A. debating
society. And the great writers, like the great orators, have been, in
many instances, men doomed in some important respect to lead
frustrated lives. Mr Beerbohm recently said that he has never known a
man of genius whose life was not marred by some obvious defect. People
have talked for two thousand years of the desirability of _mens sana
in corpore sano_, but if everybody possessed this--possessed it from
birth and without effort--there would probably soon be a shortage of
genius. The sanity of genius is not the sanity of the healthy minded
athlete: it is the sanity of the human spirit struggling against
forces that threaten to frustrate it. The greatest love-poetry has not
been written by men who have found easy happiness in love. Donne's
poems are the poems of a frustrated lover. Keats's greatest poetry was
the fruit of unfulfilled love. Thus genius turns poverty into riches.
Few men of genius are enviable save in their genius. Beethoven, a
frustrate lover and ultimately a deaf musician, is a type of genius at
its most sublime.
Charles Lamb, as we read the _Essays_, seems at times to be one of the
most enviable of men, but that is only because he is supremely
lovable. Who knows how much we owe to the defects of his life? Even
the impediment in his speech seems to have been one of the conditions
of his genius. He tells us that, if he had not stammered, he would
probably have been a clergyman, and, if he had been a clergyman, he
would hardly have been Elia. His life, too, was that of a tragic
bachelor--he whose writings breathe the finest spirit of fireside
comedy. There could be no better example of the truth that genius is,
as a rule, a response to apparently hostile limitations.
On the whole, then, the common-sense attitude to life is, not to
deplore one's limitations, but to make the best of them. No man need
envy another his good fortune too bitterly. Good fortune has wasted as
many men as it has assisted. George Wyndham was one of the most
fortunate men of his time--strong, handsome, an athlete, an orator, a
statesman, a writer with a sense of style, popular, rich, and with
nine out of ten of the attributes that we envy most. Had achievement
come less easily to him, he might have been a greater man. There have
been ugly men who have been more enviable. There have been weedy men
who were more enviable. There have been poor men who were more
enviable. But the truth is, one does not know whom to envy. It is
probably wise to envy nobody.
It would be foolish, however, to pretend that frustration is a
desirable thing in itself, apart from all other considerations. The
beans nod their heads to no such gospel. Frustration may easily reach
the point of destruction. One might frustrate one's broad beans
excessively by pulling them up by the roots or cutting them down to
within an inch of the ground. There must still be room left for the
life of the plant to find a new outlet. The beans do not preach a
sermon against liberty, but only against lawlessness. But, for all I
know, they may preach different gospels to different amateur
gardeners. Each of us finds in nature what he wishes to find. I
confess I myself am prejudiced in favour of sermons of a consoling
kind. It is consoling to think that, in a world of defects, a defect
often carries with it its own compensation--that strength, as the
preachers say, may be made perfect in weakness. But, when one looks
round and enumerates the miseries of human beings, one wonders how far
this is, after all, true except for men whose gifts are naturally
greater than hog, dog or devil can imperil.
XXIV
ON SEEING A JOKE