I do not think this article will be much concerned with the great art
of sawing wood; but the theme of it came to me while I was engaged in
that task. It was raining hard this morning, and it occurred to me
that it was a good opportunity to cut some winter logs in the barn.
The raw material of the logs lies at the end of the orchard in the
shape of sections of trunks and branches of some old apple trees which
David cut down for us last autumn, to enable us to extend the
potato-patch by digging up a part of the orchard. I carried some of
the sections into the barn and began to saw, but I was out of practice
and had forgotten the trick. The saw would go askew, the points would
dig in, and the whole operation seemed a clumsy failure.
Then I remembered. You are over-doing it, I said. You are making a
mess of the job by too much energy--misdirected energy. The trick of
sawing wood is to work within your strength. You are starting at it as
if you intended to saw through the log at one stroke. It is the
mistake the Rumanians have made in Transylvania. They bit off more
than they could chew. You are biting off more than you can chew, and
you and the log and the saw get at cross purposes, with the results you
see. The art of the business is to work easily and with a light hand,
to make the incision with a firm stroke that hardly touches the
surface, to move the saw forward lightly so that it barely touches the
wood, to draw it back at a shade higher elevation, and above all to
take your time and to avoid too much energy. "Gently does it," is the
motto.
It is a lesson I am always learning and forgetting. I suppose I am one
of those people who are afflicted with too eager a spirit. We want a
thing done, but we cannot wait to do it. We rush at the task with all
our might and expect it to surrender on the spot, and when it doesn't
surrender we lose patience, complain of our tools, and feel a grievance
against the perversity of things. It reminds me of the remark which a
professional made to me at the practice nets long ago. He was watching
a fast bowler who was slinging the ball at the batsman like a
whirlwind, and with disastrous results for himself. "He would make a
good bowler," said the professional, "if he wouldn't try to bowl three
balls at once." Recall any really great bowler you have known and you
will find that the chief impression he left on the mind was that of
ease and reserve power. He was never spending up to the hilt. There
was always something left in the bank. I do not speak of the
medium-paced bowler, like Lohmann, whose action had a sort of artless
grace that masked the most wily and governed strategy; but of the fast
bowler, like Tom Richardson or Mold or even Spofforth. With all their
physical energy, you felt that their heads were cool and that they had
something in hand. There was passion, but it was controlled passion.
And if you have tried mowing a meadow you will know how much the art
consists in working within your powers, easily and rhythmically. The
temptation to lay on with all your might is overpowering, and you stab
the ground and miss your stroke and exhaust yourself in sheer futility.
And then you watch John Ruddle at the job and see the whole secret of
the art reveal itself. He will mow for three hours on end with never a
pause except to sharpen the blade with the whetstone he carries in his
hip pocket. What a feeling of reserve there is in the beautiful
leisureliness of his action! You could go to sleep watching him, and
you feel that he could go to sleep to his own rhythm, as the mother
falls asleep to her own swaying and crooning. There is the experience
of a lifetime in that masterful technique, but the point is that the
secret of the technique is its restraint, its economy of effort, its
patience with the task, its avoidance of flurry and hurry, and of the
waste and exhaustion of over-emphasis. At the bottom, all that John
Ruddle has learned is not to try to bowl three balls at once. He is
always master of his job.
And if you chance to be a golfer, haven't you generally found that when
you are "off your game" it is because you have pitched the key, as it
were, too high? You smite and fail, and smite harder and fail, and go
on increasing the effort, and as your effort increases so does your
futility. You are playing over your strength. You are screaming at
the ball instead of talking to it reasonably and sensibly. Then
perhaps you remember, cut down your effort to the scope of your powers,
and, behold, the ball sails away on its errand with just the right
flight and just the right direction and just the right length. And you
purr to yourself and learn once more that the art of doing things is
moderation.
It is so in all things. The man who wins is the man who keeps cool,
whose effort is always proportioned to his power, who gives the
impression that there is more in him than ever comes out. I have seen
many a man lose the argument, not because he had the worse case, but
because he was too eager, too impatient, too unrestrained in presenting
it. What is the secret of the extraordinary influence which Viscount
Grey exercises over the mind but the grave moderation and reserve of
his style? There are scores of more eloquent speakers, more nimble
disputants than he, but there has been no one in our time with the same
authority and finality of speech. He conveys the sense of a mind
disciplined against passion, austere in its reserve, implacably honest,
understating itself with a certain cold aloofness that leaves
controversy silent. Take his indictment of Germany as an example. It
was as though the verdict of the Day of Judgment had fallen on Germany.
Yet it was a mere grave, dispassionate statement of the facts without a
word of extravagance or violence. It was the naked truthfulness of it
that was so terrible and unanswerable.
And much the most impressive description I have seen of the horrors of
war was in the letter of a German artillery officer telling his
experiences in the first great battle of the Somme. Yet the
characteristic of the letter was its plainness and freedom from any
straining after effect. He just left the thing he described to speak
for itself in all its bare horror. It was a lesson we people who write
would do well to remember. Let us have fewer adjectives, good people,
fewer epithets. Remember, the adjective is the enemy of the noun. It
is the scream that drowns the sense, the passion that turns the
argument red in the face and makes it unbelievable. Was it not
Stendhal who used to read the _Code Napoleon_ once a year to teach him
its severity of style?
* * * * *
It is still raining. I will return to the barn and practise the
philosophy of moderation on those logs.