I was walking along the Strand a few afternoons ago and had a singular
impression of a cheerful world. The Strand is to me always the most
attractive street I know, especially on bright afternoons when the sun
is drooping behind the Admiralty Arch and its light glints and dances
in the eyes of the crowd moving westward. Then it is that I seem to
see the wayfarers transfigured into a procession hurrying in pursuit of
some sunlit adventure of the soul, and am almost persuaded to turn
round and catch with them the flash of vision that gleams in their
eyes. But the thing that struck me this afternoon was the unusual
gaiety of the people. It seemed to me that I had never seen such a
procession of laughing, happy faces. Probably it was due to the fact
that it was about the time when the afternoon theatres were emptying.
Probably also the impression on my mind was all the sharper because it
was a day of depressing tidings--bad news from Russia, from Italy, from
everywhere. I did not suppose that these merry people were ignorant of
the news or indifferent to it. They were simply obeying the impulse of
healthy minds and good digestions to be cheerful--_quand meme_.
And as I passed along I wondered whether, in spite of all the tragedy
in which our life is cast, our fund of personal happiness is
undiminished. Do we come into the world with a certain capacity for
pleasure and pain and realise it no matter what our external
circumstances may be? Johnson took that view and expressed it in the
familiar lines incorporated in Goldsmith's "Traveller"--the only lines
of Johnson's very pedestrian poetry which have won a sort of
immortality:
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consigned
Our own felicity we make or find.
In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse.
Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but
distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform.
And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation
to the conditions in which we live.
It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the
slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by
exploiting others. And like most falsities there is a sense in which
it is true. The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and
probably experiences as much animal happiness--assuming it is
sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm--as the boy in the Eton
playing-fields. It is a mercy it is so. It is a mercy that we have
this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and
bitter blows of outward circumstance. But he who advances this fact as
a political argument is not a wise man. Is the quality of happiness
nothing? Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a
pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the
infinite fields of the mind's adventures? Is it nothing to society?
We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.
But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects,
there is much truth in Johnson's lines. Happiness is an entirely
personal affair. We have it in large measure or in small, but in so
far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of
fortune. I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not
lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of
happiness. If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will
afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may
be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction. I hope
it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on
the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer
physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less
to-day than in normal times.
I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed
satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most
"interesting" period of the world's history. There was an indignant
protest against the word from another member of the company; but the
author insisted. Yes, interesting. Could not tragedy be interesting
as well as comedy? Could not one feel all the horror and misery and
insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's
part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the
mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and
pronounce it--yes, interesting? His own record of unselfish service
during the war, and his passionate desire for a sane and ordered world
were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.
And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough. There has never
been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the
energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we
are living. It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours
everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks
up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe,
and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships. I can fancy
that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of
their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the
tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has
overtaken us. In a sense they will be right. In another sense they
will be wrong. We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our
dreams. The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to
plunge us individually in despair. But it doesn't. Individually we
seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, snatch our pleasures with a
sharpened appetite, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the
lightnings that stab the tortured earth.
As I look up I see the buses passing and read the announcements on the
knife-boards. You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in
the most light-hearted of worlds. There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at
one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing
Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to
"Zig-Zag." These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with
which England amused itself in the time of the tempest. And do not
forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept
the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy. Perhaps
without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled
renown. For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties--a
violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of
things even. The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little
wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into
the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its
equilibrium throughout.
We are seen both at our best and our worst--stripped naked as it were
to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves
and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both. Our nerve-ends
are bare, and our reactions to circumstance are violent and irrational.
We are at once more generous and more bitter. We are the sport even of
the weather. If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more
brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a
more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush
of our winter nights. I could not help associating with the procession
of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I
witnessed in a bus the other night. It seemed the reverse side of the
same shield. A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of
the darkness and the sleet. They were both rather large, and there was
not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with
an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no
nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to
waste on anybody. You know the sort of people. If you don't get out
of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you. They do
not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?" That would be a sign
of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness,
except in other people. They expect it in other people.
"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.
"Victoria," said the man with a snap.
"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.
"I've told you six times," snapped the man.
"What a bully you are," retorted the woman. Then they subsided into
silence. Husband and wife, I thought--bursting with bad temper to such
an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people. Probably
they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will
go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.
But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust.
They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the
gloom of the London night in their souls. Most of us get it in our
souls more or less. It makes us ill-humoured and depressed. In the
early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and
some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so
beautiful before. They even wrote poems about it. When you blundered
into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled
against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but
substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across
Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure
of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating. But three
winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made
London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make
it a debauch of another kind.
But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is
no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves
and our tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since
we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on
each other. The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and
there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust
rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore. We
have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are
subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed.
Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is
worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the other
day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who
mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining
with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case
gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the
million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their
excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers. When Mars is
abroad Venus must be abroad, too. Murder is the sole business of the
world and lust is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any bookstall
and note the garbage which lines its shelves. Dip into the morass of
the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and
see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly
intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has
overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable
tragedy.
It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity always reveals
these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of
the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the
background of a city perishing of plague. We live at once more
intensely and more frivolously. The pendulum of our emotions swings
violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers
the mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that that couple in
the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and
read that Vimy Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys' Diary, a
delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in
times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise. It is the 10th of
September (Lord's Day), 1665. The plague is at its worst and the whole
city seems doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. Mrs.
Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black. But there comes
news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord
Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich--
--where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the
receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it
inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that
in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this
night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made
up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it
so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did
make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir
J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so
out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself
out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the grave John Evelyn
having this gaiety in him! You will read the whole of his Diary and
not get one smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity to
turn to his own record of the same time. He has no entry for the 10th,
but two days before, he says:
Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however,
I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's,
a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the
streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful
silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is
seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest
evening of his life. And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that
the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of
circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the
surface. There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage
in that great and moving book "Under Fire"--the most tremendous picture
of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man. One of the squad
of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near
Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is before the English had taken over
that part of the line. There is a quiet time and some of the men get
on companionable terms with the enemy. This man's wife and child are
in Lens, just behind the German lines. He has not seen them for
eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend
him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into
Lens. He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own
house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a
comrade sitting at their work. In the room with them are two German
non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife
is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.--"Not a forced smile, not a
debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave."
He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness
had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the
adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words
of extraordinary beauty:
"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She can't hold her
youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in
the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst
out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat.
It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of
herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's all.
It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very
well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the
Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen
months. Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there
is to it."
In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter. We live. And,
living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of
ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the
unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that we can be happy and
may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our
natures. We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out
the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become
mad. We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges
that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There was a
good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that
"Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood." The wild
current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our
separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private
distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of
events. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic
wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event.
She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little
callously. And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had
the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz
and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the
battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits
of the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this faculty of
detachment and independent life. If there were no private relief for
this public tragedy the world would have gone mad. But perhaps you
will say it has gone mad....
Let me recall by way of _envoi_ that fine story in Montaigne. When the
town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was
stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner. And as he was led
away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest
that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich
and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."