I was putting on my boots just now in what the novelists call "a brown
study." There was no urgent reason for putting on my boots. I was not going
out, and my slippers were much more comfortable. But something had to be
done. I wanted a subject for an article. Now if you are accustomed to
writing articles for a living, you will know that sometimes the difficulty
is not writing the article, but choosing a subject. It is not that subjects
are few: it is that they are so many. It is not poverty you suffer from,
but an embarrassment of riches. You are like Buridan's ass. That wretched
creature starved between two bundles of hay, because he could not make up
his mind which bundle to turn to first. And in that he was not unlike many
human beings. There was an eighteenth-century statesman, for example, who
used to find it so difficult to make a choice that he would stand at his
door looking up the street and down the street, and finally go inside
again, because he couldn't decide whether to go up or down. He would stay
indoors all the morning considering whether he should ride out or walk out,
and he would spend all the afternoon regretting that he had done neither
one nor the other.
I have always had a great deal of sympathy with that personage, for I share
his temperamental indecision. I hate making up my mind. If I go into a shop
to choose a pair of trousers my infirmity of purpose grows with every new
sample that is shown me, and finally I choose the wrong thing in a fit of
desperation. If the question is a place for a holiday, all the artifices of
my family cannot extract from me a decided preference for any place in
particular. Bournemouth? Certainly. How jolly that walk along the sands by
Poole Harbour to Studland and over the hills to Swanage. But think of the
Lake District ... and North Wales ... and Devon ... and Cornwall ... and
... I do not so much make decisions as drift into them or fall into them. I
am what you might call an Eleventh Hour Man. I take a header just as the
clock is about to strike for the last time.
This common failing of indecision is not necessarily due to intellectual
laziness. It may be due, as in the case of Goschen, to too clear a vision
of all the aspects of a subject. "Goschen," said a famous First Sea Lord,
"was the cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty, and the worst
administrator. He saw so many sides to a question that we could never get
anything done." A sense of responsibility, too, is a severe check on
action. I doubt whether any one who has dealt with affairs ever made up his
mind with more painful questionings than Lord Morley. I have heard him say
how burdensome he found the India Office, because day by day he had to make
irrevocable decisions. A certain adventurous recklessness is necessary for
the man of affairs. Joseph Chamberlain had that quality. Mr. Churchill has
it to-day. If it is controlled by high motives and a wide vision it is an
incomparable gift. If it is a mere passion for having one's own way it is
only the gift of the gambler.
But, you ask, what has this to do with putting on my boots? It is a
reasonable question. I will tell you. For an hour I had paced my room in my
slippers in search of a subject. I had looked out of the window over the
sunlit valley, watched the smoke of a distant train vanishing towards the
west, observed the activities of the rooks in a neighbouring elm. I had
pared my nails several times with absent-minded industry, and sharpened
every pencil I had on me with elaborate care. But the more I pared my nails
and the more I sharpened my pencils the more perplexed I grew as to the
theme for an article. Subjects crowded on me, "not single spies, but in
battalions." They jostled each other for preference, they clamoured for
notice as I have seen the dock labourers clamouring for a job at the London
docks. They held out their hands and cried, "Here am I: take me." And,
distracted by their importunities and starving in the midst of plenty, I
fished in my pocket for a pencil I had not sharpened. There wasn't one
left.
It was at this moment that I remembered my boots. Yes, I would certainly
put on my boots. There was nothing like putting on one's boots for helping
one to make up one's mind. The act of stooping changed the current of the
blood. You saw things in a new light--like the man who looked between his
legs at Bolton Abbey, and cried to his friend: "Oh, look this way; it's
extraordinary what a fresh view you get." So I fetched my boots and sat
down to put them on.
The thing worked like a charm. For in my preoccupied condition I picked up
my right boot first. Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left
boot. "Now why," said I, "did I do that?" And then the fact flashed on me
that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first. If you had asked
me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that
there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit
so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like
the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate. The thing couldn't be done. The
whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint. I became interested. How,
I wondered, do I put on my jacket? I rose, took it off, found that my right
arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process,
discovered that it was as difficult as an unfamiliar gymnastic operation.
Why, said I, I am a mere bundle of little habits of which I am unconscious.
This thing must be looked into. And then came into my mind that fascinating
book of Samuel Butler's on _Life and Habit_. Yes, certainly, here was a
subject that would "go." I dismissed all the importunate beggars who had
been clamouring in my mind, took out a pencil, seized a writing pad, and
sat down to write on "The Force of Habit."
And here I am. I have got to the end of my article without reaching my
subject. I have looked up and down the street so long that it is time to go
indoors.