I was in a company the other evening in which the talk turned upon the
familiar theme of the Government and its fitness for the job in hand. The
principal assailant was what I should call a strenuous person. He seemed to
suggest that if the conduct of the war had been in the hands of
earnest-minded persons--like himself, for example--the business would have
been over long ago.
"What can you expect," he said, the veins at the side of his forehead
swelling with strenuousness, "from men who only play at war? Why, I was
told by a man who was dining with Asquith not long ago that he was talking
all the time about Georgian poetry, and that apparently he knew more about
the subject than anybody at the table. Fiddling while Rome is burning, I
call it."
"Did you want him to hold a Cabinet Council over the dinner-table?" I
asked. The strenuous person killed me with a look of scorn.
But all the same, so far from being shocked to learn that Mr. Asquith can
talk about poetry in these days, the fact, if it be a fact, increases my
confidence in his competence for his task. I should suffer no pain even if
I heard that he took a hand of cards after dinner, and I hope he takes care
to get a game of golf at the week-end. I like men who have great
responsibilities to carry their burdens easily, and to relax the bow as
often as possible. The bigger the job you have in hand the more necessary
it is to cultivate the habit of detachment. You want to walk away from the
subject sometimes, as the artist walks away from his canvas to get a better
view of his work. I never feel sure of an article until I have put it away,
forgotten it, and read it again with a fresh mind, disengaged from the
subject and seeing it objectively rather than subjectively. It is the
affliction of the journalist that he has to face the light before he has
had time to withdraw to a critical distance and to see his work with the
detachment of the public.
There is nothing more mistaken than the view that because a thing is
serious you must be thinking about it seriously all the time. If you do
that you cease to be the master of your subject: the subject becomes the
master of you. That is what is the matter with the fanatic. He is so
obsessed by his idea that he cannot relate it to other ideas, and loses all
sense of proportion, and often all sense of sanity. I have seen more
unrelieved seriousness in a lunatic asylum than anywhere else.
The key to success is to come to a task with a fresh mind. That was the
meaning of the very immoral advice given by a don to a friend of mine on
the day before an examination. "What would you advise me to read to-night?"
asked my friend, anxious to make the most of the few remaining hours. "If
I were you," said the don, "I shouldn't read anything. I should get drunk."
He did not mean that the business was so unimportant that it did not matter
what he did. He meant that it was so important that he must forget all
about it, and come to it afresh from the outside. And he used the most
violent illustration he could find to express his meaning.
It is with the mind as with the soil. If you want to get the best out of
your land you must change the crops, and sometimes even let the land lie
fallow. And if you want to get the best out of your mind on a given theme
you must let it range and have plenty of diversion. And the more remote the
diversion is from the theme the better. I know a very grave man whose days
are spent in the most responsible work, who goes to see Charlie Chaplin
once or twice every week, and laughs like a schoolboy all the time. I
should not trust his work less on that account: I should trust it all the
more. I should know that he did not allow it to get the whip hand of him,
that he kept sane and healthy by running out to play, as it were,
occasionally.
I think all solemn men ought to take sixpenny-worth of Charlie Chaplin
occasionally. And I'm certain they ought to play more. I believe that the
real disease of Germany is that it has never learned to play. The bow is
stretched all the time, and the nation is afflicted with a dreadful
seriousness that suggests the madhouse by its lack of humour and gaiety.
The oppressiveness of life begins with the child. Germany is one of The two
countries in the world where the suicide of children is a familiar social
fact. Years ago when I was in Cologne I christened it the City of the
Elderly Children, and no one, I think, can have had any experience of
Germany without being struck by the premature gravity of the young. If
Germany had had fewer professors and a decent sprinkling of cricket and
football grounds perhaps things might have been different. I don't
generally agree with copybook maxims, but all work and no play does make
Jack (or, rather, Hans) a dull boy.
Perhaps it is true that we play too much; but I'm quite sure that the
Germans have played too little, and if there must be a mistake on one side
or the other, let it be on the side of too much play.