mud that made our boots unwieldy. At that moment came a threadbare place
in the cloudy curtain that was sweeping across the sun, and our shadows
showed themselves for an instant to comfort us. The amber patch of
sunlight presently slipped from us and travelled down the meadows
towards the distant blue of the hills by Waltham Abbey, touching with
miraculous healing a landscape erst dead and shrouded in grey. This
transitory gleam of light gladdened us mightily at the time, but it made
the after-sky seem all the darker.
So through the steep and tortuous village to High Beech, and then
leaving the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle
deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter
walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of
an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again
while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the
smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly
illuminated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not
simply unsympathetic but ominous. And the misery of the wind grew apace.
Presently we wandered into that sinister corner of the Forest where the
beech trees have grown so closely together that they have had perforce
to lift their branches vertically. Divested of leaves, the bare grey
limbs of these seem strangely restless. These trees, reaching so
eagerly upward, have an odd resemblance to the weird figures of horror
in which William Blake delighted--arms, hands, hair, all stretch
intensely to the zenith. They seem to be straining away from the spot to
which they are rooted. It is a Laocoon grouping, a wordless concentrated
struggle for the sunlight, and disagreeably impressive. The trippers
longed to talk and were tongue-tied; they looked now and then over their
shoulders. They were glad when the eerie influence was passed, though
they traversed a morass to get away from it.
Then across an open place, dismal with the dun hulls of lost cows and
the clatter of their bells, over a brook full of dead leaves and edged
with rusty clay, through a briery thicket that would fain have detained
us, and so to a pathway of succulent green, that oozed black under our
feet. Here some poor lost wayfarer has blazed his way with rustic seats,
now rheumatic and fungus-eaten. And here, too, the wind, which had
sought us howling, found us at last, and stung us sharply with a shower
of congealing raindrops. This grew to a steady downfall as the open
towards Chingford station was approached at last, after devious winding
in the Forest. Then, coming upon the edge of the wood and seeing the
lone station against the grey sky, we broke into a shout and began
running. But it is dismal running on imperfectly frozen clay, in rain
and a gusty wind. We slipped and floundered, and one of us wept sore
that she should never see her home again. And worse, the only train
sleeping in the station was awakened by our cries, and, with an eldritch
shriek at the unseasonable presence of trippers, fled incontinently
Londonward.
Smeared with clay and dead leaves almost beyond human likeness, we
staggered into the derelict station, and found from an outcast porter
that perhaps another train might after the lapse of two hours accumulate
sufficiently to take us back to Gospel Oak and a warm world again. So we
speered if there were amusements to be got in this place, and he told us
"some very nice walks." To refrain from homicide we left the station,
and sought a vast red hotel that loomed through the drift on a steep
hill, and in the side of this a door that had not been locked. Happily
one had been forgotten, and, entering at last, we roused a hibernating
waiter, and he exhumed us some of his winter victual. In this way we
were presently to some degree comforted, and could play chess until a
train had been sent for our relief. And this did at last happen, and
towards the hour of dinner we rejoined our anxious friends, and all the
evening time we boasted of a pleasant day and urged them to go even as
we had gone.
THE THEORY OF QUOTATION
The nobler method of quotation is not to quote at all. For why should
one repeat good things that are already written? Are not the words in
their fittest context in the original? Clearly, then, your new setting
cannot be quite so congruous, which is, forthwith, an admission of
incongruity. Your quotation is evidently a plug in a leak, an apology
for a gap in your own words. But your vulgar author will even go out of
his way to make the clothing of his thoughts thus heterogeneous. He
counts every stolen scrap he can work in an improvement--a literary
caddis worm. Yet would he consider it improvement to put a piece of even
the richest of old tapestry or gold embroidery into his new pair of
breeks?
The passion for quotation is peculiar to literature. We do not glory to
quote our costume, dress in cast-off court robes, or furnish our houses
from the marine store. Neither are we proud of alien initials on the
domestic silver. We like things new and primarily our own. We have a
wholesome instinct against infection, except, it seems, in the matter of
ideas. An authorling will deliberately inoculate his copy with the
inverted comma bacillus, till the page swims unsteadily, counting the
fever a glow of pure literary healthiness. Yet this reproduction,
rightly considered, is merely a proof that his appetite for books has
run beyond his digestion. Or his industry may be to seek. You expect an
omelette, and presently up come the unbroken eggs. A tissue of quotation
wisely looked at is indeed but a motley garment, eloquent either of a
fool, or an idle knave in a fool's disguise.
Nevertheless at times--the truth must be told--we must quote. As for
admitting that we have quoted, that is another matter altogether. But
the other man's phrase will lie at times so close in one's mind to the
trend of one's thoughts, that, all virtue notwithstanding, they must
needs run into the groove of it. There are phrases that lie about in the
literary mind like orange peel on a pavement. You are down on them
before you know where you are. But does this necessitate acknowledgment
to the man, now in Hades, who sucked that orange and strewed the peel in
your way? Rather, is it not more becoming to be angry at his careless
anticipation?
One may reasonably look at it in this way. What business has a man to
think of things right in front of you, poke his head, as it were, into
your light? What right has he to set up dams and tunnel out
swallow-holes to deflect the current of your thoughts? Surely you may
remove these obstructions, if it suits you, and put them where you will.
Else all literature will presently be choked up, and the making of books
come to an end. One might as well walk ten miles out of one's way
because some deaf oaf or other chose to sit upon a necessary stile.
Surely Shakespeare or Lamb, or what other source you contemplate, has
had the thing long enough? Out of the road with them. Turn and turn
about.
And inverted commas are so inhospitable. If you _must_ take in another
man's offspring, you should surely try to make the poor foundlings feel
at home. Away with such uncharitable distinctions between the children
of the house and the stranger within your gates. I never see inverted
commas but I think of the necessary persecuted mediæval Jew in yellow
gabardine.
At least, never put the name of the author you quote. Think of the
feelings of the dead. Don't let the poor spirit take it to heart that
its monumental sayings would pass unrecognised without your
advertisement. You mean well, perhaps, but it is in the poorest taste.
Yet I have seen Patience on a Monument honourably awarded to William
Shakespeare, and fenced in by commas from all intercourse with the
general text.
There is something so extremely dishonest, too, in acknowledging
quotations. Possibly the good people who so contrive that such
signatures as "Shakespeare," "Homer," or "St. Paul," appear to be
written here and there to parts of their inferior work, manage to
justify the proceeding in their conscience; but it is uncommonly like
hallmarking pewter on the strength of an infinitesimal tinge of silver
therein. The point becomes at once clear if we imagine some obscure
painter quoting the style of Raphael and fragments of his designs, and
acknowledging his indebtedness by appending the master's signature.
Blank forgery! And a flood of light was thrown on the matter by a chance
remark of one of Euphemia's aunts--she is a great reader of pure
fiction--anent a popular novel: "I am sure it must be a nice book," said
she, "or she could not get all these people to write the mottoes for the
chapters."
No, it is all very well to play with one's conscience. I have known men
so sophisticated as to assert that unacknowledged quotation was wrong.
But very few really reasonable people will, I think, refuse to agree
with me that the only artistic, the only kindly, and the only honest
method of quotation is plagiary. If you cannot plagiarise, surely it
were better not to quote.
ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE
A MEDITATION AT EASTBOURNE
To stay at the seaside properly, one should not think. But even in
staying at the seaside there are intervals, waking moments when meals
come, even if there are no appointed meal-times. Moreover, now and then,
one must go to buy tobacco, a matter one can trust to no hireling, lest
he get it dry. It cannot be always seaside, even as it cannot be always
May, and through the gaps thought creeps in. Going over the cliff and
along the parade, and down by the circulating library to the cigar
divan, where they sell Parique tobacco, the swinging of one's legs seems
to act like a pendulum to the clockwork of one's brain. One meditates
all the way, and chiefly on how few people there are who can really--to
a critical adept--be said to stay at the seaside.
People seem to think that one can take a ticket to Eastbourne, or
Bognor, or Ventnor, and come and stay at the seaside straight away, just
as I have known new-hatched undergraduates tell people they were going
to play billiards. Thousands and thousands of people think they have
stayed at the seaside, and have not, just as thousands of people
erroneously imagine they have played whist. For the latter have played
not whist, but Bumble-puppy, and the former have only frequented a
watering-place for a time. Your true staying at the seaside is an art,
demanding not only railway fares but special aptitude, and, moreover,
needing culture, like all worthy arts.
The most insurmountable difficulty of the beginner is the classical
simplicity of the whole thing. To stay at the seaside properly you just
spread yourself out on the extreme edge of the land and let the sunlight
soak in. Your eyes are fixed upon the horizon. Some have it that your
head should be towards the sea, but the best authorities think that this
determines blood to that region, and so stimulates thought. This is all
the positive instruction; the rest is prohibition. You must not think,
and you must not move, neither may you go to sleep. In a few minutes the
adept becomes as a god, even as a god that sits upon the lotus leaf. New
light and colour come into the sky and sea, and the surges chant his
praises. But those who are not of the elect get pins and needles all
over them.
It must be freely admitted that staying at the seaside such as this,
staying at the seaside in its perfection, is a thing for a select few.
You want a broad stretch of beach and all the visible sea to yourself.
You cannot be disturbed by even the most idyllic children trying to bury
you with sand and suchlike playfulness, nor by boatloads of the
democracy rowing athwart your sea and sky. And the absence of friend or
wife goes without saying. I notice down here a very considerable
quantity of evidently married pairs, and the huge majority of the rest
of the visitors run in couples, and are to all appearances engaged. If
they are not, I would submit that they ought to be. Probably there is a
certain satisfaction in sitting by the sea with the girl you are in love
with, or your wife for the matter of that, just as many people
undoubtedly find tea with milk and sugar very nice. But the former is no
more the way to get the full and perfect pleasure of staying at the
seaside than the latter is the way to get the full and perfect flavour
of the tea. True staying at the seaside is neither the repetition of old
conversations in new surroundings nor the exposure of one's affections
to ozone. It is something infinitely higher. It is pure quiescence. It
is the experience of a waking inanition savouring of Buddha and the
divine.
Now, staying at the seaside is so rarely done well, because of the
littleness of man. To do it properly needs many of the elements of
greatness. Your common man, while he has life in him, can let neither
himself nor the universe alone. He must be asserting himself in some
way, even if it is only by flinging pebbles at a stick. That
self-forgetfulness which should be a delight is a terror to him. He
brings dogs down to the beach to stand between him and the calm of
nature, and yelp. He does worse than that.
The meditative man going daily over by the cliff and along the parade,
to get his ounce of tobacco, has a sad spectacle of what human beings
may be driven to in this way. One sees altogether some hundreds of
people there who have heard perhaps that staying at the seaside is good,
and who have, anyhow, got thus far towards it, and stopped. They have
not the faintest idea how to make themselves happy. The general
expression is veiled curiosity. They sit--mostly with their backs to the
sea--talking poorly of indifferent topics and watching one another. Most
obviously they want hints of what to do with themselves. Behind them is
a bank of flowers like those in Battersea Park, and another parallel
parade, and beyond are bathing-machines. The pier completely cuts the
horizon out of the background. There is a stout lady, in dark blue,
bathing. The only glances directed seaward are furtive ones at her. Many
seem to be doubting whether this is not what they came down for. Others
lean dubiously to the invitations of the boatmen. Others again listen to
vocalists and dramatic outcasts who, for ha'pence, render obvious the
reason of their professional degradation. It seems eccentric to travel
seventy or eighty miles to hear a man without a voice demonstrate that
he is unfit to have one, but they do. Anyone curious in these matters
need only go to a watering-place to see and, what is worse, to hear for
himself. After an excursion train to Eastbourne, upwards of a thousand
people have been seen thus heaped together over an oblong space of a
mile long by twenty yards wide. Only three miles away there was a
towering white cliff overhanging a practically desert beach; and one
seagull circled above one solitary, motionless, supine man, really
staying at the seaside.
You cannot walk six miles anywhere along the south coast without coming
upon one of these heaps of people, called a watering-place. There will
be a town of houses behind wherein the people lodge, until, as they
think, they have stayed a sufficient time at the sea, and they return,
hot, cross, and mystified, to London. The sea front will be bricked or
paved for a mile or so, and there will be rows of boats and
bathing-machines, and other contrivances to screen off the view of the
sea. And, as we have indicated, watering-places and staying by the
seaside are incompatible things. The true stayer by the seaside goes
into the watering-place because he must; because there is little food,
and that uncooked, and no tobacco, between the cliffs and the sea.
Having purchased what he needs he flees forth again. What time the whole
selvage of England becomes watering-place, there will be no more staying
by the seaside at all in the land. But this is a gloomy train of thought
that we will not pursue.
There have been those who assert that one end of staying at the seaside
is bathing; but it is easy to show that this is not so. Your proper
bathing-place is up the river, where the trees bend to the green and
brown shadows of the water. There the bath is sweet, fresh out of the
sky, or but just filtered through the blue hills of the distant
water-shed; and it is set about with flowers. But the sea--the sea has
stood there since the beginning of things, and with small prospect of
change, says Mr. Kipling, to all eternity. The water in the sea,
geologists tell us, has _not been changed for fifty million years_! The
same chemist who sets me against all my food with his chemical names
speaks of the sea as a weak solution of drowned men. Be that as it may,
it leaves the skin harsh with salt, and the hair sticky. Moreover, it is
such a promiscuous bathing-place. However, we need scarcely depreciate
the sea as a bath, for what need is there of that when the river is
clearly better? No one can deny that the river is better. People who
bathe in the sea bathe by mistake, because they have come to the side of
the sea, and know not how else to use it.
So, too, with the boating. It is hard to imagine how human beings who
have drifted down streams, and watched the brown fish in the shallows,
and peered through the tall sedges at the forget-me-nots, and fought
with the ropes of the water-lilies, and heard the ripple under the bows,
can ever think of going to and fro, pitching spasmodically, in front of
a watering-place. And as for fishing--they catch fish at sea, indeed,
but it is not fishing at all; neither rods nor flies have they, and
there is an end to that matter.
An Eastbourne meditative man returning to where he stays, with his daily
ounce of tobacco already afire, sees in the streets what are called by
the natives "cherry-bangs," crowded with people, and, further,
cabriolets and such vehicles holding parties and families. The good
folks are driving away from the sea for the better part of the day,
going to Battle and other places inland. The puzzle of what to do with
their sea is too much for them, and they are going away for a little to
rest their minds. Regarded as a centre of drives one might think an
inland place would be preferable to a seaside town, which at best
commands but a half-circle. However that may be, the fact remains that
one of the chief occupations of your common visitor to the seaside is
going away from it. Than this fact there can be nothing more conclusive
in support of my argument that ordinary people are absolutely ignorant
and incapable of staying by the seaside.
CONCERNING CHESS
The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the
world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the
most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an
aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us
say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy.
Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable--but teach him,
inoculate him with chess! It is well, perhaps, that the right way of
teaching chess is so little known, that consequently in most cases the
plot fails in the performance, the dagger turns aside. Else we should
all be chess-players--there would be none left to do the business of the
world. Our statesmen would sit with pocket boards while the country went
to the devil, our army would bury itself in chequered contemplation, our
bread-winners would forget their wives in seeking after impossible
mates. The whole world would be disorganised. I can fancy this
abominable hypnotism so wrought into the constitution of men that the
cabmen would go trying to drive their horses in Knights' moves up and
down Charing Cross Road. And now and again a suicide would come to hand
with the pathetic inscription pinned to his chest: "I checked with my
Queen too soon. I cannot bear the thought of it." There is no remorse
like the remorse of chess.
Only, happily, as we say, chess is taught the wrong way round. People
put out the board before the learner with all the men in battle array,
sixteen a side, with six different kinds of moves, and the poor wretch
is simply crushed and appalled. A lot of things happen, mostly
disagreeable, and then a mate comes looming up through the haze of
pieces. So he goes away awestricken but unharmed, secretly believing
that all chess-players are humbugs, and that intelligent chess, which is
neither chancy nor rote-learned, is beyond the wit of man. But clearly
this is an unreasonable method of instruction. Before the beginner can
understand the beginning of the game he must surely understand the end;
how can he commence playing until he knows what he is playing for? It is
like starting athletes on a race, and leaving them to find out where the
winning-post is hidden.
Your true teacher of chess, your subtle chess-poisoner, your cunning
Comus who changes men to chess-players, begins quite the other way
round. He will, let us say, give you King, Queen, and Pawn placed out in
careless possible positions. So you master the militant possibilities of
Queen and Pawn without perplexing complications. Then King, Queen, and
Bishop perhaps; King, Queen, and Knight; and so on. It ensures that you
always play a winning game in these happy days of your chess childhood,
and taste the one sweet of chess-playing, the delight of having the
upper hand of a better player. Then to more complicated positions, and
at last back to the formal beginning. You begin to see now to what end
the array is made, and understand why one Gambit differeth from another
in glory and virtue. And the chess mania of your teacher cleaveth to you
thenceforth and for evermore.
It is a curse upon a man. There is no happiness in chess--Mr. St. George
Mivart, who can find happiness in the strangest places, would be at a
loss to demonstrate it upon the chess-board. The mild delight of a
pretty mate is the least unhappy phase of it. But, generally, you find
afterwards that you ought to have mated two moves before, or at the time
that an unforeseen reply takes your Queen. No chess-player sleeps well.
After the painful strategy of the day one fights one's battles over
again. You see with more than daylight clearness that it was the Rook
you should have moved, and not the Knight. No! it is impossible! no
common sinner innocent of chess knows these lower deeps of remorse. Vast
desert boards lie for the chess-player beyond the gates of horn.
Stalwart Rooks ram headlong at one, Knights hop sidelong, one's Pawns
are all tied, and a mate hangs threatening and never descends. And once
chess has been begun in the proper way, it is flesh of your flesh, bone
of your bone; you are sold, and the bargain is sealed, and the evil
spirit hath entered in.