to consider success in games the one paramount object of their lives;
it was all knit up with social ambitions, and it was viewed, I do not
hesitate to say, as of infinitely more importance than anything else. I
do not mean to say that many of the boys did not consider it important
to be good, and did not desire to be conscientious about their work.
But as a practical matter games were what they thought about and talked
about, and what aroused genuine enthusiasm. They were disposed to
despise boys who could not play games, however virtuous, kindly, and
sensible they might be; an entire lack of conscientiousness, and even
grave moral obliquity, were apt to be condoned in the case of a
successful athlete. We masters, I must frankly confess, did not make
any serious attempt to fight the tendency. We spent our spare time in
walking about the cricket and football fields, in looking on, in
discussing the fine nuances in the style of individual players. It was
very natural to take an interest in the thing which was to the boys a
matter of profound concern; but what I should be inclined to censure
was that it was really a matter of profound concern with ourselves; and
we did not take a kindly and paternal interest in the matter, so much
as the interest of enthusiasts and partisans.
It is very difficult to see how to alter this. Probably, like other
deep-seated national tendencies, it will have to cure itself. It would
be impossible to insist that the educators of youth should suppress the
interest which they instinctively and genuinely feel in games, and
profess an interest in intellectual matters which they do not really
feel. No good would come out of practising hypocrisy in the matter,
from however high a motive. While schoolmasters rush off to golf
whenever they get a chance, and fill their holidays to the brim with
games of various kinds, it would be simply hypocritical to attempt to
conceal the truth; and the difficulty is increased by the fact that,
while parents and boys alike feel as they do about the essential
importance of games, head-masters are more or less bound to select men
for masterships who are proficient in them; because whatever else has
to be attended to at school, games have to be attended to; and,
moreover, a man whom the boys respect as an athlete is likely to be
more effective both as a disciplinarian and a teacher. If a man is a
first-rate slow bowler, the boys will consider his views on Thucydides
and Euclid more worthy of consideration than the views of a man who has
only a high university degree.
The other day I was told of the case of a head-master of a small
proprietary private school, who was treated with open insolence and
contempt by one of his assistants, who neglected his work, smoked in
his class-room, and even absented himself on occasions without leave.
It may be asked why the head-master did not dismiss his recalcitrant
assistant. It was because he had secured a man who was a 'Varsity
cricket-blue, and whose presence on the staff gave the parents
confidence, and provided an excellent advertisement. The assistant, on
the other hand, knew that he could get a similar post for the asking,
and on the whole preferred a school where he might consult his own
convenience. This is, of course, an extreme case; but would to God, as
Dr. Johnson said, that it were an impossible one! I do not wish to tilt
against athletics, nor do I at all undervalue the benefits of open air
and exercise for growing boys. But surely there is a lamentable want of
proportion about the whole view! The truth is that we English are in
many respects barbarians still, and as we happen at the present time to
be wealthy barbarians, we devote our time and our energies to the
things for which we really care. I do not at all want to see games
diminished, or played with less keenness. I only desire to see them
duly subordinated. I do not think it ought to be considered slightly
eccentric for a boy to care very much about his work, or to take an
interest in books. I should like it to be recognized at schools that
the one quality that was admirable was keenness, and that it was
admirable in whatever department it was displayed; but nowadays
keenness about games is considered admirable and heroic, while keenness
about work or books is considered slightly grovelling and priggish.
The same spirit has affected what is called sport. People no longer
look upon it as an agreeable interlude, but as a business in itself;
they will not accept invitations to shoot, unless the sport is likely
to be good; a moderate performer with the gun is treated as if it was a
crime for him to want to shoot at all; then the motoring craze has come
in upon the top of the golfing craze; and all the spare time of people
of leisure tends to be filled up with bridge. The difficulty in dealing
with the situation is that the thing itself is not only not wrong, but
really beneficial; it is better to be occupied than to be idle, and it
is hard to preach against a thing which is excellent in moderation and
only mischievous in excess.
Personally I am afraid that I only look upon games as a pis-aller. I
would always rather take a walk than play golf, and read a book than
play bridge. Bridge, indeed, I should regard as only one degree better
than absolutely vacuous conversation, which is certainly the most
fatiguing thing in the world. But the odd thing is that while it is
regarded as rather vicious to do nothing, it is regarded as positively
virtuous to play a game. Personally I think competition always a more
or less disagreeable thing. I dislike it in real life, and I do not see
why it should be introduced into one's amusements. If it amuses me to
do a thing, I do not very much care whether I do it better than another
person. I have no desire to be always comparing my skill with the skill
of others.
Then, too, I am afraid that I must confess to lamentably feeble
pleasure in mere country sights and sounds. I love to watch the curious
and beautiful things that go on in every hedgerow and every field; it
is a ceaseless delight to see the tender uncrumpling leaves of the
copse in spring, and no a pleasure to see the woodland streaked and
stained with the flaming glories of autumn. It is a joy in high
midsummer to see the clear dwindled stream run under the thick hazels,
among the lush water-plants; it is no less a joy to see the same stream
running full and turbid in winter, when the banks are bare, and the
trees are leafless, and the pasture is wrinkled with frost. Half the
joy, for instance, of shooting, in which I frankly confess I take a
childish delight, is the quiet tramping over the clean-cut stubble, the
distant view of field and wood, the long, quiet wait at the covert-end,
where the spindle-wood hangs out her quaint rosy berries, and the
rabbits come scampering up the copse, as the far-off tapping of the
beaters draws near in the frosty air. The delights of the country-side
grow upon me every month and every year. I love to stroll in the lanes
in spring, with white clouds floating in the blue above, and to see the
glade carpeted with steel-blue hyacinths. I love to walk on country
roads or by woodland paths, on a rain-drenched day of summer, when the
sky is full of heavy inky clouds, and the earth smells fresh and sweet;
I love to go briskly homeward on a winter evening, when the sunset
smoulders low in the west, when the pheasants leap trumpeting to their
roosts, and the lights begin to peep in cottage windows.
Such joys as these are within the reach of every one; and to call the
country dull because one has not the opportunity of hitting and
pursuing a little white ball round and round among the same fields,
with elaborately contrived obstacles to test the skill and the temper,
seems to me to be grotesque, if it were not also so distressing.
I cannot help feeling that games are things that are appropriate to the
restless days of boyhood, when one will take infinite trouble and toil
over anything of the nature of a make-believe, so long as it is
understood not to be work; but as one gets older and perhaps wiser, a
simpler and quieter range of interests ought to take their place. I can
humbly answer for it that it need imply no loss of zest; my own power
of enjoyment is far deeper and stronger than it was in early years; the
pleasures I have described, of sight and sound, mean infinitely more to
me than the definite occupations of boyhood ever did. But the danger is
that if we are brought up ourselves to depend upon games, and if we
bring up all our boys to depend on them, we are not able to do without
them as we grow older; and thus we so often have the melancholy
spectacle of the elderly man, who is hopelessly bored with existence,
and who is the terror of the smoking-room and the dinner-table, because
he is only capable of indulging in lengthy reminiscences of his own
astonishing athletic performances, and in lamentations over the
degeneracy of the human race.
Another remarkable fact about the conventionality that attends games is
that certain games are dismissed as childish and contemptible while
others are crowned with glory and worship. One knows of eminent
clergymen who play golf; and that they should do so seems to constitute
so high a title to the respect and regard with which normal persons
view them, that one sometimes wonders whether they do not take up the
practice with the wisdom of the serpent that is recommended in the
Gospels, or because of the Pauline doctrine of adaptability, that by
all means they may save some.
But as far as mere air and exercise goes, the childish game of playing
at horses is admirably calculated to increase health and vigour and
needs no expensive resources. Yet what would be said and thought if a
prelate and his suffragan ran nimbly out of a palace gate in a
cathedral close, with little bells tinkling, whips cracking, and reins
of red ribbon drawn in to repress the curvetting of the gaitered steed?
There is nothing in reality more undignified about that than in hitting
a little ball about over sandy bunkers. If the Prime Minister and the
Lord Chief Justice trundled hoops round and round after breakfast in
the gravelled space behind the Horse Guards, who could allege that they
would not be the better for the exercise? Yet they would be held for
some mysterious reason to have forfeited respect. To the mind of the
philosopher all games are either silly or reasonable; and nothing so
reveals the stupid conventionality of the ordinary mind as the fact
that men consider a series of handbooks on Great Bowlers to be a
serious and important addition to literature, while they would hold
that a little manual on Blind-man's Buff was a fit subject for
derision. St. Paul said that when he became a man he put away childish
things. He could hardly afford to say that now, if he hoped to be
regarded as a man of sense and weight.
I do not wish to be a mere Jeremiah in the region of prophecy, and to
deplore, sarcastically and incisively, what I cannot amend. What I
rather wish to do is to make a plea for greater simplicity in the
matter, and to try and destroy some of the terrible priggishness in the
matter of athletics, which appears to me to prevail. After all,
athletics are only one form of leisurely amusement; and I maintain that
it is of the essence of priggishness to import solemnity into a matter
which does not need it, and which would be better without it. Because
the tyranny is a real one; the man of many games is not content with
simply enjoying them; he has a sense of complacent superiority, and a
hardly disguised contempt for the people who do not play them.
I was staying in a house the other day where a distinguished
philosopher had driven over to pay an afternoon call. The call
concluded, he wished to make a start, so I went down to the stable with
him to see about putting his pony in. The stables were deserted. I was
forced to confess that I knew nothing about the harnessing of steeds,
however humble. We discovered portions of what appeared to be the
equipment of a pony, and I held them for him, while he gingerly tried
them on, applying them cautiously to various portions of the innocent
animal's person. Eventually we had to give it up as a bad job, and seek
for professional assistance. I described the scene for the benefit of a
lively lady of my acquaintance, who is a devotee of anything connected
with horses, and she laughed unmercifully at the description, and
expressed the contempt, which she sincerely felt, in no measured terms.
But, after all, it is no part of my business to harness horses; it is a
convenience that there should be persons who possess the requisite
knowledge; for me horses only represent a convenient form of
locomotion. I did not mind her being amused--indeed, that was the
object of my narrative--but her contempt was just as much misplaced as
if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between
sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know.
It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the
worship of games, which is one of its most serious features. I wish
with all my heart that I could suggest a remedy for it; but the only
thing that I can do is to pursue my own inclinations, with a fervent
conviction that they are at least as innocent as the pursuit of
athletic exercises; and I can also, as I have said, wave a little flag
of revolt, and rally to my standard the quieter and more simple-minded
persons, who love their liberty, and decline to part with it unless
they can find a better reason than the merely comfortable desire to do
what every one else is doing.
XVI
SPIRITUALISM
I was sitting the other day in a vicarage garden with my friend the
vicar. It was a pretty, well-kept place, with old shrubberies and
umbrageous trees; to the right, the tower of the church rose among its
elms. We sate out of the wind, looking over a rough pasture field,
apparently a common, divided from the garden by a little ha-ha of
brick. The surface of the field was very irregular, as though there had
been excavations made in it for gravel at some time or other; in
certain parts of the field there appeared fragments of a stone wall,
just showing above the ground.
The vicar pointed to the field. "Do you see that wall?" he said; "I
will tell you a very curious story about that. When I came here, forty
years ago, I asked the old gardener what the field was, as I never saw
any one in it, or any beasts grazing there; and yet it was unfenced,
and appeared to be common land--it was full of little thickets and
thorn-bushes then. He was not very willing to tell me, I thought, but
by dint of questions I discovered that it was a common, and that it was
known locally by the curious name of Heaven's Walls. He went on to say
that it was considered unlucky to set foot in it; and that, as a matter
of fact, no villager would ever dream of going there; he would not say
why, but at last it came out that it was supposed to be haunted by a
spirit. No one, it seemed, had ever seen anything there, but it was an
unlucky place.
"Well, I thought no more of it at the time, though I often went into
the field. It was a quiet and pretty place enough; full of thickets, as
I have said, where the birds built unmolested--there was generally a
goldfinch's nest there.
"It became necessary to lay a drain across it, and a big trench was
dug. One day they came and told me that the workmen had found
something--would I go and look at it? I went out and found that they
had unearthed a large Roman cinerary urn, containing some calcined
bones. I told the lord of the manor, who is a squire in the next
parish, and he and I after that kept a look-out over the workmen. We
found another urn, and another, both full of bones. Then we found a big
glass vessel, also containing bones. The squire got interested in the
thing, and eventually had the whole place dug out. We found a large
enclosure, once surrounded by a stone wall, of which you see the
remains; in two of the corners there was an enormous deposit of wood
ashes, in deep pits, which looked as if great fires had burnt there;
and the walls in those two corners were all calcined and smoke-stained.
We found fifty or sixty urns, all full of bones; and in another corner
there was a deep shaft, like a well, dug in the chalk, with handholds
down the sides, also full of calcined bones. We found a few coins, and
in one place a conglomeration of rust that looked as if it might have
been a heap of tools or weapons. We set the antiquaries to work, and
they pronounced it to be what is called a Roman Ustrinum--that is to
say, a public crematorium, where people who could not afford a separate
funeral might bring a corpse to be burnt. If they had no place to
deposit the urn, in which the bones were enclosed, they were allowed,
it seems, to bury the urn there, until such time as they cared to
remove it. There was a big Roman settlement here, you know. There was a
fort on the hill there, and the sites of several large Roman villas
have been discovered in the neighbourhood. This place must have stood
rather lonely, away from the town, probably in the wood which then
covered the whole of this county; but it is curious, is it not?" said
the vicar, "that the tradition should have been handed down through all
these centuries of its being an ill-omened place, long after any
tradition of what the uses of the spot were!"
It was curious indeed! The vicar was presently called away, and I sate
musing over the strange old story. I could fancy the place as it must
have been, standing with its high blank walls in a clearing of the
forest, with perhaps a great column of evil-smelling smoke drifting in
oily waves over the corner of the wall, telling of the sad rites that
were going on within. I could fancy heavy-eyed mourners dragging a bier
up to the gates, with a silent form lying upon it, waiting in pale
dismay until the great doors were flung open by the sombre rough
attendants of the place; until they could see the ugly enclosure, with
the wood piled high in the pit for the last sad service. Then would
follow the burning and the drenching of the ashes, the gathering of the
bones--all that was left of one so dear, father or mother, boy or
maiden--the enclosing of them in the urn, and the final burial. What
agonies of simple grief the place must have witnessed! Then, I suppose,
the place was deserted by the Romans, the walls crumbled down into
ruin, grass and bushes grew over the place. Then perhaps the forest was
gradually felled and stubbed up, as the area of cultivation widened;
but still the sad tradition of the spot left it desolate, until all
recollection of its purpose was gone. No doubt, in Saxon days, it was
thought to be haunted by the old wailing, restless spirits of those who
had suffered the last rites there; so that still the place was
condemned to a sinister solitude.
I went on to reflect over the strange and obstinate tradition that
lingers still with such vitality among the human race, that certain
places are haunted by the spirits of the dead. It is hard to believe
that such tradition, so widespread, so universal, should have no kind
of justification in fact. And yet there appears to be no justification
for the idea, unless the spiritual conditions of the world have
altered, unless there were real phenomena, which have for some cause
ceased to manifest themselves, which originated the tradition. But
there is certainly no scientific evidence of the fact. The Psychical
Society, which has faced some ridicule for its serious attempt to find
out the truth about these matters, have announced that investigations
of so-called haunted houses have produced no evidence whatever. They
seem to be a wholly unreliable type of stories, which always break down
under careful inquiry. I am inclined myself to believe that such
stories arose in a perfectly natural way. It is perfectly natural to
simple people to believe that the spirit which animated a mortal body
would, on leaving it, tend to linger about the scene of suffering and
death. Indeed, it is impossible not to feel that, if the spirit has any
conscious identity, it would be sure to desire to remain in the
neighbourhood of those whom it loved so well. But the unsatisfactory
element in these stories is that it generally appears to be the victim
of some heinous deed, and not the perpetrator, who is condemned to make
its sad presence known, by wailing and by sorrowful gestures, on the
scene of its passion. But once given the belief that a spirit might
tend to remain for a time in the place where its earthly life was
lived, the terrors of man, his swift imagination, his power of
self-delusion, would do the rest.
The only class of stories, say the investigators, which appear to be
proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, is the class of
stories dealing with apparitions at the time of death; and this they
explain by supposing a species of telepathy, which is indeed an obscure
force, but obviously an existing one, though its conditions and
limitations are not clearly understood. Telepathy is the power of
communication between mind and mind without the medium of speech, and
indeed in certain cases exercised at an immense distance. The theory is
that the thought of the dying person is so potently exercised on some
particular living person, as to cause the recipient to project a figure
of the other upon the air. That power of visualization is not a very
uncommon one; indeed, we all possess it more or less; we can all
remember what we believe we have seen in our dreams, and we remember
the figures of our dreams as optical images, though they have been
purely mental conceptions, translated into the terms of actual sight.
The impression of a dream-figure, indeed, appears to us to be as much
the impression of an image received upon the retina of the eye, as our
impressions of images actually so received. The whole thing is strange,
of course, but not stranger than wireless telegraphy. It may be that
the conditions of telepathy may some day be scientifically defined; and
in that case it will probably make a clear and coherent connection
between a number of phenomena which we do not connect together, just as
the discovery of electricity connected together phenomena which all had
observed, like the adhering of substances to charged amber, as well as
the lightning-flash which breaks from the thunder-cloud. No one in
former days traced any connection between these two phenomena, but we
now know that they are only two manifestations of the same force. In
the same way we may find that phenomena of which we are all conscious,
but of which we do not know the reason, may prove to be manifestations
of some central telepathic force--such phenomena, I mean, as the
bravery of armies in action, or the excitement which may seize upon a
large gathering of men.
We ought, I think, to admire and praise the patient work of the
Psychical Society,--though is common enough to hear quite sensible
people deride it,--because it is an attempt to treat a subject
scientifically. What we have every right to deride is the dabbling in
spiritualistic things by credulous and feeble-minded persons. These
practices open to our view one of the most lamentable and deplorable
provinces of the human mind, its power of convincing itself of anything
which it desires to believe, its debility, its childishness. If the
professions of so-called mediums were true, why cannot they exhibit
their powers in some open and incontestable way, not surrounding
themselves with all the conditions of darkness and excitability, in
which the human power of self-delusion finds its richest field?
A friend of mine told me the other day what he evidently felt to be an
extremely impressive story about a dignitary of the Church. This
clergyman was overcome one day by an intense mental conviction that he
was wanted at Bristol. He accordingly went there by train, wandered
about aimlessly, and finally put up at a hotel for the night. In the
morning he found a friend in the coffee-room, to whom he confided the
cause of his presence in Bristol, and announced his intention of going
away by the next train. The friend then told him that an Australian was
dying in the hotel, and that his wife was very anxious to find a
clergyman. The dignitary went to see the lady, with the intention of
offering her his services, when he discovered that he had met her when
travelling in Australia, and that her husband had been deeply impressed
by a sermon which he had then delivered, and had been entreating for
some days that he might be summoned to administer the last consolations
of religion. The clergyman went in to see the patient, administered the
last rites, comforted and encouraged him, and was with him when he
died. He afterwards told the widow the story of his mysterious summons
to Bristol, and she replied that she had been praying night and day
that he might come and that he had no doubt come in answer to her
prayers.